I was hoping to pick up a piece of traditional Austrian Tracht for my wife on our vacation (I've made no secret of my deep appreciation for girls in dirndls). Luckily our first (and last) stop while dirndl hunting was Austrian designer Lena Hoschek's shop in Spittelberg. Ms. Hoschek (who worked in the London studio of Vivienne Westwood) shows both a nostalgic reverence for both traditional Austrian craft and embroidery and 1940s/1950s Hollywood; her current collection (Spring/Summer 2011) is very pinup girl/burlesque and next fall's collection gets back to more of the punk rock Landhausmode or (what I'll call) the sexy Alpen librarian look of past collections. I mean, Guten Morgen, fräulein Bibliothekarin:

Right inside the store we found a rack of some of the most incredibly beautiful handmade dirndls I'd ever seen. In addition to producing seasonal lines of skirts, jackets, pants, and shirts, Ms. Hoschek creates some really lovely dirndls.

Ultimately, though, a beautiful handcrafted, designer dirndl felt a little impractical once we did a cost-benefit analysis of how often she's wear it versus the cost. So the kids and I went over to the playground across the street while my wife tried on just about everything in the store. We both found last season's collection more appealing in styling, palette and price (it was 30% off). Here were some of the highlights from that collection she found in the store:

I ended up buying her a big twirly high-waist skirt and a shirt not too different from this one (without the boob hearts):

We figured that unlike a full dirndl, it was something she could wear more often. I'll try to convince her to let me take a picture of it outside once things warm up. She also tried on the sailor pants in the next photo, but thought they were a little too baggy at the bottom for her taste. But how badass does this girl look in them?

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This blog is intended solely to share the things I come across that inspire me. If I have posted a copyrighted image, I have only done so to the extent necessary to comment upon or discuss it; I will always include a link to the original source of the image if that source is online or acknowledge the source if it is in print. If I have reproduced anything of yours here that is copyrighted and you want me to remove it, please do not hesitate to contact me and I will do so right away.

I have been looking for some nice pillows for our couch for a long time. My wife---for whom total comfort on the couch is an absolute necessity---was falling asleep on these ratty old queen-sized pillows in ratty old pillowcases and every time guests stopped over I had to rush to throw them in the closet. They were seriously gross. Sometimes I would find the dog cuddled up on one down on the floor.

The last time we were in Cincinnati, I stopped into this little store on Vine Street and I saw one of these pillows embroidered with the image of suburban ranch homes. I loved it, but it was the wrong color for our room. When I got back to the hotel, I told my wife about it and the small company that makes them: K Studio. I'd seen their products online, but it wasn't until I'd seen them in real life that I realized how cool they were, and it wasn't until I talked to the proprietor at MiCA that I learned K Studio was based in Grand Rapids, a wonderful city in western Michigan where my wife and I have lived in the past and just a short drive from the smaller cities where we were raised. He also told me that it was a small business venture between a daughter and her mother, with the daughter doing the design and her mother working with the embroidery aspect. In short, I was in love with this company.

When I wrote to place my order for the pillow above, Shelly Klein wrote back to tell me she was a fan of the blog. So, of course, I had to buy one of K Studio's custom Family Series pillows, shown here:



There we all are---even Wendell----embroidered for posterity. This pillow kind of reminds me of a softer version of the Saul Steinberg print I bought for my wife during the last pregnancy:



We've now added a couple of simpler pillows to the couch as well, and I've thrown the ratty old pillows into the dog's crate. We hadn't done anything nice for the house in a long time, but just adding a couple really cool pillows to our living room has made it seem fresh and new.

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This blog is intended solely to share the things I come across that inspire me. If I have posted a copyrighted image, I have only done so to the extent necessary to comment upon or discuss it; I will always include a link to the original source of the image if that source is online or acknowledge the source if it is in print. If I have reproduced anything of yours here that is copyrighted and you want me to remove it, please do not hesitate to contact me and I will do so right away.

[source]

The $70 white laminate countertop in our kitchen is about shot and we're going to need a new one. I found this photo on one of those foreign "we'll remodel your kitchen for $380,000" websites and---given that you could buy four or five houses like ours for that much right now---I don't see much wisdom in investing in much more than a new laminate. But I dream about something like this beautiful kitchen. I would love to have a wooden/butcher block counter, but the wife is afraid it would stain or ding too easily. I don't really like granite or corian and I don't want to spend that much. Anyone have any good "alternative" countertop recommendations? I like the idea of fireslate but those bastards won't return my e-mails.

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This blog is intended solely to share the things I come across that inspire me. If I have posted a copyrighted image, I have only done so to the extent necessary to comment upon or discuss it; I will always include a link to the original source of the image if that source is online or acknowledge the source if it is in print. If I have reproduced anything of yours here that is copyrighted and you want me to remove it, please do not hesitate to contact me and I will do so right away.

Photo by Ezra Stoller, published in Detroit Home

Born in New York City and raised in Florence, Alexander Girard spent much of his life living in the suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. He moved there in 1937, opening a small design gallery and designing auto interiors as well as commercial and living spaces (I have long kicked myself over the missed opportunity to purchase a chair he designed for the cafe at the Detrola radio company's offices in Detroit's Fisher building---someone showed the chair to Charles Eames up in Bloomfield Hills and he immediately sought out Girard and their collaborative friendship was born). Girard worked as a color consultant for General Motors and in 1949 he designed the Detroit Institute of Art's "For Modern Living," a significant early exhibition of midcentury design. In 1952 he became the director of textile design for the Herman Miller Furniture company.

Joseph Giovannini said it well in New York magazine: "The multitudinous fabrics he created, sometimes bold and sometimes capricious, were a little like Andy Warhol's platinum wig: Shocked by the platinum, you don't notice it's a wig. Girard's fabrics warmed up and camouflaged the functionalist, factory-produced furniture, making it more palatable to suburban taste buds."

One of my favorite stories about Girard is the 1958 discovery of the Herman Miller San Francisco studio that he would design: "On a scouting trip to San Francisco, Girard, Eames, and Herman Miller’s Hugh De Pree (D.J.’s son) chanced upon a boarded-up building while searching for somewhere to have lunch. Taking a hammer and crowbar to the layers of plywood, they began to uncover what had once been a music hall of considerable ill repute (ed: the Hippodrome), rife with life-size nude satyrs, nymphs, and all manner of marvelous ornamentation. At Girard’s behest Herman Miller secured the property, and he set about creating a thoroughly modern interior design that would complement the location." (dwell)

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This blog is intended solely to share the things I come across that inspire me. If I have posted a copyrighted image, I have only done so to the extent necessary to comment upon or discuss it; I will always include a link to the original source of the image if that source is online or acknowledge the source if it is in print. If I have reproduced anything of yours here that is copyrighted and you want me to remove it, please do not hesitate to contact me and I will do so right away.