The receipt says October 21, 2013. I was at a local restaurant (which shall remain nameless) with two architect girlfriends. As I looked over the restaurant’s faux-Victorian, Yukon gold rush brothel decor (readers of this blog know is something that has been irking me for a while) I asked for their opinions.

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The post Compulsive restaurant decor commentary appeared first on Ouno Design.

“The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.” ~ Peter de Vries, 1977

Vancouver is overrun with restaurants blighted not just with notably bad art but also with a type of generic commercial decor that makes you want to throw cutlery.

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From Mexican design firm Omelette: “Mexico’s culture has been sculpted by its prolific natural world and its blessing/curse of petroleum.  Hotel Básico is an exploration of these twin mothers and their vastly undervalued aesthetics.

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Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.

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Dance by takeSomeCrime, via David John at You have been here sometime. Question: Is the relationship between the decor and the moves inversely proportional – the sketchier the room, the better the moves are?

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Not a rhetorical question. This is a hodgepodge sample, for sure, and spans decades, but all of it seems to partake of some form or other of adventurousness.

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The post Why is Australian design so cool? appeared first on Ouno Design.

When your decor is a romantic deal-breaker: a female visitor fled upon seeing this NYC lawyer’s sheets. My sister, by the way, had those exact sheets. When she was 12.

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The post It’s Not You, It’s Your Apartment appeared first on Ouno Design.

The Parker Hotel as photographed by Chimay Bleue, who has produced one of my favourite collections of photos of modernist architecture on Flickr. I’ll do a series of posts using his photos if he will let me.

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The post The Parker Hotel in Palm Springs appeared first on Ouno Design.

I spent hours as a kid making marble runs, using anything that was lying around my dad’s tool area. I’d usually start with a big chunk of solid wood (usually cedar, left over from deck-building) and make the marble wind around it in a spiral, down tracks made of elastic bands stretched between two pairs of nails, thin slats with grooves whittled out, leftover copper plumbing pipe etc.

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Via OWI – Office for Word and Image. Photo: Vercruysse Frederik

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