We must have spent an hour slowing looking at our friend Christopher Baker‘s beautiful online portfolios. We found ourselves culling images with a single theme: natural textiles used in original absolutely doable ways, no uptight styling here. Just a fine trove of ideas.
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The other day I bought a new Apple iPhone 6S. Its remarkable camera and interface were an instant joy, making content gathering for Improvised Life easier and more fun. But as long as I’d been using iPhones, I’d never spoken to Siri, Apple’s attempt at Artificial Intelligence. Before I’d fully set up the phone and had lain down for a nap,…
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Since I first wrote about the renovation of my 5-x-7-foot Harlem bathroom, a number of readers have written to ask just which five-foot alcove bathtub I bought that had the effect of the divinely comfortable vintage tub in my former space…and WHAT exactly was the trick I used to ensure that it would be a…
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Bryan Landers, creator of the wonderful 3 Good Things app, has a lot of interesting ideas up his sleeve. At Medium, we found an article he’d written about making his own motivational phone wallpaper. His thinking is compelling and his method simple and easy. We tried it ourselves.
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Although initially pricey, shearling coats are a great clothing investment: they are incredibly warm and last years. But like anything, they begin to show wear. There IS a simple solution that will keep them going for years that I learned from Suzanne Shaker: turn your shearling inside out and have new zipper put in by…
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We’ve written extensively about our usual practice of deconstructing and arranging overwrought hotel rooms. We’ve encountered SO many that were over decorated, stuffy, busy, that we stopped loving staying in hotels. Until we saw photos of Hotel Henriette in Paris, which breaks the mould every which way and gave us a trove of doable ideas for…
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A fan of the big white cotton shirt, years ago I discovered that XXL MEN’s cotton poplin shirts could be had for about $25 at Target* and looked as good as the much pricier women’s version. Averse to ironing, I’d drop them off at the shirt laundry and ask for “extra starch”. At about $2 each, I’d live…
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Like Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote short stories referencing imaginary books, Charles Dickens filled part of his study with fake books whose fantastical titles he invented. He had a bookbinder create imitation book-backs that he affixed to real books. The effect is rather dazzling.
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I’ve taken to leaving books open all over my apartment so I can wander by and read or look at something that I’m mulling or want in my field of vision. It often feels as though gifts or messages from amazing people are scattered throughout my space…
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Casting about for an instant gift to give? Give your brilliant someone a subscription to Improvised Life, a month or year of inventive, mind-shifting tools and ideas for creative possibility-thinking, from home design and cooking to productivity and self-expression: our whole archive’s worth. Gifting is easy…
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Every so often, a friend calls to ask me what cooking equipment to recommend. LONG story! You’ll find an extensive list of equipment for a basic kitchen in A New Way to Cook, along with 700+ pages of essential techniques and recipes. For now, here are my tried-and-true favorites, from high to low and back.
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The other day, we came across some spectacular earrings: fur pom poms dangling from thin gold wires. WANT, we thought. And then, MAKE, which starts us researching materials and processes. We discovered that pom poms, both fur and fake, can be easily bought and hold huge possibilities for gifts. And then we found we’d unknowingly tapped into the zeitgeist.
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(Video link here.) So, er, yes, well, er, we DO have a regifting drawer as well as a gift drawer of stuff we’ve bought because we think it’s universally great. Truth be told, the stuff in the regifting drawer tends to languish, we suspect because it can take a while before we find someone for whom…
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In this season of frenzied holiday shopping, Quartz asked 40 leaders in art, business, fashion, science, and social justice the question: What’s the best gift you’ve ever received? Their surprising answers cast a lens on just what a great gift really is, along with some really lovely ideas….
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At London’s Southbank Centre, architecture studio Jonathan Tuckey Design created an archival space featuring a mid-century shelving system that echoed the building’s heritage. When we looked closely, we realized it is made of slotted angle iron, an inexpensive structuring material available at many hardware stores. We first realized its potential for creating modular furniture when we bought a second-hand copy of High-Tech, The Industrial…
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Over many years of cooking professionally, amidst sharp knives and fire, I learned that an accidental cut or burn was in fact a signal: a message from myself to myself that I was distracted. I needed to listen deeply to what was going on, or at the very least, slow down and take care. I…
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Recently in a secondhand bookstore, a jazzy little book jumped into my hand. I was drawn to it by its beautiful cover design which read “Dickinson”, meaning Emily. Finding the book, and the first poem I turned to, proved to be a lovely bit of bibliomancy.
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One image in a photo essay about a Scandinavian house renovation caught our eye: a kid’s room with tissue paper pom poms hanging from the ceiling, like some sort of celestial blooms. They’d be lovely in just about any room. So we hunted them down to discover that they are a common wedding decoration, readily available on…
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Desperately Seeking Susan was Madonna’s debut film. We hear she improvised this brilliant moment on the spot: “Susan”, arriving at the seedy uptown Port Authority Bus Terminal on 181st Street, prepares for her entrance into the city by using the restroom’s hand dryer in an unconventional way… We will never view hand dryer’s the same way…
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Buried in a photo series about C-Mine design center in Genk, Belgium at Vosges Paris is an image of someone rubber stamping what we thought at first were paper placemats or cloths. Wonderful idea!
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