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Architecture 2 Mins Read

Modern House Inspired by The Sea-Nautilus House

A young couple with two children from Mexico City who after living in a conventional home wanted to change to one integrated to nature. This amazing house was build in 2006 by Arquitectura Orgánica. The goal of this project was to make it feel like an internal inhabitant of a snail, like a mollusk moving from one chamber to another, like a symbiotic dweller of a huge fossil maternal cloister.  It’s more of a sculpture than a dwelling.

Taking cues from a Nautilus shell, the house is put together using ferrocement construction, a technique involving a frame of steel-reinforced chicken wire with a special two-inch-thick composite of concrete spread over it, resulting in a structure that’s earthquake-proof and maintenance-free. The open concept inside the house is dominated by smooth surfaces, spiral stairs and natural plantings that makes the inhabitants feel like they’re living inside a snail who swallowed the entire contents of somebody’s back yard. While the house is surrounded on three sides by the bustling Mexico City, its West side has a breathtaking view of the mountains. This interior “grass carpet” is just amazing, leading residents and guests through a network of stone paths to the various areas of the home. The bathroom is simply amazing. In it, you actually feel like you’re under water with the sandy walls, gorgeous blue tiles and the window overhead.  Wow. Maybe someday all houses will be made this way.

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Architecture 2 Mins Read

Rooms In Prison Cell and Comfort In Prison

There is a very voyeuristic part of us that loves to see the inner workings of other people’s homes and Juergen Chill’s photographs feed that interest. His unexpected vantage point and subject matter takes this into a whole new realm.  Apartment Therapy is a place to discuss and discover ways in which to make the space in which you live healthy, beautiful, and functional. Juergen Chill is entering into “personal, intimate locations which not many know,” that stray from the norm, by many standards. By photographing rooms in bordellos and prison cells, he is giving us a glimpse into rooms that are appointed with things other than what we may consider typical motivations for decor.

We can take lightly take the freedom to choose how our surroundings appear. There are many people, however, that don’t have the freedom to exert much control at all. “Those that do not have it must adjust to whatever opportunities exist and strive to create their own place.” Juergen Chill has entered into the “homes” of prisoners in Germany, and given us a unique perspective on the rooms in which they spend a great deal of their lives. In a parallel universe, Chill has also granted us a peek at the rooms within a bordello. Clearly, the inspiration for the decor in these rooms may be different from what most consider. All of Chill’s photographs are done from a unique aerial perspective, and are at once intriguing and unsettling. Take a look at more of Juergen Chill’s fascinating work here. Investigate the rooms of others, and enjoy the graphic nature of his photographs.

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Bedroom 5 Mins Read

Top 10 Unique Pillows For Your Home

Pillows can be used to freak people out, as a conversation starter, or to simply accent a piece of furniture. I have collected some of the strangest pillows, and possibly you will find a pillow that matches a friend or relative’s personality or interests. Some of the following pillows are really weird and some of them are just plain cool. Either way, I hope that you find a pillow in the price range and style that you have been looking for.  Take a look at some of coolest pillows ever.

1.Blood Puddle Pillow

If your idea of a good time is tricking people into thinking you’ve been shot, these blood puddle pillows are perfect for you. Well, not completely perfect, because I don’t know how many people out there would believe your blood was made out of pillow. I know I would, but I also believe Abraham Lincoln was a part time astronaut.

2.Alarm Clock Pillow

The glo Pillow is an alternative to the traditional alarm clock. It was designed with teammate Eoin McNally in response to a brief to create a product which helps to combat the pressures of a “24 hour” lifestyle.
The pillow uses an LED fabric substrate below the surface to wake the user using light. This substrate also functions as a display, showing the time on the pillows surface using the grid of LEDs below.

3.Boy Friend Pillow

Wrap yourself up around the Boyfriend Body Pillow. This boyfriend arm pillow is a soft body pillow that looks like the torso of a man with a comforting arm that cuddles and holds you throughout the night. Feel safe and warm sleeping comfortably on his chest. This original pillow can become a great gift for a friend or relative with a good sense of humor that would love to have a little more cuddling at night. You will enjoy the comfort and warmth this body pillow gives and also the way that he wraps around you and holds you all through the night without snoring or saying a word. It is as if he knows exactly what you lik.

