living room

Visit Alexander Calder’s Alive, Colorful Homes via Pedro Guerrero

If the usual interior porn leaves you cold, I recommend spending time at photographer Pedro Guerrero’s website to roam through his photographs of Alexander Calder’s very original living spaces.

Dominique Nabokov’s As-is, Not-Styled, REAL Paris Living Rooms Are a Joy

Unlike most interior photographers, Dominique Nabokov photographed consciously NOT-styled or lit spaces, each unique because they reflect the very unique lives of the people who created them, whose lives dictated their design.

Hunting Art in Apartment Galleries and Salons We Found Amezkua’s Women with Power Tools

Living room galleries provide community meeting places for artists and alternative ways to exhibit their work, and continue the salon tradition.

Annals of Good/Bad Design: DIY Burlap Panel Shades (with Fixes)

Remodelista recently posted a compelling DIY by San Francisco blogger Caitlin Long of The Shingled House. It’s an example of a charming idea that has, in our eyes, something of a “fail” built-in, or at the very list, an interesting design problem.

Cy Twombly’s Fab Deconstructed Villa in Rome (1966)

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…

Low Shelving as Settee, Display and Storage

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,…

Bohemium Homes: An Alt Kind of Eye Candy

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…

Alicia Nunez House: “A Balanced Personal Ecosystem”

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…

House Tour with Life Lessons: Tom Fallon’s Shelter Island Cottage

When our friend Tom Fallon’s Shelter Island cottage was featured in Hamptons Cottages & Gardens, we realized just how many lessons about home design and LIFE we learned from him over the years. Here they are, with pictures by Jason Penney.

Rough-stitched Ripped Linen Pillow Covers

Just as we were wrapping our head around learning to use our new sewing machine, we noticed these big pillow covers on IKEA’S blog Livet Hemma… …which sent us hunting around Ikea USA to discover that it is selling 100% linen by the yard for 7.99 a 59″ yard in white and gray. We’ve long been fans…

A HUGE Paper Globe Transforms a Room

Spotted in a house tour at Desire to Inspire: one swell idea. Want to add some moderne architectural interest to a prewar room? Hang a giant Noguchi-esque paper shade. We’re talking BIG: 36-inch or 42-inch in diameter We like the Maru white paper lantern available at Shoji Decor. They also sell single cord lantern kits for…

Achille Castiglioni’s Inspiring Casa d’Oggi

In 1956 Italian industrial designer Achille Castiglioni created “COLORI E FORME NELLA CASA D’OGGI”, the installation of a living room at Villa Olmo, a neoclassical villa located in the city of Como, northern Italy. When we saw images of it, we flipped. It is such a far cry from the sterile interiors we see so often today; it’s…

Murals Inspired by Frescoes to DIY or Buy

These images Castello Sonnino’s frescoes that Peggy Markel emailed us from Tuscany got us thinking about mural services we’ve come across in our wanderings, and just what images we would put BIG on a wall.

The Beauty of Unframed Art via Schnabel’s Palazzo Chupi

We’re so used to seeing images of tidy interiors with neat rows of framed pictures that it was a joy to stumble on this image of Julian Schnable’s living room at Palazzo Chupi. In addition to all the pink, there’s a nice mashup of art, much of it unframed. Unframed canvases have an immediacy and,…

Dirty Pink Obsession: Even Donald Judd Loved It

It seems that even Artist Donald Judd liked muted, “dirty” pink walls, the focus of our ongoing obsession. Here’s one of the rooms in the Cobb House that he renovated in Marfa, Texas, the vast army base he bought and transformed in the 1990’s.

A Cool Tiny Moderne House Inside a Prewar Apartment

Far in advance of the “tiny space movement”, Wayne Berg designed this innovative room inside of a high-ceilinged prewar apartment.

House Tour: Jean Cocteau’s Villa Santo Sospir

An image of bookshelves set into a wall painted by Jean Cocteau sent us looking for its origin, which is we discovered, is Villa Santo Sospir, the artist’s home in the South of France. And such a home it is. Cocteau used the walls and other surfaces — even lampshades — as the canvas for his drawings, transforming the house into magical dwelling.

Enzo Mari Fireplace Inspiration (A Mantle as Display)

Enzo Mari’s fireplace rolls all sorts of things we love into one: a fireplace, slabs of concrete or stone, shelves and ledges to display still lives —perhaps one of the nicest use of a mantle. Our own yellow mantle acts as a repository of things we love. It’s been getting pretty full lately; a friend suggested placing a smaller mantle inside it.

Tiny Plywood Studio Morphs into a Gallery via Pegs

We got a lot of ideas taking a little photo tour of the versatile 66-square-foot artist’s studio Anaan Stern and Shany Tal, with its many kinds of clever storage: folding bed, shelving, drawers of all sizes…But what we liked best are the wooden pegs inserted into sliding doors to hold works of art or open books, to make an ever-changeable private gallery.

Design Swap Brilliance: Painted Radiators and Pipes

Designer Davito’s inspired painted radiators, and other design solutions, came from “crashing” in friends’ shoebox apartment. It got us thinking about enlisting friends to give their unique perspective to spaces or design issues that have become too familiar for us to “see”.

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