warm and modern

the dweller of this apartment is a ceramics artist and teacher who transfers her skills as an artist to creating a warm and inviting space. She also makes a mean chocolate chip cookie and a gentle bar of soap and is consistently rated a "chili pepper" (hot!) on ratemyprofessor.com. Much of the furniture is actually 1960s industrial office furniture that she obtained through a university surplus program a few years ago. Seems they had better taste in furniture in the 60s than they do now.

It's built on a base of 60s modernism but strays from there into the realm of the lived-in, where the clutter is always creative. Who couldn't love a bookshelf crammed with books books by Tolstoy, Thoreau, Kafka and Flannery O'Connor, and also Love Signs by Linda Goodman (which is always the book that gets passed around when people are over).

I always appreciate a real stereo, with a turntable of course, which here she runs through a vintage tube receiver. The print on the wall was created by her uncle in 1967, and the collaged Victoriana is a testament to the height of the 60s.

If there is a theme to this project, the terms that would come to mind first the Dutch word I've already metioned "gezellig" and also "warm and modern". Not "warm but modern" but "warm and modern" because the first implies that there is or should be something contradictory about those terms. This little apartment, a dwelling in the Heideggerian sense of the term, perfectly fits that description.