December 6, 2008
David Crosby in 1970 with his father in the family living room in Ojai, California. The shot is from a collection of photos by photographer John Olson of 70’s rock musicians in their parents’ living rooms that has been circulating around the design blogs.
December 5, 2008
The Cave Room (above), the Projection Room, and the Xanadu Room (below) are from “The Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating,” 1973, by Barbara D’Arcy. D’arcy was famous for her wild display rooms actually constructed inside the Bloomingdales store in New York in the 1960s and 70s.
December 3, 2008
The use of the word “bohemian” is getting curiouser and curiouser (to quote Alice in Wonderland). Bohemian! Arty! What do these even mean now? To choose a trivial example, is this round object in our studio arty?
November 30, 2008
English textile designer Barbara Brown produced these superb textiles in the 60s and 70s. We found her designs by chance on The Textile Blog, a well-written site out of England covering “the history of interiors and interior furnishings over the last three centuries.” The writer is John Hopper, a trained textile designer from Cornwall.
November 28, 2008
Russian architecture from here and here and here. All but one building is in Siberia. The top two are classic Siberian houses; the third is the Church of the Transfiguration on Kizhi Island in Karelia, near Finland.
Like nomad fashion, Russian styles keep circulating and recirculating in fashion. Maybe it’s because layered-against-the-elements clothes are compelling in uncertain times. Whatever it is, and whatever romantic, escapist fantasy these styles are probably satisfying, they’re beautiful.
November 25, 2008
Spock: They remind me somewhat of the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin… but they seem to eat a great deal.
I fell in love with this artifact when I saw it in the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico in Mexico City in 2000. One of my best friends and I were in Mexico City and were wandering around the museum’s immensitude for a couple of hours when I turned a corner and suddenly saw this piece.
November 24, 2008
Hard-edged rooms, even the rustic kind, seem to need at least one big soft thing. Scandinavian interior design uses textiles in this way, and increasingly the term for the contemporary application of this idea seems to be “warm modernism” or “soft modernism.” The more unrelieved the hardness, the more warmth is needed and the more excessive the textures can be.
November 23, 2008
A favourite San Francisco live/work loft space. I partly love it for the great painting of the burning ruin—the text at the bottom reads “Monument to Frankenstein.” I can’t find the source of this photo so if anyone knows, please tell me.
