Holton Rower designed a iron-clad magnetic wall painted to look like the adjacent walls. It allows Holton and his family to easily display and remove artwork, photographs, notes —anything that can be held up with magnets — as they wish. Here’s how he did it.
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The trend of the past several years to make sofas deeper so that they appear more luxurious is bad design in the name of the illusion of affluence and style. Here’s our thinking…
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Always on the lookout for clever ways to fit in additional storage, we love this “sofa” made on a base of flat files used to store art and other “flat” works on paper.
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Desire to Inspire’s recent 20+ photo post about an apartment made out of wooden crates — from makeshift walls and a kitchen island base, to night stands, a coffee table, and a bathroom vanity— made us think TOO MUCH!. This is one over-the-top crate obsession. Although living in that crate-filled apartment would drive us crazy,…
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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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Spotted at Desire to Inspire: this Alec Hemer‘s photograph of a flight of stairs whose extra room at the side makes a fine, surprising set of bookshelves. Related posts: staircase of succulents + succulent sculpture reverse-painted stairs (a carpet of wood) stairs in colors
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Knowing that I am in the process of designing a wall of bookshelves with a berth-like murphy bed built-in, Maria Robledo sent me pictures of the bookshelves in Creative Director Anne Johnson’s country house. The simple wooden shelves are held up by triangular wooden brackets nestled into horizontal supports. It’s a way to have a…
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We’re always on the lookout for interesting painted floor ideas and love this modernist pattern painted onto the naked wood. This ‘freeform’ design would have to be done with care, with a series of stencils, we imagine, shapes carefully cut out of big sheets of thin but firm plastic. We started to imagine other “moderne”…
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The best part of Maria Popova’s Brainpickings blog is, for us, the glimpses she gives us into new books. With extensive pictures and well-selected quotes, she immediately and completely draws you in to the world of the book she’s featuring. This picture from the book Nomad by Jeroen Toirkens particularly spoke to us, as it reveals the…
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Periodically we like to feature the messy workspaces of artists as a reminder that being creative often means making a mess…We see it as an antidote to the shelter-magazine vision of a nice neat life that has infiltrated our heads over the years. To take the idea a step further, we thought it would be…
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Adam Kuban of Serious Eats’ Slice Blog has a compelling series about people who have built their own pizza ovens. His interview with Mark Wilkie, who created this beauty is in the backyard of his Brooklyn rental, comes complete with photos and drawings of the process. Wilkie found lots of practical resources at Forno Bravo, a…
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Many years ago, I bought an amazing yellow mantle, salvaged from an old house in Maine, to surround the fireplace in an apartment I thought I’d live in forever. Then things changed (life’s operating principle) and I had to leave that beautiful space, and make a new home amidst the the harsh realities of…
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