WHEW. I am totally exhausted. Evan and I have been going back and forth between our house and the new little apartment all week, and it’s wearing me out fast. I think this is what happens when you take time off from home renovations for a while—you lose your swing.
We started with the kitchen yesterday (my incredibly patient and determined mother came along and spent the day cleaning the filthy kitchen cabinets inside and out—and then spent an hour stuck in traffic with us en route to IKEA), and I’m hoping we’ll wrap things up tomorrow. Today we got a first coat of paint on the walls, new knobs on the cabinets, and assembled a butcherblock that we’ll be using for extra counter space and storage.
Do you think it’s possible for us to finish renovating and decorating the apartment in six days? I actually think it might be, despite the fact that we seem to be on the six(ty)-year plan when it comes to our house.
p.s. IKEA TO THE RESCUE, OMG. What do those of you who live in places without IKEA do when you need something beautiful and cheap and you don’t want to thrift for it? I have no idea.
We did it! Door Sixteen is officially one of the six finalists in The Homies 2009! Between now and January 6th, you can cast your vote for ONE nominee in the Home Design category.
I must say, Door Sixteen is in some fine company with this nomination. Pam of Retro Renovation, Nicole at Making it Lovely, Holly from Decor8, Sherry and John at Young House Love, and all of the ladies from Remodelista are some of the hardest working bloggers in the field, and many of these blogs are among my favorite daily reads. No matter who wins, it will be a well-deserved honor!
It’s not very cute right now, but it will be.
I feel a little bit like Evan and I are getting ready to go away to college. There are piles of pillows and blankets, dishes and kitchen gadgets in a corner of our dining room, just waiting to be loaded into the car and transported into the city.
It’s a funny thing, suddenly buying metal steamer baskets and ladles and garlic presses and measuring cups at this stage in my life. (Again.) It’s been 17 years since I left for college for real, and 15 years since I moved into my first apartment. I never expected to shop for these little things a second time. You forget how much you need.
It’s fun. Overwhelming at times, but fun.
Just a quick reminder that if you would like to see Door Sixteen in the running for The Homies 2009 and haven’t yet added it to your list of favorite Home Design blogs, you can do so here!
The nomination process will end tomorrow (12/28) at 5:00pm EST.
p.s. You can see my favorites here.
A friend of mine asked me recently if I think that black walls are overdone at this point, having been featured in every décor magazine and interiors blog around the world for several years now. My answer was a resounding NO: I love a good black wall (I wrote about them a while back, too) and I’m not afraid to say it!
This is the black wall in my office. That’s not paint, of course, it’s Fir Tree wallpaper from Ferm Living.
From Scandinavian Style.
Photo by DeanStreet. I love how the deep gray Mañana Lamp blends into the wall color.
At the Moormann Berge hotel in Germany (via Remodelista). PERFECT. Now, will someone please take the time to make that branch chandelier for me?
Black kitchen and bath at Harts Lane.
From LivingEtc. I wish I were brave enough to have an acid-green door in my life. Maybe in the apartment. Hmmm.
From LivingEtc. Will I ever get over the wonder that is Jenna Lyons’ house? No, I won’t.
L: Interior architecture and design by Philippe Harden; R: Home of Laura Aviva (via Design*Sponge).
Photo by Aaron Able at Apartment Therapy. Black paneling at Studio Aalto, Alvar Aalto’s design office in Helsinki.
L: Source unknown (sorry!); R: From Sköna Hem.
From LivingEtc.
L: Interior by Rose Uniacke, photo by Andreas von Einsiedel (via Remodelista); R: Photo by Keller & Keller. That’s actually a tall cabinet painted black on the left, but it reads as a full wall.
L: Ruthie Sommers’ kitchen, from Domino magazine; R: Interior by Ilse Crawford.
I haven’t been doing a lot of scavenging lately, but with a second home in the works, I’ve started keeping my eyes open a little wider again. Yesterday I found this pretty piece of pottery at the the Goodwill for $2.99! I love the rich, deep blue of the cross pattern and the all of the crazing in the glaze.
I get asked about this a lot, but I don’t really have any secret tips for good scavenging—it’s just luck of the draw. I check Craigslist regularly (I have a list of keywords that I search for), and every now and then I buy something on eBay, but I don’t do a lot of going to antique or thrift shops. I’m too lazy! I do wholeheartedly recommend the DWR Annex in Secaucus (there are also Annex locations in Palm Springs and Cleveland, which I assume are similar), however, but not during the “sales”. You’ll get a better deal just going there on a regular day. It’s not as busy, there’s more stock, and the salespeople have more time to negotiate on prices.
And the Goodwill! I do love the Goodwill, even though 99% of what’s there is garbage. It’s that remaining 1% that gets me excited.
Ben Shahn, “Supermarket” (1957)
Herbert Matter, Arts & Architecture (January 1945)
Ole Flensted, “Futura” mobile (1970)
Charles and Ray Eames, “Hang-It-All” (1953)
Unknown designer, from the “Helvetica” exhibit at MOMA
George Nelson ball clocks (1947)
Elisabeth Dunker, “Dot play” (2008)
Ray Eames, “Dot” pattern fabric design (1947)
It’s the time of year again! Apartment Therapy has opened up nominations for The Homies 2009, and the entire process has improved by leaps and bounds since last year. You can now now create lists of all of your favorite blogs in multiple categories (Home Design, Home Tech, Kids at Home, Green Home, and Home Cooking), and see how they stack up against each other by number of nominations. You can nominate as many blogs as you’d like in any category.
If you’d like to nominate Door Sixteen in the Home Design category, you can do so here!
p.s. Here’s my list of favorites (so far), if you’re curious.