4.Girl Friend Lap Pillow

The Girlfriend Lap Pillow. A creative pillow design which allows one to sleep on the lap of a lady.  A pillow called the “Lap Pillow” will be released. It is a pillow imitating a woman’s legs made from urethane foam. Just like I’m sure you understand as you look at the picture, this product has quite an impact. Although it’s a pillow, it’s wearing a skirt. Not just any skirt — a tight miniskirt, even.

5.Tissue dispensing Pillow

It’s good to see that crying is finally receiving some recognition in the design world, even though the fabulous German innovator Design 3000, lists the ThenCry pillow as a “First Aid” product! What better “treatment” for crying than the warmth of a cozy pillow that dispenses tissues. A crying pillow is so comforting, like a teddy bear, only more huggable. Everyone needs a special pillow for low times… especially if they don’t have to go searching for a box of tissues, which is so disruptive to a good cry! Children should always have a ThenCry in their rooms wherever they throw themselves when things don’t go their way.

6.Rock Pillow

This is your opportunity to bring nature indoors in one of the most unique and exciting ways.  Whether creating your own indoor Rock Garden, or turning a child’s playroom into an imaginative wonderland; with these unique designer pillows you can create your fantasy.  There are many ways to show off and enjoy these stylish throw pillows.  Amazing in their simplicity.  Shockingly realistic.  Surprisingly comfortable.

7.Pizza Pillow

This Pizza Pillow is certain to wake your taste buds, made of high quality printing on a round polyester shell, stuffed with polyester filling. Measuring 12″ diameter, pizza pillow features the pizza toppings on one side, while the back resembles the pizza crust view from the bottom.  The Pizza Pillow design is a cute one for pizza lovers and food lovers as a whole. It may not give you a pick of your own pizza toppings, but it does provide the ability to have your own Pizza pie with you even while you sleep.

8.i Sleep Laptop Pillow

In past we have seen ‘Comfy Pillow While Working On A Laptop’ and ‘The Napbook: The Laptop Bag That’s Also A Pillowcase’. And now we have i-Sleep by Ivonne Dippmann. Here we have a comfortable soft i-Sleep pillow with which you can sleep on your laptop. i-Sleep pillow can be attached on top of your laptop. If you feel sleepy, just close your laptop, and a pillow gets filled with warm air, music is being played and after 10 minutes the alarmclock rings. Now this is something which most of us need!

9.Emotion Pillow

The Emoticon pillow set is good for expressing your feelings when you are around your loved ones at home. You can throw an emoticon at someone  if you want to make them aware of your mood! Or when you want to make a statement. You can even keep them handy around your desk. The emoticons are so cute that you really feel like hugging them. You can use them to decorate your room, your car or even your work area to cheer things up  a bit. Each Emoticon Pillow is approximately the size of the palm of your hand, so they’re good for keeping around your desk and you can rest your face on them when you need a short and quick break form your work or your computer monitor.

10.Alt-Ctrl-Del Pillow

Reboot your livingroom with this three pillow set. Light gray pillows look as if they’ve jumped right off your keyboard. Set of three pillows. Made from Eco-Felt  these 12″ pillows are soft yet durable. Backs have envelope enclosures so the pillow inserts can be removed for easy washing. Machine wash cold with like colors then tumble dry on low.

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Architecture 2 Mins Read

Amazing Design Wooden House by Robert Harvey Oshatz

This beautiful house is located in Portland, Oregon. The impressive design has been making for seven years, since 2004. When it just was a simple scratch on drawinng board. It is made by Robert Harvey Oshatz, an architect that involve a lots of his time in making of this wooden house. People around the world like it and and every single of them have different explanation of this . A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior. One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

This home was referred to as the Wilkinson Wave House by HGTV Extreme Living. You can see the waves, circles and cylinders, mimicking nature and music. The copper clad roof runs around the courtyard and is turned down to define the entrance. To enter this home, a person walks down a steep driveway and through a small courtyard. The floor then continues out over the slope as the ground rapidly drops away.

This home speaks to all of the senses. Being built on such a steep slope with the living spaces extended onto a deck, heightens the feeling of living in the forest canopy. By the time a person reaches the cantilevered deck amongst the trees, the floor level is about 25 feet above the ground.

