Design Public

Just a few links to get you through the weekend:

1. Synagogue turned studio above and below as seen in New York Home:

2. Fun interview with Domino Editor-in-Cheif Deborah Needleman over at All Things Bright and Beautiful

3. A thorough guide to design blogs from Down Under, over at decor8.

4. Sumptuous Art Deco costumes and sets from the movie The Aviator, over at designsmack. It’s hard to choose a favorite, but my lord, when was the last time you saw a public restroom this gorgeous (note Leo in the mirror):

5. Design book releases we are anxiously anticipating, from one of my favorite bibliophiles, The Peak of Chic.

photo credits:

1 & 2 from New York Home by Jason Schmidt

3 via All Things Bright and Beautiful

4. via designsmack

5. via The Peak of Chic

Clotheslines have been on my brain all weekend. It started on Friday morning. I finally got around to reading the rest of The New York Times from the previous day (it took me until then to get the whole Charlton Heston thing that was going on the crossword, and I’m not allowed to read the rest of it until I’m done. It’s an O.C.D. thing, you wouldn’t understand). The International Report had a great article called “A Line in the Yard: The Battle Over the Right to Dry Outside.” It seems some Canadian renegades who like, want to save energy or something crazy like that, have the audacity to hang their clothes on a line behind privacy fences in a neighborhood that prohibits such an obscene act. With Earth Day being in April and all, I thought I would take a look at good old clotheslines.

I was trying to find an image of the clothesline in the middle of Muriel’s burned backyard, and I came across this fascinating and eloquent post over at makingwifi. I love it when that kind of thing happens! Am I the only person that did not realize this contraption is called a Hoist? It’s really rather genius.

This photo from flickr member Vincent Casey conjures up one memory I have of clotheslines: My classmate Peggy had all of her jeans stolen off the her clothesline in Venice (this was back in the day when most jeans were under $100; I know some of you are too young to remember way back then).  Unfortunately, Peggy and her roommates had a second story apartment, and the jean bandits would jump up and steal their pants.   Similarly, I figure in my ‘hood, where pieces of cars, lawn ornaments and copper gutters are stolen on a daily basis, a pair of True Religions on the line would not be safe, never mind the bird poop problems, so it’s a no-go for me. However, I have fond memories of my grandparents’ long line in Bristol, Connecticut, and even in historic and perfect looking Hingham Massachusetts, where the town likes to dictate what kind of mailbox one should have, my mom lets her laundry dry in the sun. What’s the big deal?

Later on that day, I was catching up on Bluelines, the blog that has taken the place of Blueprint magazine, and I saw a great feature written by Lena. She had collected some of her favorite flickr clothesline images. You can see all of them here. The one above is from flickr member turkeyfarmtreasures as shown over at Bluelines. The clothesline is a great way to air out and show off her vintage tablecloth collection!

In addition, late last week I noticed hulagirl’s mini-clothesline workspace arrangement on another blog, which right now I can’t remember. I think it may have been shelterriffic. I have been doing this with my holiday cards for the past few years and it’s a great way to show them off without involving tape on the walls.

By the way, I still miss her fabulous booth at Kudzu. Atlanta lost a lot of creativity when Hula and her family left us for Portland! You can keep up with them at her blog, Hula Seventy.

Finally, in this stream of consciousness mixed with blog hopping trip I was on, I remembered a favorite Martha Schwartz exhibit from the 1997 Spoleto Festival. It was called “Field Work”:

In case you are interested in installing your own clothesline, here’s how.  Also, here’s another article about the benefits of air-drying and how much it can reduce our carbon footprints.

Briefly, I just wanted to go over just a few of the design styles and designers who had a great influence the past year. We love to track trends and trendsetters, and this group of both kept coming up over and over again whenever I was trying to post. Yes, we are leaving out a ridiculous number of hits and hitmakers, but hey, I want to get this out before 2008, so this is it. As I started to try and name trends and think of style names, I realized that it seems like we are almost running out of catchy combinations to characterize design. As a matter of fact…I’m back in love with The New York Times again, just a week after they annoyed me. Julie Scelfo’s article last week called “Marketing Decor for a Conflicted Era” really nails everything that’s going on in design, by simply discussing the problem of trying to find nomenclature for styles that are designed to defy tradition. Scelfo asks the question of “how to stand out when rebellion has become the rule?”

How indeed. This year was ruled by eclecticism. When everyone is eclectic, is it still eclectic? Or does that make the thing that used to be banal and traditional the new eclectic, since it stands out in a quirky way from all of the formerly quirky eclectic stuff. It’s kind of like going to the bike messenger bar 97 Estoria, where every girl there has the same shade of fakey maroonish-auburn hair I have personally dubbed “alternachick red.” Is it alternative if everyone you know has the same color? Have we overused different adjectives put together with “classicism” or “traditional” or “modern” so much that it’s been done to death? (more…)

In case you missed it, the SF Chronicle recently wrote about the Sunset Idea House. The article is a great teaser if you have not seen the home yet…almost a play by play of each room and feature. To wet your whistle, the picture included with this post (courtesy of the SF Chronicle) shows a smattering of DP bedding. Quite handsome, I must say.

