The latest Pottery Barn catalog sports a see-through coffee table so you can showcase the sea shells and first edition Hemingways you’ve got laying around. We, however, can’t do see-through because our coffee table is filled with remotes and dog brushes.
Enough about pottery barn.
We found the IKEA LIATORP, perfect for stashing unsightlies, except for the glass top that makes them completely…well
sightly.
No problem, we had a vintage power company leaning in our back entryway.
And that baby fit perfectly suspended under the glass, resting on some sturdy screws. Thanks for the wham bam, Mam.
i hope you all had a happy christmas / hanukkah / solstice / day!
we were pretty much snowed in, which means we hung out and enjoyed our pets, some movies and the holiday decor that we actually managed to hang this year.
but we don’t have stockings, mostly because i haven’t seen any that i really like yet (and don’t actually want to knit any). until i saw the adorable stockings that brooke from inchmark made. adorable and the tutorial is so easy to follow. so maybe next year? only if i start them right now, i suppose.
(photo via brooke reynolds)
seven rules to understanding designers
from the personal section of graphic exchange and for sale at harmonie interieure in lots of colors for your walls. love it.
on my ridiculously long list of home to-do projects, one that i have avoided committing to is painting our front hall and stairwell (even though it is sorely in need of a fresh coat!), mostly because i haven’t been able to settle on a paint color. orange has been in the back of my mind for a while now (especially with the little splashes of orange we have in the living room), but finding the right orange seemed like a long shot.
enter good bones, great pieces, one of my favorite blogs. the post on the best oranges made my day. and while the photo above isn’t my style, i think it has helped me finally decide to give orange a go. but probably not for a while. there are some other items on the list to check off first!
check out all their color theory posts here. a really great decorating resource.
An Oblique Lesson in Creative Direction (part 1)
One of the credos from my childhood that has served me particularly well as a creative director is “Give credit where credit is due.” With sufficient practice this simple act of generosity becomes so rewarding you’ll never miss an opportunity to share the love. So, naturally I felt the need to share with you my praise for the beautiful portfolio of residential work featured in the Turnbull Griffin Haesloop Architects portfolio. It looks like a really nice crew of folks in this San Francisco office and I appreciate the smiles on their down-to-earth faces given what a minor miracle it must be to achieve architectural nirvana despite the obstacles of budgets, deadlines, building codes, personalities, weather and the chaos inherent in a quantum mechanical universe.
In a world overflowing with cheap plastic meaninglessness and flashy technological trends there is something about the soft, reassuring glow of wood that never fails to satisfy my sense of a welcoming home and TGHA employs it masterfully. The integration of these houses into the landscape is likewise wonderful and I hope to see the next iteration of the TGHA website give the firms they work with (like Lutsko Associates) credit for their important role. Take a minute to click through their work, email them a note of appreciation and let the inspiration of their work find expression in your own.
Don’t forget to apply this lesson’s theme of sharing credit with those who have earned it.
Lately, I’ve been going back over some of my housing related links looking for interesting ideas that might inspire something for my new house. I rarely go back through my bookmarks so it’s always like I’m discovering new things all over again.
One of my favorite rediscoveries is Rural Theory a partnership between Blake Dollahite and Jarod Harmeier. Together they create beautiful modern homes that feel warm and inviting. I’m especially enamored with some of the custom built furniture and the beautiful landscaping. (And I absolutely adore the fan in the dining room)
The end of my nomadic way of life, with pictures.
Have you ever bought a house? If you haven’t, and you, like me, have led a somewhat nomadic lifestyle over the past years, let this serve as a warning. When you close on your house they ask for your last 10 years of residencies. For someone who has moved every year at least once the last 10 years of residencies is not a trivial request. If you’re lucky, you have a good memory, if you’re not, there is google street view, my new favorite website.
In honor of the end of my nomadic life and the start of my settled life in one place (and the start of what I imagine will be a lot of interior design posts in the near future) I give you the last 3 years of my home life.
I guess when you move as often as I have you get sentimental about places and decide you need to set them up and photograph them all pretty. So here they are, 2008-2009, 2007-2008, 2005-2006. (2006-2007 was a weird year that never got photographed.)
So here we are, a tour of apartments past:
When I first moved back to Minneapolis, I lived in a little studio apartment that looked out onto a pretty little courtyard. It was my very first apartment without any roommates. I don’t have any pictures of them here, but it had cute built-ins and sweet arched doorways. The plaster walls made it hard to hang much of anything at all and the squirrels were constantly trying to break in, but it was a sweet little place. (more photos here)
In between my studio and this place I lived with a roommate on the bottom floor of a really cold house. Moving into this place with it’s heavenly warm radiators was the best thing ever. My new yorker parents liked to call this my “new york style apartment” because they lived in something similar when they were younger. I just liked to call it awesome. I’ve never had more light than I had in this place. It was by far my favorite place to live (even with the random problems that cropped up while I lived there.) (More photos here)
This is home for the next few weeks. A cute little bungalow in the Longfellow neighborhood. I seem to have a thing with cold houses because this one was freezing. It is a cute little house though and it has a beautiful garden out back that I somehow managed not to completely destroy while I lived here. (more pictures here)
(gratuitous puppy shot)
A house tour of our new house will be coming sometime in the next few months, once we have a chance to paint and unpack and all that.