I’ve been storing up a big secret for a few weeks now, and it’s finally time to let the cat out of the bag: Evan and I have decided to rent a small (400 square feet) studio apartment in Manhattan!
No, we’re not selling our house, and no, we’re not moving away from Newburgh. We’re just giving ourselves another option throughout the course of the week. Evan and I both spend a lot of time in the city, and having a little place there will allow us to do things like go to museums or concerts or dinners with friends without having to think about taking a long train ride home afterward. (Bruno and Fritz will always be in tow, of course.)
Having a pied-à-terre in Manhattan is most definitely a luxury (though our apartment in decidedly no-frills), but as with the ongoing renovation of our house (work is currently on hiatus until February, by the way—we needed a break!), we’ll be doing everything on a supertight budget and with a lot of careful planning. And, of course, I’ll be blogging about all of it here!
I’m excited to be taking a new direction with Door Sixteen. Renovating and decorating a rental is a very different kind of undertaking than working on a house that you own—not to mention the challenge of making life work inside of much smaller place, and in one room to boot!
I hope you’ll follow along in this new space. Sunday the 27th will mark Day One of cleaning, painting, and planning. I can’t wait…
There’s something I really love about white bricks. It’s a contrast of texture and roughness with uniformity and a kind of secrecy—almost like hidden treasure.
This is at the BDDW in Soho. A few years ago, Apartment Therapy did an article on how to (maybe) get your brick walls to look like theirs, but apparently it’s a bit of a secret recipe.
Great backsplash, right? From Alvhem, a Swedish real estate site.
Interior by UXUS Design (via Design Crisis).
In case the bar cart wasn’t a tip-off, this is at Studio Aalto, Alvar Aalto’s design office in Helsinki. There’s a great tour of the entire office at Apartment Therapy.
Is there any doubt that this is going to be the most amazing kitchen ever? It belongs to Heather and Fernando over at Get to Fixin’, it’s still in progress, and I plan to rip it off as much as I can when it comes time to overhaul my own kitchen (which has nearly the exact same layout, right down to the hearth).
Photo by Hotze Eisma; Photo by Lisa Cohen.
I’m pretty much in love with everything about Andreas’ Greektown loft. Sigh.
From Inspace Locations; Photo by Hotze Eisma. (Yes, I know it’s black! I’m just making sure you’re paying attention.)
Today I’m over at the beautiful Swedish blog DosFamily with a Christmas present for you all! What’s behind the number 16? Click to find out!
When we finished renovating our downstairs bathroom back in April, I did a “reveal” over at Decor8 detailing all of the real-life costs associated with this kind of project. Unfortunately, there was subsequently a data loss at Decor8, and Holly lost all of the comments (including the answers to a lot of questions people had about the renovation). There are also some errors in the price breakdown, so I figured I might as well post the photos, interview, and correct information here for the sake of keeping it entire project archived in one place.
What inspired the design of this room?/How did you decide upon the colors & overall style?
The architecture of my house is the base inspiration for everything I do within it. As a Modernist living in a Victorian-era house, I try to be very respectful of its original structure and character while still moving forward and not trying to create a faux-Victorian look. This attitude toward renovation (particularly when it comes to kitchens and bathrooms) is quite prevalent in Scandinavia, but in this country there is a still a tendency to try to make newly renovated spaces look “old”, and unfortunately the result is usually more of a pastiche than anything.
That said, I have tried very hard with both of my bathroom renovations to not make them look too “new”, either! The last thing I want anywhere in my house is for someone to open a door and immediately know that a particular room was recently renovated. My house is full of quirks and imperfections, and I have deliberately carried them into this space. This bathroom was added to the house sometime in the 1930s or ’40s (the space it’s in was originally a pass-through pantry connecting the entry hall to the kitchen at the back of the house), and I elected to keep the cast iron corner tub that was installed at that time. The old toilet was very cute, but it was terribly inefficient—rather than replace it with a “faux-old” toilet, though, I prefer the honesty of a very contemporary-looking one-piece.
But back to the question, you could say that every design decision I make in my house is inspired by Modernism, Industrialism, honesty of materials, and contrasts between old and new.
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If you were to ask me, “What is the one item you would like to own for your home that you do not already have?”, the very first thing that would come to mind without a moment’s hesitation would be Pia Wallén’s Crux Blanket.
Prohibitively expensive (5,500 SEK is about $770 US) but ridiculously beautiful, it has become an object of desire from afar for me. I regularly check the website to see what colors are in stock, and just to make sure the price hasn’t miraculously dropped by 75%. I’ve been obsessing over it for years. I even used it as a template for my medicine cabinet!
Let’s fantasize together, shall we?
This photo marks the first place I ever spotted the Crux Blanket—in the bedroom of Michael Asplund, co-founder of the Swedish company Asplund. A tour of his home is featured in the wonderfully inspiring book Scandinavian Homes.
Photo by Andrew Wood
What makes Frédéric Méchiche’s loft even more perfect? That’s right, a Pia Wallén Crux Blanket.
L: From Elle Decor UK; R: From Marie Claire Maison
See? Orla Kiely has a Pia Wallén Crux Blanket in her house, too.
L: Photo by Roland Bello; R: From Grazia Living
R: From Hus & Hem
L: From Hus & Hem; R: At Skandium (photo by Chris Stubbs)
What, you don’t see it?
From Skona Hem
L: From Inside Out; R: Photo by Pia Ulin
From Scandinavian Style
You want one now too, don’t you? Start saving! (And keep it away from pesky Chihuahuas that like to chew holes in things.)