I plan on going to the house this weekend to finally put my imagination to rest. I am sure my visions of the kitchen cabinet doors (photographs of exotic wood under layers of class), the Endless Pool, or the 50-foot wind turbine, let alone all the *DP products in action don’t do the features justice. (*To be alerted when these items will be made available for sale, sign up for our newsletter here.)

Also, a friendly reminder that this is the last weekend to view the house (more…)

Ahh, a place where the green trend is not getting on my nerves in terms of its trendiness and actually is effecting change*:  Chicago is greening its alleys. This is the type of move I would expect from a landscape architecture studio student thesis, perhaps completed in Portland Oregon, or somewhere deep in Vermont. Yippee, these forward-thinking ideas are moving west!

Chicago is chock-full of non-permeable alleys, a major source of non-point-source pollution, and they are in the midst of changing that. In today’s New York Times, there was a fantastic article all about it - check it out here. As I am sure I won’t be able to stop myself from boring you with Atlanta drought stories in the upcoming weeks, I promise to send a copy of this to Mayor Shirley Franklin and Governor Sonny Perdue. While Mr. Perdue seeks to hoard water away from other states within the watershed in court case water wars and make a big show of praying for rain, let’s see if he actually will try to do something about our situation like Chicago is doing.

*I have nothing against the green movement, but the way I feel about it was summed up perfectly in 30 Rock’s NBC Green Week episode that featured David Schwimmer as Greenzo. It’s starting to get like the grunge trend; sometime after the movie Singles was released, Blaine Trump started showing up at fundraisers in haute couture wool and flannel, and soon after the trend went away while glamour made a big return. I don’t want the trendiness of the green movement to reach the tipping point and cause the backlash return of hedonistic wastefulness.

photo by Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

Do you have something that holds a permanent spot on your inspiration board, that has helped your ideas flow for years and years? I loved this charming piece on the author Douglas Coupland in Sunday’s New York Times. It figures that the author who captured the zeitgeist of Generation X and the technology bubble (Microserfs - personally I liked that one better, maybe because I am a member of Gen X, I don’t know), chose this cusp-of-the-eighties postcard from Fiorucci 1979. It did seem a sign of everything that was to come, and it affected Coupland so deeply that he dumped science for art then and there. I don’t think a postcard has ever done that much for me, but I do know that are quite a few images from bulletin boards that seem to make the cut during every clean-out and every move. Care to share yours?

photo from Bayne Stanley for The New York Times 

I remember telling you about the best magazine covers awhile back, but now I have to add a new one to the list. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the latest Rolling Stone in my mailbox - Hunter S. Thompson looking so cool, in the way only he could. I remember on my first trip to Vegas I ran into an old friend who insisted I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I’ve been addicted to Thompson’s gonzo journalism ever since. This one is a keeper, I just wish they didn’t integrate my address label into the cover - I’m going to have to go buy another issue to frame.

photograph from Rolling Stone by Edmund Shea with colorization by Michael Elins

TREND ALERTS!

I haven’t been keeping up on our ubiquitous design object drinking games/trendy object scavenger hunt (Part II is here), whatever you want to call it, but some other bloggers have had some great posts with more objects. Megan over at BeachBungalow8 has a list right here, and Style Court has some design library additions here.

The latest for me? These gorgeous Suzani prints are popping up more and more lately. Here’s one in a beautiful room from Style Court*:

Another object spreading through blog world (and apparently to a lot of bloggers walls) is this Partridge Family-esque print by GoodShapeDesign:

(more…)

Yes, going green and being as environmentally responsible as possible is very important.  However, it’s become so trendy and there is so much greenwashing out there, that it’s hilarious to see the cynical take on the whole thing.  Chelsea Handler is the perfect fearless person to do that, saying she has “already traded in my Hummer, for a smaller Hummer…I’ve been listening to a lot of old music…I started listening to The Spin Doctors again…”  Here she meets with some green experts, so she can jump on the green celebrity bandwagon with “Leo, Bono…and Akon…”:

I spied this over at AT NYC before I had even opened The NYTimes House and Home Section today and swooned over it. This beautiful house in Germantown NY is a grain silo that contains the living room and bedroom, a shingled shed that houses the kitchen, bathroom, home office and closet, and a breezeway in between the two. I just love the simple forms side by side - the proportions are perfect and the shapes are so pure. I can see the conceptual collage underneath - the square opening touching the cylinder, the square to the right of it, the roof of the shed on the right that looks like if you extended it that it would graze the top of the silo.

The materials are perfect in their simplicity too - the galvanized steel silo, the shingles, and the gray rocks leading up to the entry. The site looks beautiful and the simple landscape plan compliments it so well. Something about it made me think a little tiny bit of Charles Gwathmey and a lot of Robert Venturi, (and then, of course, I started wondering if it were a duck or a shed or both!). Isn’t it wonderful to see someone build a small getaway (about 1000 square feet) that pays tribute to the vernacular architecture in the region. What a perfect country retreat!

*photos by Phil Mansfield for The NYTimes

Architect: Michael Altschuler