Wedding gowns and shoes get saddled with amusing, silly, and patently odd names. Why was Cary named Cary? And who’s Madalyn?

As it turns out, plenty of furniture comes complete with interesting and evocative monikers. Meet Cairo, the bench that apparently hails from the land of the pharaohs.

I have these two friends. One is a die hard New Yorker and a subwayphile. The other is loathe to pass up any opportunity to snap up an old street sign that happens to be lying around. If I had a few thousand bucks burning a hole in my pocket, you can bet I’d be placing an order for a few of these chairs. Designed by Boris Bally, they are crafted from aluminum and steel signs rendering each chair unique.

As Michael Monroe (wait, that Michael Monroe?) so aptly put it:

“An attraction to the bold graphics of discarded highway signage inspired Boris Bally to collect, recycle, and fabricate furniture of great wit and distinction. His chairs – with fragmented words, symbols and arrows splashed across their surfaces – seem to symbolize urban grit and rhythms.”

Indeed…of course, I love weird highlight pieces like this. You wouldn’t want to outfit your whole house with them–at least most people wouldn’t–but they’re awesome in a starring role. My main stand-out piece is a beautiful and striking Russian khokhloma side table that my grandparents brought back on some excursion some years ago. What’s yours?

Before I could even imagine buying a house, I was quick to profess my love of small houses. Cottages. Bungalows. Whatever you want to call them. After all, they’re cheaper to heat and cool, they’re cute, and they kind of force you to prioritize your junk. Then I actually bought a small house and realized just how much junk I really had!

Figuring out what to do with my small spaces was a challenge. I had more space overall, but the individual rooms in my new house were smaller than the corresponding rooms in my apartment. What that meant was that I had to prioritize when choosing my furnishings and decor, find creative and aesthetically pleasing ways of packing everything I wanted in, and make as many pieces as possible do double duty.

What do I mean by double duty? Take a plain kitchen window, for example. Demesne suggests you turn that window into:

• A plant window with glass shelving for indoor plants or garden starts. A narrow bookcase with attractive baskets for holding garden books, planting tools, and a covered bucket for potting soil could turn this into a mini-plant care center.
• The perfect cat zone by adding a somewhat wider shelf to the typical sill, then topping it with a home-made cushion (with a washable cover).
• An entertainment bar with a drop leaf shelf mounted at bar height under the window for extra eating or serving space. When you need it, it’s there, but for convenience it can be left down. Camouflage it as part of a built-in if you’re ambitious.
• A breakfast table. An eastern exposure combined with a small drop leaf table and a couple chairs is a natural solution. The leaves can be left down to facilitate flow through except when having that morning cappuccino.
• A mud space. If it’s next to a door, a narrow bench with cubbies for outdoor shoes, boots, and a bin for hats and gloves provides a good spot to catch family clutter. Put a couple heavy duty hooks nearby for backpacks or purses. Voilá. If you can train your family to take their shoes off, you’ll cut down dramatically on the dirt that gets tracked in.

And so on and so forth. Little niches can become mini offices, prettied up storage nooks, or entertainment areas. Ask yourself: Where can I fit some additional seating? How can I display my stuff to its best advantage? How can I make my spaces feel bigger without sacrificing comfort? If you plan carefully–perhaps using some of the software readers recommended here–your small spaces will pop.

Now you tell me…what have you done lately to maximize the appeal of your small spaces?

For many, the new year means new furniture, new appliances, and a new decor scheme. I know that I definitely get way more into the whole new year thing when I’ve made some outward changes in my existence, a la moving everything I own around and donating anything that hasn’t seen the light of day in, oh, six months. The keyword is organization, a.k.a. shelf shopping! I’m contemplating the one you see above, but only in a ::wouldn’t it be nice if I had $700:: sort of way.

I hope you have a most prosperous and beautiful new year!

Before the official launch of the blog, I wrote about shopping your home when you need a decor pick-me-up. What do you do, though, when you’ve found all of the perfect new furniture for a certain room in your house or apartment, but you have no clue how to arrange them? When I find myself facing this conundrum, I put scissors to paper.

I could explain myself in my own words, but Seeds of Knowledge wrote it out so succinctly:

1. Measure your room. Draw it to scale on graph paper which you can find at your local discount store. Use a 1/4 in. equal 1 ft. scale. If you can’t figure out how to draw out scale, ask your know-it-all teenage son!

2. Mark anything on your room drawing that will affect the arrangement of the room. Outlets, telephone, cable, light switches, windows, doors that open in, the space between windows, and the height of the window sills are all things that should be measured and noted.

3. This is the fun part! Make scale paper cutouts of your furniture (just like cutting out paper dolls!) Use the cutouts to arrange and rearrange the furniture in your room until you are satisfied with the result.

That’s it — without breaking a sweat, you can be sure your old rooms with their new furniture will look wonderful in their new configuration. Even if you find drawing tedious, it beats asking your friends, significant other, or “know-it-all teenage son” to help you move your couch over and over and over again.

Pets come with accessories… there’s just no getting around it. Me and The Beard? We keep cats, and thus we know that the ugliness of the litter box is legendary. A few enterprising furniture makers have endeavored to help people for whom aesthetics are of utmost importance hide the realities of their cats’ daily lives.

Below you’ll find just a few examples of the many attractive litter box hideaways out there. Perhaps kitty is craving a little privacy this holiday season?

A man I know in Costa Rica lives at the top of a mountain in an open-air home. It’s not nearly as pretty as the picture you see above, being as that it’s made of a scrap wood frame paired with corrugated metal sheets. Nonetheless, I get the feeling that one of these floating beds would fit perfectly in with his charmingly rustic decor. What I’m not to sure about is whether these round, hanging beds are actually comfortable.

The site claims that they’re not only comfy, they’re also healthy.

The floating motion is scientifically designed to reactivate a deep relaxation response in our cellular memory. It will dramatically improve your sleep, or spare moments of relaxation. It is a powerful remedy for the problems of modern living.

Bunker than a bunk bed? I hope not. At $3195 for a queen size bed frame without any bells and whistles, it had better deliver on its promises.

Give an Ikea ISIG to lifestyle guru Matthew Mead and you’ll end up with something lovely. I found his easy-peasy DIY directions through ikea hacker, a blog devoted to finding the most interesting and innovative uses for boring old Ikea flat pack furniture.

Go and check ikea hacker out, then come back and tell me about your most creative Ikea furniture hacks. After all, just because something came from Ikea (or the Goodwill or the Dollar Tree) doesn’t mean it has to look like it did!

Cubes have gotten a bad rap, what with so many people working in those ucky tight workspaces commonly known as cubes. This utterly adorable jacquard cube makes it easy to forget that you’re chained to a whole different sort of cube for eight hours each day. You can put your feet up on it after a long stint at the office and then use it as makeshift seating when one too many post-dinner visitors come knocking at your door.

In fact, just keep your feet up. Speak in hushed tones, and whoever is asking to be let in will give up and go away so you can enjoy a little sit down and a big glass of wine in peace.