Manolo for the HomeFebruary, 2008 | Manolo for the Home - Part 2



Archive for February, 2008


With the look of not-so-real wood

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
By Christa Terry

I love to blog hop, moving from one to another by following random blogroll links. It’s fun, it helps me to better understand the roll of my own links section, and I invariably find myself reading something awesome. It may take a few jumps to find those best-of-the-blog-world type sites, but the time I spend sitting at my desk nearly always proves worth it!

To illustrate, it was just yesterday that I happened upon It’s (K)not Wood, a blog celebrating all things “faux bois.” Written by Emilyn Eto and Jonathan Lo, this blog highlights the best in wood that isn’t actually wood.

The latest post introduced me to this faux wood wedge shelving from West Elm.

With the look of real wood

Neat, yeah? And not what I was expecting at all. If I were to create a blog about fake wood, it would probably be filled with lots of posts dissing the nasty faux wood paneling The Beard and I encountered in so many of the houses we looked at when shopping for somewhere to live. Ugh. You can paint over it in the short term without it looking too bad, but you’ll always know it’s there.

Luckily, faux bois is typically a lot nicer than that. Here are some of my (clickable) favorite things, all done up in white:

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A rainbow in the bedroom

Monday, February 18th, 2008
By Christa Terry

As promised long ago, here are just some of the makings of a colorful, cheery bedroom. While I do like the stark white kitchens and bathrooms, pretty much everywhere else in my house needs to be absolutely saturated with color. I had our paints picked out long before The Beard and I closed on our house, and the first order of business upon closing was to start prettying up the walls. Being that I already knew where my decor was headed, I had no trouble re-purposing what we already had to fit the new scheme.

I did, naturally, have to flesh the whole works out with some fresh things, if only because we were moving into a totally different space…at least that’s what I keep telling myself!

RED!ORANGE!YELLOW!
GREEN!BLUE!PURPLE!

I love the chair, but I don’t know that I could find a place for it in the pale green sanctuary of my own bedroom. But the radio? Bring it on!


Art, it’s about time you walk all over it

Friday, February 15th, 2008
By Christa Terry

Glinda brought a certain Jonathan Roubini to my attention in the not so distant past, via a link to an article in the LA Times. While I just can’t seem to wrangle a working perma-link that’ll lead you to the article, I can sum the whole thing up thusly: Awesome freakin’ rugs.

Pay attention where you’re stepping these day. A trend may be underfoot. A new category of high-end contemporary rugs is emerging: graphic illustrations of sex, drugs and other not-so-PG themes rendered by designers who look to the floor as an uncensored canvas.

Kissable carpet?

Roubini’s The Kiss is hand knotted using wool and silk, and is available in standard and custom sizes…for a goodly price, of course.

Sex and drugs aside, I really do like the illustrative rugs I’m seeing more and more these days. My fondness for Oriental carpets cannot be trumped, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t mind laying down something artful and sumptuous on my bare wood floors. (Lest you think I’m being stingy, there are more pretty pics below the cut.)

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Furniture for the broken hearted?

Thursday, February 14th, 2008
By Christa Terry

Screw this silly made up holiday! With chairs!

If your hatred of Valentine’s Day runs so deep that you feel a pressing need to express it in your home decor, you could do worse than to order some sad, sad seating from Vermont Wood Studios. Designer Steve Holman envisioned and built these broken-hearted chairs out of figured maple, topping them off with velvety red fabric.

Should it happen that they are too cutesy for your tastes, don’t let that stop you from browsing the rest of Vermont Wood Studios’ wonderful pieces, which encompass everything from sophisticated and sumptuous carved tables to furniture crafted from reclaimed barn wood…a material that is ever so close to my heart.


Figuring out your furniture footprint

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
By Christa Terry

A while back, I talked about using tools to help you plot out a room’s worth of furniture. Software is just one option. There’s always your handy dandy graph paper. I even knew one guy who’d cut out little pictures of couches and end tables and move them around the miniature room he’d sketched out.

But here’s an option I never realized existed…

Um, couldn’t you just find some cardboard on Craigslist?

Yep, that’s right. It’s pre-fab flat paper “furniture” that lets you guesstimate the footprint of your stuff and then move it around until you find a configuration you like. Move it without giving yourself a hernia, I mean. Back when I was in high school I would move my bedroom suite around every few months, never taking the drawers out of anything or the mattress off the bed. I’d shove, shove, shove until I’d gotten everything just right, probably ruining the carpeting in the process. Sorry, mom!

At about $30 a room, the sets are fairly cheap, which is good considering that they’re basically heavy duty paper. You could go to your local arts and crafts emporium, get a bunch of off-the-roll paper, and DIY, but art supplies tend to be pretty expensive and you may end up spending just as much. The upside of sourcing your own paper is that you can cut it to match your actual furniture instead of having to rely on someone else’s standards.


Here fishy fishy fishy fishy!

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
By Christa Terry

They have lots of room to roam

I’ve never really gotten the whole fish as pets thing. My experience with them begins and ends at the nomadic fairs that would roll through town in my youth. Remember the fish bowl game where you could toss a ping-pong ball and win a goldfish in a bag? I loved it, and I came home with a fish every time.

The problem? There weren’t enough fairs to support my fish habit, and those little fishies always died within weeks of my bringing them home. The lesson, I suppose, is that one should not adopt pets that have been traveling in the back of a carny’s trailor.

If I ever again feel the inclination to try my hand at aquatic pets — keep dreaming, kitties — I’ll snatch up one of these sweet aquariums from Octopus Studios. Who knows…maybe fishies that have plenty of room to move about and visit with their friends would live a whole lot longer?


Fantastic plastic?

Monday, February 11th, 2008
By Christa Terry

Forget ugly old monobloc white lawn chairs — plastic can indeed be fantastic as is evidenced by the lovely images below. The only thing I can’t vouch for is whether your beshorted legs will stick to these chairs once they’ve spent some time baking in the sun on a hot summer day.

These are prettier than you’d think

The Alchemia Polycarbonate Dining Chair from Calligaris looks smashing as a modern insert in an otherwise traditional dining room, provided you choose the right jewel-like hue.

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An easy upgrade

Friday, February 8th, 2008
By Christa Terry

The Beard and I were in the Home Depot the other day buying a standard-sized drop in cast iron sink to replace the horrid two-piece stainless steel monstrosity that was slowly sinking into the cabinet underneath. It so happens that we need a new kitchen lighting fixture, so as we were walking down the lighting aisle, The Beard casually asked me if I’d like a big, fancy chandelier.

And I thought, yes, of course I would, thank you very much. But I think I’d prefer something that didn’t look like it came straight out of someone else’s gram’s dining room. I do rather like these:

Black!Red!Uh, wood?Green!

On the subject of chandeliers, I came across a cool tip in some magazine or another. It suggested buying a second-hand brass chandelier from the local Goodwill and spray painting the whole thing white to make a cool shabby chic lighting fixture. There was a wonderful before-and-after that I naturally cannot find anywhere online, but I did find just such a chandelier painted blue on Curbly.

Blue!

I think it’s lovely and one hell of an easy upgrade. Your thoughts?









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