Our warmest best wishes and thanks to all the mothers out there! The way we look at it, every day should be Mother's Day, so don't just make today a special day to recognize all the hard work and love that goes into being a mother...those other 364 days matter too.
Below is our hottest posts from the last week, including top 10 organizing tips, a discussion about designer knockoffs, 20 household tips for newspapers, a secret kitchen compartment, a DIY storage bed, and much more...
Name: Cindy and Harvey
Location: Granada Hills, CA
Size: 2500 sf
Years lived in: Own, 9 months
In the northern most part of Granada Hills, in an area where time seemingly forgot, is an enclave of colourful modernist homes...a slice of Midcentury heaven filled with preserved and renovated homes all sharing the recognizable architectural details of the California-based, post-war residential real estate developer, Joseph Eichler. Cindy of OneStopModern was kind enough to invite us to step inside her renovated Eichler home on this magical block...
Climbing rose, beginning its third year, reaching up the garden's chainlink fence.
So I promised a peek in at our tiny garden...before we leave it. Back when I began submitting pictures to Maxwell, I was another busy New Yorker trying to find a few minutes to stop and smell the roses - and never had any intention or expectation of growing any.
We are packing up and moving from our apartment soon. I don't consider myself a real gardener OR garden blogger by any means, and yet here I am very sad to leave these plants behind...
The reader's favorite posts on AT:Chicago this week were an update on the decor at Dana's place, a kitchen redo for less than $100, how to read design blogs (while resisting the urge to spend) and a House Tour of Michelle Kaufmann's fantastic smart home.
Jump below for links to these & LOTS more hot posts from AT:Chicago last week:
![2008-04-20Chocolate7Sunflower_BOB[1].jpg](http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/2008-04-20Chocolate7Sunflower_BOB%5B1%5D.jpg)
Sunflower BOB (Borders on Black), one of the chocolate offerings
This past month's Horticulture Magazine features a farm in Washington that champions this deep color and has beautiful gardens that are based on a 'chocolate palette', which inspired me to get those near-black dahlias last week.
Since many of you create "clip files" of the useful, inspirational or intriguing articles from your magazines, we are putting together a digital version of a clip file for you. Last week was all about choosing a paint color, this week, in keeping with our monthly theme, it's cleaning tips. Jump below for our clip file of 8 great cleaning
how-to's for you to peruse now and bookmark for later!
This week we had a garden on wheels, gorgeous peonies, incredible garden sheds and air plants, an infant's indoor forest, and lots mor kitchen gardening...
Name: Emily Gurstelle
Company: Room & Board
Location: St. Paul, MN
Favorite Weblink: I love Cribcandy.com. It gives a little taste of what people in the online design community are chatting about each day.
Profession: Emily comes to us from our contest sponsor. A professional writer and editor, AND a fan of design blogs, Emily heads up marketing writing for Room & Board and is a long time resident of the Minneapolis/St Paul region. Welcome, Emily!
Hey all you crazy AT readers in NYC. We're inviting you to come on down to BKLYN Designs TODAY, to join us for lunch and get your AT Book signed by myself - Maxwell - and Jill Slater, as well as all the other folks in the book who will be there. Unlike many coffee table books, this one has 40 authors...
This week I was inspired to get these deep, almost black dahlias after discovering a farm dedicated to such dark-hued plants (I'll be posting about them later today). Having such a dark flower is much like beginning an oil painting on a deep ochre ground...
I like the large negative space formed by such dark flowers. What would you have put in with them?
We're sending a shout-out to all of you who bring home flowers to brighten up your home. Do YOU have some Sat. morning flowers to share? Let me know! You can drop a line with a small description and some pics at matt at apartment therapy dot com
What were our hottest posts this week? Well, we took a little break from the Small Cool Contest while gearing up for all the excitement next week, and so the top posts on our Northwest site weren't all contest-related... Click here to jump below to take a look.
We're looking for a new face on our team page - AT:Chicago is getting ready to grow and we are hoping to add a fantastic new blogger from a NEW CITY. That's right, our current team has got Chicago covered, so we want to add posts from one of the other cites that fall under the general AT "midwest" umbrella. We want to go where the design scene is heating up, the shops are interesting, homes are inspiring and, naturally, where a great blogger is!
One of the many things we loved about Monique and Richard's Apartment at a Glance was this shelf that wraps around a corner.
We've now got a growing desire to cover our stairway ceiling and walls with these paintable and textured wall coverings from Graham & Brown. We've never considered using wallpaper on the ceiling, but these vinyl sheets seem more like ceiling or wall tiles, don't they? Plenty more photos and where to get them below the jump...
Wow! It's over. Congratulations to the graduating class of the SF Spring 2008 Cure. We hope you enjoyed the process as much as we did.
We loved this idea from TRUE BLUE last week:
"I actually suggested when the book first came out that the apartment management buy a book for everyone in the building. Or start giving them away with each new lease or when they raise the rent (yearly). It makes sense from not just a renter's point of view. But from a management point of view too. For people to make good choices when it comes to their apartment . . . It's something for those of us in multiple resident dwellings to consider suggesting to our landlords. Everybody wins."
And it's true, with the Cure everybody does win. We suspect that living in beautiful, organized and healthy homes affects not just the residents but everyone they interact with - when your home is more together your life is more together, and it shows in areas of your life that you think have nothing to do with your house.
(This is the first of our honorable mentions, which go to submissions that did not make the finals but really rock. They are awarded purely at the judge's discretion. Each honorable mention receives a special gift.)
Our Midwest Judge, Jan Parr, chose a fantastic entry, East #21 - Eduardos Recyclables as her Honorable Mention.
She has this to say about Eduardo's place: "This apartment has loads of charm and feels very personal. The artwork is great, and it's a great example of how open shelves can open up a space and provide lots of storage when done right."
We unwittingly opened a Pandora's box earlier this week when we posted about an Eames-style office chair knockoff a reader wrote in about as a sales tip. There was plenty of discussion about the ethics of purchasing discount priced copies of modernist classics. Target continues to offer near exact copies of many modernist originals to the excitement of some and to the horror of others (sans the exacting quality and details of the originals), and two equally passionate camps on both sides of the fence make valid arguments for and against the practice. Check under the jump for some notable quotes about the topic from a site specifically reporting Target's modernist knockoff offerings...
[image via Blue Ant Studio]
This Saturday, May 10th, from 9am to 3pm, West Seattle ushers in the yard sale season with its Community Garage Sale Day. What this means is that more than 70 individual households, blocks and businesses will be conducting garage sales at the same time.
Our friend is decorating her bedroom in yellow and gray - a color combination we love. She thought it might be too trendy at first, but she loved the pieces she found so much that she decided to go with it. We think that's the right way to approach decorating - don't worry too much about trends and do what you love because you're the one living with it. In honor of our friend, here's a roundup of yellow and gray color combos...
It seems like such a no-brainer to use these short, wide containers for small parts storage. But then again, we've discarded hundreds of tuna fish cans in our lifetimes without a second thought, so there you go.
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