The art consultant and dealer Peter Heimer’s postwar Berlin townhouse has all sorts of cunning details. We love the yellow daybed Heimer designed himself. The slanted pillows are brilliant, forming a comfortable backrest when reading or lounging. I’ve discovered that you can get the same effect with a simple DIY.
Read More
Lately clothing ads coming over my transom have been featuring men’s shirts with an extra side button. When you put the usual buttonhole around THAT button, it pulls the shirt into an asymmetrical form-fitting wrapped number. Of course I immediately thought of how I’d do it myself…
Read More
This lamp by English lampshade designer Mark Betty has this description “Lamp and Brown Paper (or whatever you want)” . The brown paper rolled into an asymmetrical cone and secured with a pin seems to have been made in a single gesture. Like all Betty’s shades, it has its own unique personality, as though it were alive…
Read More
We love this skeleton of a picture frame hung pictureless on a wall. As we gaze into its empty space, we find ourselves imagining all sorts of things while we enjoy its austere shape. It reminded us of the old silver frame we gave to artist Maria Robledo years ago. Picture frame as magical objet.
Read More
Blossoms knocked off their stems make for free flower arrangements in the form of ad hoc indoor ponds like the one photographer Maria Robledo devised (the perfect accompaniment to this poem written over a thousand years ago)
Read More
I pondered the maxim “Irritation is the message” a long time before understood that the things that irritated me were the things I sought solutions for. I started transforming ugly shopping bags.
Read More
We were instantly riveted by @tumanualidades.de’s tiny videos of mending because they were so restful to watch, offering seemingly simple solutions to fixes we have in the past spent too much time worrying or procrastinating about. They called to mind a cosmic view of mending and sewing from some favorite artists.
Read More
In the messy digital file I keep of ideas for possible Improvised Life posts, I found trove marked simply “paper shades”. Their big message: A rice paper shade or two adds A LOT to even the most “undecorated” room. They have a unique, rather magical presence that pulls the room together. Here’s how.
Read More
In the 1970’s mysterious Italian designer Lino Schenal clad his house in sculpted styrofoam, from walls to simple, stylish furniture. Fifty years later we looked to Max Lamb to reveal the secrets of the ubiquitous material for making artful, practical creations.
Read More
Listening to the water music of women from the northern Vanuatu and Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal takes us into the realm of joy, and gives us ideas for our own hot weather revelry. Steven Nachmanovitch, tells us how to access our own inner music…
Read More
We love the green polka dots in this down-at-heels kitchen, a perfect way to jazz up a wall. It got us thinking about their cosmic meaning and how to make them without laboriously holding up stencils.
Read More
When we looked closely at this stumbled-upon image of Henri Matisse, we realized that the wallpaper behind him was really tacked up prints and drawings. Brilliant. Looking for more, we found a trove of ideas to employ.
Read More
“Just a pair of hands and a whole lot of clever imagination” perfectly describes this 1933 film from British Pathe. The performer moves his hands slowly so that the audience can see how the shape is formed. The setup is minimal: a darkened room, a bare patch of wall, a light source to cast shadows.…
Read More
In the 1970s, legendary furniture designer Enzo Mari pioneered the idea of “autoprogettazione”, roughly translated, “self design”, projects that he hoped would empower people to create with their own hands. With “ecolo” he applied the idea to plastic bottles…
Read More
When we stumbled on thisimage by photographer Jill Burrow, we thought, ‘Ah yes. We’d love to sleep surrounded by flowers, especially now, after months of guarded and circumscribed living.’ Looking closely, we found permission to do it…
Read More
Designer Seung Jin Yang’s whimsical furniture appears to be made of the kind of twistable balloons used to entertain kids. OMG, we thought, could we make furniture out of balloons?
Read More
Tokujin Yoshioka created a simple, easy-to-make face shield held in place with ordinary eyewear. It gives an added measure of protection against Covid-19.
Read More
We’ve read a lot theories for the toilet paper hoarding that has marked the Coronavirus pandemic. We have a few of our own + viable alternatives.
Read More
When we found hand sanitizers sold out everywhere, we did some research to find ways to achieve what commercial hand-sanitizers would, along with a few other strategies for killing that nasty coronavirus.
Read More
We were knocked out by selections from poet Mary Ruefle’s beautiful ”erasure books”, poetry made by whiting out words in old books. We also discovered Wite-Out is a potent, paint-like art material.
Read More