I’ve often commented on how strange my house is – mostly because someone in the past did a lot of shoddy DIY – but it’s not strange at all compared to these strange buildings:

Erwin Wurm’s House Attack in Vienna, Austria – located at the Museum Moderner Kunst

The Basket Building in Ohio – which houses the corporate offices of The Longaberger Company

Cubic Houses in Rotterdam, Netherlands – designed by Piet Blom in 1984

Torre Galatea in Figueres, Spain – an annex of the Salvador Dalí Theater/Museum

The Kansas City Public Library in Missouri – the permanent installation conceals the library’s car park

Very cool! My favorite is House Attack, mostly because I like the idea of my little house deciding to go up against a great big building!

Can we just admit that most glider rockers are unbearably hokey? Nursery furniture has come so far in terms of design – right now I’m loving the Nurseryworks American Collection and the shop fawn&forest – that it seems a shame to insert a glider rocker that looks like something grandma bought way back in the day. And not your hip grandma, either! The good news is that things are changing, and glider rockers are starting to catch up to cribs and dressers and mobiles.

Here are two faves: the Empire Rocker from Nurseryworks and the Monte Luca Glider. What I like best about them is that they’ll look amazing somewhere in your house when the baby isn’t a baby anymore, which I think should be the goal of almost all nursery furniture.

For an easy update, you can’t beat wainscoting (especially the fakey stuff that doesn’t need much other than cutting down to size, though of course it doesn’t look as sharp as the real deal). But what is wainscoting, exactly? And how do you say it? According to Webster’s, the proper pronunciation is not waynescahtting but rather waynescoating – though either is acceptable in a pinch. As to what it is, wainscoting is paneling typically applied to the lower three feet of a wall below a chair rail and above the baseboard molding, though it can be much taller. According to Wikipedia, the original purpose of wainscoting was to cover the lower part of walls which, in houses constructed with poor or nonexistent damp-proof courses, are often affected by rising dampness. Nowadays, it’s purely decorative.

Here’s what it looks like:

Raised panel wainscoting (via)

Flat panel wainscoting (via)

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My house is starting to look a little bit like Roma Interiors as photographed by Carlo Gianferro, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. His portrait series captures the inner lives of these super interesting people (who I’d occasionally see when I lived in Germany but never actually interacted with) by focusing on their homes… and what homes they are! Admittedly, some of them are a little busy for me, with too much “antique furniture, tapestries, paintings, religious images, china, staircases and mirrors” for my tastes, but you have to love the colors. That’s what I meant, of course, when I mentioned my own home. No tapestries there.

You can see more images from Gianferro’s portrait series at his web site, but I wanted to take a moment to share these because I am just in awe of the colors in these homes (and you have to see the one living room that contains very little furniture, but has an absolutely amazing hardwood floor).

How cool are those kitchens? Or the curving pink living room wall with the surprising insets of… stone? Bricks? And while I’m not a huge fan of tiger murals, I’m in awe of the frame paneling color choices! I’m not sure if it’s just the photo, but it looks like the ceiling yellow is lighter than the wall yellow, yum.

Sometimes a house has just the right amount of doors and windows and eaves and things to fill up all the space one needs to fill to please the eye. And sometimes a house doesn’t – ours, for example, has a big dead zone between a first-floor bedroom window and the front door. There’s just nothing… nothing but boring blank siding. Until recently, we filled the space with a Penn Dutch hex – one indicating friendship, supposedly – but it’s begun to look a bit worn around the edges in recent months. But what to put in its place? Hanging plants? We can’t afford to put in another window there or push out the front door at this time. At some point, signs came to mind. Specifically, signs that advertise who lives in the house to which they’re affixed.

The thing is, though, I eventually nixed the idea. While it’s easy enough to find out who lives in my house – search for the address online or have a peek in the mailbox – do I really want to advertise that the so-and-so lives here and, oh yeah, we got married in such-and-such a year? Not to mention the fact that it feels a little hokey-boasty to me. What do you think? When you see a sign that says something like “The Johnsons – Established 1994″ or whatever, how does that strike you?

