housewares

Hi/Low: Round Porthole Mirrors for a Haiku-like View

You have only to search MIRROR on Improvised Life to find evidence of an obsession. Not to look at one’s self. But to angle them in such a way as to SEE a bigger view. Take these port-hole mirrors, for example…and Basho’s haiku…

A Cheap Chic Black Bag to Rival Ikea’s and Balenciaga’s Tote

After the designers at fashion house Balanciaga knocked off Ikea’s iconic big blue 99-cent tote (in leather for $2,145), frequent contributor Susan Dworski jumped into the fray with a chic, cheap black bag that we hacked to perfection.

HomeMade Modern: Smart Stylish DIY with a Mission

We’re smitten with HomeMade Modern’s stylish, DIY-able home goods — from beds to planters — and really smart, detailed designs that empower you to improvise.

Find: Red Steel Bookends (via FIT)

The bright red bookends we saw at FIT’s library totally transform the common bookend into something both graphic and stylish…and practical. We wondered if we could find them.

Improvised Life’s Thoughtful Un-Gift Guide

Here’s our list of things we think are worth giving for the way they expand minds/hearts/creativity, or are just downright useful…

Tasting Spoons: Essential Kitchen Tool and Welcome Gift

A tasting spoon is an essential kitchen tool, allowing you to add flavor experiments directly to the “taste” to see if you like them. Over the years I’ve collected —and given — quite a few tasting spoons. They make great, unexpected gifts. Here’s a roundup:

DIY or Buy: Kitchen Knife Holder

We saw this knife holder in a friend’s kitchen and thought: seriously clever. It’s simply a tall, narrow box filled with vertically-standing wooden skewers. The skewers hold the knives in place without dulling the blade. Although we tracked down where you can buy one, the formula for making it yourself is simple…

A Cook’s Favorite Gifts for Cooks of all Stripes

Every so often, a friend calls to ask me what cooking equipment to recommend. LONG story! You’ll find an extensive list of equipment for a basic kitchen in A New Way to Cook, along with 700+ pages of essential techniques and recipes. For now, here are my tried-and-true favorites, from high to low and back.

Hanging Paper Blooms Can Change a Room

One image in a photo essay about a Scandinavian house renovation caught our eye: a kid’s room with tissue paper pom poms hanging from the ceiling, like some sort of celestial blooms. They’d be lovely in just about any room. So we hunted them down to discover that they are a common wedding decoration, readily available on…

Irregularly Shaped Mirrors to DIY or Buy

As soon as we saw Mc&Co’s irregularly shaped mirrors we thought WANT. We’ve been thinking for some time that our very angular Laboratory could use some organic forms to soften it, and have been mulling how we might do that with mirrors. Mc&Co’s mirrors look like portals into other rooms. Swell! Although we’ve written about irregularly…

What happens If You Try and Fail?

I spend a lot of time trying things and…failing. Hmmm. Is failing even the right word? I spend a lot of times trying things and having them not go as expected.

Wireless Speakers We Love + How We Found Them UPDATE + Caveats

After we accidentally sacrified our trusty-ancient-unwieldy speakers trying to counteract the bed vibration that woke us up each morning, we went on the hunt for great sounding wireless speakers. We ended up getting two variations because music is so essential to us. It fuels our work when energy levels are low, helps us chill out, and even…

How to Trigger Summer All Year Long

On Labor Day it was like a cosmic switch was flipped: suddenly we could smell fall and a chill crept into the air. We’re totally down with Thoreau and thinking of ways to spark summer’s lovely feeling even in the dark days of winter.

When Broken Tools Reveal New Usefulness (Su Tung Po)

The other day I was reading a poem written by Su Tung Po in 1097, over a thousand years ago, and realized that it was talking about me, right now in 2015, using such perfectly wrought words, I saw the most ordinary moment differently. Here is a fragment*

Annals of Misleading Design: Chilewich Dahlia Coasters

Chilewich, maker of now-iconic, minimalist woven polypropylene floor mats we’ve admired, recently introduced their Dahlia Coasters. Their website shows icy drinks resting on the coaster (one with an ice bucket in the background), calls them “coasters” and claims “these functional designs will enhance and elevate your dining experience“. But at the end of the enticing copy is…

Paola Navone’s Wire Crate Shelves

When VosgeParis posted images of a party at designer Paola Navone’s home in Milan, the wire crates affixed to the wall caught our eye. Are they an artwork, or simply vintage crates made into art, on which she arranges objects to her liking? So we hunted for google images for clues.

For the Table: Water Pitchers, To Buy and DIY

The pristine, white sculptural water pitcher featured at A Cup of Jo is so pretty, it briefly made us consider abandoning our tried-and-true DIY ones, below. It holds about 2 1/2 quarts, has a footprint of 10 x 7 x 4 1/2 inches and is available at Amazon for under $30, a bargain. We love our homemade…

Why Not Art in the Closet and On the Floor?

Bombarded by imagery all day at work, Sam Shadid, the renowned mastermind behind ads for Calvin Klein and Banana Republic, prefers an ultra-minimalist home with the feel of a luxe high-design hotel room. It was recently featured in a slideshow in The Times’ T Magazine. Although we find his sensibility crazy-austere, we LOVE a couple of…

DIY Idea-Capturing Desks

Kirsten Camara’s Analog Memory Desk has a holder embedded in its legs for scrolling huge rulls of butcher paper over the desk’s surface to make “a sort of tablecloth of memory”. It can record months, possibly years of ideas, drawings, doodles, mind maps, phone numbers, calculations etc. She has made detailed blueprints so you can build your own. Or you try these other methods of analog idea-capturing.

Mortar and Pestles to Buy or DIY (and Ones Not To)

Recently, Jim Dillon asked me to recommend a good mortar and pestle. It is a fine request as they are incredibly useful, yet misunderstood tools. I’ve been mentally panning most of the mortars and pestles I see for year because of their ineffective —yet often beautiful — design. So here are some mortar and pestle basics,…

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