department of the interior: home decor

hm my rug budget is around $200

don't think everything in that room adds up to $3400, even w/ POWERBOOK included

er sorry MACBOOK PRO

hey what happened to suggest ban?!?!

Don't mind I DIED, he's obsessed with looking at fewer things. I think his apartment has one chair, one rug, and some cardboard boxes.

oh yeah abc carpet is the type of site i can only depress myself looking at but its often p easy to rip off stuff you find on really high end blogs/catalogs and im always just as happy with the stuff i find at the flea market and not having credit card debt

Two of these Ikea rugs fill my living room...

http://images1.americanlisted.com/nlarge/rug_ikea_beige_checkers_40_glen_rock_8617756.jpg

....arranged in an L shape, not side by side - like my living room itself.

http://fuckyournoguchicoffeetable.tumblr.com/
lol tho tbh i like a lot of stuff i see there

God every single photo on that thing is from Apartment Therapy it seems like. They all look familiar....

haha I 100% agree with 'Fuck your Keep Calm and Carry On poster' and 'Fuck your thing that says EAT in your kitchen' but a lot of the rest I'm a little jealous of. Except a book stack because fuck getting a book out of that thing.

haha yeah i laughed at those too
and i don't understand book stacks! is there a device to keep them stable? and so that you can take books from the middle of them? or is it truly a crazy stack of books??
i also only half understand colour-coordinated bookshelves - my initial reaction is 'how can you find anything if you don't coordinate your books by theme??' but i realize that some people really do remember the colour of a book, i mean, i sometimes do. but still, it doesn't seem very efficient. pretty though.

but yeah there are many things in those pictures that i covet

I might be a teeny bit jealous of the card catalog, and my grandpa once built a platform bench that I wish I had, but everything else can bite me. Books arranged by color or wrapped in brown paper jackets or shelved with the spines to the back all send me over the edge of my temper almost immediately.

i really like the nelson platform bench as coffee table, for instance
and many of the couches are simple and awesome

The secret of the book-stack.

i'm a fan of frame clusters, if the pictures are good
i can get behind luggage stacks, in a way

xp

what is the secret??

ohhh

haha our apt is v apt therapy tbrr

i even have 4 of those walnut eames chairs that i bought from someone on craigslist

(haha my ilx theme is one where the underline in the link doesn't show, so i don't always know things are links)

dissing MCM / apartmenttherapy is pretty weak IMO, up there w/ "fuck your skinny jeans! fuck your vans authentics! fuck your carabiner w/ keys on it!"

i mean talk about easy targets

I read AT every single day, don't think I don't.

And designsponge.com and Door 16 or whatever that one is called, and the Victorian renovation in SF blog and some others.

i don't read that tumblr as a full-on dis though

apartment therapy always reminds of when in contemp novels (male, always male) authors describe a certain kind of home as containing 'the artful but disposable furniture, carefully chosen, that also sat in all the other now empty apartments' or w/e but not in a bad way, like those sentences make me mad and i can think of at least five novels last year that did that because it totally mistakes how nice this stuff is, and that its not really all that disposable or mechanical idk im just rambling in defense of my wall of midcentury oil paintings and my danish modern coffee table and my minimalist bensen bed frame

I like fuckyournoguchicoffeetable because they seem to, at least so far, have a pretty good sensibility for things that have gone from fresh to cliche. The issue with a lot of home design blogs is that they tend to turn spaces into a collection of trends rather than the reflection of a personality - they've been good for design, but bad for good design.

well i must admit i recently stopped reading apartment therapy because it does get really really samey but come on it doesn't take a genius to point out when somethings overexposed! (the overexposure kind of does it for you, no?)

and yeah, i agree with fuck your

-- wall clusters x 1000
-- ornamental vintage whatever (typewriters, card catalogs, taxidermy)
-- graphic design-y posters
-- thing that says eat in kitchen

the barcelona chair / egg chair disses are weird though - those are amazing pieces of furniture! who wouldn't want one?

I hate the Barcelona chair

fuckyournoguchicoffeetable

!

why would anyone put a collection of empty birdcages in their apartment? why ONE?

barcelona chair looks like a mousetrap imo, maybe someone should add that functionality to it

http://www.core77.com/reactor/images/designersblock/barcelona_spikes.jpg

only a mercedes and not a maybach? ... i don't know, my friend had a cream one with a matching ottoman, it was amazing to fall asleep on.

i was at a movie theater the other day that had fake ones in the lobby.

