From Nat Shapiro’s funny, grumpy quotation collection Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.

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The post Interior decorators, 60s nostalgia, and slang appeared first on Ouno Design.

Above, the 1970s modern two-level platform in painter Frank Stella’s loft, from the classic book Inside Today’s Home. Below, a recent photo of the renovated 1950s conversation pit in the Number 31 Hotel in Dublin.

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The writer Douglas Coupland (“Generation X”), who has been interested in Canadiana for a long time, recently went about finding a classic 70s “builder’s special” house slated for demolition, filled it with objects constructed from the Canadian paraphernalia of his childhood, and then staged a party in it.

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Young Meagher’s “Militant Guild of Rural Tailors” is apparently a fashion line that doubles as a faux-museological collection of objects and textiles purportedly belonging to a revolutionary worldwide underground cult of rural tailors reaching back into early 19th C history.

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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.

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Sometimes after seeing too many chichi, precious, and citified houses, too much shiny, overproduced design, and everything just starts to look too estranged from the materials it was made from, as an antidote I go look at pictures of handbuilt houses.

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The post Handbuilt houses of the Pacific coast appeared first on Ouno Design.

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.

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The post Egle Amaldi’s bookshelf & modernist Cado shelving appeared first on Ouno Design.

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.

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Only 32 years have passed since this fantastic official poster for the 1976 Montreal Olympics was produced, but from a 2008 vantage point it’s hard to imagine how a committee ever okayed it.

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The post Official Montreal ’76 Olympics poster that would never pass a committee now appeared first on Ouno Design.

From left, Deacon Boondini, the Great Gatsby and Giovanni James of the James Gang, a neovaudevillean performance troupe in NYC in full steampunk gear.

I’m not the first to blog about this, but I couldn’t not jump into the fray.

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