February 24, 2009
This origami was created for Japanese shoe company ASICS by Sipho Mabona of Mabona Origami. Original video is here. Celebrating corporate advertising isn’t really our thing, but this little movie is pretty engaging and it has, not surprisingly, won many of the world’s top animation and advertising awards.
February 23, 2009
This is the one kind of pillow you actually can’t have too many of. The pillow rocks, called Livingstones, are by Smarin, a French design company named for designer Stephanie Marin.
What are these pillows doing – posing for their family photos? Yes, it is possible to have too many pillows.
February 22, 2009
The big glasses everyone’s been wearing for five years? Charles Nelson Reilly and Brett Somers, 1975. More here.
February 18, 2009
This graph shows the occurrence of the terms “decor” (blue) and “interior design” (red) in The New York Times between 1984 and 2009. What happened to the word “decor”? It fell out of usage in approximately February, 2001, maybe a result of a change in editorial style policy?
February 17, 2009
70s space age armchair, via backgarage, origin and name unknown. Does anyone know who or what made this? Does it actually bounce on that spring? Imagine eating breakfast in this chair.
February 16, 2009
There’s something compelling about this photo of the bedroom of novelist Marguerite Duras in the house she bought in Neauphle, outside Paris, in the 1960s. The thin cot bed is so peculiar, like something she might have grown up with during her impoverished colonial childhood in French Indochina.
February 14, 2009
Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone.
A few more spreads from our collection of the sadly long defunct Nest Quarterly. So many magazines have died this year, but I still miss Nest the most.
February 11, 2009
While on the topic of Afghanistan, here are some examples of Afghani war rugs. Production of these pictorial rugs began in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and persisted throughout the civil war and into the US invasion.
The so-called “afghan blanket” seems to go to Value Village to die. It’s hard to know which is more disturbing: the synthetic nature of the object itself, or the fact that it is still, amazingly, given everything that has happened over the last fifteen or more years, called an “afghan.” A search online to discover the origins of this craft object immediately turned up “The All American Denim Stripes Afghan.” No lie!
