housewares
- photo: blog.ounodesign.com
The great blog Ouno recently documented a visit to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyds Wright’s winter home and the main campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. A photo of the “dinner cabaret room” caught our eye: strings of tiny lights glowe3d on the ceiling. We don’t know if this is a Wrightian touch or an innovation of the current caretakers (more images below). But it got us thinking about using string lights as actual indoor lighting…not Christmas lights, but strings of lights with bigger, more illuminating bulbs.
So, we went on the hunt for ideas and sources, to explore the possibilities.
We love these lights hung vertically to make a partition and define a room… read more…
01.31.12 |
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in housewares, inside, lighting, materials, reimagine, resources, tools |
photo: sally schneider
At dinner parties these days, everybody seems to be drinking lots of water, in addition to or instead of wine. Rather than plunking a pitcher of water on the table that will undoubtedly need several refills, we’ve found another solution. We decant filtered water into great-looking wine bottles whose labels we’ve soaked off. We keep 4 or 5 of them in the fridge to have chilled water readily available. They look great on the table, and seem to make non-wine drinking guests feel like they are included in the pouring of something special.
During an ordinary day, we find them a simple, useful pleasure: chilled water to pour from a lovely vessel.
Once you start really looking at wine bottles, you’ll notice all sorts of shapes and sizes and colors, some more beautiful than others. We go for the most austerely sculptural we can find. read more…
01.23.12 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, entertaining, housewares, reclaim, repurpose, strategies |
Over many years of sifting through flea-markets and junk stores, one of our happiest and most inexpensive finds have been single plates, bowls and cups of fine china. Drinking tea out of Limoge cup, with its perfect proportions and translucency, gave us pleasure during many years of writing. One chipped, shallow soup bowl of unknown origin became the fall-back dish at photo-shoots we worked on. A stack of mismatched dinner plates, each with its own beauty, became a charming way to serve a crowd.
Which is why we’ve found Dish, 813 Colorful, Wonderful Dinner Plates by Shax Riegler so unexpectedly helpful and illuminating. In addition to using it as a reference for plates we’ve collected or seen, we use it a guide to plates we’d like to find, keeping our eyes peeled for them in our wanderings, or setting up a “search” on Ebay to notify us when one is for sale.We’ve found the warning in it’s opening chapter to be true: THIS BOOK MAY INDUCE MANIA. read more…
12.08.11 |
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in gifts, housewares, resources blogs + sites |
photo: herbert matter, courtesy of the calder foundation
Of all the brilliant artists we feature on ‘the improvised life’, Alexander Calder holds a special place in our hearts. In addition to his monumental artworks and legendary mobiles, he was a prolific creator of household objects for everyday use. If he or his wife Louisa or a friend needed something utilitarian, he would devise a solution on the spot, with whatever was at hand.
The trove of his improvisations is vast and inspiring; each invites rethinking of common objects we often take for granted: tin cans, pie tins, wire, bits of scrap wood. His creations were not only useful, but visually stunning.
Here is the artist telling how he created a barbeque grill out of an iron garden chair after his son-in-law Jean Davidson invited a horde of people over for a party: read more…
12.07.11 |
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in d-i-y, elements, housewares, inside, kitchen, materials, outside, paths + processes, people, reclaim, repurpose, why not? |
Recently, Manhattan User’s Guide featured a chic cast iron book bar from Beekman 1802 in a round-up of gifts under $21. It’s designed to hold open the pages of a book, while providing a horizontal guide for reading. It is 7 inches long by 1/4 inch square and weighs 4.4 ounces; with shipping, it costs $23.
We thought it was a great idea, being non-fru-fru, elemental and totally utilitarian, qualities we value in our attempts to keep things minimal. We wondered if we could fashion one ourselves out of a softer metal – say copper, which would oxidize nicely but presented no danger of rusting. read more…
11.14.11 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, gifts, hard, housewares, how-to, inside, materials, resources |
Having been swept up in hype (and hope), we spent $35 or so to buy a Plumen bulb, the high-concept CFL (compact flourescent lamp) that is getting a lot of play on design blogs these days. Designed by Sam Wilkinson for the London-based boutique electronics brand Hulger, the Plumen is meant to be the answer to the unattractive compact fluorescent bulbs whose energy-saving virtues are, for many, cancelled out by the ugly light they cast. The company says that the CFL’s problems can be solved by changing the design. “Make the bulb attractive and people will enjoy a better quality and spend a bit more”. Yeah?
Hopeful, we screwed ours in and voila: the sculptural Plumen emitted the same terrible cold, dim, gulag-like light of an ordinary CFL. The naked truth of the Plumen is: when lit, its 60 watts are ugly… the fancy designed failed in its mission. The Emporor’s New Clothes came to mind. read more…
09.28.11 |
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in housewares, lighting |
photo: j. canosa
When Style-Files recently posted about furniture maker and interior designer Katrin Arens, we couldn’t help seeing a shipping pallet in her rustic dish rack. Or vice versa…
…h-m-m-m…take a slat or two away, or pull the whole thing apart to build with the slats you like…it’s a simple configuration…
…there appears to be no end to what a shipping pallet can be.
