Manolo for the Home

There’s a long tradition of looking to nature for inspiration in art and design, and no wonder. Once upon a time, there was nothing but pure imagination and what you could see around you in the great outdoors. Nowadays we have a lot more to look at, but nature continues to inspire those who create.

The tree bed from Shawn Lovell Metalworks is a wee bit pricey at $15,000, but how delightful to sleep and dream in the comforting arms of a break in the woods. There’s even a nest for passing birds overhead!

For those who wish to dry their duds the old fashioned way, Insitu has stylized tree clothes lines, suitable for indoor or outdoor use. The colors are great, though the $600 price tag leaves a lot to be desired.

These look like slim vases, but they’re actually quite tall. Jean-Marie Massaud’s Missed Tree Flower Pot has a sturdy steel base so you can be quite sure you won’t be left shouting timber as your beautiful pot crashes the ground.

I adore people who know what they like, which means I have a real thing for John Webster of Kitsch’n. He gets his kicks with kitsch and isn’t afraid to take his flair for retro chic decorating and DIY to the next level.

Ooh la la! I’m loving that little wall clock… and how about that mantel? Gorgeous! (I’ll leave it to you to decide what you think of the other odds and ends.)

Lots of the furniture you see here has backstories that can be found in the archives, like the weirdly shaped coffee table and the pretty blue side table. Anyway, Webster’s entire blog is delightful, and I thoroughly recommend that you give it a read.

Regardless of how you feel about the legitimacy of the sixth installment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, I think we can all agree that this is a pretty sweet chair.

This take one the iconic Egg chair designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1958 is being produced in a limited run of, you guessed it, just 42 numbered chairs. The design pays homage to the Hitchhikers Guide series with a beautifully rendered hand-finished embroidered exploding earth on the back. The front of the chair features optical white hide with a cowhide seat cushion (which frankly, I could do without, but I suppose one could remove it).

The Beard and I are starting to think seriously about home renovations, which is a good thing when you consider that I have an office and he doesn’t, and the entire upstairs of our house is basically unfinished. We think, though we’re not entirely sure, that we’ve figured out a way to turn the upstairs floor (which is currently divided into two fairly large rooms) into two small offices and one big master bedroom. That would leave us with two children’s bedrooms on the first floor and a basement that said children can eventually destroy, thus saving my living room from wear and tear.

This change, if it’s even possible, is quite a ways off, which is fine since we’re still, nearly eight months later, getting used to managing the day-to-day responsibilities of being parents, homeowners, employees, and well-rounded grownup people. Oh, and Horde warriors, but that’s another tale for another day.

Back to those small offices. I’m not sure what The Beard will do with his other than fill it with expensive audio equipment and an ankle deep pile of papers, but I plan to actually work in mine since that’s what I do in my current, rather more expansive home office. Moving upstairs will mean some things have to go — like my freestanding bookshelves, for example. So what to do, what to do…

There’s this:

Isabel Quiroga’s Storyteller Shelves could be a fun DIY project resulting in some truly deep shelves. And cheap, too, if I have the patience to scour the classifieds for legged coffee tables that are just about the same width. Plus a similarly-sized desk. Overall, I love the look (not to mention the color!), and it’s something I’d consider if it happened that the Craiglist freebies board became inundated with shorty tables.

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I’ve recently been reading The Book of Games: Strategy, Tactics & History by Jack Botermans. It’s a look at international games and their place in culture and history, from The Royal Game of Ur, one of the oldest board games ever found, to the much more modern Mastermind. Naturally all that reading about games got me to thinking about games and furniture, which is how I found this super sweet set of Scrabble couches.

Crafted by Stephen Reed for employees in the London offices of Bloomberg financial services, it’s not only the couch cushions that, ahem, get into the game. The couches themselves are stylized to look like Scrabble tile racks, i.e., those easily upended wooden things where one hides one’s tiles.

I get the overall concept, but frankly I’m much more interested in the Scrabble tile pillows than I am in the Scrabble-racks-turned-seating. The look uncomfortable, at least where the back of the knee is concerned… and possibly also for shorter people, whose legs might not quite reach the floor.

You can steal this look with Scrabble tile pillows from Etsy seller Pillow Happy!

