paint-dipped wooden spoon

Heather Chontos puts her colourful spin on a fleamarket find, dipping an old wooden spoon in tangerine paint to transform a low-tech stirring implement into something…fab. It’s from a selection of homewares chosen by Will Taylor for The Simple Things. We’ve painted new wooden spoons this way but somehow hadn’t thought to do it with oldies-but-goodies. Why not…

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paint test: beautiful hardworking flat matte Aura

Encouraged by our friend Bruce McKenna, we tried Benjamin Moore’s flat matte Aura paint in The Laboratory’s very hard-used kitchen, instead of the usual oil-based eggshell, which we’d assumed was the only really washable paint. But even eggshell would have shown up the really ugly imperfections in this wall. So, in desperation and against our…

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life lessons from an exploding egg + roz chast

This morning while engrossed in redesigning ‘improvised life’, I forgot about the eggs I was boiling on the stove. Suddenly, I heard what sounded like a gunshot in the kitchen. When I explored, I discovered firm little pellets of egg yolk scatter-shot across the kitchen. Once the water had boiled away in the little copper…

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il reader julie houston’s brooklyn renovation

We are always thrilled to hear (and see) how ‘improvised life’ resonates in our readers lives. Sometimes it’s a “shift” of mindset, sometimes it’s a daring diy. In Julie Houston’s case, it was a major renonovation of the back parlor of her Brooklyn brownstone,  transformed into kitchen/dining area. When children and pets leave — as…

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ladders as pot racks in wood or copper (diy)

Recently, Design Sponge featured the three-level Copenhagen apartment of  Camilla Ebdrup, half of the Danish duo behind LuckyBoySunday, and her husband, photographer Andreas Stenmann.  Their style is a mix of modern and vintage, with many items foraged from the nearby canals, where interesting items are washed in from the sea.  We especially loved the wooden ladder…

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book giveaway: ‘canal house cooks every day’

We’ve long been fans of Canal House Cooking, the groundbreaking cookbook series created and published by Christopher Hirscheimer and Melissa Hamilton. We are totally smitten with their latest effort: Canal House Cooks Every Day, a bright red, 385-page tome documenting a year of cooking from Canal House, based on their popular daily lunch blog. The book offers…

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strangely chic water crate garbage can + the garbage bag question

  Recently, quite out-of-the-blue, we contrived a surprisingly chic garbage can. In the course of moving apartments, we had found 6-gallon bottle of “emergency” water stowed away in the back of a closet. It was housed in a rectangular black plastic crate . When we pulled the bottle out, the box suddenly looked wonderfully Bauhausian, a perfectly-designed…

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