Modern Home Decoration

Some people specialize in preserving the rare and valuable, such as endangered animals, antique books, or important paintings. Washington, D.C., custom builder Tom Glass focuses on saving an equally diminishing and beloved commodity: old houses. Growing up in southeastern Ohio, he fell in love with the area’s declining 19th-century housing stock, and that passion never left him. He’s devoted his 30-year-old business, Glass Construction, to renovating and restoring Washington’s rich trove of historic residences.

Several years ago Glass purchased a property in Virginia’s pastoral Rappahannock County, with the thought of one day finding an old house he could move there to use as his weekend residence.

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Amsterdam designer Andreas Kowalewski has created a series of lamps shaped like mushrooms.

The Fungi Lamp is made of nylon webbing that has been wound around a mould and bonded with glue.

The lamps come in three different colours and heights.

More lighting on Dezeen »

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Here’s a tiny bit of text from Kowalewski:

The FUNGI LAMPs are made out of a nylon webbing, bonded together through a special glue technique. With

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UK-based GEAR4, a company better known for its iPod and iPhone audio docks, today announced the U.S. availability of its UnityRemote that turns an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad into a universal remote control. To get around the fact these Apple devices don’t pack an infrared transmitter, the GEAR4 setup consists of an app available for free from the iTunes Store and a small cylindrical device that receives a Bluetooth signal from an iOS device and then sends an infrared command to control the various components of your home entertainment setup.

GEAR4 says the cylindrical IR transmitter, which is powered by three AA batteries, can be placed anywhere in a room thanks to five infrared transmitters within the device providing 360 degrees of coverage. T

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Tesfaye Tessema at New York’s Skoto Gallery in Chelsea December 9

Art is at the top of my holiday wish list. And one of the best ways to find affordable, museum-quality paintings is by discovering young, emerging talent or rediscovering an established master with a museum track record. That’s why I can’t wait for Thursday, December 9, when Tesfaye Tessema, a native of Ethiopia who lives in Harlem, unveils his newest work at New York’s Skoto Gallery (529 West 20^th Street). The artist caught my eye several years ago, but he has a following among top gallerists, museum curators and serious collectors. The G

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To some, simplifying means downsizing. But for San Francisco designer/builder Loring Sagan, it means combining his professional and personal lives into one cavernous building. He runs his varied business ventures—an architecture firm, a real estate redevelopment company, and a pottery studio—out of a 6,000-square-foot former bakery. It’s an industrial space lined with desks and lit by a large skylight, but built into the soaring atrium is a pied-à-terre whose kitchen/dining area doubles as an office conference room. “My wife and I don’t live in the apartment full time, but I take a nap here almost every day,” Sagan says.

After 20 years of building resort homes in Tahoe City, Calif., Sagan had begun searching for work space in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, a once-seedy district on its way to becoming the cultural corridor it is today. The grun

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