Designer Laura Handler, whose chic Montana cabin and cool teeny ‘everything’ vial we’ve featured, sent us images her latest brilliance. The Harlem building in which she recently renovated her apartment is having the bricks repointed, which is seriously messy work. To keep dust OUT, Laura first made a barrier of blue painter’s tape around her (very cool)…
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Having created the illusion of an expansive corner window using smoke-and-mirrors in our Harlem space (below), we LOVE seeing other riffs on the theme of optical illusion windows. Granit Chartered Architects devised a brilliant faux bay window
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On a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I stopped at the Carnegie Museum of Art to wait for a friend who worked there. In my short rambling, I saw some wonderful works ‘in person’ that I’d previously only seen online, including On Kawara’s date paintings. Reading the little info cards alongside the works often gave me…
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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.
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(Video link here.) On the heels or our article about Room-Size Shadow Boxes, images from an illuminating 2014 exhibition at New York’s Venus Over Manhattan gallery has expanded our view of the great Alexander Calder‘s work AND sparked ideas for abstract room shadow sculptures. In ‘Calder Shadows’, eleven works by Alexander Calder, from 1929 to 1974, are ingeniously spot-lit so…
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Our friend Susan Dworski recently email us a link to artist Anila Quayyum Agha‘s room-size shadow box with this note: Sally – this is pretty fabulous. So simple a concept, so detailed the craft, so profoundly spiritual the effect. And she is right. ‘Intersections’ is large-scale shadow box composed of Moorish patterns suspended in the middle of…
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When enlisted to design a compact tea shop in a limited footprint, Brazilian architect Alan Chu created a giant puzzle box whose color blocks unfold to reveal its wares. Seeing it unfold gives us lots of ideas for maximizing our own storage spaces, and making them visually appealing. With each panel that is opened, the…
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I am continually knocked out by the clever design ideas interior designer Susanne Shaker comes up, like this hand-painted De Gournay wallpaper that instills the serene feeling of Nature in a bedroom.
It got me wondering if there was a way to have one of the many wall mural companies around custom-make a wall covering from an open-source digital archive image.
Designer Oskar Zieta’s Tefla mirrors reminded us of how GREAT oddly-shaped mirrors can be in adding fluid, sculptural “windows” to a room. Although Zieta’s mirrors are thick with beautiful jagged edge, the essential idea would work fine cutting regular mirror into organic forms, freeform or using a template.
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During a visit to Christoph Niemann’s website recently, we found ourselves smitten with the images of his workspace. They were full of decidedly straight-forward, practical ideas with a sort of deconstructed charm: back-to-back work tables on simple pipe frames, articulating task lights, flat files that serve as additional work surfaces. Niemann wrote us that the…
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We love this detail from a home designed by i29 Interior Architects: a spray of cut-outs in a wall of cabinetry. It breaks up the uniformity of the cabinets in a random, rather artful way. It applies a technique we love — unexpected holes cut out of walls — to cabinets.
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We stumbled on this curiously beautiful sheetrock wall at the always illuminating Under the Sun. It appears to be a way an art gallery displayed a show. Sheets of uncut 4 x 8′ sheet rock were nailed to a carefully constructed wall of ordinary sheet rock studs with plenty of space between. Not great for sound…
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Though it’s not exactly a headBOARD, we love this painted canvas hung on the wall at the head of a low bed. And we are inspired by the canvas Cy Twombly tacked right onto the walls of his Rome villa, ready for painting. 63-inch by 6-yards rolls of primed artist’s canvas can be found on Amazon…
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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…
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When we saw these curiously chic oversized streamers, we thought: what a lovely design element, not realizing they were party decorations. They are so UNLIKE any crepe paper we’ve seen before. The secret is extra wide Italian crepe paper, a whole other order of magnitude than the vin ordinaire stuff. It looks more like fabric.
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Artist, designer, inventor and “thinkeruper”, Dominic Wilcox is one of the most inspired improvisers we know, constantly challenging himself to push limits as he asks himself “What would happen if”… We are especially smitten with the “multiple brush paint brush” he made after he bought 150 paint brushes cheap and wondered “IF I could join them…
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In response to our post about various permutations on the Guest Book, Laura Handler sent us images of her friend Dennis Decker’s Guest List on a wall of his Harlem guest room. With overtones of a Haring-esque comic book, we imagine it to be compulsively readable.
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We are smitten with this radical optical-illusion color block. Even without the table and chairs, there is something thrillingly startling about painting a bright, bold geometry over everything on a wall. (When we search GEOMETRY on Improvised Life, we find it a recurring theme. Perhaps because it seems like a do-able way to shift a room using…
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We have a thing for custom-made wall paper, that is, wall paper with images we would love to see, rather than the usual flowers and stripes. Although we aren’t crazy about the DIY wallpaper we saw on San Francisco Girl by Bay recently, we LOVE and see huge possibilities in the process. Writes SFGBB Editor…
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We’ve long been fans of binder clips for all sorts of uses, including hanging unframed artworks. But we NEVER considered how beautiful vintage binder clips might be put to this and other uses, until we saw Remodelista’s recent article. They are prominently featured in the home of art collector and mid-century furniture dealer Demetrio Zanetti.…
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