Manolo for the Home

Oh how I wish you were mine, Sari patchwork ottoman. You remind me of a wonderful set of throw pillows that dazzled me in childhood, and you say, “I belong to someone who isn’t afraid get cultural in the pursuit of coolness.” Unsurprisingly, that’s also what Gaiam Living wants me to think when I look at this refreshingly red ottoman. Let me quote their catalog…

Sometimes all you need is one work of art to bring an entire room together. Reclaimed cotton fabric patches, shells, embroidery, appliqué, tassels - they all lend a hand in giving this handcrafted ottoman its fantastic worldly flavor.

Could this bring a room together? I’m not so sure…I rather think you’d need an awfully special sort of room for that to happen. That’s not to say I wouldn’t happily accept this as a gift and stick it willy-nilly in my living room…because I so would. But you have to admit that this is a stand out piece, not some kind of aesthetic glue that’s going to suddenly meld all of your disparate bits of furniture into a cohesive whole.

Who’s Jo Meester? He’s a designer from the Netherlands and co-founder of the Meesters & Van der Park Design Studio. I enjoy his work because of its amazing diversity — instead of sticking to one discipline, he moves from one to another with great skill. He explores woodworking before moving on to crochet before taking up a needle to create art from cast off pieces of wool. Not everything is particularly functional, but all of it is fun.

These err on the side of functionality, though the name — Ornamental Inheritance Vessels — speaks to me of urns and ashes. I think I’d set them up somewhere instead of, say, filling them with filberts.

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Decor tends to be a lady’s concern. There’s plenty of frippery and frills out there in furniture shops — florals abound and pastels float in and out of style in a never-ending cycle. Furthermore, a lot of gentlemen are not at all concerned with the outward appearance of their domiciles. All they want is a roof that doesn’t leak and working appliances.

To illustrate my point, let me take you back a few days to Saturday afternoon. The Beard and I were standing in front of a huge display of light fixtures. I was nattering on and on about the relative pros and cons and each, and kept asking him which he preferred. His answer? “You care a lot more about this stuff than I do,” he said. “So why don’t you just pick out the one you think will look best.”

That’s not to say that all dudes don’t care about decor, but I’m willing to bet that a great deal of them have no opinion one way or the other. Maybe they’d care more if they saw a few more masculine interiors like these?

This living room, put together by one Stefan Tyra and featured in The Sydney Morning Herald, was actually crafted with a mix of lavishness and frugality. Two-dollar mirrors hang over accent cushions upholstered in $2000 a meter fabric! How’s that for mixing and matching?

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One of the places those of us who are seriously eco-minded fail is in the home. We drive environmentally friendly automobiles, recycle like crazy, buy fair trade coffee and sustainably grown veggies, and organic cotton t-shirts. Go us, right? Then we buy any old rug, furniture made of any old wood, and any old paint. It’s not surprising — after all, the really nice ecologically sensible stuff is reeeaaaaally expensive, right?

You’re only partly right. A lot of it is outlandishly expensive. On the other end of the spectrum, Freecycled furniture is about as low-impact as you can get. And somewhere in the middle you find stores like VivaTerra that have stuff for your home that pairs elegance with eco-friendliness at prices that won’t bankrupt the average buyer.

I absolutely luuuurve this chair. Oddly enough, however, I had my very own slice of trunk table when I was an apartment dweller. The cross section was a lot bigger and the whole thing was a lot lower, so we gave it away on Craigslist to someone who had the space for it.

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Every now and again, my mailbox is inundated with home decor magazines. Where all of them have converged in recent months is in their liberal use of blue. It’s not just one particular sort of blue, either. There are Greenwich blues and icy blues and cornflower blues and cobalt blues. Light greenish blues seem to be dominating at this time, but there certainly seems to be plenty of room for other competing blues.

Did I mention that other than black, blue is my favorite color? There are millions upon billions of ways one can integrate a color into a home decor scheme. Sometimes it’s hard to decide what to do because there are so many options, but seeing what others have done can be all the inspiration one needs. Below you’ll find some blue interiors that will get your creative juices flowing.

The thought of painting a floor never really occurred to me until just now. As it turns out, The Beard and I have an unfinished floor in the upper story of our home and I’m sorely tempted to start laying down color!

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There’s nothing like a nice squishy tosser, as I’ve mentioned previously. In my little abode, throw pillows get sat on, chucked around, used as trivets, gnawed by curious kitties, and taken on long car trips. Huh…maybe that’s why none of mine are stuffed with down and covered in raw shantung silk like the colorful examples above. If your throw pillows lead a far less vigorous life than my own, perhaps it’s time to upgrade to something more refined.

image by scriptingnews

Doesn’t that look gorgeous? It’s the little touches–like funky pillows or an heirloom quilt–that make a space feel homey to me, which is why sitting on any of my couches and chairs usually involves moving a bunch of throws and things. What are the tiny details that make you feel at home?

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.

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 pieces 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 you’re spaces 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.

Yesterday we got to peek inside Betsy Johnson’s NYC pad. Today it’s time to have a gander inside Saddam Hussein’s mega-yacht, the Qaddisat Saddam. This $34 million boat, which now goes by the less disturbing moniker Ocean Breeze, can now be yours! Let’s have a look…

The 269-foot yacht comes equipped with bulletproof glass, a full medical clinic, prayer rooms, weapons storage, gold fixtures, marble, fountains, and more. It also comes equipped with decor straight out of the hotel decorators’ handbook.

Again, this is pretty much the set-up I would have envisioned if someone had asked me to guess at Saddam’s taste in interiors.

via Radar Online