Furniture, like the best things in life, comes in a variety of flavors. But normally, once you’ve committed, you’re living with the piece for the long haul, or at least until you’ve used it enough to justify whatever you’ve spent.
Not so with the Darwin chair by Stefan Sagmeister, presented at Design Miami/Basel a few weeks ago. The chair features 200 uniquely patterned sheets that can be torn off as they wear.
A dugout home, a la Laura Ingalls Wilder
When I was a kid, my dad read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books to me. I loved imagining life as a settler, and I was fascinated by the idea that for part of her life Laura lived in a house that they carved out of the ground. It seemed amazing to think that your walls, floor, and ceiling might all be made of dirt. As I was growing up in a very clean house I simply couldn’t imagine my mother letting the walls be made of dirt.
The Cave Home of Curt and Deborah Sleeper
In a recent slide show on extreme home make-overs, The New York Times looked at several innovative approaches to making existing spaces into homes. Laura’s dirt house came to mind when I saw Curt and Deborah Sleeper’s Sandstone Cave Home in Festus, MO.
The Sleepers had been living in cramped quarters with their two children when an eBay property caught their eye. The three acres of land also featured an empty sandstone cave that was once a quarry. In the days of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a dugout home not only kept the family from all the elements, the earth that surround the home acted as a thermal layer for the home, keeping the space warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. The Sleepers realized their new land featured a cave that had the same benefits and with 15,000 feet of space, they decided to build into the cave.
Chris Gardner lives and makes things (music, art, furniture, dinner, messes) in Columbus, Ohio. He contributes to the home-design community Curbly, and also runs ManMade, a DIY and handmade site for the postmodern male.
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Garth Johnson and Claire Joyce are a pair of artists who are renovating and decorating their first home, a 1905 Victorian in Eureka, California. They would like to share the joys and frustrations of home-ownerhsip, and to hear about the same from you. See Claire's art here, and get more of Garth on his blog, Extreme Craft. Claire and Garth's home-owning adventures to date are collected at Keeping Up With the Johnsons, also on ReadyMade.
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Sonia Zjawinski is the co-founder of the pet site Pawesome. She's been obsessed with animals ever since she could grab hold of her parents' first cat, Pimpek. When she's not wrangling cats or training dogs she's writing for Unpluggd, Wired, the New York Times, and ReadyMade.
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Megan Jeyifo is a twenty-something married who loves black coffee, chaotic thrift stores, picking up new crafts and putting them down after 25% mastery has occurred, repurposing castoffs, the back porch, her dog, the Midwest and letters on real pages. She writes the blog Urban Casita and lives in the great city of Chicago.
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