Williams-Sonoma 5 Interior Design Blogs We Couldn’t Live Without

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5 Interior Design Blogs We Couldn’t Live Without

By Jay Johnson
It’s easy to smell a phony when reading a blog; the words don’t ring true, they sound contrived, and the advice isn’t from the heart. But a great interior designer’s blog can be inspirational and helpful – and even funny. As bloggers, Irwin and I appreciate the extra work it takes to step outside of your everyday design projects and communicate to people you might never meet about what you love, what you hate, what resources you’ve just used on a job, and what elements of taste and style make you see the world in your own unique way. Here are some of our favorite interior designer blogs.

Patricia Gray This cleanly designed and beautifully photographed blog is the creation of a generous designer. Vancouver based Patricia Gray shares her keen eye for style, takes us on trips around the world (and points out her “favourites”), and points out the resources and materials that she enjoys using on a job. The latter is particularly useful for interior designers. It’s great to see a master designer work, look at resources as they appear in finished spaces, and get an analysis of why and how they function beautifully. You also get the bonus of a well-trained feng shui student, layered on top of the interior designer, and you can better understand why Patricia’s interiors exude calm, serenity, and strong flow.
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PATRICIA GRAY INC is an award winning interior design firm in Vancouver writing about lifestyle and
WHAT'S HOT in the world of interior design, architecture, art and travel.
2011 © Patricia Gray | Interior Design Blog™

Sky Village, Denmark

Right now, the housing market is slowing down, and developments focus more towards office-space. One that shows flexibility. Where offices can easily be transformed into housing - and vice versa. Where smaller units can be transformed into bigger ones - and vice versa.

By creating a tower that is a grid structure with a minimal pixel size, any configuration can be imagined and filled in. The grid-size of 7.8 x 7.8 m combines a good parking grid, a proper housing unit and office type (a unit of 7.8 x 7,8 x 4 m, approx. 60 m2 or 240 m3), that can easily accommodate a large variety of tenants, e.g. young people that want to live close to the city and starters in the office market. Small offices and home offices… a vertical SOHO! The units, or pixels, can also be joined together to form larger spaces to accommodate larger apartments, hotel rooms or offices.

A sustainable structure arises. The grid has been organized around a central core with lifts, stairs and shafts. The central core is divided in three individual cores that individually serve the apartments, the offices and the hotel and restaurant. It allows for deeper offices with cells and meeting rooms, and for deeper houses, or public functions like for example a library or a conference space. By varying the infill, less deep offices and houses can be created. By pulling away many pixels on the ground and lower floors, a more open plaza is created, while keeping some program on ground floor for lobbies and shops. By stacking the units more towards the northern side on top of the cube a taller building emerges with sunnier terraces with views to Copehagen city centre, Skåne, and the rest of the region. By opening the cube in the middle, a series of covered terraces is created to allow for communal outdoor areas for offices or public functions.

A sky village. The columns are clad with cast-aluminium panels. It serves both domestic and office purposes: individualized usages, natural ventilation, and maximum visibility from the sky towards the grounds. Where needed stability elements are diagonally positioned behind the façade. The tower continues underground with some small shops, the plant rooms and a parking garage. By using the identical pixel-unit sizes, the plaza obtains the same qualities and character as the rest of the tower. As if the tower is ‘emerging’ from the ground. This mixed use concept also demands for a mixed environment. The bench surrounds a protected play area, an outdoor fitness area for elderly citizens and picnic zones.

Location         : Rødovre
                            Denmark

Site type          : Urban

Building area : 22000 m2

A project by    : MVRDV, ADEPT Architects

                             Architecture

Photo Gallery of Sky Village, Denmark

Convection Slum, Brazil

The Rocinha community originated in the 1930’s from the division of bigger farms in smaller lots for food production. The pressure came specially from people seeking for jobs in infrastructure construction taking place in other parts of developing Rio de Janeiro. The proposal located in this settlement is directly related to local space needs and the lack of inhabitable land.

