Why buy rugs to roll out on your floors, when you can paint them? Why collect art when you can decorate walls, floors and ceiling, with found materials? I’m smitten by these two wildly different, improvisational ways that artists have used paint to mimic and displace art in such disparate places as a house on the…
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Photographer Virginia del Giudice has been sending us sightings from her travels in Amsterdam of random brilliant “everyday” improvisations the Dutch have come up with. Here’s a favorite: numbered tiles formed into a hopscotch grid and placed permanently on the sidewalk, for a quick spontaneous skip and jump on your way to do an errand or go…
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Is it chalk, or spray paint or regular paint? Whatever…we wish more sidewalks looked like this. Thanks Holton!
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Looking for ways to jazz up wood decking? Studio Weave has designed a new roof terrace for London College of Fashion’s gallery space, adding brightly coloured decking and seats. Says Studio Weave’s Eddie Blake: The whole thing was done with reference to basket weave – trying to make timber look as if it’s woven. The timber is…
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When we were hunting for a affordable flooring solutions for the Laboratory, we came across a wood floor we had never seen before in a store in Soho: it was made from tiles cut across the grain of hard wood beams: end cuts placed in a grid to make an unexpectedly beautiful pattern. The lighting in…
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Just as we’re on the verge of buying a sewing machine so we can actually MAKE some of the things we imagine, we’ve been seeing images of beautiful patchwork rugs made out of vintage kilim remnants. Wondering if it would be possible to DIY them ourselves, we went hunting for kilim remnants.
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Eagle eyed Susan Dworski spotted this polka dot wall and floor in the portfolio of the write/stylie + photographer couple Amandine and Jules. We love the idea of a graphic element flowing from one to the other, softening angles, and make the space seem more…fluid. Here’s another example of using paint to define a space in…
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One of our most popular diy posts is an outdoor floor made of wood “bricks”, the sawed-off ends of boards placed in a brick-like pattern. Recently, we saw a very cool variation on that theme: an outdoor floor made of cross-cut tree trunk slices, which make for a wonderfully graphical floor of circles.
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We discovered decorative painter Deirdre Newman when she reached out on Facebook to say “I can paint a lot (all) of the painted floors and walls you suggest! Would love to execute some of your amazing ideas!”. We poked around her huge portfolio of projects and found a trove of clever, meticulously-executed ideas. We especially like her faux parquet…
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As we turn our attention to getting our patio ready for hanging out, we’re inspired by this charming image we found on From Moon to Moon of a Moroccan-style garden ladened with brightly colored rugs. The rugs define and soften the space, and create an outdoor “room”, perfect for hanging out with friends. Creative use of colorful textiles, Moroccan-style, is a great strategy.
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Kilim rugs so popular in modern homes have their roots in nomadic tribal cultures. Here’s a bit of their story, and the strategy for their care.
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“Breaking the expected pattern” is an ongoing theme that is threaded throughout Improvised Life, in all aspects of our lives. It tends to show most concretely in interiors, in floors and walls.
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Black-and-white checkerboard floors are an enduring, curiously forthright flooring material that seems to work in just about any space, from modern to classic, from Josef Frank’s Swedish modernist interior to Julian Schnabel’s New York City home Palazzo Chupi.
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When we discovered that a glorious thick, Luis Barragan-esque wool rug had a few less-than-pristine-spots we wondered: How DO you clean a rug at home? We wondered if Dyson’s proprietary Zorb Carpet Maintenance Powder would work with our cheap, noisy, trusty, Mighty Mite. So we tried it.
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We love this inspired DIY featured Remodalista in recently: rough-hewn banged-up floors embellished with dramatic stencils spotted in the showroom of Chairloom in Philadelphia. The how-to cuts down unnecessary steps and make the most of the floor’s as-is beauty.
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What do you do when you’ve got a parquet or hardwood floor with patches that are broken or in generally terrible repair? We found a surprising solution via artist Mathias Kiss’ installation Banquise: replace wood rectangles or slats with tile. You don’t have to just stick with rectangles. Paola Navone made a fabulous patch using…
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Right after we posted Gene Davis’ Fab Striped Street’, Susan Dworski sent us this great before-and-after picture of a Rotterdam parking lot half painted with stripes. The with-and-without is quite an example of the possibilites for stipes in unlikely places. Then we found another: a brilliant striped car spotted in New York Magazine recent The Urbanist’s Warsaw:
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After Maria Robledo sent us this unattrubted image, we tracked it to the Ace Hotel in NYC. Such a good idea to put a mind-shifting sign on a staircase, with all the little vertical”walls”. Here’s another stair-with-signs we found at Houzz, created with wall decals (a tad corny, but swell just the same):
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In 1972, artist Gene Davis painted his 414-ft-long painting “Franklin’s Footpath”on the street in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. So beautiful. Imagine if all more streets were painted in glorious stripe… via Clauda Bruno Related posts: why not paint the sidewalk (or any outdoor floor?) how a little colored paint can transform neighborhoods the…
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When Remodelista recently featured a picture of the Laboratory’s painted plywood floors in Remodeling 101: Painted Plywood—The Best Budget Wood Floor, I figured it was time to show HOW my plywood floors actually were made, and to lend a little reality to what it takes to install and paint 1000 square feet of them. I love ’em, and…
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