There are many reasons not to follow Marie Kondo’s mission to declutter. Witness this report from Susan Dworski, with Louise Bourgeois and Italo Calvino…
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There are many reasons not to follow Marie Kondo’s mission to declutter. Witness this report from Susan Dworski, with Louise Bourgeois and Italo Calvino…
Read MoreA budget apartment overhaul by a Brooklyn design student reminded us of the great design possibilities inherent in salvaged cuts of marble and other stone.
Read MorePhotographer Dominique Nabokov was way ahead of the curve when she started using just a Polaroid camera to photograph the unstyled, unlit spaces of notable people “as close to reality as possible”. They are a joy and relief.
Read MoreWhen he was thirty-two, Alexander Calder visited the legendary Mondrian’s studio in Paris. The experience changed his life. Here’s what Calder saw.
Read MoreIn a house tour of furniture dealer and interior designer Michael Bargo, we thought: “How nice to hang a really beautiful rug on the wall, in a mashup with beautiful objects from many eras”. Then we read the fine print.
Read MoreLast night, we found ourselves sitting in early 20th century French architect and designer Pierre Chareau’s garden in Paris, looking at a leafy wall, and at the lovely pattern of flag stones, after we’d wandered through his extraordinary Maison de Verre. We advise going there right now. Here’s how.
Read MoreThe Times T Magazine featured ANOTHER perfectly minimalist apartment with no sign of a human being in it. Still, we culled some good ideas from Danish designer Oliver Gustav’s very gray Copenhagen apartment.
Read MoreWe love seeing Casa Helsinki, an old house in the historic district of Alberdi, in Córdoba, Spain, renovated to become a guest house. Its vintage black and white floors off a simple, inexpensive lesson in design.
Read MoreUsing our rusty French to translate this video tour of designer extraordinaire Paola Navone’s Paris apartment, we’ve gathered a small trove of smart, original, inspiring and doable ideas.
Read MoreThe jazzy black-and-white checkerboard “rug” that defines the living room of artist Marisol’s Tribeca loft reminded us a painted canvas floor cloth: practical, stylish and easy-to-make.
Read MoreWe found a number of simple ideas for textiles in photos of a former Tuscan convent restored by designer Holly Lueders and her daughter. Our favorites are this very do-able paneled bedskirt and a pillow cover fashioned like a gift.
Read MoreRecently I skyped with a colleague who just moved into a prewar rental in Brooklyn; she asked me to see if I could come up with solutions to the various challenges imposed by the wonderful but imperfect and not-hers-to-renovate space. So we did a video tour of her space. (I hope show some before and after’s…
Read MoreWe must have spent an hour slowing looking at our friend Christopher Baker‘s beautiful online portfolios. We found ourselves culling images with a single theme: natural textiles used in original absolutely doable ways, no uptight styling here. Just a fine trove of ideas.
Read MoreWe’ve written extensively about our usual practice of deconstructing and arranging overwrought hotel rooms. We’ve encountered SO many that were over decorated, stuffy, busy, that we stopped loving staying in hotels. Until we saw photos of Hotel Henriette in Paris, which breaks the mould every which way and gave us a trove of doable ideas for…
Read MoreAhh THESE are our idea of wondrous Christmas trees. No need to decorate them further: the house does it all, a magical platform for living trees.
Read MoreAt London’s Southbank Centre, architecture studio Jonathan Tuckey Design created an archival space featuring a mid-century shelving system that echoed the building’s heritage. When we looked closely, we realized it is made of slotted angle iron, an inexpensive structuring material available at many hardware stores. We first realized its potential for creating modular furniture when we bought a second-hand copy of High-Tech, The Industrial…
Read MoreAs we ramp up to the holidays, a lot of people we know are scrambling to pull their spaces together in preparation for big crowd of family and friends. We take a cue from the unexpectedly chill interiors of this 12th Century château in France that Isabelle Dubois-Dumee and Hubert Bettan of the interiors brand Les…
Read MoreWe are smitten with Parisian antique dealer and interior designer Florence Lopez’ website and its many interiors showing her extraordinary use of darkish, saturated color, especially deep blues and greens (all with a little black in them). Of note, this geometrically patterned wall in greens and cream in her showroom and the other iteration of the same pattern
Read MoreAs apartments in urban areas become prohibitively expensive, young people in Oakland, California have been developing innovative, grassroots strategies to provide homes for themselves, and for homeless people in their communities. The New York Times recently article and slideshow samples new ways of thinking about “home”, “a social experiment in stripping down to the basics.”
Read More“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:
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