I usually go in for nice hotels, unless I’m traveling by myself in a foreign country, in which case I usually like to check out the cheapest option. Usually that’s a hostel calling itself a hotel, and sometimes there’s a pool. Here in the States, my preference is for accommodations in which I don’t have to worry about touching the bedspread for fear of catching a venereal disease. (Seriously, don’t touch hotel bedspreads any more than you have to.)

Now the Madonna Inn on the Central Coast of California… does it fit my criteria? Well the thing is that I can’t figure out if it’s a nice hotel trying to look like a cheesy hotel from the 60s or an actual cheesy hotel from the 60s trying to market itself as a retro kitschy nice hotel!

JUST HEAVEN: “This celestial room is embraced by golden cherubs and kissed in shades of blue to create a little heaven here on earth. An enchanting staircase winds upward into a private viewing tower above the king bed…where gentle rays of sunlight filter through multi-colored glass during the day and soft touches of moonlight linger at night. Graceful French-style furnishings fashion an affectionate ambiance in this heavenly creation for two.”

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Are furniture designers artists? Is cabinetmaking an art form in an of itself? Jake Cress seems to think so with his whimsical furniture pieces that poke fun at traditional chairs and tables. His creations are made one at a time, very carefully, by one dusty old guy (that’d be Jake Cress) who works by himself in an ancient log cabin.

According to an article in the Roanoke Times, Jake Cress “was inspired to do his funny furniture after being embarrassed by telling a curator in Georgetown that a woman had left her gloves on a table. The gloves were a part of the sculpture, Cress learned.” Whoops!

Of course, Cress’ funny furniture isn’t for those on a budget… and his traditional pieces and refinished antiques don’t come cheaply, either. A box will run you between $100 and $2,400. I’m not saying that his chests and tables and cabinets aren’t worth the lucre — far from it. Rather, in my set, these are the sorts of things we admire from afar instead of buying.

But if you’re flush, the front page of Cress’ web site does say that everything you see is for sale. Then again, it also says that the cabinetmaker will turn into a termite at midnight, so who knows.

And then there’s this:

AAAAGH! For real, someone needs to kill this mouse murdering grandfather clock with fire.

Yesterday’s Tetris Tiles were so cool that I started looking for other Tetris-themed stuff, like Tetris furniture. Inspired by the classic game, artists Diego Silverio and Helder Filipov created modular stacking furniture pieces that can be used together in different ways.

What’s odd is that in my search I found a company called IndoAntique selling what it calls Tetris furniture, but it appears their entire line consists of the T-shaped blocks. Not quite the real thing, is it?

Furniture designer and artist Mario Philippona has a thing for the female form. A serious thing. You might just say he’s a tad obsessed with the ladyparts most people describe as private. Indeed so obsessed that he uses the colors and textures of various types of hard woods to emphasize the, er, natural curves found on most women. In his own words:

“The shape of a woman, her organic architecture, combined with my passion for wood inspired me to sculpt these sexy designs.”

Righteo. This is me trying very hard not to make the obvious ‘wood’ jokes. Ahem. As you might imagine, Philippona’s cupboards, tables, and wardrobes are not the sort of furniture you’ll normally see in the homes of friends or colleagues for obvious reasons. Now let’s have a look!

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Small spaces can be a pain to furnish, as so much furniture is made for the average house and not the average city dweller’s apartment. I can remember trying to cram a full size bed, a closet, a dresser, and a desk into the one-room apartment I occupied just out of college. There were no built in storage fixtures, so the closet and the dresser were non-negotiable. As I was working part-time from home, the desk was also necessary. Everything that didn’t fit into those pieces of furniture either lived on top (as was the case with the television) or under something else. It worked, but wasn’t at all nice to look at.

Tumidei in Italy could have saved me some organizational headaches — though not money — with their unique space-saving solutions for tiny bedrooms and apartments.

The company creates clean and modern furniture set ups that incorporate most or all of the furnishings one needs into a single unified whole, and the pieces can be fitted together in numerous ways, meaning you can customize your order to fit precisely into the space you have available. All in all, it’s an elegant solution to a problem many people face… if not a solution that’s exactly easy to implement.