Incredible Crafts Room Uses Cheap Space-Saving Solutions Design is one thing – deployment is another. All of the ingenious storage and shelving in the world cannot help if the person utilizing them does not do so with forethought and intentionality, as this incredible space-saver craft room illustrates. Etsy seller Megan of?Crafty Intentions used off-the-shelf solutions like IKEA and Lowe’s wall shelves, flea-market find and standard-sized glass jars, lights and other economical products to piece together this elaborate-looking system for her home crafts area. Stored with a sense of immaculate organization are endless collections of beads, fabrics, yarns, ribbons and other material scraps, odds and ends … the list goes on, and all readily at hand for on-demand sewing and general crafting purposes, placed on dowels, suspended from strings in baskets, slotted into cabinet drawers, hung from the walls, laddered along -stepped-up, wall-mounted shelves and more.
Fascinating Lamps by Calabarte | Pondly Calabarte is the pseudonym of a Polish artist named Przemek Krawczynski, whose art takes on a peculiar but incredibly beautiful form: cool lamps. The name itself is a portmanteau of two words – art (obviously), and calabash, the fruit that carries his imagination. The calabash is a bottle gourd originating in India, although Calabarte gets his supply from Senegal. Due to ancient domestication and usage, the bottle gourd has an incredibly tough outer shell. Due to the combination of dark, thick material with a light source within, the primary art of his work, however, shines in the dark. Hard work, beauty, an exceptional degree of detail and a marriage between mathematical geometry and a rampant imagination – all imprinted onto the husk of a Senegal calabash. Described as the art of light, Calabarte’s artistic tendencies truly took off in 2009, when he made his first gourd lamp, by chance of coming across a calabash. Website
Imprint-The Online Community for Graphic Designers — Expanding the Design Conversation Way back in the 20th Century, back before one small, viral meme could have more impact and influence than tons of Times op-eds, newspapers still mattered. But it was also a time of severely limited access to communication outlets. As A.J. Liebling noted: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own... The New York Times got it wrong about the highly hyped Batman #50 with its description of the caped crusader’s nuptials to Catwoman. Fantasy artist Ken Kelly was just five years into his professional career when he received the assignment of a lifetime—painting the cover for… Chesley Bonestell is little remembered today except by hardcore science fiction fans. After 14 years in field, designer Russ Honican joined Trailer Park, where he runs the department of motion graphics and works hands on as a designer. Lana Roulhac has more than 10 years of design expertise, focusing especially on bringing humanity and relevance to government design and technology brands.
Loft Bed turns Single-Floor Studio to Two-Level Apartment The thought of loft-style sleeping may bring back childhood memories of kids’ bunk beds … but for urbanites in small not-quite-double-height apartments like this one in New York City, clever space-saving furniture designs like this one can also help make the most out of tiny-interior dwellings with low square-footage, narrow layouts and limited access to natural light. A few simple white wall and ceiling/floor planes added by KSWA help divide spaces within this (essentially one-room) redesigned residence, creating an entrance passage – while providing enclosure from above and the side for part of the kitchen and a desk workspace below. The resulting small hall has a side ladder leading up to the bedroom. Also, by thickening the vertical-wall zone a hallway closet is created for much-needed additional storage as well as further structural support for the loft space above. The bedroom itself is a brilliant combination of cozy and open.
Peace Pod Bokja I was so excited to have spotted these chairs by Bokja on Table Tonic this morning – but WTF, how can anybody not notice them? These exuberant pieces of furniture are the fruits of Beirut-based Hoda Baroudi […] Yabba Dabba Doo Would you have ever guessed that this Flinstones inspired house belonged to television legend Dick Clark? The bright and cavernous house sits on over 22 acres in Malibu, CA and is currently up for sale at $3.5 […]
UnderConsideration LLC Hempcrete House: World’s First Hemp & Paper-Walled Home Hidden between the walls of this one-of-a-kind residence are piles of hemp, long touted as a sustainable material with many eco-friendly uses but rarely thought of as a building material. For this home, however, something special was required: the designer created it for his daughter, who has extreme chemical sensitivities that limited what could be used in its construction. Necessity, as they say, is the mother (or father) or invention. Mixed with other materials, the resulting ‘Hempcrete’ used by Push Design may be a bit misleading by name – it is not a structural substance, but rather an insulator and air purifier. The outside of the walls feature a stealthy surprise as well: instead of typical wallboard or sheet rock, a composite cardboard-like, paper-based and fully-structural covering is used that is both non-toxic and fully recycled (and recyclable in the future, for that matter).
