Needlework from Norway

With long winters it's no surprise those living within a coo-ee of the Arctic Circle can work a needle and thread. I was amazed by this chair and cushion combo in Norway. Actually almost everything in this living room was fantastic. We were visiting for lunch. Not being handy with a camera I turned to my parter in crime and wiggling my fingers in mime mouthed "Take some photos."

I have a big appetite for interiors magazines and read everything: from the accessible, aspirational end of the publishing spectrum to cold architectural titles and the peerless World of Interiors. I like looking at photos of other peoples homes a great deal. There is something about photography and interiors that click, excuse the pun. The good fit became apparent to me thinking about art and the cluster of magazines devoted to that sector and creative activity. Why is it that I love art but have little interest in art magazines? In the end I want magazines to be an uncomplicated pleasure. Discourse or chairs? No contest.

Warsaw pot plants

Possibly because of the nature of housing in Warsaw, medium density, the city's inhabitants have a particular kind of relationship with nature. This is a city where public parks and pot plants reign supreme. Warsaw's parks are beautiful – lush, varied and highly cultivated. And even the smallish squares the central point around each housing complex in my inner suburb of Mokotow, where we were based, are well maintained. You can't step a metre without bumping into a rubbish bin though good luck finding a seat (a deliberate strategy to limit loafers apparently). I was touched most though by the pot plants. I have vivid memories of my grandparents flat circa 1994 where an entire wall of the living room was covered by plants like a jungle scene. Each floor of the stairwell of their six floor apartment building had a number of pot plants lined up beside a window, in a curated display that suggested the pastime was taken seriously. The plants are still there, still tended to and watered. It's nothing like a Mediterranean film, no gingham in sight, or artful watering cans. Just a few 1.5 litre plastic bottles, a motley crew of recycled pots and saucers, some succulents and a few hardy blooms. I was moved by the  communal effort on which their survival depended and how little was made of it other than a basic and unspoken agreement that the presence of plants mattered.

Photos: Josef Lumley

Kindergarten, Rena, Norway

From the archives: Dolfi Trost

That saying, ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’, I’m not so sure about it. I have a pretty good idea how little I know but what’s the use dwelling on that. I’m still feeling sore about the parking ticket from yesterday. Still, every time I stumble across a new artist, someone I feel like I should have known about years ago, I can’t work out whether my education let me down or new discoveries should fall under the category of new research/internet mania.

I spent years studying modernism and then years teaching modernism. I came at it from different departments – art history, cinema and later design. Sure, by the 2000s there was a lot of hoo-ha about modernisms, plural. But I’m still wondering how Romanian Surrealist Dolfi Trost (1916-1966) escaped my cross hairs. How come I never heard of him? Here was someone who was investigating the surrealist drawing technique entopic graphomania in Bucharest (a youtube tutorial might go like this: Draw dots on a page. Join them together.)

I never knew. He published his drawings in a serious looking publication in French if I’m not mistaken Vision dans le Cristal, Oniromancie obsessionelle (Et neuf graphomanies entoptiques from1945. Then he went to Chicago. What did he do in Chicago? Why was he there? Did he marvel at the skyscrapers designed by that well-known European modernist, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his students at Illinois Institute of Technology? At this point we can only speculate.*

*In the English language, on the web, I can’t find anything.

You speak my language

Home. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. In Adelaide, over the school holidays, we stayed at a friend's house. It was super comfortable, kid friendly and well located. I got to know its inhabitants communing with their things and as a result I grew to like them even more. Outside the regard and affection I felt for my absent hosts, who happily happen to be bookish and musical, it was not a house that spoke to me. I felt like I was having an argument with the furniture, functionality of space and objects at every turn. Which just goes to show you aesthetics is a language and the house and I did not share a common dialect. I felt this forcefully when my twin took me to visit her friend Louise. She did not say, Her Place Is Amazing. But I am pretty sure she knew I would be blown away though this phrase doesn't convey exactly the emotion, which was a quietening. I felt a happy, joyful hum of contentment, bordering on relief. It was an environment that emanated a calm confidence and reflected its owners curiosity for objects, art, geography and history. How else do you explain an English country garden, a renovation in the Japanese brutalist style with a bit of Finish modernism thrown in? In these photos everything looks like it has been put away, but on the sunny Saturday I visited and ate lunch in the kitchen, less tidy, it was less austere, more natural. I admired Louise's originality and courage in imagining such a home and bringing it steadily to life.

Super

Credit: Ramona Barry



As Oprah would say I have not been in my "right mind" this past fortnight. Stevie Zee caught a superbug during fairly routine and minor surgery and before you could say Methicillin-resistant Stapylococcus aureus, he had clocked up twelve days in hospital (released yesterday, he's now convalescing at home).

My altered, high stress state may have influenced the abnormally excited reaction I experienced at the new Carlton Court Brunetti's. I had naturally heard about its imminent opening, followed the visa kerfuffle in the local paper (importing real I-talians to bring the right amount of strut to the service).  None of this prepared me however for the encounter which was rapturous. I almost wept, though that might have been because it was my first night off round the clock child care duties in one hundred years.

I saw mirrored cabinets with tortes, a twenty meter long coffee bar, and elegantly suited waiters with FBI-like ear pieces working in concert on a raised platform. The bold scale, high-ceilings, luxurious surfaces in terrazzo and marble, not to mention the dizzying circular construction, had me enthralled.  The theatre! The grandeur! I felt like a lowly peasant who had travelled from the French provinces sometime circa 1888 and caught sight of one of those new things, department stores.

I understand Yuri Angelé and his partner have a few years in the business under their belt, like 38 years. They've learnt a thing or two along the way about creating an impression.They've finessed their vision in Singapore and Dubai. But honestly, on this one I felt they'd sat down with an espresso and a napkin and sketched out the pyramids.

Everybody was there. I saw Italian mammas and their formally attired offspring, fusty academics, stylish queens and gen Y hipsters. In a tribal town like Melbourne this felt like some kind of triumph. I felt glad to be a city girl, glad to be out after dark, glad to be alive.

From the archives: Adolf Loos

One of the things I admire about my husband is his knack for packing. He can work a rubik's cube like no one I know. And he brings the same logic to organizing objects into confined spaces. Taking a squizz at Czech architect Adolf Loos's (1870-1933) now iconic Muller Villa, I thought Loos and Mr Zagala have something in common, something I would describe as a particular kind of spatial intelligence. It's interesting puzzling over Loos's approach to planning interior spaces. For an early modernist who embraced clean geometric lines, his interiors contain a surprising counter-movement. They are strangely complex, sort of like an Escher print, but more stripped back. And what about the luxe, surfaces and eclectic furniture? This photograph is of the children's room. Without squirts in it, Loos's room reminds me of a cross between a motel and a doll's house. And colourful though it may be, there is no denying its severity. With my own kids room looking like a fricken bomb site today I have to admit to a longing for the an epoch before China agreed to supply capitalism with piles of plastic crap, some of which has found its way to our place. I need a Loos-like solution for makin' it disappear.