Lane's lovely prints

Lane, aka Joff Casciani and Ollie Wood, started out as a graphic design company. But last year the Nottingham-based duo branched out into products... 



...launching a range of beautiful things like prints, notebooks (in collaboration with Margaret Howell), lampshades and, shortly, cushions (in collaboration with Kirkby Design, them behind the brilliant London Underground textiles range).

All

Brutal and Beautiful: the exhibition

Oooh, we are most excited about a new exhibition from English Heritage about post-war buildings, and our
love/hate relationship with them.

Brutal and Beautiful: Saving the
Twentieth Century, which has just opened in central London, covers the period from 1945 to the 1980s and features many photographs and interviews with
architects demonstrating the vast amount of post-war architecture the
UK

Tait modernism

I was car booting last weekend and found a little gem. Have a look at this lovely old pot – yes, it's missing a lid and has a chip on its spout, but it's just gorgeous. A modernist shape and a perky hand painted design, perfect for a bunch of jolly flowers to pep up a windowsill as we trundle into autumn.






I found it, as I often find these
things, at the bottom of a grubby old box of stuff

I'm on the radio today...

I mentioned the other week that I was working on a project looking at obsession with domestic chores. Well now I am allowed to talk about it  – it's for the kitchen gadgets people, Beko, who've done research into the topic and come up with some rather startling results. Which, ta-da, I am going to be chatting about on various radio shows today.





Did you know, for example, that the average

Student bedrooms

Last week I wrote about the 50th anniversary of the Mathmos lava lamp (and the surprising character who invented it). I recalled the orange/yellow example I found in a junk shop in my teens and which I managed to transport through several moves around the country. Well this week I've found the photographic evidence. 






And some extras to boot. So here, I am slightly ashamed to admit, are my

Hemingway Design's post Olympic revamp of Athletes' Village

This time last year Athletes' Village in the east London Olympic Park was probably most famous for housing 150,000 condoms. Now it's about to hit London's housing market – with interior design Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway's company, Hemingway Design. 






As part of the redevelopment of east London's Olympic site, the complex that formerly housed more than 10,000 frisky athletes has been

Design Junction – a taster

The Design Junction preview this week was a visually exhausting (but most inspiring) three-storey adventure. The event is on all weekend, part of London Design Festival. Details at the end. Meanwhile, here's what I found out...






Among the new works launched by illustrator artists agency, Outline Editions, is work by the most excellent, often rude and very funny (unless swearing offends you)

Ever wondered how a lava lamp was made?

You might have heard that classic student bedroom accessory, the lava lamp, turns 50 this year. Or, at least, Mathmos, the company behind the 1963 invention does.





 Image: www.mathmos.com

Did you have one of these classic stoner accessories decorating a former bedroom? I delicately hauled the one I owned through many different abodes, none of which – alas – bore any resemblance to the

London Open House 2013

I love Open House weekend – the annual opportunity to wander around other people's houses, gawp with guidance at genre-defining architecture and public buildings generally closed to the public. What nosey parker wouldn't love it? Here are my top three snoops...





 Wrotham Park, Hertfordshire



This privately-owned Grade II listed Palladian mansion, built in 1754 and restored in 1883, is not

Book preview: Homes from Home

Why are small spaces are irresistible? There's something very satisfying about knowing everything has its place, that storage is clever and in use – not just filled up with crap because it's there and was once empty – and, like people, homes look cuter when they're little.



Image: Jacques Delacroix/Alain Dufour




Image: Jake Fitzjones/Claire Peter




Image: Getty




So I was very pleased

Yippee: Poundshop opens full online store

Poundshop is a most excellent concept, and one I've written about before. It is a shop – previously a sporadic, temporary affair – where new and established talent create bespoke items to be sold for less than £5 (and often, indeedy, for just one lone squid). 



The news this time is that they have launched a full online shop. It is brilliant. Here are some great things from it.

Totem blocks, £

Domestic chores: are you obsessed?

