(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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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 recently stumbled across a couple of images from Decoracion, which features the work of Spanish interior designer Jaime Parladé. We love Parladé’s use of the elements of a living room: a cotton rug, a shelf of objects, a painting, unexpected tiles, a basket trunk, to give a bathroom a more UNbathroom like feel. Of all the elements in the…
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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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We recently stumbled in this image of French fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s 1970’s Paris bathroom which interests us for its vision of bathroom as parlour or even work space. It includes a sitting area with Panton chairs around a mirror table by the tub. The room is filled with mirrors and posters. We love seeing…
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We’ve long admired this rather visionary bathroom of some friends. They planned their bathroom to accommodate what most bathrooms do in an ad hoc way: house reading material and intellectual pursuits. That got us checking out other iterations of this idea.
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After we posted about Calvin Trillin’s imagined “sling contraption” for a walk-in tub, we started hunting for images of what that might look like. Maybe there was such a thing already. Instead we found a tub that has made the rounds on design blogs: an elegant, sleekly-shaped fiberglass tub modeled after a hammock (a sling, of sort).…
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Some time ago, I spent a week at Omega Institute, a non-profit educational retreat center located in Rhinebeck, New York. It’s kind of like a summer camp for adults who want to retreat, take workshops, be in nature, mull over where they are in their lives. Since Omega was originally a summer camp for kids so…
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We read Overflow Calvin Trillin’s one pager in the May 5th New Yorker on the subway and laughed out loud. We laughed again when we re-read it a month later to find this excerpt. Trillin’s piece describes a man desperately emailing a walk-in bathtub company — and other spammers — to STOP sending him offers. His IMAGINING just…
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Browsing through my image files, I came across photos I’d collected of matte black door hardware, which I contemplated using in the Laboratory. The first time I saw it used was in a friend’s just-renovated Brooklyn brownstone: black hinges add a surprising graphic element, as does the rosette of the crystal doorknob. Beautiful. Although I only used black hardware in one detail of the Laboratory, I learned its biggest lesson and caveat.
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We keep stumbling on brilliantina interior designer Andrée Putman‘s clever, simple, visionary plays on ordinary objects. Here she hacked a clawfoot tub way-before-her-time, by replacing the claw feet with giant balls to give the tub a completely “other” modern look. It retains the comforing depth, length and back-slope of the classic clawfoot. Putman used this…
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Design student Nicole Pannuzzo created this clever origami-inspired toothpaste packaging concept that collapses, accordion-like, as the toothpaste is used. We’d LOVE to walk into the bathroom and see that practical little sculpture. But what we love best was Pannuzzo’s window into the design process, with the many attempts it took to get it right:
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Good idea: use water-based, all-surface Uni-Posca markers to label glass canning jars (they come in different point thicknesses and colors). When you change the contents, just wash the jar. We’d use these markers for other glass and mirror markings…
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At the great, somewhat cryptic art blog Atelier Journal, we stumbled on Rollers, a wire sculpture made by artist Richard Tuttle in 1970. We are smitten with it as an artwork, while our barbarian selves see it as divine inspiration for a toilet paper holder that we hope to one day fashion.
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We’ve long been fans of copper plumbing pipes being configured on the OUTSIDE of bathroom walls to make interesting sculptural fixtures (not to mention, using copper pipe in general for pot racks, books shelves, closet fittings). And even though we’re not crazy about the somewhat drear gray tiles in this bathroom, we LOVE the creative…
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We were stunned by this painting by Frida Kahlo, sometimes referred to as “What I saw in the Water“. It has EXPANDED our view of what a bath can be…or perhaps better put “What one might see” in an ordinary bath… via From Moon to Moon Related posts: frida kahlo’s body cast paintings (art transforms)…
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Susan Dworski spotted this cartoon a few minutes after we posted Annals of Bad Design: Uncomfortable Bathtub Surround. As usual, a New Yorker cartoon nails the zeitgeist! Thanks Susan! Related posts: xcultivating gardens real and imaginaryx xmadan kataria’s laughter yoga: laughing as a practicex
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It was by climbing into the luxurious-looking tub at friends newly renovated brownstone that I identified a design-flaw that I’ve since seen repeated over and over again in shelter sites and magazines: A nice deep tub would be set into a surround of beautiful stone which would form an elegant finish around its edge. But…
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Our minimalist self generally thinks classic white toilet paper is just about a perfect design. If you want to make it more graphical, stack it sideways to make a rhythm of its black dot/holes/sides (below) or forge a unique holder, like Alexander Calder‘s…
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There is no getting away for my thing for cement. Fantasies of making things out of it abound in ‘improvised life’s archives and for years Working with Cement was in the stack of books on my bedside table. When I was renovating what was to become ‘improvised life’s Laboratory, I contemplated surrounding the tub in…
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