Concept: Poverty, hunger, discrimination, reality. Life experience. In what way could we relate the lack of inhabitable space  to the huge amount of  underprivileged people in one of the largest Brazilian cities? Differences between living space and designed space. The organization in a slum is similar to a competition for survival, where the strength, be it political or physical, coupled with low budget creates huge spaces of both innocence and turbulence, human and inhuman spaces to the extreme, an example of vivid architecture, not about mistakes or successes, about the huge range of differences. Plurality. Experiences. Culture.

Interstitial spaces are the living spaces of slums, this spaces are the consequence of the lack of private space and the high density, forcing the street meetings, so the boundary between public and private becomes invisible, almost non-existent, but it does not become a problem for the culture of miscegenation. The multi-space (the transition area) becomes the meeting place of the local community. The building design aims to maintain the diversity of events generated by the “favela” in its interstitial spaces. Resulting from this, the skyscraper is shaped spontaneously in a rich mixture of sustainable spaces. Program:   The building, more than 500 m (1640 ft) tall, will provide housing for thousands of people and also access to educational, cultural and leisure infrastructure to inhabitants and nearby communities. The plurality and mix found in the “favela” is applied to the programmatic needs of the skyscraper:

Culture – theaters, cinemas, music halls, auditoriums, museums, places for samba rehearsals, libraries, places for expositions; Sports – gyms, pool, sport rooms, lockers, services; Green roofs; Health Unities; Schools, elementary schools and nursing houses; Small offices areas; Service and Commerce areas; and, most significantly, habitations of various sizes. The vertical circulation always starts and stops in an interaction space, a gathering and cultural place with enormous encountering and exchange possibilities. The building is provided with a major vertical circulation and various secondary circulations.  Hierarchy is established by the vertical movement, the principal one, the generator of multiple possibilities. The secondary vertical circulations act as local transitive elements, mixing uses and promoting contact.

Photo Gallery of Convection Slum, Brazil

Black and White Photography in Whistler

I have taken up photography. Is there ever a lot to learn. I started by taking a digital photography course at Emily Carr University. Then after much research and trial I decided on my camera and lens: a Nikon D7000 with a Nikkor 18-200 lens with polarizing filter. I wanted to get a full format FX camera but decided to get familiar with a DX camera first. I got Photoshop CS5 and Silver Efex Pro 2 (a program that converts color digital photography to black and white photography) as well as several books that I downloaded to my iPad 2 (BTW I love my new iPad 2 which was a gift from a client – thank-you very much!). All of this because I have a very curious mind and a very curious eye. I love the fact that when I look through the view finder of the camera I see the world differently from the way I view the world of Interior Design through my eye unframed. Looking through the lens forces my attention down to a small and very refined focus. I am also a believer of the value of life long learning and the fact that the appreciation of different  art disciplines enhances and broadens our experience of life.


The above photo was taken at a client’s home in Whistler just before sunset as I was standing on the edge of the dock. I went there to take photos of the lovely views from their home of the dock and lake, with hopes of getting some good images to frame and hang in their just completed home in Vancouver. Somehow the color version looks nice in a smaller format for viewing on the internet or in the photo album, but when I thought about enlarging it to a frameable size it didn’t look like fine art. I far prefer to hang black & white photography on walls. I converted the digital color photograph to black and white photography with a software program called Silver Efex Pro2 and I quite like how the images below the water show up much clearer in the black and white photography then in the color version.


This image was converted from a color digital to black & white photography using a program called Silver Efex Pro 2.

These are some of the other photos I took.

Fresh fruit for our morning brunch. The sunlight was streaming in the window and this setting was calling out to me to take the photo quickly before 1. either the sunlight moved on or 2. we sat down and started eating. So much of photography I am learning is to seize the moment. Thank-you Nora for the delicious and beautiful meals you prepared.

 
The picture above and below were taken at sunrise in one of the most beautiful places in the world Whistler.

The morning dew.

I will leave you with a quote by the brilliant French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

“To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.”

PATRICIA GRAY INC is an award winning interior design firm in Vancouver writing about lifestyle and
WHAT'S HOT in the world of interior design, architecture, art and travel.
2011 © Patricia Gray | Interior Design Blog™