The photo shows one of her half-done billboard paintings on the kitchen table, in a living space that is clearly in action, work and living woven together. Even though Zittel could try discipline herself to work in her studio – a shipping container fifty feet from the house – she doesn’t. She works where it feels best, and things happens organically…
“When I was twenty and studying art in undergrad, I house sat for my parents one summer and built my entire senior show in their kitchen. I remember the feeling or horror one day when cutting out a shape with the jigsaw and accidentally making a slice into the tabletop that my mother had hand stained when I was an infant. Three decades later and I’m still making most of my work in the kitchen…”
We wonder how many BIG THINGS in the world were figured out at the kitchen table?
(In the background, you can also see the cardboard shelving we were so taken with…stuff beginning to be stored in it.)
A couple of weeks ago, we started posting about Lydia Wills’ former studio apartment in New York City; the 600-square-foot space had so much going on, we had to make it a series…
Here’s her renovated kitchen which, when she moved in, was the most generic of New York City apartment galley kitchens (there’s a gratifying “before” after the jump). A few years ago she ripped it out and rethought the original space. The question: How to create a pleasurable, efficient kitchen without moving any walls or spending a fortune?… read more…
We are always amazed by how we’ll have an idea and start thinking about it, trying to figure it out, and then start to stumble on echoes and iterations of it. We’ve been thinking about modular shelving that looks good and sleek and is sturdy but do-able, not too expensive…Why not stack boxes in various ways, we wondered, why not CLIP them together? In the course of a week, we came across some interesting versions of the idea, from chic http://muuto.com/##mce_temp_url#‘s architect-designed – and expensive – shelving to shelving units made with clipped-together crates, and even cardboard boxes (see pt 2). What figure we can find the box pretty easy to find or make; what we want is the clip so we do this our own way, on-the-cheap.
The problem with this great idea is that we haven’t been able to find affordable clips – or any that would work on 1/2 or 3/4-inch thick boards (two put together). So we’re calling on you to help us find them, by expertly or uniquely googling, or keeping eyes peeled in hardware stores or websites that might sell clips for a totally other use that would work here. We’re asking for HELP…
Twenty years ago or so, I designed a kitchen for a space I thought I’d be in forever. I had cabinets made in a Shaker style that I hoped could walk the line between classic and modern for a long time, and bought myself a restaurant stove. Ten years later, life changed, and I had to leave that space. Having designed the cabinets and seen them installed, I knew that they were basically boxes bolted to the wall. So I took them with me, and reconfigured them on-the-cheap for the smaller space I was moving into. The cabinets that could not fit on the kitchen wall became freestanding furniture. read more…
Pascal Anson sussed out kitchen cabinets and discovered that cabinet makers earn their serious money from the doors, which cost much more than the base cabinets. So he bought base cabinets from IKEA and then bought a mish-mash of doors that had been marked way down. Easy and cheap. There’s a caveat though:
“The rule with this kind of thing is…if you’re going to use a mix of doors, make sure it is a REAL mix and looks really really wrong, not just a little bit wrong.”
We love the idea of REALLY REALLY WRONG as design concept…when you push dissonance to cool…
We also love that Anson’s little video wakes your head up to the way kitchen cabinets work: read more…
Ten years after it was built, my kitchen still looked great EXCEPT for the counter tops. The speckled black-white-and-gray granite that seemed so right at the time looked dated, and its pattern was too busy to use as a surface for the food photography we did in my space. My friend Holton, who is an amazing artist, designer, and gifted improvisor said “Why don’t you make a top to fit over the one you have?…Make a form out of plywood that will fit over the granite, and cover it with a soft-ish metal that can wrap around the form…”
I remembered the old burnished zinc bars and cafe tables I’d seen in France, and thought that zinc’s soft luster would be make a beautiful surface to photograph food on. So I looked up ZINC FABRICATORS in the Yellow Pages, and found a guy in Brooklyn who would make me what I wanted. All I had to do was send him a plan… read more…
When Margot Wellington designed the kitchen of her house in East Hampton in 1984, she defied the usual notions of kitchen design. Instead, she set out to incorporate the elements she found essential from many years of serious cooking and entertaining. One of her most remarkable innovations was the design of an eleven-foot-long stainless steel counter with a large shallow sink built seamlessly into the center of it. The sink itself becomes a work surface, allowing her to use the whole eleven-foot span to do many jobs at once, from prepping vegetables on the left to preparing a turkey for roasting on the right. She designed the sink herself and then found someone to make it for her.
