Today it was nice to be reminded of the source of one of my favourite colours.
Archives for category: garden
The more a hotel room feels like a really chic apartment the more I like it.
I love what pure white can do for an 80′s interior.
A design objective often touted in architecture, the link between inside and outside space. This rebuilt house in rural Switzerland actually gets there, not by big openings alone but through a common palette of colours and materials.
Unlike any house and land deal you’re likely to see round these parts… Designed for the architect’s brother, whatever you might think of the red corrugated form reminiscent of a child’s drawing, it’s hard to go past the 125,000 euros build cost. Especially once you get a look inside…
I caught myself watching one of those lifestyle outdoor transformation shows last night. It was a local production, and while admirable for its championing of landscaping for a dry climate, I couldn’t help wishing the team had just taken a step back and looked at how those inventors of the urban condition, the Romans, are still doing their inner city courtyards today. They might make good television, but slatted timber cabanas and funky retro-floral print wallpaper just aren’t quite the answer our gardens are looking for.
In Modena, art dealer Emilio Mazzoli and architect Fabio Bortolani have combined talents to design an apartment where the line between interior design and art all but disappears. Destined to be the city pad for guests of Mazzioli’s nearby gallery, the apartment retains a warmth and intimacy not always possible when living spaces play host to serious art.
The ultimate Italian property fantasy for many of us pretty well begins and ends here: a recycled medieval oasis, complete with secret garden, Roman wall, and just a stone’s throw from the borderline pandemonium of Stazione Termini and Santa Maria Maggiore… These days more dream than temptation perhaps?
Still we can all take heart. The house – product of the unlikely union of a disused bakery and former dairy – is not on the market. Instead its odd, beautiful rooms are home to the (much envied) Milan-born collector, and PR consultant to the architectural profession, Paola Maugini.
Four long years in the making, Vegetal designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and produced by Vitra is a chair with a very long tail… In fact, as the story goes, one that leads all the way back to the gardens of the 19th century, to a time when young plants were painstakingly trained to grow in the form of chairs… But this just released work by the French duo is much more ode than parody. With Vegetal it was important for the Bouroullecs and Vitra to create not just an evocative visual rendition of a chair inspired by plants but also to replicate their natural growth patterns within the very process of mass manufacture. (Suddenly the four year time line starts to feel reasonable.)
No doubt destined to be a Vitra centre piece in Milan in April, the intrinsic goodness of Vegetal, I think, makes it a very suitable new chair for such troubled times as ours…
