When we start poking around the google translate version of rioetc.com.br, a site meant to show the stylish side of Rio, we found, over several separate posts some compelling mashups of tables. The first, the coffee table, above, which appears to be made of mismatched crates, some with wheels, some not, and a cubist hunk of…is…
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Last weekend, we walked down to the Urban Garden Center to check out the pig roast they hold every Saturday in the summer in their rough-and-tumble party pavilion. The pavilion is made of all sorts of found and rustic materials, including mismatched chairs and junk store finds. We especially loved the huge table made of shipping pallets and concrete block, two of our favorite building materials. It could easily seat twelve AND weather the elements.
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Outdoor wooden benches are a pain to move around. Here’s a clever wheelbarrowish solution as well as our own simple hack.
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We are struck by the many similarities between the iconic American Adirondack chair designed in 1903 and the Crate Chair Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld designed in the 1930’s. We’ve investigated ones to buy, and plans that would allow you to make an interesting fusion of the two —all great, indoor and out.
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Stumbled on at Mondo-blogo: a great little adhoc chair repair. In addition to the cat’s-cradle-ish string design, we imagine numerous possibilities for fixing the seat of this bentwood chair carcass, using many of the materials we’ve come across over the years…
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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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A couple of days ago, a dear friend called early in the morning having difficulty breathing and asking us to meet him at the imaging center the doctor advised. The results of the CT-scan had us accompanying our friend to the Emergency Room where we spent nine hours navigating his serious distress with a cellphone that…
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Netherlands-based Designer Francois Duquesnoy is a nomad at heart. Instead of moving heavy furniture everytime he changes living space, he prefers to use whatever discarded items he finds in his new surroundings and transmute them. Sometimes, he splices objects together. More often, he simply paints what he finds, every detail in the same color. As with…
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The Frey Desk is a flexible modular workspace that quickly transitions from sitting desk to drafting table to standing desk to easel. It is decidedly brilliant and, to us, pretty homely. Nevermind. We LOVE Frey’s design thinking…
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Over the years, we’ve come across chair frames and carcasses — the structure without soft back or seat in place — and wondered what we can do with them. Recently we came across a compelling idea for transforming chair frames: wrapping them with a layered, intersecting network of suspenders to form the pan and backrest. The elastic framework provides comfortable, lightweight seating.
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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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Having a hammock indoors is pure joy, and there are a variety of ways to hang them, depending on your space.
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Despite the idiotic title of the Times’ T Magazines recent piece about the Greenwich Hotel’s multi-million dollar penthouse suite renovation designed by Axel Vervoordt, the house tour yielded some lovely ideas, like this low table made of 4 pieces of wood. It reminds us of the alter-ish low diy-able tables/shelves we’ve seen in the past.
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When we saw “non-working” fireplace listed in real estate ads, we used to think “What good is that?”. Then we lost our space with a working fireplace and took the mantle with us; we realized just how great a non-working fireplace i.e. a mantle, can be. Depending on what it looks like and how it…
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César Cervantes is a Mexican art collector with an unconventional story and lifestyle. We love Cervantes’ comfortable library with a seating area of outdoor furniture (Reitveld crate furniture?) and the disparate collection of sagging shelves.
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Sometimes people adept at designing things get jammed and stuck by thorny design problems. When that is the case, making a prototype with moveable parts can help to test out various iterations. You can shift them around and play with them to see how they will actually work and feel. Somehow, I had forgotten this essential technique until a friend reminded me and got my stalled hideaway bed/storage/bookcase unit project MOVING.
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Over the years, we posted a good number of stylish housewares made from copper or black pipe, from closet fittings to faucets to table bases and pot racks, all diy-able. Sometimes we don’t diy because we don’t really have a sense of the essential workings of the process: how do we actually do it?
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According to London-based design firm Doshi Levien, this fence was the inspiration for the line of cabinets below. We think the fence itself is just swell in it’s simple, curiously modern lines and simple construction. As for the cabinets, were interested to see someone else’s iteration of our long-held fantasy of using corrugated metal for cabinets and doors, even room…
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Another simple, surprising re-envisioning of an ordinary object by interior designer Andrée Putman: vintage garden chairs used forthrightly as dining chairs — indoors. They are comfortable and bouncy and have a similar, strangley modern feel as her modernized clawfoot tub. The white chairs in the image are classic Retro, easily found at yard sales and on Ebay. We’ve…
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Although acrylic can initally be pretty cool looking, we’ve never been crazy about it given it’s tendency to scratch and yellow with age. But recently, Design Milk’s Interview with Aaron R. Thomas, “Master of All Things Acrylic” shifted our view a bit. When we saw the acrylic furniture Thomas had painted, a light bulb went off.…
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