February 3, 2009
Minimalism and fantasy, together. The interior of this teahouse is simple and modern, while the fantastical exterior looks like something from a Hiyao Miyazaki film. The interior view of the sliding wooden doors or shutters is just beautiful.
January 31, 2009
Maybe it’s because these houses are reminiscent of the tradition of handmade houses here on the West Coast, but there’s something pleasingly familiar about the eccentric wooden buildings of Christiana, the surreal, semi-autonomous, rebel neighbourhood of Copenhagen.
January 18, 2009
This is one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen. It is the “Final Wooden House” by Sou Fujimoto, 2008, in Kamamura village in the south of Kyushu. It has just won Best Private Home award in the Wallpaper Design Awards 2009 and is probably on every design blog this week.
January 14, 2009
That’s the title of an interesting article in the NYT last week. By “design” the writer obviously means design itself, and not the world of commercial design which is in fact suffering during the current economic crisis.
The new building for the BC Cancer Agency is a good addition to Broadway, one of Vancouver’s most ridiculously unattractive streets. The building’s most obvious feature is its round windows which are meant to reference the glass petri dishes used in cancer research.
January 9, 2009
Wow. It might be difficult to pull off these colours in the watery light spectrum we have here in Vancouver. But frankly Vancouver ought to be able to do a lot better than the local Victorian colour scheme of dark maroon with sickly, pale butter-yellow trim.
January 6, 2009
Why are round windows so uncommon in North America? Not a rhetorical question. When you do see them here, either in house or garden, they seem magical and out of the ordinary. Round, eye-level windows are quite prevalent in many other places, including Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa and parts of Europe.
December 24, 2008
In the late 1920s, the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray designed and built a landmark piece of modernist architecture in the form of a seaside house.
November 9, 2008
I have been really feeling the absence of Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors magazine lately, more than four years after it became defunct. On a whim I Google searched “I miss Nest Magazine” this week and found out how very not alone I am.
November 2, 2008
It would be hard to count the number of times I’ve seen a photo of a beautiful minimalist interior in a blog and then scrolled down to the comments to discover that many people find it cold, sterile, clinical, unfit for kids, even morally reprehensible.
