Who cares if the table tops are not quite true? If the scale of upholstered furniture is slightly off? If some turned table legs are cabriolet and others are claw and ball?

Perfect” interior décor can be captivating in photographs, but underlying the flawless arrangement of drapery, wallpaper and furnishings is a palpable fear of anticipation — when will this mirage of a showroom become, you know, “used?”

You can’t dance in a corner. An over-decorated/accessorized space leaves little room to do anything but sit with knees pressed together

But many people insist on turning their houses into some kind of fetish that delivers a voyeuristic thrill — rooms to look at, but that have little capacity for real life.

The cafe itself presents a visual language of contemporary design completely devoid of fuss, but with the fun of orange Jasper Morrison Air chairs.

When we can, we like to use colour, and strong colour at that – it lifts people’s spirits

Daniel Crooks

Stairs had previously connected the floors by taking up the end portion of each level; however, now the floors are individually continuous and provide much grander visual length, with the row of galleries forming an enfilade. As Marshall explains: “In response to the old building’s circulation problems we wanted to create a circulation that was seamless and that visitors wouldn’t have to think about.”

MCA’

'I think people are starting to have a little more respect for their lawns,

reports a significant increase in homeowner spending on lawn care products, from $6.5 billion to $8.5 billion between 1993 and 1998.

''If you're serious about your lawn, if you're an aficionado of grass, you refer to it as 'turf,'

Real lawn guys no longer call their lawn ''lawn,'

Despite environmental concern with pesticides and herbicides and a brief fling with prairies and meadows in the 1980's, many suburban males want their lawns to look like ballparks and putting greens.

lawn maintenance

In a development of similar new houses with mostly burnt, brown lawns lumpy from the excavator's backhoe, his is the really green, rolling, luxuriant one, the one with mowing lines like straight brush strokes up and down a fine piece of suede.

Robert Esernio

Cycling should mean a fitter population and a longer life expectancy, which would take pressure off the National Health Service and bring huge economic benefits. It would of course also reduce energy consumption.

Towards the end of my trip, it occurred to me that this explosion in cycling, ought to be put into an historic context, in order to enable the politicians and the public to recognize the scale of the opportunity, the change it might bring to our cities and our lives.

However, the real question is: will cycling actually change the city? Will it result in new urban forms or, as the title of Australian academic Dr Steven Fleming’s new book predicts, a “Cycle Space”? Like Fleming, I believe so. I believe that cycling might just be the catalyst for a 21st Century urban renaissance.

And the trend’s not anomalous to London: Wikipedia reports that there are 535 cycle-share schemes in 49 countries, employing more than half a million bikes worldwide.

There are now more than 8,000 Boris Bikes and 550+ docking stations in Central London.

London’s cycle hire scheme, named after mayor Boris Johnson – was the clearest indication to date that cycling was no longer just for a minority of fanatics but a healthy, efficient and sustainable mode of transport that city planners wanted in their armoury

Lucinda Hitchcock

Design history has long overlooked women in our narrative, despite continuously having a large group of women active in the field of graphic design over the past century.

I argue that sexism is somewhat less obvious in our workplace today, far subtler than it might have been in the 1950s and 60s, but perhaps we still accept some mores of old, underlying currents that flow through our design culture, much like that lecture in 2011.

Forty or fifty years ago, the workforce was overwhelmingly a man’s world. In the design field, many women may have been assistants or “office girls” and so few held the top titles, such as art director or creative director. In a basic sense, women’s careers have rarely followed the same path of men’s, since there has historically been immense pressure placed on women to be solely homemakers and nurture families

three hundred and twenty-three independent designers listed — twenty-two women

Women of Graphic Design

But why is retrospective accreditation important? And if it is getting better, do we need to keep talking about it? Tori Hinn, of Women of Graphic Design, talks through some of the issues facing women in the past, and regrettably, in our industry today. —

It is often discussed, academically and informally, that the presence of female designers missing from the history of graphic design is a sore oversight of the profession.

The Three Girls

The uneven textures and faded iridescence of Freer’s collection yield a modulation of tones that makes up for the wonted éclat of the glossy blues and whites. The arrangement of the pieces is random, without regard for provenance.

He closed the room’s three sets of tall shutters, and painted them and the walls Prussian blue and resonant blue-greens, gilded the shelving, covered the neo-Gothic ribbed ceiling (nearly fourteen feet high) in overlapping petals of Dutch metal (brass oxidizing to green and gold), and filled every incidental surface with freehand abstract patterns and images of peacocks in gold and blue. The whole plainly anticipates Art Nouveau, but without that style’s rote longueurs. It realizes a synesthetic fusion of dazzling spectacle and intimate touch, evoking music and something like a subliminal, ambrosial perfume.

Where Jeckyll had envisioned a sun-dappled Chinese pavilion—with walls covered in embossed and floral-patterned, bright-yellow leather

The Leyland bird is pompous and hectoring, with a breast of gold and platinum coins, windmilling wings, and an immense explosion of tail feathers; the Whistler bird poignantly droops, raising one wing in feeble defense

Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room,

A mania for things Asian raged in England then, in concert with the aestheticist movement—a reaction

a Liverpool shipowner who used the room’s wall shelves to display his vast collection of blue-and-white Chinese porcelains

Marshall O. Roberts.

Leutze

Through the centuries the painting has been criticized aesthetically and for historical shortcomings. (

American history, when on Christmas night in 1776 George Washington crossed the Delaware River with 2,500 troops in a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers.

But this is the centerpiece of the American collections.”

“It’s like the boat that was built in the basement

Washington Crossing the Delaware,