laboratory

Life Lesson on The Ordinary State of Affairs

During my recent week off to recover from moving house and getting repairs underway to my leak-damaged home, I continued the work of embracing a big life lesson…

Rocks and Stones Make Endlessly Useful Tools and Beautiful Objets

A personal compendium of the pleasures and uses for rocks and stones, with John Cage and Mary Oliver…

The Dirty Little Secret of Spare Minimalist Interiors

When Houzz featured our friend Laura Handler’s Harlem renovation on their site, we spotted the great secret to maintaining a spare, orderly space.

Plywood Niche Set In Sheetrock Wall

We love this very practical, very stylish idea from Oink Studio: a plywood-lined niche set in a in sheetrock wall. Baltic Birch’s stripey uniform plies make for a pleasing natural edge that gives a crisp furniture feel with an organic edge. Here’s what you need to know…

How to Make a 5-foot Alcove Tub FEEL Like a Vintage One

Since I first wrote about the renovation of my 5-x-7-foot Harlem bathroom, a number of readers have written to ask just which five-foot alcove bathtub I bought that had the effect of the divinely comfortable vintage tub in my former space…and WHAT exactly was the trick I used to ensure that it would be a…

Workspace: A Cheap Stylish File Cabinet Strategy

While planning the office portion of the Laboratory’s renovation, I had to be lean and efficient, having spent some serious money on a sliding wall to make it all disappear. I happily used a strategy that had served me (and about a million designers) for years: a desk made of pedestal file cabinets and a…

Signs and Blessings Hidden In Floors or Walls

When you look at the image of the bathroom in Improvised Life’s budget renovation, you’d never guess what lies hidden under the tumbled marble floor tiles the contractor generously donated. While I was choosing just the right mix of tiles —marble itself is so varied, each tile was different — I thought of a slight addition I’d…

Martha Antidote: Visit Alexander Calder in His Studio

(Video link here.) After we wrote about artist Tom Sachs’ practice of knolling, simple, incredibly effective steps he takes to neaten is very busy work space, we got an interesting comment from Kevin Neff, the engineer who helped us reason-out some of our vibrating bed experiments ages ago. He wrote: So interesting. I had been wrongly…

Clever Minimalist Pot and Utensil Hanging Systems

We spent a lot of time and thought devising a pot rack that would make our decades of pots easily accessible AND sleek-looking, rather than a weighty mass hanging above our kitchen island. So we were intrigued by two ideas found rummaging through Boffi‘s “Kitchenology“, pdfs of their latest offerings.

Inspiring Messy Workspaces of Famous Creatives

(Video link here.) They Might Be Giant’s just released their new song I Made a Mess, which is a sort of homage to something we strongly believe (#12 in our Manifesto): Making a mess is an essential part of improvising. Here, then, is our visual ode to wondrous in-flux workspaces of some spectacular creatives to view while you…

Material for Making: Raw Copper Sheeting

Jersey Ice Cream Co’s ingenious stove backsplash out of copper flashing made us LUST for copper sheeting, which we imagined cladding our ugly old fridge, making into a headboard, using as extravagant wrapping paper or placemats, wrapping an ordinary chair or table to transform it… among other things. So we checked it out.

Perfect Room Screen: Bamboo Wave or Plywood Eames?

Over the years, one of the very best purchases I have made were two bamboo Wave Room Screens made of thin bamboo slats that unfurl to create an organic wave shape. I have had mine at least 15 years in two spaces and they have proven to be endlessly useful. They are an inexpensive, stylish alternative to the classic Eames plywood screen I could not afford. Here are SOME of the ways I’ve used them…

Transforming Wall Bed-Bookshelf-Storage Unit

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…

Does Your Apartment Vibrate? Fixes that Help Tame Vibration

Here’s a summary of all the fixes I’ve found to dampen irritating, sleep-depriving vibrations coming from machinery and other mechanicals.

Calder-esque Improvised Olive Fork

Looking through our photo archive of the Laboratory renovation, we came across this image of an olive fork improvised by Roberto, a stunningly-outside-the-box-creative of a carpenter who was part the construction team. Being Portuguese, he loved olives and bought a jar for his lunch one day. Having no fork with which to spear them, he…made one…

Finally, A Pleasing LED Bulb + Our Lighting Strategy

After a great deal of testing, and disappointment, we’re happy to say we’ve FINALLY found an LED bulb we can live with; with pleasing, BRIGHT incandescent-quality light.

Re-envisioning Pendant Lamps: “A Room Within a Room”

When we were designing the kitchen for the laboratory, we wired the ceiling above the island expecting to hang two or three pendant lamps. But when we got to selecting them, we realized we dislike pendant lamps for the way they seem to intrude in the space, and because of the sameness of the look we…

Essential Lessons about White Painted Floors

Recently, a reader wrote us about our white painted floors: Your white floors look amazing. How are they holding up over time? I’m interested in doing the same in my house but there are lots of naysayers saying they won’t be durable enough to retain the sleek look. I love my pale floors which are…

Le Corbusier’s Wall Built Tight-to-The Window, and Ours

This image of a room in Villa Savoye, the Le Corbusier-designed modernist villa in the outskirts of Paris, defies notions we had previously held about the WRONGNESS of having a wall run right into a window. That is what we encountered when we bought our laboratory space; we saw it as a major design flaw,…

Vibrating Bed Mystery Contest Update

Several weeks ago, in desperation, we posted a challenge to our readers to come up with solution for our vibrating bed, which, shaken by some mysterious force, wakes us in the wee hours of the morning. Until we find the source, we are hoping to find a way to keep the bed from shaking, so we…

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