Matchbook Magazine

The design blog world is all a-flutter with Matchbook Magazine – the latest in a steady stream of shelter/lifestyle mags (seems everyone’s still trying to fill the void left by Domino).

I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical about Matchbook.  I only have so many hours in the day, and as much as I love wasting time online, a magazine has to be really great to hold my attention.  So I checked it out, thinking I’d give up after reading a few pages.

But then I stumbled on this page:

I want just about EVERYTHING here.  Look, there’s a bookplate that says “This book belongs to Avery”!

And then I kept reading, and saw articles about Anna Bond (of Rifle Paper Co), Peggy Guggenheim, Princess Margaret (who knew she was an “it girl”?), Burberry, Jemma Kidd, Warby Parker… and that’s just in the first half of the magazine.

Matchbook Magazine, you’ve won me over.

Dreamy Dwellings: kitHAUS

You know I love me some modern architecture.  So of course, I love modular, pre-fab structures.  Check out this dandy by kitHAUS, featured on desire to inspire on Monday.

kitHAUS structures come in all different configurations and sizes.  They’re surprisingly affordable and easy to install.

Wouldn’t you love to find some wonderful place in the woods or on a secluded beach, and put one of these homes there?

Midair Art

Shinichi Maruyama makes the most gorgeous art out of throwing water and ink.  Yep, he throws liquids and takes pictures and video of the shapes they create.  Sounds kind of kooky, but the results are spectacular.  He calls them “Kusho” or “writing in the sky”.

I read about Maruyama and his work on Robert Krulwich’s “NPR sciencey blog”, and Krulwich says:

But if chemistry does the work, these shapes come from Maruyama. He sculpts them. He has an image in his head and some instinct, some deep knowledge of water, time, muscle tells him how to move so that these shapes can form, then hang momentarily in the air until the pull of the planet drags them (gently when viewed in this high speed camera) back to Earth.  Maruyama’s work is most beautiful when his forms begin to fall apart.

Isn’t that beautiful?  [the] work is most beautiful when it begins to fall apart. Lovely.

Books for the Kid

As Ian and I start to make the long list of stuff we need to get for the tadpole, I want to make sure we don’t forget to build a great library for the kid.  Of course, we’ll be visiting the actual library often, but there are some books that are so good, I want to have our own copies.

On the must have list:

Goodnight Moon
Where the Wild Things Are
The Very Hungry Caterpillar (and anything and everything else by Eric Carle)
Eloise
This is New York (and the rest of the “This Is” series)
Moxie, The Daschund of Fallingwater
The Secret Garden (I’ll have to read that one to the kid for a while until they’re older)

What other books would you recommend for our kid?

The Year of Color by Kate Spade

Don’t you just love Kate Spade?  Lately I find that Ms. Spade and Jonathan Adler are my biggest sources of design inspiration.  Both are so good at working with bright colours in a way that looks chic and stylish, and not childish or sloppy.

Check out Kate Spade’s Living Colorfully/The Year of Color project.  She’s choosing 12 signature shades, and unveiling a new colour each month (with accompanying limited edition prints, short films, and products, of course).  First up – red.  Just what we all need for the January blahs!

Map Prints by These Are Things

If you’ve been in my house (or if you remember this) you know I like maps.  I think I like cartography as an art form, and I especially like how maps inspire me to travel.

Aren’t these map prints by These Are Things cool?  While I quite enjoy the neighbourhood maps, the ones that caught my eye are the brightly coloured world map and Europe map (pictured above).

A Blog I Enjoy: Eight Hour Day

Lately I’ve been really enjoying the blog from Eight Hour Day.  Eight Hour Day is the name of the design studio run by husband and wife team Nathan Strandberg and Katie Kirk.  They do really cool design and illustration, and their projects include websites, posters, branding, and even a children’s book.  Oh yeah, and of course their own website is as gorgeous as everything else they do.

And as if that wasn’t already cool enough, they decided to take a year to travel across the States, setting up camp and working along the way.  More on that here.

But anyway, back to the blog.  They do a regular thing called “The Best Thing I Saw Today” and both Strandberg and Kirk post an image of something they saw and liked.  It’s inspiring.

Ultimate Book Collection


I guess as a final way to celebrate their 75th anniversary, Penguin Books has released The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection: More than 1000 of the Greatest Classics.  And if you have a spare $13,413.30 it can be yours!  [sidenote – if it costs that much money, is the 30 cents really necessary?  Couldn’t they have rounded it up or down?]

Consisting of 1,082 titles, this really is the ultimate book collection. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a private library with all of those books at your fingertips?  I guess that already exists, and it’s called an e-reader… but if you love the printed page, this is the way to do it.

[via kottke.org]