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.
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Wood apple boxes come in graduated sizes and have a handle routed out at one end, making them easy to move around. A staple of photo studios, they would be a great piece of multi-purpose “furniture” for home, to use as step stool, sitting stool, small table, ledge or stand for books or objects…We’ve discovered that you can buy them or make them.
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The Floyd Shelf Bracket is a clever tool that allows you create a shelf from any flat surface by simply installing the brackets on a wall and clamping them to the material. With them, you can turn all sorts of interesting materials into shelving and switch out surfaces whenever you find something neat and new (or old).
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On design sites recently, we’ve been noticing quite a few interesting iterations of industrial storage cabinets —new and vintage—as furniture, like the classic Bisley 10-drawer steel storage cabinet, above. We’ve relied on the trusty Ikea lacquered metal Helmer drawer cabinets ($39) for years,
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The forts and bunkers of his childhood inspired Czech designer Michael Tomalik to design a wire frame chair that is “a place of convenience, comfort and personal repose“. His monkey-bar-ish construction is a kind of grownup fort, made comfortable with giant pillows and outfitted with books, plants, and a light (to which we’d add a shade and…
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(Video link HERE.) Barclay Moore is a woodworker who was fed up with broken sawhorses. So he designed is own and knocked prototypes out of plywood. Then he created a Kickstarter to raise money to sell his invention. The project, he says, developed out of necessity (as many great inventions do). What interests us most are all the constraints…
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As great admirers of the infinite possibilities of ordinary cardboard, we love British designer Torsten Sherwood‘s simplified single-component system that encourages instinctive building. Noook are colored, double-faced cardboard disks that slot together to create overlapping formations that can create unique structures. Inspired by Legos, Noook offer’s infinite possible combinations. Designed for children, we see it as a wonderful…
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Having grown up as outdoor brownstone stoop sitters, we were intrigued by the possibilities for INDOOR stoops, and for portable stoops you can place outdoors if you don’t happen to have a real one to hang out on.
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When we looked closely at images of the invalid Matisse sitting in bed or in a chair making his beautiful paper cutouts, we realized that he used an adjustable bed table similar to one we’ve had for years. We came across ours while trolling Ebay for mid-century furniture nearly 20 years ago. Billed as a Danish…
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I’m crazy about how mirrors can animate a room and bring it to life. Particularly oversize, leaning mirrors. I thought these were beauties. … You don’t need to do anything — no hanging or rigging; just set them where the look best or reflect the best view. An oversize picture frame can easily be fitted…
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We recently stumbled on designer Olivier Dollé‘s very compelling room partition. Or that’s what we thought it was until we started wondering why he add the two horizontal pieces at the top and realized… they were LEGS! It’s a table, turned on its side. Eureka!
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We’ve written quite a bit about Max Lamb in the past because of his unique ability to combine art and simple practical design. An integral component of his art is showing people HOW he made it. At MaxLamb.org you can see illuminating how-to’s on just about all his pieces. His latest work is his Marmorial series of…
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This clever bread board bird feeder reminded us of the endless odd permutations on the theme of bread boards we’ve written about before, and of the vast possibilities for using wood planks in general for household projects, from a ledge to perch on top of the back of the toilet tank to a low bookshelf…
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To raise funds for Teddy’s Wish charity auction, nineteen of the UK’s leading designers from the field of architecture, design, fashion and graphics have been invited to customise the iconic Ercol Stacking chair, a simple, elegant wooden chair that invites embellishment. We are smitten with Faye Toogood’s iteration, above, wrapped with what looks like white nylon…
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Spotted at Aqqindex: a very cool Rock Table by Elisabeth Garouste and Maria Bonetti. Could we chistle out notches in small boulders or interesting big rocks to hold a triangle or rectangle of painted ply or…
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Annaleen Karlsson of Annaleenas Hem came up with this DIY room divider for La Petite Magazine. It’s not a new concept, but a tried and true one: You attach hinges to two boards of the same height and width, painted or finished as you like. Our old friend Tom Booth made a two-panel screen almost the…
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Artist Donald Judd’s austere, organic, ultra-simple furniture has been inspiration for lots of knockoff’s and diy’s and straight-out ripoffs. His iconic sofa, below, inspired the $6,000 Maple sofa, above, a collaboration of Brooklyn-based industrial designer Farrah Sit and textile designer Rebecca Atwood. Sit and Atwood have made improvments on Judd’s design, from a practical comfort point-of-view. The sofa is definitely DIY-able.
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We stumbled on this lovely side table at the ever-illuminating Aqqindex. “Paint and parchment side table” was the only info. We instantly envisioned plywood, one of our favorite materials for its possibility and accessibility. You could make a table like this with three rectangles and two flat sides cut with whimsical swirls.
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Years ago, we clipped this image from a design blog thinking: How lovely that looks, in its minimalist setting. Then we imagined lying on a swinging bed hung in a nook so near to a wall and could feel how jarring it would be if/when the suspended bed actually hit the wall. Much better it be…
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We’ve had this fab, rare, 19C French dining table in storage, hoping that we’d have a place for it in the Laboratory. Unfortunately, it’s eight-foot length just won’t work in the configuration of our space. We’ve decided to sell it, for a steal. The buyer would arrange for an pay for shipping from Seattle (or pick it…
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