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.
February 1, 2009
Beautiful, inviting 60s room from English textile designer John Hopper‘s amazing Flickr collection of textiles and interiors from the last several centuries. That hidden door!
January 30, 2009
These photographs are from my husband grandparents’ house, a blue Edwardian two-storey that still stands in Strathcona, Vancouver’s oldest residential neighbourhood. The house is less than a block away from our studio and very close to where we both live.
January 17, 2009
These staggered, airy midcentury modern arrangements are so much less chichi than the many fancified contemporary bookshelves you see around.
I love this simple, balanced living room belonging to Italian architect Egle Amaldi in the 1960s.
January 12, 2009
Here are two quite beautiful DIY projects from the 60s, both found in The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970. Most of what you find in the book is a bit kitschy, but these two ideas seemed brilliant.
January 11, 2009
Bathroom futurism! Excellent circular spaceship thing going on here. I’m not sure about shag rugs in the bathroom, but will boldly go where no one has gone before. Still, how on earth would you clean this room?
January 9, 2009
A final post on great DIY furniture from Spiros Zakas’ 1979 “More Furniture in 24 Hours” book. If you want the building plans for any of these pieces, go to this Flickr set.
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 18, 2008
Granted these are already amazing spaces, but wooden pony walls can work in smaller spaces also.
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.
