I should have known I’d come upon another wonderful Panton Chair shot at Living etc.:

image via Living etc.

P.S. The architect on this project was Steven Whiting

I’m giving flickr a rest today because frankly, I can’t seem to stop surfing Living etc. It’s been to long since my last visit over there. People keep using Panton chairs in such great ways. My new favorite is this rhapsody in blue over at Living etc. This is a modern cottage in Melbourne Australia and this space rocks. Love the crazy nest/beaver habitat of a chandelier. Love the use of the navy chairs. Love the light ceiling abutting that dark wall & matching cabinets. Love the floor, love the table, love the contrast of the modern, curvy plastic chairs with the slightly rough hewn, blocky table. What the hell is that flower arrangement? I must love it as well, as this all just works.

To pick up some Panton chairs of your own, click here. They are $260 each.

image via Living etc. Are there many magazine sites with better galleries than Living etc.? My only wish is that the images were larger, but that’s a very minor quibble. I love the quality of all of their picks, and the site architecture is great. Let’s hope the shelter mag blight does not reach them.

O.K., so these table legs from Home Depot are not all that sexy. However, ever since I admired Priscilla Locke’s studio a few weeks ago I have had them on the brain:

from The Locker

My cryptic notes on this picture source say “colombe steven via destoinsp” This means I swiped it from Desire to Inspire, but I’m not sure about the rest. Let me know if you can help me clarify!

My notes here:francesca harris sunset WS. I think I’ve decoded it – photographer name, magazine (Sunset) and WS means “Work Space”!

From Living etc.

Notes here: “cordelia de castellane ws hg” House & Garden?

from Natural Curiosities

from Living etc.

from Nate Berkus

Here are a few cuter cheap versions if you want to try the look out yourself. The yellow one is from Home Depot, and the silver ones are from Lowe’s.

I grew up in a flyover state (Ohio), and they must be on my mind this week. Yesterday I was thinking about midwestern Seed Bombs, and today I’m taking a virtual house tour in Kansas:

Kirstie Alley was on Oprah the other day, talking about how her first job was being a housekeeper at a wealthy family’s home (she recommends cleaning bathrooms with gallons of cheap vodka), and her second job was at an interior decorator who was high on cocaine a lot of the time. She talked about dreaming of owning this house in her hometown of Wichita Kansas, which was the headquarters of the historical society at the time. She decorated it herself, and there is a fun tour of it over at Oprah.com. Personally, I love the bedroom below, and I love that Kirstie is not afraid of loud, bold wallpaper. The kitchen is beautiful, but because it wasn’t all that large, Kirstie bought the house next door, transformed the entire downstairs into a kitchen, and built a bridge between the two houses. You can see a lot of nods to traditional design and a few moves that seem kinda eighties, but who cares? Kirstie is hilarious and my dad and I sat and watched the segments of her and cracked up the entire time.

all images from Oprah.com

I picked this book up at one of the best used bookstores I’ve ever visited, ABCD in Camden Maine (though my Great Uncle Frank Piskor, a huge bibliophile, used to say they had “New York prices.”). It’s a MoMA book from 1961, and Uncle Frank was right; it was $6.50 new, and $75 used forty years later. I’m going to let the jacket sum up Futurism for you because I would use up all of my blogging hours for the month trying to do it myself and I would not do half as good a job:

The Futurist artists…set out to create an art as exhilarating as Marinetti’s promise. They translated the kinetic rhythms and the confused, intense sensations of modern life into potent visual form, creating works of art of extraordinary emotional impact. The Futurists’ approach to art, their manifestos and demonstrations set a pattern for many art movements which followed, such as Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism…and the sympathy between certain Futurist procedures and current endeavors is largely responsible for the growing interest in Futurism.”

-Joshua C. Taylor

The Futurists looked to the past to rebel against it than to be inspired by it, and they had a tinge of anarchy running through their movement. Alright, enough art history, think about what was going on in the 19-teens and you’ll get it. Onto the inspiration of color, shape, movement, and composed confusion:

Severini: The Boulevard 1910

Boccioni: The Street Pavers 1911

Balla: Mercury Passing Before the Sun as Seen Through a Telescope 1914

Balla: Iridescent Interpretation 1912

Balla: Girl Running on a Balcony 1912

Boccioni: Iron Man. Just Kidding! Unique Forms of Continuity in Space 1913

Carra: “Free-Word” Painting (Patriotic Celebration) 1914

Boccioni: The Calvary Charge 1914

Hmmm, O.K., so the late fifties/early sixties are the time of the “current endeavors” Taylor alludes to. That makes total sense when you think about the art scene in the sixties and beyond. I’m seeing a lot of inspiration here for Jim Dine and Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol. Think of whatever Cooper is hanging in his office on Mad Men, think of how the space race would have effected art the way the industrial revolution and speeding cars and airplanes did decades earlier.