I can't say too much about it just yet, but I've been asked to work on a fun project about how we live, particularly with reference to domestic chores...



...so: who does what, how long for and what does it stop you doing – that kind of thing.

I was talking to a friend about it who said that she'd read on a problem page that a woman was obsessed with cleaning her house to the point where it

FLORA + FAUNA temporary shop for London Design Festival

The imminent London Design Festival (it kicks off in two days, running 14-22 September) may be happening in the capital here, but that doesn't mean you can't get in on things if you're nowhere near the city this month.





White Horses Chase Your Dreams, by Beetroot Press, £28



FLORA + FAUNA is a temporary shop hosted by design agency, Designers / Makers to coincide with the festival – and

Put a bird on it

Been meaning to post this Portlandia clip "Put a Bird on it" ever since a friend sent me the link. You – like me – may sense some recognition...



It's an oldie but a goodie. In case you have never caught this "hipster-baiting" cult sketch TV show, Portlandia is a barely fictional place around which the comedy is based; the Guardian summed it up as "the capital of the muesli belt, a place where

Small kitchen? Some modern inspiration

We've covered the beautiful, brutalist(ish) Barbican buildings and flats here before – in an awe-inspiring architecture tour Abi and I took, as well as in various noses around some of the interiors of the flats there and at nearby Golden Lane. 



On the tour we learned that, no surprises, the flats with original interiors and fittings were not only more valuable but also pretty rare. Sadly,

My mad, fat empty wall

This rather enticing photo from the excellent NY Magazine's Design Hunting blog has got me thinking about the trickiest wall in the house.



I love the way those slightly untidy hanging baskets soften the vast, empty wall on the right. Tumbling cascades of soft greenery casting interesting shadows... I want some of that on the vast, empty wall in my life. This one.



The wall in question, at

Leaf sticker cable tidy

Sometimes an idea is so simple it's just annoying you didn't think of it yourself.

These wall stickers designed to tidy up dangling cables by turning them into a foliage-style feature are one of those. Totally brilliant, don't you think?






It's on a par with the clever Pretty Pegs (exciting replacement legs for your Ikea sofas) in terms of simplicity and brilliance.

The brains behind the

The Design Junction Shop

I've become a bit obsessed with window shopping at the Design Junction shop since it opened recently. In case you're not familiar: the new retail outlet is part of London Design Festival, which will be all over the city in a couple of weeks. 

The shop is the perfect place to browse if you can't make it to the festival – it also, reassuringly, proves that LDF is not all about very expensive

Drink more: wine glass holders and other outdoors excellence

You reach the end of summer and belatedly stumble across the thing that would have made the unexpected hot evenings in the park or garden just a tiny bit more civilised. 









The wine glass holder you can spike into the grass on a picnic or other outdoor drinking excursion is hardly a new product.

But simply because this one (from Stripey City on Etsy) is rather nicely made and photographed

Introducing... textile designer Anna Wooster

As London Design Festival draws closer – the city-wide event here that (among other things) shows off heaps of new creative talent – I'm plundering last year's finds...

...all those flyers and cards and notes I scribbled when I saw something I liked. Here's one: Anna Wooster, an interesting, not-long-graduated textile designer with a suitably urban edge to her work.



From Brighton to LDN

A holiday home called FABULOUS...

Abi here. I've just got back from five days in the Algarve – our lovely friend Jarod lives and works out there so we stayed with him at the gorgeous, but very traditional, villa where he's based. 

I did very little except read trashy novels by the pool (I did manage to drive a speed boat which was very exciting; I sang Duran Duran's Rio in my head) but
one day we took a turn around the

August holiday

It's been a lovely, long and hot August. Some people like to go on holiday this time of year. But I like to make a masochistic seven-page list of things that need doing to the house.

And work through it. So plants have been potted, fences treated, comical arguments about fence treatments had in B&Q – though that wasn't one of the moments caught on camera. Among a few other things I did, however,