bathroom

Bathroom ‘Tile Painting’ Is an Unexpected Liberation

Found at Lucinda Chambers instagram: Permission to NOT tile an entire bathroom wall, but just selected parts. Beautiful! As is her inspiration…

Practical Ways to Alleviate Toilet Paper Anxiety and Hoarding

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.

The Bathroom As Incubator of Ideas

The bathroom is the one place where I find mindfulness overrated. It is a lovely place to read, write, draw. Look at all the way it can be an incubator of ideas.

Henry Miller’s Bathroom “A Voyage of Ideas”

This clip from a 1975 documentary of Henry Miller takes place mostly in the writer’s remarkable bathroom and transports you WAY beyond the little room…

Annals of Found Art: Anonymous Side-by-Side Toilets Rival Duchamp and Cattelan

In a coffee shop restroom, we stumbled on a mind-blowing installation that rivaled Marcel Duchamp’s ground-breaking Fountain.

Bathrooms Designed for Our Intellectual and Creative Selves

In their visionary bathroom, friends purposefully accommodate what most bathrooms do in an ad hoc way: reading material, a laptop, and art for their ever-creative selves.

Metallic Checkerboard Floors + a Trick for Visualizing Pattern Painted Floors

When we couldn’t find examples of the metallic checkerboard floors we’re smitten with, we devised a way to envision what they —and other jazzy patterns— would look like as a floor.

Annals of Bad Design: Glass Walled Bathroom in a Bedroom

Were we not in the real world, this glass enclosed bathroom might seem lovely and airy. But its ‘reality sandwiches’ are daunting.

How a Toilet Paper Holder Turns into Sculpture

In the bathroom of the Van de Weghe gallery, where we saw Devir, Enrique Oliveira’s massive tree sculpture, we were struck by the strange, very sculptural toilet paper holder with its bold statement of HERE I AM. Then we looked more closely…

Good Idea: How to Have an Indoor Tub in a Garden

Via poet Ocean Vuong’s tumblr: a vintage tub in a small bathroom festooned with flowered wallpaper (just the right wallpaper). Sweet and magical.

DIY Live Edge Bath Table / Board

For a bath person, it is heaven to luxuriate with whatever you need close at hand: cocktail, herb tea, iPad, novel… A bath board that rests across the tub makes for a perfect surface to rest things on. Recently, we saw an easy-to-make iteration that David Sanford made for a friend…

Charm and Practicality of Odd and Broken Mirrors

Roaming through photographer Christopher Baker‘s online portfolios, we came across this lovely quirky bathroom. We love the long rough surface for double sinks, and the little set of matching vessels to hold toothbrushes, turning them into little sculptures. But what we love most are the mirrors: a couple of vintage rectangular ones and two shards propped…

How to Make a 5-foot Alcove Tub FEEL Like a Vintage One

Since I first wrote about the renovation of my 5-x-7-foot Harlem bathroom, a number of readers have written to ask just which five-foot alcove bathtub I bought that had the effect of the divinely comfortable vintage tub in my former space…and WHAT exactly was the trick I used to ensure that it would be a…

Annals of REALLY Bad Design: Faceted Crystal Sink

The other day, we got an email from a reader named Ann: Here’s something for your Annals of Bad Design! It almost deserves its own new category . . . Annal of Really Really Bad Design! We found we agreed on WHY the amethyst bathroom sink is really really bad:

Signs and Blessings Hidden In Floors or Walls

When you look at the image of the bathroom in Improvised Life’s budget renovation, you’d never guess what lies hidden under the tumbled marble floor tiles the contractor generously donated. While I was choosing just the right mix of tiles —marble itself is so varied, each tile was different — I thought of a slight addition I’d…

A Family Home Full of Heart and Good Ideas

“Something boldly improvisational and cheery going on in this house in Australia” wrote Susan Dworski in an email as she described the home Ruth Bruten, writer of Gourmet Girlfriend blog, shares with her husband and five boys. It is delightfully REAL and colorful, and packed with ideas. Here are Susan’s favorites, and ours:

How to Get Stains + Mildew Out of Fabric + Tyvek a L’Ancienne

Whenever I can’t get a stubborn stain out of a linen napkin, tablecloth or a blouse, I do what my Greek great-grandmother did: I squeeze lemon juice onto the stain and put it directly in the sun. When I lived in a south-facing apartment with no outdoor space, I’d open the window and rig ways to…

Hidden Art + Reminders on a Medicine Cabinet Door

When we installed a tall, narrow 13-inch-wide sliver medicine cabinet in our newly renovated and very minimalist bathroom, little did we know that it would do more than provide storage for essential toiletries. The mirror door is backed by white-glazed steel, a perfect “clean slate” to which we could affix signs, reminders and images that…

Disguises for Computer Cables + Other Ugly Stuff

As we scroll through design sites, we periodically spot some new gadget for keeping ugly computer wires in check: reels that wind them up, dongles that collect them behind your desk… Perhaps the BEST improvisation we’ve seen is in Christoph Niemann’s workspace. The inspired illustrator/artist/author disguised an ugly black cable by placing a black and white image…

Annals of Invention: Poop Spray (to Buy or DIY)

(Video link here.) When a grieving friend came for dinner, the conversation eventually turned from sadness to LOL hilarity. He told us that he had recently heard that an entrepeneur was making a fortune selling “poop spray”, a scented liquid that you spray in the toilet “before to go” to literally prevent your shit from stinking. You’re kidding, we…

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