Here she describes the logic behind her design, and how she made her idea a reality:
My friends N and O constantly inspire me with their simple, brilliant solutions to the everyday, imbued with their very unique, very personal style. Here N uses a lemon to stopper her carafe of filtered water: perfect. (It would work equally well for iced tea or lemonaid.)
When I asked if I can blog what I see in their home, they said “Okay, but please don’t say who we are; we like our privacy.” It’s a deal! The idea stays the same whether you know who thought it up of not.
More anonymous brilliance to come over the next few weeks…
I started viewing coriander seed as Instant Flavor Enhancer one day when I was testing a recipe and had a lot of cracked coriander left over. I tasted it on whatever came to mind to discover its slightly lemony-orange peel-herbal flavor and bit of crackle is wonderful on all sorts of foods, sprinkled on before serving, like pepper. It provides the perfect little alt-note on everything from smoked salmon to rice pudding to a cracker spread with crunchy peanut butter). My all-time favorite is on crushed new potatoes with crème fraiche and chives. (See the list and recipe farther down)
I was snooping around the internet hoping to find a coriander photo when I stumbled on this image and the big idea behind it: read more…
Pamela Hovland alerted me to these cool jars that have chalkboard labels so you can just scribble the contents (or the date) with chalk. You can by them at Rockett St. George for 12.50 euros and have them shipped from the U.K. OR you can rig your own. Paint labels directly on jars using chalkboard paint by hand or with chalkboard spray paint (follow the directions and caveats here). Or make or buy press-on labels like these from an industrious Etsy seller who cuts them out of chalkboard vinyl (fine for jars with a flat surface).
The wonderfully-shaped Weck canning jars would be great with painted labels (though press-on labels would probably work on their gentle slope.
When I’m camping in a borrowed or rented house out of town, I love the challenge of cooking in the invariably rudimentary kitchen with whatever is there. It’s fun to devise solutions to small dilemmas: making roasting pans out of tin foil, or rolling pins out of wine bottles. I’ve made cheese souffles in cast-iron skillets, and used the same skillet to smoke trout using dried twigs from a nearby apple tree. These small challenges are somehow gratifying.
The one thing I always bring with me, though, is a good knife – NOT a set of chef’s knives bound in a leather roll – but a simple, inexpensive, picnic knife from France, the Opinel. read more…
Adam Kuban of Serious Eats’ Slice Blog has a compelling series about people who have built their own pizza ovens. His interview with Mark Wilkie, who created this beauty is in the backyard of his Brooklyn rental, comes complete with photos and drawings of the process. Wilkie found lots of practical resources at Forno Bravo, a California based pizza oven maker that offers free plans for building “Pompeii” brick pizza oven as well as forums where d-i-y oven builders can exchange info.
It seems the Forno Bravo can fashion all or part of an oven if you’re into designing your own. Their “Photos” section has inspiring photos of wood-fired ovens from all over the world, read more…
Westerby Gard is an inn and restaurant on a beautiful centuries-old estate near Inkoo, 45 minutes southwest from Helsinki. Its traditional, rustic style reflects the Swedish influence on Finland. I was taken with their glossy painted tables, cleverly configured to make a huge dining table, or rectangular tables of any length – no tablecloth necessary. It’s an expensive-looking way to transform cheap wooden tables and chairs like these (from Ikea, Crate and Barrel, or an unpainted furniture store… ) read more…
Patchwork was created as a way to make use of scraps of fabric by frugal people who couldn’t afford to waste anything. Though it’s an age-old technique, there’s no rule that it has to look that way. This patchwork tablecloth, a for-sale prop at Rogue’s Gallery in Portland, Maine, is made from stitched-together heavyweight vintage linen grain sacks. It’s totally do-able, and a great example of how “moderne” patchwork can look, simply by choosing the right colors or pattern. read more…
Dish racks and kitchen storage systems are among the most disappointing offerings in stores; it’s hard to find one that really functions well and looks great. The design group Studio Matière has designed a kitchen storage system built of pine splints in an irregular, ladder-like grid that can hang from a tree branch, or be free-standing. The tree-thing is definitely out-there (charming…impractical for many), but the shelf part does seem to me to be a design-model that could easily be improvised upon read more…
(follow the directions and caveats 
(fine for jars with a flat surface).
. 