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Architecture 3 Mins Read

Chinese Amazing Hakka Houses

In 2008, UNESCO dubbed China’s Hakka Houses as an official World Heritage Site, noting the historic, cultural and architectural value of these amazing structures.  Constructed from the 12th century up through the 20th, these buildings housed up to 800 people each, a city within a city that provided it’s inhabitants with safety, shelter and community.  Also known as Fujian Tulou, there are 20,000 of these structures across the Fujian province of China, a large section of coastal China across the sea from Taiwan. The Fujian Tolou are an important part of this province’s history, as these buildings were designed to protect their inhabitants from roaming bandits and warlords.  The typical tulou is a three to five story structure comprised of a thick earthen wall  with a single entrance that was protected by a 4″ thick solid wooden door and an iron gate.  At the roof level, the tulou were dotted with gun holes to ward off attacking intruders.

Aesthetically, these buildings capture the spirit and beauty of rural China. Visually, these structures are decidedly Chinese in nature, with clay tiled roofs, wooden framing, stone walkways and earthen walls. The very small round building has about 12 to 18 rooms, the small ones have 21 to 28 rooms, the medium ones have about 30 to 40 rooms, the large ones have about 42 to 58 rooms, and the super large round buildings have about 60 to 72 rooms.

Two-third of the round building are 3 stories high and hold roughly 20 families or 100 people. The round earth building is a “group-oriented” residence, usually with one main entrance. Its wall is usually around 1 meter thick. The main entrance door is padded with iron sheet and is locked by 2 horizontal wood bars. The wooden bars retract into the walls in order to open the door. In the event the wood bars are sawed through, the locking mechanism is still intact.

Inside the entrance is a huge central courtyard where all the doors of the rooms and inner windows are open to. At the ground level except the hall and the staircases, the rooms are used as kitchens and dining rooms. The rooms on the second floor are used for storage. The rooms on the 3rd level are used as bedrooms. The rooms in each level are identical. In front of each room, there is an open round hallway and usually there are 4 staircases to move from one level to another. A typical room is about 10-13 square meter in size. The larger round earth building has room around 15 square meters. The windows facing outside tends to be small, with the window size at the outer wall smaller and the window size at the inner wall larger enabling wider surveillance from the inside. It is extremely hard for outsiders to come in through the windows. There is usually no window at the ground level.

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Home Decor 3 Mins Read

Wooden Roof Tiles Covered With Lawn, Norwegian roof

In Norway, the main construction material has always been a tree. High insulating properties of wood allows you to build a good and warm home. Norwegian houses are distinctive in complicated weather conditions. This is of particular interest in Norwegian housing. Like all of the Scandinavian countries, Norway is surrounded by lush nature. Scandinavians are proud that they use elements of nature rather than conquer it. Roofs in Norway have long been covered with turf, which provides excellent protection from frost and winds. Among other things, they also have vegetation on roofs as part of their landscape. These days’ roofs of modern buildings are covered with grass making it a green roof. Companies like Colorado Roof Toppers have seen an increase in green roofs the last few years.

A sod roof or turf roof is a traditional Scandinavian type of green roof covered with sod on top of several layers of birch bark on gently sloping wooden roof boards. Until the late 19th century it was the most common roof on rural log houses in large parts of Scandinavia. Its distribution roughly corresponds to the distribution of the log building technique in the architecture of Finland and the Scandinavian Peninsula. The load of approximately 250 kg per m² of a sod roof is an advantage because it helps to compress the logs and make the walls more draught-proof. In winter the total load may well increase to 400 or 500 kg per m² because of snow.  Sod is also a reasonably efficient insulator in a cold climate. The birch barks underneath ensures that the roof will be waterproof.

A sod roof or turf roof is a traditional Scandinavian type of green roof covered with sod on top of several layers of birch bark on gently sloping wooden roof boards. Until the late 19th century it was the most common roof on rural log houses in large parts of Scandinavia. Its distribution roughly corresponds to the distribution of the log building technique in the vernacular architecture of Finland  and the Scandinavian peninsula. The load of approximately 250 kg per m² of a sod roof is an advantage because it helps to compress the logs and make the walls more draught-proof. In winter the total load may well increase to 400 or 500 kg per m² because of snow.  Sod is also a reasonably efficient insulator in a cold climate. The birch bark underneath ensures that the roof will be waterproof.

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