The only time I've seen a Barcelona chair that looked really comfortable was in someone's house where the leather was really old and cracked and the edges were worn. It seemed lived in! Normally it's so unapproachable. But maybe I'm just traumatized from years of designing law firms.

that worn-in type is the best barcelona chair, but we can only strive to make it such

what's really ostentatious is the barcelona "couch"

laurel!

thanks for the advice - i didn't really follow your advice EXCEPT in spirit ...

i moved one danish armchair and bentwood magazine stand / side table thingy so that they are facing the wall unit directly, and at a right angle to the window. i moved the rocker so that it is also at a right angle to the window - now the rocker and near armchair are facing each other. i also smashed the plant deep into the corner and spaced out the placement of the speakers and window chair.

i wish i had somewhere else to put the tree and turtle tank, but that's one of the only windows in the house that gets direct sunlight - the south and east facing windows all miss out on morning sunshine because there are tall trees shading the backyard AND the house is on a graded lot so the (southeastern) backyard is higher than the front yard.

if i could move the turtle tank and the plant i would follow your advice to the letter, except the armchairs would be facing the wall unit.

i suppose i could put the turtle stand in the window (and the stereo on the facing wall) but that means getting a new bookshelf for art books (can't be sitting in the sun) and probably also would mean cleaning out the turtle tank twice a week due to the algal bloom it would probably create to have *that much* sunlight.

I'm glad you're happy with the room! I hope it's a little more restful now but still fulfills its social fxn.

the point that got lost in that rambly post is that i am definitely transitioning from chairs and side tables spaced radially around the coffee table to chairs and side tables arranged perpendicular or parallel to the walls and facing towards or away from the wall unit.

without evening moving the furniture much but just re-orienting it so that it's more gridlike has already opened up a ton of space and avenues for movement into and out of that cramped corner.

it's a bummer because i like that danish coffee table but i guess the next step would be to switch that out for a skinny rectangular coffee table. maybe a fuckyourgeorgenelsonslatbench?

I wouldn't put any coffee table in there tbh. I don't think there's room. That's what I meant by using little side tables or stools or piles of books or etc to put next to chairs instead. I figure in theory all you need is a place to put your drink/cup of tea, that's what the side table is for. Coffee tables are mostly decorative and/or footrests as far as I can tell, because they're a bitch to set anything on when you're actually seated in a chair or couch.

i finally got some shades for the naked bulbs hanging down from the ceiling and after taking in a strong scent of burning plastic while making dinner realized that i was supposed to actually attach the shades to the fixture instead of just letting them rest on the bulb

I'm kind of anti-coffee table tbh, as a tight skirt-wearer and cocktail-drinker. They're murder to reach down to/over every time you want to take a sip. Plus they have to be stepped over or around by everyone who sits down or gets up from the couch/seating area.

i think you're making sense re: the coffee table. friends sitting in the rocker are already using the wall unit as a wet bar, more or less.

hey there is a famous midcentury swivel chair that is very very simple and made in two pieces of bent wood. it does not look fancy or design-y but just like a very simple, straightforward task chair. anybody know what i'm talking about?

it is like if you put a herman miller eames bent plywood dining top onto a swag leg swivel / rolling base, but the seat and backrest parts are smaller and less flamboyant than the eames shapes, sort of a transitional thing from 30s industrial to 50s midcentury, looks like something a WWII architect might sit on

the Nelson chair maybe?
http://www.homeofficesolutions.com/common/images/products/main/herman_miller/nelson_swag_leg_chair/herman_miller_nelson_swag_leg_chair.jpg

no it's not that crazy. it doesn't have armrests. it has a simple rectangular backrest (wider than tall) and a simple rectangular seat, both of which are mildly rounded-off and subtly bent.

i said swag leg but i realize that's wrong now - it isn't angled the way a swag leg is.

hmm sounds kind of like a generic Enco-style factory stool?

http://www.use-enco.com/ProductImages/0171770-11.jpg

yeah i think that's the right brand, actually. i kept wanting to say an ARCO chair but i knew i was thinking of the arco lamp.

the difference between what i was looking at buying and that one:

1) legs are more "modern" looking, meaning they don't bend down to a perpendicular foot, they just stick radially out and terminate in legs

2) the metal was some sort of fancy black anodized stuff, like what they use for the legs of nelson slat benches

3) the seat was flatter, no "bump" in it

4) the back and seat are closer to the same size

terminate in WHEELS, not legs

http://vintageindustrial.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/18.jpg

^^ very very similar to this, except with wheels and no "gooseneck" bump on the pipe to the backrest

also, made in the USA based on a classic design and available for under $200, often paired w/ heywood wakefield TV tables as a tiny desk/chair set

mega LOLs at I DIED's floor plan suggestion. typical bloody architect.

(my suggestion would be very close to same)