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…
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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.
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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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There are a lot of things we like about this interior but this crazy tall, fabulously orange lampshade takes the cake for completely shifting our view of lampshade possibilities. It makes us wonder why most lampshades are so ordinary. We are hard-pressed to find a ready-made shade like this BUT know that the reliable Just Shades…
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We’ve long been fans of binder clips for all sorts of uses, including hanging unframed artworks. But we NEVER considered how beautiful vintage binder clips might be put to this and other uses, until we saw Remodelista’s recent article. They are prominently featured in the home of art collector and mid-century furniture dealer Demetrio Zanetti.…
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Chinese design studio KBme2 believes that there are simple ways to create housewares that could truly belong to the user. They tested their idea our using LEGO, the timeless building tool beloved by both children and adults.
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Check out Public Radio’s The Splendid Table interview with Sally about her favorite gift ideas for cooks and eaters. Most are inexpensive but give a big bang for the buck. To find more about the gifts on Improvised Life, click here for a roundup. You can also hear her favorite holiday tabletop decorations (some of which made great…
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Wood apple boxes come in graduated sizes and have a handle routed out at one end, making them easy to move around. A staple of photo studios, they would be a great piece of multi-purpose “furniture” for home, to use as step stool, sitting stool, small table, ledge or stand for books or objects…We’ve discovered that you can buy them or make them.
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The Floyd Shelf Bracket is a clever tool that allows you create a shelf from any flat surface by simply installing the brackets on a wall and clamping them to the material. With them, you can turn all sorts of interesting materials into shelving and switch out surfaces whenever you find something neat and new (or old).
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We don’t like seeing labels on things we have around the house — there’s enough advertising in our world; we don’t need it at home — so we routinely peel them off. At the kitchen sink, we fill plain, unmarked bottles with dish soap and hand soap. Even when we had two very differently-shaped bottles,…
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When we’re looking to buy a fitness tracker, pair of headphones, a TV, or even a spatula, Consumer Reports and Amazon don’t always cut it. Our favorite resource these days is The Wirecutter, a site that seriously researches, vets and tests all sorts of essential items. Recently we followed their lead (well, their companion site Sweethome)…
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As great admirers of the infinite possibilities of ordinary cardboard, we love British designer Torsten Sherwood‘s simplified single-component system that encourages instinctive building. Noook are colored, double-faced cardboard disks that slot together to create overlapping formations that can create unique structures. Inspired by Legos, Noook offer’s infinite possible combinations. Designed for children, we see it as a wonderful…
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(Video link HERE.) Master life-hacker/improviser Dave Hax shows how to make a spoon out of a plastic bottle. It reminds us of “Found” the beautiful metal-coated plastic cutlery by designer Oscar Diaz in 2009, featured in Dezeen. Photographs of Diaz’s process show the kind of “x-ray vision” a clever designer employs when looking at a material.
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(Video link HERE.) Bio 50 has applied open-source thinking to electronic appliances we use in our homes everyday. They’ve prototyped of a system built upon standard components that offers the user the ability to assemble, customize, repair, and repurpose existing products. Check out their clever fan, hand mixer, and a balloon-encased lamp all configured from the same elements.
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I’m crazy about how mirrors can animate a room and bring it to life. Particularly oversize, leaning mirrors. I thought these were beauties. … You don’t need to do anything — no hanging or rigging; just set them where the look best or reflect the best view. An oversize picture frame can easily be fitted…
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This clever bread board bird feeder reminded us of the endless odd permutations on the theme of bread boards we’ve written about before, and of the vast possibilities for using wood planks in general for household projects, from a ledge to perch on top of the back of the toilet tank to a low bookshelf…
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After Remodelista touted the virtues of the vin ordinaire hardware store porcelain light socket, we were reminded of the one that ended up on our wall during the Laboratory’s renovation. Overwhelmed by the all the details we needed to get together to make the space livable, we improvised, adorning it with lighting designer David Weeks’ clever,…
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Here’s something to put up on your refrigerator door: a chart showing 72 practical uses of common “core” ingredients that make up our (far more expensive) store-bought soaps, lotions and surface cleaners. The idea is that all of the countless “new and improved!” drugstore potions lining our cabinet shelves are really just permutations of six or seven simple active components
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Our friend Virgina del Giudice sent us a lovely vacation email with the subject line: “Improvising“: We were on vacation in La Pedrera, Uruguay (very beautiful place!) My husband and I rented a forties garage converted into a cozy little appartment for two. The kitchen was small but perfect for improvising nice recipes like croquettes…
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We stumbled on these HUGE dish towels and ordered a set to check out, having learned the hard way that the real thing is often way different than pictures. We washed them and…they are great, 100% cotton, wonderful-looking and useful for many things.
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