Early on in planning the Laboratory renovation, we started thinking of ceiling lights. Since the ceiling was only eight-feet-high, we were trying everything we could to give the illusion that they were higher, achieved mostly by replacing the squat doors with tall ones that created floor-to-ceiling vertical lines that made the ceilings appear higher. In…
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Many modern spaces, including our own Laboratory, suffer from having so many right angles, rectangles, linearity, that they can be a bit harsh. The simple solution is to shake them up with rounds, patterns, art. We love the solution in this image found at Bohemian Homes:
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Over the years, lighting designer par excellence Lindsey Adelman has posted free diy lighting instructions on her website, where she also sells her beautiful, pricey creations. A generous act indeed; Linssey reveals the tools and techniques to many of her designs. Her simple, liberating words: Make your own light. Experimenting with off-the-shelf parts is how Lindsey…
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On the heels of our post about Noguchi-esque Rice Paper Shade lighting, we spotted this one hung LOW to beautiful effect. It provides a round volume AND casts light where a table light would be.
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A recent house tour in Remodelista showed a cool, minimalist renovation of a 1940’s summer cottage in Denmark. The hard angles and rectangles so common (and problematic) with a modern aesthetic were softened by huge, translucent paper spheres hung from the ceiling, pioneered by Isamu Noguchi in the 1950’s. They’ve long been a favorite of ours because the…
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Installing hardwired, outdoor lighting can be a big, expensive, all-too-often unaesthetic hassle, forcing you to put lights where you really don’t want them, and use commercially produced fixtures that are less than enchanting. One elegant, inexpensive solution is solar lanterns. My favorites are Allsop‘s faux Japanese shoji solar lanterns available in a rainbow of lightweight polyester that mimics silk.…
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Since hauling several huge hunks of fallen trees home after Hurricane Sandy, we’ve been attuned to interesting ways of transforming them. We especially love Italian designer Marco Stefanelli‘s idea of illuminating the splits and cracks in the wood with LEDs (he embeds them in resin), and the thinking behind creating his wonderful luminous stools and tables:…
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We’ve long been fans of lighting designer David Weeks beautiful lighting, having been smitten initially with his sculptural Lunette clip-on shades. On December 14th and 15th, Weeks will hold his annual sample sale, where you can buy samples and prototypes of some of his wonderful designs at steep discounts. We won’t be going. We checked…
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These recent pictures spotted on Desire to Inspire affirmed the enduring chic of noguchi-esque paper shades, a subject we’ve posted about before since so many true mid-century modern houses relied on them. The formula is simple:
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Good lighting is essential to making any space come alive, ESPECIALLY one suffering from disorder, as ours has during our recent move of lock-stock-and-many barrels. The solution was Lunette, lighting designers David Weeks’ and Lindsey Adelman’s inexpensive clip-on lamp shade we bought and blogged about a couple of years ago, but never had occasion to use.…
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In a recent post about 50’s shopping centers at the Paris Review’s oddly wonderful blog, we spotted these George Nelson bubble lamps stacked one on top of another to make wondrous sculptural lighting. Copying this would be pretty expensive…but we saw an alternative in another picture. Various organic shapes of vaguely Noguchi-esque modernist paper shades stacked and…
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We were completely smitten with this wondrous PINK staircase, wondering how we’d feel if we had it to walk down/up everyday, when we came across a video by Minute Physics explaining why pink doesn’t really exist.
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photo: blog.ounodesign.com The great blog Ouno recently documented a visit to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyds Wright’s winter home and the main campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. A photo of the “dinner cabaret room” caught our eye: strings of tiny lights glowe3d on the ceiling. We don’t know if this is a Wrightian…
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Recently, we’ve been on the hunt for great lighting, that is, lighting that is cool looking and gives us the option of as much light as we want to adjust hi-or-low with a dimmer. We keep finding wonderfully designed lights with really low wattage bulbs, like 40 or 60, which rule them out. We want…
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Although we love walking through the canyons of trees for sale on New York City streets, we haven’t been able to wrap our heads around buying and decorating a Christmas tree. Lately, we’ve seen a number of festive alt-Christmas trees made with inexpensive string Christmas lights: right up our last-minute alley. We can tack them…
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Asymmetry can be such a relief, “breaking” the obvious perfection of a designed space. We’ve long been a fan of mismatched chairs…but hadn’t thought of mismatched pendant lights. A simple, unexpected visual surprise. via French by Design Related posts: wabi sabi, the perfection of imperfection thanksgiving logistics: makeshift tables + chairs we’re back (breaking our…
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(Video link here.) Barr Hogan sent us this compelling video about a man who invented simple, easy-to-make solar light “bulbs” using ordinary materials housed in recycled plastic liter bottles. He has literally brought daylight indoors to poor families in the Philippines whose houses are so close together, they block the sun from entering. Now the My…
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The disappointingly ineffective, much-touted high-design of the Plumen, to us, reveals just how desperate designers are to find a bulb that will override the ugly light of CFLs. Starting in 2012, the provisions of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act will go into effect: incandescent bulbs will start to be phased out, starting with…
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Having been swept up in hype (and hope), we spent $35 or so to buy a Plumen bulb, the high-concept CFL (compact flourescent lamp) that is getting a lot of play on design blogs these days. Designed by Sam Wilkinson for the London-based boutique electronics brand Hulger, the Plumen is meant to be the answer to the unattractive…
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photo: sebastian bergne We are slightly obsessed with the idea of using Lego’s to make functional objects that we can really use; it’s kind of a mindgame we play with ourselves that we hope to put into action one day, since you can now buy as much of any color Lego as you want at…
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