Related posts: painted shipping pallet coffee table
led-illuminated shipping pallet bed
d-i-y shipping pallet vertical garden
d-i-y shipping pallet wine rack + flat storage
the scoop on safe shipping pallets (shipping pallets 101)
09.22.11 |
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in d-i-y, elements, hard, housewares, inside, inspiration, materials, reclaim, repurpose |
Harriet Bell alerted us to this beautiful candy wrapper chair and the story of how she found it…one thing leading to another in the course of a few minutes:
Our friend Peter Davis just returned from San Miguel de Allende; knowing that I love handbags made from Mexican candy wrappers, he brought me three! One candy wrapper in the bags looked weird, so we started poking around the web to identify it. And we found this amazing candy wrapper chair.Thought you’d get an improvised kick out of it.
The gorgeous chair designed by Mexican designer Emiliano Godoy takes a very old and simple idea – weaving candy wrappers (which we remember doing as kids) into a strong “textile”, and EXPANDS it, literally. The large size squares and monochrome palette gives it a definite chic. We found a step-by-step how-to here, and a video (below). We’re imagining scaling up the method to larger sheets of whatever cool paper-like material we find (magazines, high-end paper shopping bags…?…It might even be done with leather or some of the out-there synthetic materials you can find at fabric and art stores these days. You can drap and stitch it…Think of the possibilities for using this strong geometric weaving as furniture covering (of an ordinary wooden Ikea chair, perhaps), rug, tablecloth, satchel, room screen!!!!???
read more…
09.15.11 |
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in cheap + great, furniture, housewares, how-to, inside, materials, repurpose, resources |
We totally love this collection by of elements and connectors for making whatever you want, designed by Louise Cohen. It is like a perfect fusion of built-it-yourself Lego/Tinkertoy/K’nex/ErectorSet-esque material for adults.
The CREATE YOUR OWN Collection is a building system consisting of 18 galvanized elements and 5 kind of connectors. According to individual desires unique living accessories can be composed.
Constructions for all kind of purposes can stand, lay or ride, hang from wall or ceiling. read more…
08.25.11 |
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in d-i-y, elements, furniture, gifts, housewares, how-to, inside, materials, resources, stores |
© Don Freeman
Speaking of tinkering, while we were culling photos from Artists’ Handmade Houses
for our recent giveaway, we came across a photo of Constantino Nivola’s living room in his house on Long Island (see photo below). In the back corner, partially blocked by a chair, is an intriguing light made of Tinkertoys and shiny rolled paper. OMG, Tinkertoys! Unbelievably brilliant…so we went searching the internet for more pictures of his wonderful idea. We found only this photo, in which you can barely make out a fab ceiling light made of Tinkertoys: read more…
08.01.11 |
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in art, cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, hard, housewares, inside, inspiration books + zines, lighting, materials, people, resources |
Maria Robledo has a way with flower arranging, or perhaps we should say: off-the-cuff displays of just about any fresh branch, or flower or bunch of leaves. The other evening at her house, we were smitten with the huge green vase into which she’d poured a shallow pool of water; she simply floated a few flowers that she picked one of the bushes growing in her Brooklyn backyard. read more…
07.21.11 |
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in copy this!, elements, garden, housewares, how-to, inside, people |
Sally Schneider
One of our favorite mindgames is to think about what we can do without, or perhaps better put: What do we really need? We started doing it rigorously in the kitchen when we had to downsize years ago, and began to ask ourselves,”What equipment is truly necessary for the way we cook”. Not only did we discover that we did NOT need the wealth of gadgets being touted as essential, but we didn’t even need some things that people take for granted, like an electric toaster. In our smaller space, we saw an electric toaster as a space glutton that we didn’t want on our counter. About the same time, we came across an inexpensive stovetop fish grill in a Japanese kitchenware store. Hmm, we thought, wonder if we could toast bread on this? It worked wonderfully and we’ve been using it to grill our bread on a burner ever since…(sometimes we put the buttered toast back on it to melt…)
So naturally we LOVED stumbling upon Ellen Lupton‘s pdf Are Toasters Necessary? from her book Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things
. read more…
05.12.11 |
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in housewares, inside, inspiration books + zines, people, repurpose, resources, solutions, stores |
When Consilientist | Futurist Stuart Dambrot alerted us to Norwegian designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen’s toast spoons, we were totally smitten. We envisioned them brushed with olive oil and a cut clove of garlic, to eat our soup/stew/eggs with. Then we realized that they were part of a bigger study, of the idea that “Like the fascintating species of nature are a result of biological evolution, our everyday products are results of an artificial evolution; both are the results of optimization of hereditary characteristics from generation to generation.”
Feeling that the spoon had come to the end of its evolution, having hardly changed for hundreds of years (except in its decoration), Wilhelmsen set about to explore its evolutionary possibilities, adding into the mix ‘different ways of human eating’ (necessity just about always being the mother of invention). The experiment came up with some “interesting spin-offs, read more…
05.05.11 |
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in food, housewares, paths + processes, people, principles, repurpose, resources, tools |
