We stumbled on this wonderful hanging shelf on You Have Been Here Sometime, but when we went back to look it was gone! It’s from an exhibition by Ian McDonald called Wearing. In our minds it’s art = a shelf = art = a shelf = wonderful to look at = practical = odd =art…
Read Moresmall space inspiration: 24+ rooms in 344 square feet
Using sliding panels and walls and consummately clever thinking, architect Gary Chang revamped his tiny 344-square-foot Hong Kong apartment to be able to change it into 24 different designs. It totally challenges preconceived notions of what a space can be, which is Chang’s mission. We are especially inspired by his use of sliding walls, which offers…
Read Morestylish improvs on ikea
Every morning we scroll through A LOT of blogs looking for delicious/interesting/useful ideas and improvisations. Lately, we spotted some Ikea pieces buried in features about stylish interiors. Our view of Ikea is that when it’s great, it’s really great, like the Alto-esque stacking stools they used to sell for $12 and the geometric rug, above,…
Read Morestep-stool as bead organizer, via 5-year-old marco
Our friend Anthony Giglio sent us this email: …being a vertically-challenged Italian-American with extra-tall kitchen cabinets, I keep a step-stool at the ready for a quick boost. This week while trying to pack lunch boxes for Sofia and Marco I couldn’t find my white, plastic step-up, and calls out to the family yielded not a…
Read Moremore black pipe brilliance: closet fittings
After we wrote about making bookshelves out of black pipe, we stumbled on these images of black pipe closet fitting. We’d taken them a couple of months ago at our friends’ newly renovated, about-to-be-moved-into, Brooklyn brownstone; there are no clothes hanging yet so you can really see the detail. We’re thinking that the resources in…
Read Moreweight control system, via ernest hemingway
The great blog Ouno recently published a wonderful post about Finca Vigia, Ernest Hemingway’s villa in Cuba where he lived from 1939 to 1960; the house has been preserved pretty much intact. We love Hemingway’s method for tracking his weight: write daily scale readings on the bathroom wall. (We’d paint the wall with whiteboard paint.)
Read Morecopy or buy: pipe bookshelves and…
The other day we stumbled on some oddly wonderful, sculptural bookshelves made of black pipe. They’re for sale at DirtyBils shop on Etsy for $79, a fine deal, we’d say. But as we looked closely at the pictures (below) we couldn’t help thinking “Why not monkey around with this great idea”, and started searching for…
Read Morestoring firewood indoors = firewood as storage unit
If you’ve got a wood-burning fireplace in a city apartment and use it a lot, you have to come to terms with a firewood storage system. Do you store it in the basement and lug batches up flights of stairs (which we once did), or do you find a nook inside to pile it up…
Read Moretoilet paper as design element
No need to hide supplies of toilet paper in the closet… Toilet paper as objet… via Desire to Inspire
Read Morecopy this: leather strap catch-all
An image we saw on Ancient Industries put us on the trail of Evert Collier, the 17th century Dutch still-life and trompe l’oeil painter. Several of his works show strips of leather tacked onto a board or wall to make a kind of catch-all, into which you could slide or hang all sorts of essential…
Read Mored-i-y shipping pallet wine rack + flat storage
Last week’s Remodelista post about the shipping pallet shelving Olabisi Winery’s devised for their tasting room opened our eyes to an essential quality of shipping pallets we had overlooked: stacked, they make instant flat storage. Pallets are only about 5 inches high, with a natural space for bottles (wine, soda, olive oil – anything) or flat items…
Read Moreikea pick: 16-drawer cabinet
We can imagine lots of ways to use this 16-drawer cabinet from Ikea, PS Sinka($249). It is made out almost entirely of solid birch (except for drawer bottoms and back), so doesn’t stand the chance of being chipped like a laminate. It could be easily taken off its base and hung on the wall, placed on…
Read Moretom sachs’ philosophy of making
A picture of a chair made out of orange-and-white-striped wooden safety barriers that we saw on The Selby led us to discovering Tom Sachs. He’s an artist who makes elaborate recreations of modern icons: masterpieces of engineering and design of one kind or another, from Knoll office furniture to Prada to NASA (like this hilarious video). The all-seams-showing…
Read Moremore clipped-together shelving: indie shelving’s clamps + manifesto
Since we first set out on our mission to find good looking clips to make shelving out of boxes, we came across Indie Furniture‘s site. (That’s what happens when you hold an idea in your mind: answers and iterations start to appear). The folks at Indie devised a clamp/joint that can fit different sizes of…
Read Morebinder clips for d-i-y shelving and other improvised solutions
Our recent call for accessible clip/clamp ideas for securing stacked boxes (wood, cardboard, plastic) to make d-i-y clipped-together shelving got a big response, all offering the same solution: large binder clips. These cheap, ubiquitous clips seem to be the go-to solution for many niggling problems. Wine writer Anthony Giglio wrote: “I have improvised with these binder…
Read Moreclipped-together shelving pt. 2: cardboard boxes
Pamela Hovland, who is our BEST scout, found this cardboard box shelving system on Etsy. It’s a variation of the clipped-together shelving idea we wrote about earlier. It is to our mind a brilliant use of an ordinary cardboard box (which we’re thinking, could even be painted with rubber paint…) It seems to be the…
Read Moreclipped-together shelving pt. 1: wood (help needed)
We are always amazed by how we’ll have an idea and start thinking about it, trying to figure it out, and then start to stumble on echoes and iterations of it. We’ve been thinking about modular shelving that looks good and sleek and is sturdy but do-able, not too expensive…Why not stack boxes in various…
Read Morepascal anson on (cheap) kitchen cabinets
Pascal Anson sussed out kitchen cabinets and discovered that cabinet makers earn their serious money from the doors, which cost much more than the base cabinets. So he bought base cabinets from IKEA and then bought a mish-mash of doors that had been marked way down. Easy and cheap. There’s a caveat though: “The rule…
Read MoreMore Pascal Anson: Re-Imagined Silverware and Cutlery
Here’s another Pascal Anson innovation: disparate forks, knives and spoons, all painted the same way, are transformed into new collections of “silverware”. Such a simple design principle makes a cool unified set. Here’s what Design Museum had to say about Pascal’s “Reunification Project”: “One of the new generation of British product designers for whom narrative is…
Read Morelemon squeezer repair in honor of platform 21
When my trusty lemon squeezer broke, I toyed with the idea of buying a new one, but found that design collaborative Platform 21’s Repair Manifesto (blogged last summer) had lodged itself in my consciousness. “REPAIRING IS A CREATIVE CHALLENGE“…and “TO REPAIR IS TO DISCOVER” subtly resonated. There’s a way to fix this, I thought, as I wandered…
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