Sleeping Bag Chair Sleeping Bag Chair February 19th, 2012 | Inspiration | Comfortable lounge chair with integrated sleeping bag designed by Les M. Anais Morel and Celine Merhand created a chair that will keep you warm while you sleep, relax, watch TV, or read your favorite book.The “Cocon” blanket is removable and machine washable. Also check out: Sleep Suit, Vertical Bed, and Ostrich Pillow Share this Page: viewer want! Add Your Comment The Most Beautiful and Imaginative Public Schools in the World Albert Einstein, responsible for the world’s most famous equation and quite possibly the smartest man to ever live, said that “logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” With that in mind, surely a child’s imagination is something to cherish and nourish. Architects and local governments around the world are now fighting the good fight against dismal, uninspiring schools and the groundbreaking results are re-shaping the learning experience for our future generations. Kindergarten Kekec by Arhitektura Jure Kotnik — Ljubljana, Slovenia Image credit: Miran Kambič via House Variety An extension of a typical Slovenian prefab kindergarten from the ’80s, the colorful, interactive design is a response to the school’s lack of play equipment.
Huge Tropical House: Super-Small Lot + Big Beach Home = It is tough enough to find ocean view property to buy – but building a 4500 square-foot dream home on a 30 by 60 sf. property is even trickier, particularly with space left for a back patio, interior garden and various front-yard tropical plants to keep the site green around the edges. Broken lines and surfaces make the design dynamic on all fronts, both inside and out – a wood-and-white theme serving to further connect the interior and exterior, with linear wooden ceiling boards drawing one’s view ever outward. One would never guess from looking at it just how much it pushes the building envelope in terms of bordering homes, vertical restrictions and relatively small lot dimensions (for a structure of its size anyway). Rockefeller Partners designed the building to maximize ocean views and open spaces, taking full advantage of landscape elements and lines of site to make the rooms seem as big as possible and have the outdoors always close at hand.
Bars As far as nightlife goes, in Porto, Portugal, it is all happening downtown. A local company, Baixa (baixa is Portuguese for downtown), has recently added another downtown nightclub to its roster that already includes the Baixa bar. The new nightclub, Instalação (installation), was designed by José Carlos Cruz Arquitecto, the same team responsible for the design of Baixa bar as well as the Farmacia Lordelo we have featured earlier. The space for Instalação, opened in March, was in essence a long, narrow corridor with two dividing structural arches that support the building itself. From this 250 square-meter (2,690 sq.ft.) space the designers created a golden wire tunnel where the main materials are concrete, brass and polished aluminum. Andy Warhol’s Factory inspired some of the ideas for the smaller VIP room, and Anish Kapoor’s ideas gave suggestions for the beautifully textured concrete ceiling – our favourite part of the entire project. Photos by Fernando Guerra FG+SG.
Rick Poynor's Book List Books led me to typography and graphic design. Love of reading became love of the medium in which the words are printed, of the type that composes these words, of the substrate that supports them, of the page layouts that give form to narrative and argument, of the covers and bindings that hold these texts and pictures together, of the lettering and imagery that seek to express a book’s essential nature. . . . View the complete text Books led me to typography and graphic design. Love of reading became love of the medium in which the words are printed, of the type that composes these words, of the substrate that supports them, of the page layouts that give form to narrative and argument, of the covers and bindings that hold these texts and pictures together, of the lettering and imagery that seek to express a book’s essential nature. Graphic design books are a kind of meta-book.
Huge-Plot House Made of Multiple Modular Mini-Home Plans Taking layout lessons from the mistakes of unplanned city development, this multi-unit housing complex is a unique attempt to combine genuine community spaces with private residences – custom-planned apartments with shared green space but room to breath as well, all on large plot of land. There is an organic way in which urban density leads to developments that may never have been designed for those living within them – from accidental single-family home-to-apartment adaptations to intentional but cookie-cutter stacked modular housing situations. In India, Anagram Architects (images by Asim Waqif) has anticipated the paradigm and designed something to respond in advance of inevitable suburban sprawl on the edge of a major city. Like Frank Gehry’s now-infamous home remodel of his house in Santa Monica, this project truly looks like the conclusion of a set of experiments – design done over time – rather than a built-at-once piece of custom architecture.