Love ‘em? Find em here: 1, 2, 3

My husband said an interesting thing to me the other day. He said “Since the baby was born, I feel like we’re really living in the living room.” I knew exactly what he meant – prior to, say, the baby becoming mobile, our living room was a pretty room that didn’t have much going on. Our TV and all our books are downstairs in what you might call the family room, my workspace was in my home office, and the kitchen is so the hub of our house. We just didn’t spend much time in the living room unless we had people over who wanted to sit instead of hovering in the kitchen.

But once the baby was born and started getting into everything, it seemed like the living room was the easiest one to childproof because she still didn’t have her own room and my office was full of things like crafting supplies while the so-called family room contained my husband’s desk. So the living room became play central. We switched out the carpet for play mats, put a Little People’s Farm on the game trunk, and if you can imagine it, inflated a ball pit, right there in the middle of everything. Now we spend a lot of time in the living room (though the baby’s room is almost finished and certain things like play mats will be moving in there).

So how can you start living in your living room without having a baby and filling your living room with toy cars and build blocks and dollies? Think about how you’d like to use your living room – would you like a reading room? A place to hang with your kids? A media room? Then decide what you can put in your living room to make that happen, like floor-to-ceiling book shelves, play mats, a huge TV, or whatever. Don’t put a lot of other stuff in there that won’t fulfill those objectives. That will help you avoid the kind of clutter that will make the room feel uninviting. Make sure the lighting supports whatever it is you want to do in your living room.

And then spend time in your living room! Instead of sitting down at a kitchen chair to flip through that magazine, stretch out on the couch. If you’re writing a letter, sit down at that writing desk that usually does nothing but collect dust. In fact, keep your stationery, stamps, and envelopes in said desk. Make an effort to live in your living room until it becomes a habit, and just like that, you’ll have a whole new room in which to while away the hours.

You may not remember the name Mike Oehler, but if you around in the 70s or 80s you may have seen one of the houses he inspired. It was Oehler who built what is considered to be the first “underground house” in the U.S., and he sparked an interest in the concept of eco housing. Hi book, The $50 and Up Underground House Book sold almost 100,000 copies – not too shabby!

The structure in this – which I’ll say right now is very, very bad – video is the house Oehler wrote about in The $50 and Up Underground House Book, and while the property is home to six underground houses in total, this one was his primary residence for more than three decades. Oehler admits that using the word ‘underground’ in his book’s title was a mistake, and since the book was written, people have taken to calling this type of building is now known as “Earth sheltering.”

The benefits of earth sheltering are numerous. They include: taking advantage of the earth as a thermal mass, offering extra protection from the natural elements, energy savings, providing substantial privacy, efficient use of land in urban settings, shelters have low maintenance requirements, and earth sheltering commonly takes advantage of passive solar building design.

Have an old mantel? Know where you can get one for like $20? Grab it! Because you can make a truly unique and fun headboard with it. All you need is some paint, some way to mount your mantelpiece headboard, and that’s about it, according to Leah Moss. For those who love the idea, here’s some inspiration!

via Maison Reve

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Isn’t word association bizarre? I just found a gorgeous chair in the weirdest way possible, and so I want to take you on a short and strange journey through my thought processes. First, you have me remembering me when I shared a basement apartment with a good friend who was kind of nuts – in a fun way, I should add. For a while, he had a thing for saying “What is that, velvet?” in the reediest faux-Jewishy New York accent. I don’t know that anyone in my social circle knew where it came from. Next you have me deciding, on a random Thursday, to Google it, at which time I found out it’s a quote from Coming to America. At roughly the same time, in my search for the quote’s origins, I also found this:

It’s a reproduction of the classic french chair, flocked in blue, pink, purple, red, orange, or green and then upholstered in matching silk. No, it’s not velvet, but it is velvety and possibly less prone to scratches and dings as a result. English Eccentrics makes them to order, so they’re by no means cheap, but they are a lot of fun to look at and I certainly enjoyed finding my way to them!

…it’s sushi time, obviously!

(Do you wish it was sushi time at your house? It can be! Clock 1 and clock 2 can be yours, for cheap.)