Last October, 22 temporary hotel rooms popped up around Mannheim, Germany, as part of the Hotel Shabby Shabby event for the city’s Theater der Welt festival. Designers were invited to build temporary cabins in unexpected locations using found or recylable materials, for a strict 250 pounds (less than $400) budget. It yielded a many ideas for building…
Read More
For many years, we made a study of sanctuaries of various kinds — from the icon-rich imagery of a Franciscan Church to Buddhist monasteries. Ultimately we found that being in Nature was the best way to center ourselves, clear our head, connect with something bigger. But we had never experienced a chapel like ThornCrown, designed by a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, in the deep Ozark woods…the unlikely brainchild of a retired, rarely-churchgoing alcoholic schoolteacher.
Read More
We’re smitten with the vivid crimson aluminum triangles suspended in mid-air in the Issey Miyake store designed by Tokujin Yoshioka in Tokyo’s commercial Marunouchi district. WHAT IF we had a huge, light-weight, vividly-colored triangle to move around our space?
Read More
During a visit to Christoph Niemann’s website recently, we found ourselves smitten with the images of his workspace. They were full of decidedly straight-forward, practical ideas with a sort of deconstructed charm: back-to-back work tables on simple pipe frames, articulating task lights, flat files that serve as additional work surfaces. Niemann wrote us that the…
Read More
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…
Read More
In one of the images on the feature 1st Dibs did about interior designer Suzanne Shaker recently, we spotted this clever long shelf made of two different materials, which makes for an unexpectedly interesting shelf unto itself, whether or not it holds objects or art. It was designed by Rogers Marvel Architects for a row of modern townhouses built in…
Read More
In his eco-friendly country home in Uruguay, artist Pablo Reinoso embellished the spare modern decor with tree trunks and branches from the surrounding landscape. He is a man after our own hearts; our NYC laboratory is full of sculptural tree parts foraged from the neighboring park. We especially love the bathroom with a huge trunk embedded in the polished concrete…
Read More
Last May I posted the life-size prototype I made out of FoamCore to help me design a complex combination of berth-style (sideways) wall bed, storage and bookshelves for my space in Harlem. I had been struggling with the design problem for some time: how to make the massive volume of the wall-bed blend into the structure, so you…
Read More
As fans of plywood for its economical, elemental, very modern possibilities for stylish interiors, we are smitten with bright blue-stained plywood used in Vancouver’s Kin Kao Restaurant. Local Scott & Scott Architects choose plywood to use in tandem with readily available materials, including painted concrete, soaped beech, and galvanized metal. Their clever technique of using construction-grade…
Read More
We stumbled on this curiously beautiful sheetrock wall at the always illuminating Under the Sun. It appears to be a way an art gallery displayed a show. Sheets of uncut 4 x 8′ sheet rock were nailed to a carefully constructed wall of ordinary sheet rock studs with plenty of space between. Not great for sound…
Read More
At the compellingly odd blog Under the Sun, we stumbled on an gorgious interior with messily painted, canvas like walls in what appeared to be an Italian Villa. We follwed the trail to discover it was from an article Vogue magazine ran in 1966, about artist Cy Twombly’s villa in Rome. The photographs were by…
Read More
In response to our post about various permutations on the Guest Book, Laura Handler sent us images of her friend Dennis Decker’s Guest List on a wall of his Harlem guest room. With overtones of a Haring-esque comic book, we imagine it to be compulsively readable.
Read More
For years we’ve wondered at the seeming impossibility of living in Philip Johnson’s Glass House — a house clad entirely in translucent plate-glass— without feeling totally exposed. We learned only recently that the house was is really just one of an array of buildings splayed across Johnson’s 49-acres of land in Connecticut which constituted Johnson and…
Read More
Lately, we’ve been seeing appealing LOW shelves in some of the interiors we’ve come across. The low-to-the-floor horizontals they create have the effect of making the ceiling look higher, especially useful in low-ceiling rooms. We especially like the these clever shelves spotted at Il Richiamo Del Bosco (The Call of the Woods), and eco friendly bed & breakfast in Sala Baganza,…
Read More
We browse A LOT of websites in our search for illuminating content for Improvised Life that will inspire new ways of viewing every aspect of the everyday. We have a special fondness for interiors as we hunt for ideas we can apply to our own space, if only in our imagination. But we have grown…
Read More
We recently stumbled on two images at Aqqindex simply titled “Alicia Nunez house”. We were knocked out by the feeling of the space and its many interesting ideas: concave ceiling and angled walls, built-in niches, bricks positioned sideways, a long ledge for sleeping and reading with more niches…the living area steps up, from shiny dark tile to a…
Read More
While we were mulling the theme of crumpled paper (or Tyvek) being employed in novel and useful ways, we stumbled on Japanese design studio Naoya Matsumoto Design‘s use of crumpled tracing paper to transform a Japanese gallery in Osaka into a cozy pop-up bar. Ahhh, a swell, inexpensive new decorating material we hadn’t thought of: like a sheer, crisp fabric…
Read More
While we were browsing through photographer Prue Ruscoe‘s work, we came across this image of a what appears to be a garden shed or trailer painted (or stenciled) with huge butterflies. A lovely visual breath of air…
Read More
In Remodelista’s recent 14 Lessons in Minimalism from the Glass House, we found many good ideas (in addition to a gratifyingly voyeuristic house tour). We especially love Philip Johnson’s inspired idea to mount a large painting on a stand to make an artful room partition.
Read More
In Not Red But Green, Trondheim-based installation artist Per Kristian Nygård crammed mini hills and valleys of turf into one room of Oslo’s NoPlace Gallery. The unlikely landscape which explores “the limitations and possibilities of space” is “an antithesis to the organised architectural environment.” That’s for sure!
Read More