It makes me wonder what kind of art will come out of this tumultuous time in history. We’ve seen the architecture, we’re seeing how the fear of a crashing plane affects design, how security concerns keep campuses from planting shrubs, how we memorialize heroes and events. How are tumultuous times and technology and all of the new ways of presenting media and communicating affecting art today? Please tell me what you think as it’s kind of blowing my mind just thinking about it at them moment.

Blu Dot always catches my attention by doing something creative. Starting on Wednesday, they will begin The Real Good Chair Experiment, tracking Real Good Chairs on a journey through N.Y.C. You will be able to follow the chairs in real time here.

Ah, an afternoon post – I was very sidetracked as my Style and Substance: The Best of Elle Decor arrived today. I got so into it I haven’t even read David Rohde’s daily installment of “Held by the Taliban” in the Times yet, and that is a seriously riveting serialized read. I thought most of it would look familiar because I flip through my Elle Decor issues again and again and save and make tear sheets galore, but actually, a lot of it was new to me, and the familiar shots were all tear-sheet worthy. The book is set up by space – bedrooms, bathrooms, etc. They range from rustic Martha’s Vineyard bathrooms to opulent “Marrakesh retreats”.

Best of all, Margaret Russell, author and Elle Decor E.I.C. spares the reader from the usual flowery writing for the sake of having X amount of text on the page copy that is so common in such lovely, glossy design books. I mean really, how often do we actually read these books? 85% of the time, I buy interior design books just for the pictures, as they are usually worth a thousand words. Russell sticks to giving a nice introduction to each section, and “Style Guides” at the end of each section. In the guides, she pulls together what we can learn from the spaces and gives easy-to-follow, pragmatic advice about how to glean style skills from the images. This book is one I will pore over many times, and it also makes a great gift.

Who are your favorite interior design writers? Mine include Russell, Celerie Kemble, Jonathan Adler, Billy Baldwin and Dorothy Draper. Please share yours in the comments section.

images via amazon.com, from Elle Decor: Style and Substance, by Michael Mundy and Henry Bourne, respectively.

Lately I’ve been trying to make sense of Kelly Wearstler’s latest Bravura Modern designs. They seem to be in every magazine this month, as part of the promotion for her new book Hue. While they are way too much for me, when I deconstruct them, I can appreciate the pieces and what she’s getting at. Seeing how beautiful her line for SFERRA has helped me see this, as well as how much I love some of the wallpapers she’s designed. She gets a lot of her current inspiration from the 1980s. The eighties usually make me think of shoulder pads, Miami Vice, too many florals, chintz, and peach.

This week, I decided to take down an old book from my shelf, The Decorator by Florence de Dampierre. It’s fabulous. You’d never guess it was published in 1989, because the designs featured in it are so timeless and elegant. You can see how much the works of Sister Parish, Albert Hadley, David Hicks, Bunny Williams et. al. have influenced more classic designers like Michael S. Smith and Celerie Kemble today, as well as renegades like Wearstler. Here are just a few favorites from this must-have tome.

Mario Buatta mid-1970s bedroom. photographed by Richard Champion.

Garousle/Bonetti Design. photographs by Simon Kentish; sketch by Mattia Bonetti

2 preceding photos: Albert Hadley Design. Photographs by Antoine Bootz

Michael Krieger Design. Photograph by Antoine Bootz

Sandra Nunnerly Design for a Kip’s Bay Show House. Photograph by Grand Mudford

Does this one scream Jonathan Adler/Kelly Wearstler or what?

Betty Sherrill Design. Photograph by Grisby and Michael Dunn

Right now The Decorator is available used at amazon for under $5.00. Buy it! You won’t regret it! As for Hue, I haven’t previewed it yet, so I can’t recommend it, but I am heading over to pre-order it now and I’ll let you know.

first image via mirror mirror via Vogue.

Alright, one more workspace and then stop thinking about workspaces and have a great weekend. This one is from the new online magazine called Lonny, a project by a group of ex-Domino staffers and a few others. This space is from the ex-E.I.C. Deborah Needleman’s house. Have you been noticing all the black and charcoal walls out there these days? I find it very bold and brave and elegant, but I’m afraid it would be depressing. While it’s gorgeous in this room, I fear that if I did it in my own house I’d become a secret cutter or something.

By the way, Lonny is laid out really nicely and it’s very easy to navigate. While some of the content was not really my cup of tea, it’s a great effort and it’s so nice to see the Domino peeps back; we missed you!

image by Patrick Cline via Lonny

LOVE the round-up of kid workspaces over at remodelista. Here’s a taste:

image from Elle Interiors, via remodelista