My sister, who lives in Chicago in a late 19th century architectural gem has a loft that needs a new staircase, so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ladders, and spiral staircases and other moderately affordable, space saving solutions to her problem.

A spiral stair case would be a dramatic and attractive solution. I, mean, look at this:

It’s attractive in a modern way, it doesn’t take up much of the precious floor space, and it looks like great fun. The problem, however, is that spiral staircases are really only for the young and healthy. If you’re a stout person, or elderly, or someone with a bum knee, then a spiral staircase is not the ideal mode of transportation between floors. The treads are too narrow and the turns are too tight for many of us to negotiate in comfort.

The better solution, for her however, is a space-saving staircase (especially if grandma comes to visit). The treads are not quite as narrow, and for a loft like my sister has with a shorter distance to top than a full second floor, there’s no need to put in turns to save space.

The traffic to her loft is comparatively light, they use it mostly for storage, so I would say a relatively inexpensive modular staircase might get the job done.

“Today I worship the hammer,” so ends American poet Carl Sandberg’s short poem “The Hammer“, which isn’t really about hammers so much as humankind’s dualistic nature as builder and destroyer. But, whatever, it’s a good opening line for a short meditation on high-quality hammers and their utility.

What you see above is my favorite hammer, a 24 ounce, Eastwing Leather-Handle Rip Hammer in a straight English pattern. I love it. It feels magnificent in my hand, a beautifully balanced, precision tooled piece of cold steel, made warm to the touch by a piece of cow hide leather.

A well-built, one-piece steel hammer is a pleasure to use. The force of the blow transfers exactly to where you apply it, a mis-strike won’t snap the head off, and the good balance means it’s easy to wield.

Hammers are the King of All Tools, the direct, straight-line descendent of that first rock our distant ancestor, homo habilis, picked up and banged on a coconut, or the bone of a mammoth, or the head of his neighbor. All we’ve done to the hammer since then is improve on the basic concept; added a handle, made it from hardened metal, and attached something that lets us put out the nail we’ve just bent with a clumsy blow.

The hammer: it builds, it destroys. Tools don’t get any better than that.

You probably didn’t think it was possible for outdoor lighting to be glamorous, but then you probably haven’t seen anything as photogenic as these two pictures from the online catalog of Castlegate Lights:

Both of these are from a Swedish company called Konstsmide. The top one is the Konstsmide Fenix Solid Copper Upwards Wall Lantern and the bottom one is the Konstsmide Fenix Solid Copper Downwards Wall Lantern.

These aren’t just handsome wall lanterns, the way they’re portrayed in the photos above makes them handsome wall lanterns that promise to transform our surroundings into something special. The autumnal leaves, the ancient wall, the way the shadow in the top photo indicates late afternoon, all of these things combine to make these the most romantic wall lanterns ever.

My friend, the writer Virginia Postrel, has a new book coming out this fall The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion, and as the title suggests part of the power of glamour is that it makes us desirous; the glamorous object, or the glamorous photo incites a sense of longing. Undeniably, there’s a longing to be where these wall lanterns are, which is a pretty great trick when you consider that by strict definition these are just pieces of hardware, but what glamourous pieces of hardware they are!