Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan Connecticut is opening up for tours again starting May 1 and running through November. Tickets start at $30 and go up to $400 for a private tour that includes dinner at The Four Seasons in NYC (this is my nerdy architectural dream date – forget all those The Bachelor-esque dates that include helicopter rides or wine tasting lessons). Click here for more information on the tours. Also, if you are a member of The National Trust for Historic Preservation, you will receive 50% off the Standard Tour (90 minutes) and the Extended Tour (2 hours, take all the pictures you want).* Seriously, if you are not already a member, why not? I mean, The Governator recently proposed SELLING California’s historic sites in order to raise cash! Get on it! Click here and join today – you’ll get all sorts of discounts at historic sites and you’ll receive a subscription to Preservation – it’s a wonderful magazine.

Image swiped from The Glass House website.

*members pay full price when ordering and then receive the 50% discount when attending the tour.

For this week’s organizing tip I turned to Laura Marsden, a member of our Design Public Team, for some help. She has all kinds of great ways of stashing necessities all over her home, and one of my favorites is how she stashes her yard stuff – it’s so clever and cute, and it’s a great way to repurpose something that might have become junk. Check it out:

Out in the garden – Our garden is a bit far from the garage or the house.  We painted and mounted an old mail box to store things that you often need but don’t want to carry back and forth – garden gloves, pruning shears, watering nozzles, spare seeds…

Sorry for the very late start to inspiring you today – I cannot seem to get anything right this morning/afternoon! I’m going to brush that off and get started with a little inspiration. For some of us, spring has been teasing. Here in Atlanta, all of the daffodils and cherry blossoms are in full bloom, but there were teeny tiny snow flurries this morning. Perhaps we could all use “The Secret” and start planning our gardens to speed things up again. O.K. I’m kidding, I think “The Secret” is really cheesy, but I’ll roll with it.

Gertrude Jekyll was a brilliant English garden designer. She was a master at applying color theory to the composition of gardens. I have this book by Richard Bisgrove, where he has combed through thousands of her plans (there are very few remaining Jekyll gardens as she passed away in 1932) and reinterpreted them. Here are just a few examples of how you can plan out beautiful color combinations in your garden. Oh, and here’s a link to the book, The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll by Richard Bisgrove. If you like to have a few garden tomes to flip through for inspiration around your home, this one is a must-buy for your library.

all images from the above-mentioned book; photography by Andrew Lawson.

Have you been following the caption contest over at Unhappy Hipsters? I don’t know if they could have picked a better picture. This one is by far my favorite:

Zen had come easily to him—sparse interior, shaved head, “rug-garden.” It was motorcycle maintenance he was having problems with.
-Sebastian Biot

To see the typical Dwell interior shot that inspired this ingenious blurb, click here. I promise it’s worth it. Warning: If you haven’t been keeping up with Unhappy Hipsters, be prepared to sacrifice at least twenty minutes of your time as you catch up. You won’t be able to stop.

This has gotta be really bad feng shui…

from here.