Design Public

So I started to tell you about the Modern Atlanta Home Tour yesterday but I didn’t get very far! I wanted to show you more from my favorite home that I saw on the tour (stairs described yesterday are pictured above). By the way, I only made it to five. I’d say five to six is the maximum you can really see when driving from place to place in a five hour time limit. It’s exhilarating but also exhausting. Also, once in Decatur my car automatically drove me to Victory Vintage, and I stopped by my house for a snack before visiting the house down the street. That’s how I roll.

O.K. So first, the architects who live in the house with a soul also designed this house around the corner (photos immediately above and below). It’s absolutely gorgeous, and the inhabitants have a smart mix of high end items and art and IKEA. I just found myself wondering if all the stuff they usually keep out was smushed in the “not part of the tour” closed door rooms, or if they are really this strictly minimal. That’s cool if they are, I just know that I could not accomplish such discipline in a million years:

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Yesterday I was perusing one of my favorite neighborhood shops, urban cottage, and I came across some beautiful beads. It turns out they were part of the Akola project. The Akola project is part of the Ugandan American Partnership Organization. The Akola project has employed over 90 widows to make necklaces that are sold in Atlanta Georgia and Greenville South Carolina, for the purpose of stimulating economic development and providing relief to widows in rural villages. The beads are absolutely stunning, by the way. To learn more go to TheUAPO.org; to purchase visit urbancottage-atlanta.com.

photo from UAPO.org

Well, postage may be going up a penny soon, but it seems worth it just to be able to have this stamp. USPS is releasing an Eames stamp on June 17th. I haven’t been this giddy since the Frederick Law Olmsted stamps. I still have sheets and sheets of those somewhere that I can’t bear to use, along with the folk art stamps and the Noguchi stamps. It’s a good thing I do most of my mailing via the internet, since I can’t bear to use any of my stamps.

As you can see, each sheet has 16 different Eames images on it with the logo enlarged and in the middle. The composition is genius; I love the way they played with the rectangles and squares and how they relate to one another the way Charles and Ray would have done it (IMHO). I’m going to have to keep a sheet just to put in a frame.

It’s funny how I wind up trying to track down images online. I first caught wind of this in Metropolis, so I then tried to find the image at usps.com, but it’s too small and it sucked, so I Googled “Eames Stamp” and found that several other bloggers were hip to this news way before I was. I wound up checking out Happy Mundane and seeing their image, and from there linking over to flickr member eamesd’s image. By the way, eamesd’s flickr account is definitely worth spending some time perusing. So thanks to all of the above, and thanks to Metropolis, where I first heard the good news.

I’m so excited that Jonathan Adler’s “Monthly Musings” now includes a comments section. I left one that really rambled because the paragraph separations did not work out, so I sound even more A.D.D. than usual. This month he is musing about finding inspiration in places from Morgan Fairchild’s face to Timbaland’s mad mixology. I love knowing what makes people tick. My favorite example of this is in Douglas Keeve’s documentary Unzipped, where Isaac Mizrahi creates a collection inspired by Nanook of the North and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

So what inspires you? Do tell!

image of Kiki’s Derriere from Jonathanadler.com. You can buy one here.

Unzipped and Nanook images from amazon.com. You can buy your copy of Unzipped here.

MTM image from youtube. You can catch the theme song here.

If you are in the SF area over the next week, check out the “Untitled” exhibition by Joe Gebbia for CITIZEN:Citizen.

The when and where:

Launch Party: May 2nd; 6-8pm Chronicle Books 680 Second St, San Francisco. (Design Public staff will be there to check it out!)

Exhibition: May 3rd-May 10; 10am-5pm Chronicle Books 680 Second St, San Francisco

Many years ago, I went to the movie “The Full Monty” with my friend Chris Reilly, who is from Long Island. I remember at the end we could not stop laughing, and she was in tears, saying “the gnomes! That’s SO LONG ISLAND!” I thought the gnomes were great characters, or at least very important symbolically. Then again, I was an English major, and I tend to read a lot more into things than is actually intended. Bottom line is, I always get a kick out of a gnome or a pink flamingo.

Martha Schwartz’s Westfalia Germany exhibition, 51 Garden Ornaments, highlighted the meaning of these yard trinkets, and her words on the subject are much more eloquent than mine:

Our gardens have become increasingly important in our everyday lives. The reason for this may be our increasing need for an escape from our information society. This is true for the United States as well as Germany, two places where I have been working and spending time. The importance of our gardening activities is made evident through the fact that in the USA gardening is a billion-dollar industry and gardening our #1 hobby.In addition to being a beloved past-time spent nurturing our immediate home environments, our gardens are, in fact, a vehicle of expression through which we broadcast our individual message or image to the world. It is the picture window through which the world sees us. To this end, our gardens are a highly manipulated piece of nature in which the choice of ornaments placed in the garden reflects the home-owners character, and in turn, collectively, a national character.51 Garden Ornaments displays the ornaments which Americans and Germans often choose to place in their gardens. The ornaments have been purchased at garden-store chains which sell high volumes of these artifacts. I have chosen ornaments which also seem most popular and typical. Because of the sheer numbers and ubiquity, these ornaments therefore reflect who we are and how we would like to be seen. They come to characterize a larger collective landscape as we see them often in people’s yards. They represent areas of cultural similarity as well as difference.

• Images from marthaschwartz.com 

My favorite image from my newly set up bloglines feeds - the tree cozy. From PAN-DAN via swissmiss:Does anyone else know anything about where this is? It reminds me of some exhibition in France - I am blanking on the name, or The Spoleto Festival. Wherever it is, it’s quite striking, and this is a great image.2:30 p.m. E.S.T.:  UPDATE!  Zee from Homebug has let me know that the tree is the work of artist Carol Hummel!  Thank you Zee! Another image I clipped a few weeks ago comes from one of my new favorite blogs, Homebug. New to me, I should say, it’s been around for over a year. I stumbled upon it via design*sponge.

The weird thing is, I had just finished admiring Homebug’s red phone in our anti-depressive living group and within 24 hours I saw her on design*sponge. Isn’t it weird how certain things cross your path a few times all of the sudden? It was like it was fate telling me to subscribe to Homebug! I am also in love with Homebug’s dog, Polly, who looks exactly like my niece dog Chloe Harris. Is this dog the perfect model or what?I’ve also been enjoying exploring Urban Prairie, and checking out Chris Brown’s inspirations, like this one:

Finally, I can’t stop thinking about this perfect nook from Christina Murphy Interiors I saw over at desire to inspire:

Has anyone else been following the controversy surrounding the design for The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in D.C.? It’s interesting, and I’m not sure I have the latest update, but here it is in a nutshell. The designers selected a Chinese artist, Lei Yixin, to sculpt Dr. King. This artist is well known for a sculpture he did of Mao Zedong. A group calling themselves King Is Ours opposes the choice of artist and materials, and  has stated “The People’s Republic of China has the worst human and civil rights records in the world”, and “the granite used for the statue probably will be mined by workers laboring in unsafe and unfair conditions.”

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An awesome look into the mind and creations of Jason Miller. The video makes me love Jason’s “Seconds” collection even more than I already do. Now that’s a lotta love.

Check out all of Jason Miller’s items on DP.

I was just perusing our Anti-Depressive Living group on flickr today and came across this wonderful photo from one of my flickr faves, ninainvorm.  I’ve been amassing some favorite photos for another art arrangement post, but who knows if I’ll ever get it organized.  For today, we can all be inspired by ninainvorm!