Design
July 5, 2012
By Amy Feezor
Cheery, streamlined, and as comfortably designed as the loft he calls home, the small rented office of educational consultant and academic tutor Maurice LaBonte offers him the chance to keep his personal and work spaces separate. “Renting is an…indulgence and a necessary professional requirement,” he explains to Apartment Therapy Tech. “I enjoy leaving the house to go to work…It makes me happy.” Get a quick look at his Chicago-based office space (including a glimpse of his vintage Eames molded armchair), then get the full tour at Apartment Therapy. Read more
Design, Products
April 17, 2012
By Amy Feezor
For the past eight years, Apartment Therapy has been conducting its “Small Cool” contest, which lets readers post photos of their compact spaces (1,000 square space or less) in order to earn a shot at the prestigious annual title. This year, thanks to Gregory Han of Apartment Therapy Tech, we’re noticing a few home offices featuring Herman Miller pieces (like the Eames Molded Plastic Side Chair with Wood Dowel Base in the Seattle home of contest entrants Lauren and Kyle). Take a look at some of the workspaces on our radar, then cast a vote for your favorite here. Read more
Technology
March 26, 2012
By Amy Feezor
Smartphones are many things: useful, intuitive, flexible, fun, and, sometimes, a deterrent for work. It’s easier to check up on your Twitter feed than clean out your inbox, or play another round of Angry Birds than organize next week’s calendar. Luckily, there are plenty of effective apps to help bring order to chaos. Here are some smart solutions at even smarter prices. Read more
Balance, Design, Products
June 7, 2010
By Cerentha Harris
Who? Gregory Han, managing editor, Apartment Therapy’s Unplggd.
Where? Los Angeles, CA.
How do you take your coffee? What brand is it? Black…Pantone 4C Black. I grind and brew Intelligenstia Black Cat Espresso almost exclusively, though I’ll occasionally switch over to Stumptown’s roasts to mix things up. I’ve also started to add one part roasted cacao beans for every 6 parts coffee beans before grinding, which I highly recommend for chocolate lovers.
Tell me about your coffee cup. My friends Angie and Ted of Poketo gave me this coffee cup as a gift, a mug I truly love and that reflects my affinity for that most simple of life’s pleasures, the donut.
What happens if you skip your morning coffee? I’m pretty immune to the effects of caffeine (I enjoy a cup after dinner), so the 1-2 cups I drink most days of the week are mostly for the pleasure of taste. I don’t suffer from any of the classic symptoms of coffee withdrawal, but I do get flummoxed if forced to drink tea in the morning instead of coffee when we run out (no offense to tea, but I prefer it in the afternoon). Bean > leaf!
Balance, Design, Products, Technology
February 15, 2010
By Cerentha Harris
Photo: Jim Franco: www.jimfranco.com
Talking to Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, co-founder and New York editor of Apartment Therapy, is fascinating. You start to understand why this online community, with its 4 million monthly visitors, is so popular. During the course of the interview Maxwell manages to move seamlessly from a discussion about blogs versus newspapers and his time as a Waldorf teacher to European home offices and what color works best in a living room. Every topic, big or small, is given serious consideration. There is an underlying kindness to Maxwell that permeates the site. As he says “Apartment Therapy isn’t snarky, or edgy or even fast, it’s not the newest latest thing we are covering. The whole goal was to help people with their homes, to get them over the finishing line, most would love help from an interior designer or architect but don’t know where to start.” Apartment Therapy has become a very good place to start.
But, enough from me, here is Maxwell:
On blogs: “My wife is a real magazine reader and there’s so much discussion around the demise of magazines and whether blogs are undermining them. Blogs don’t compete with magazines – we compete with newspapers. You post on a blog and then move onto the next thing, it’s very forward looking, fast. And much closer then to a newspaper model than a magazine model.”
On his years as a Waldorf teacher: “[Those years] very much inform my work – now it’s just a much bigger classroom! After teaching for 5 years at a Waldorf school I could have gone on and taken a new class. But I wanted something else. I wanted to live on a larger plane, schools can be small parochial places. I wanted to be rid of the politics.”
“And I had studied design, my first job out of college was as a designer. And I was still very much interested in design. Waldorf is connected to design right down to the chairs and desk and furniture and the color of the walls through all the grades. Design is central and there is a strong belief that the right design can have a very positive effect.”
“I did home visits and the children who had ‘good’ homes – neat, clean and well organized, did better in my classroom. Not necessarily the smartest – it was the ones with a good home foundation. And I thought a lot about that. I was fascinated with that. Being a teacher you need to live the model life. You have to start where you are.”
On starting Apartment Therapy: “At this time I found myself reading the business section of the newspaper more than any other section. It was that time in America before Bush where there was a real optimism in this country around business – business was creative and practical and honest. I craved that opportunity.”
“So in 2001 I started what turned out to be an early version of Apartment Therapy in the summer and gave myself a year to try it out. If it didn’t work I would go back to teaching.”
Read more
Balance, Design, Products, Technology
February 3, 2010
By Cerentha Harris
This story over at Apartment Therapy’s Unplgged really hit a chord this morning. We’re so obsessed with space in home offices, but what if you simply don’t have the room? I’ve been known to retire to my bedroom with the laptop – more for peace of mind than anything else! When I shared an apartment with a friend in New York (many years ago now) I spent hours writing from my bed just like Emily in the photograph above (she is Unplgged managing editor Gregory Han’s ‘better half”). So what do you do? Gregory offers a great practical round-up of small desks (check out the cool bentwood tables from Offi and the amazing little laptop trays from Logitech.) Let me know if you’ve got a small desk to add to this list.
Design, Products
February 2, 2010
By Cerentha Harris
Once you start looking you see Herman Miller pieces everywhere. This is the first in an occasional series where we will cover all the places we’ve spotted the good stuff. Let me know if you find anything. You can email me directly at cerentha_harris@hermanmiller.com.
Modern Findings: cat on a hot Eames rocker.
Curbly: Plastolux posts his home office complete with Aeron chair and vintage George Nelson desk.
Mark Wentzel: Those lovely fat Eames chairs. I know Mark made them in 2009 but I only just discovered them and I think they deserve a bit more attention.
Notcot: A chocolate Eames house. OK, again this was published a while ago but I bet a lot of you missed it. Canadian magazine The Block commissioned chocolate guru Thomas Haas to make the classic 1949 Eames Case Study house.
Apartment Therapy: Where’s the connection here? Well, the bunny is called Eames. And that’s it really. Although we did start with a cat. Get the full story on Pawesome.
