It's coming

Spring is in the neighbourhood. Plant Hamamelis x intermedia 'Diane' close to a window where you catch it every day and it'll bring tidings of spring even when snow covers the ground and warmth seems far away.

Trophies

My Darling have provided us with our fair share of roe deer skulls on plaques, and now they're all trendy. Time to put them up.

A wagon in the garden

Playhouse, gazebo, writer's hideout, allotment cottage, summer house... the possibilities are endless.

Remembering those gone

iTravel

It would certainly be travelling in style. Horse pulled bowtop, lavishly decorated. Mercifully slow and simple.

Shimmering red

Alvaret on Öland a rainy August weekend. The limestone's red glow felt almost alien. It's got a special feeling, Alvaret. I remember well when we were on Öland with the school when I was 9 years old how the colours vibrated, how I felt like running out in to the impressionist painting with the incredibly blue sky arching above. Even when the sky is dark grey and the rain is hammering it's incredibly colourful.

Saunders+Wilhelmsen+Åland

Yeah, I'm in the modernist camp. I'm no big fan of wooden houses but this one is really lovely. Linky to Wilhelmsen and linky to Saunders.

The domestic godess

Buy her books and use them. You won't be disappointed. It's not for those who have ideas about special diets which is going to save their life, but most of her recipes are generally okay health-wise, because she bases her cooking on Mediterranean food.

Gaudí

Still haven't been to Barcelona.

Papaver somniferum

Invite it in to your garden and it will stay with you for as long as you have that garden, popping up (pun intended) everywhere.

Spring porn

Prunus 'Accolade'.

Outside the box

We're so very used to having hard floors everywhere in our houses, insulated properly. It is possible to do it differently though. This house is in Japan, and part of the house has dirt floors where various plants thrive. If you're building a glazed extension of the house, consider something like this. Not only does it give a lush, more earthy feeling, but it gives a better in door climate in that part of the house.

Kurbits

Folklore colour shock.

Seved

Sevedsplan, Malmö.

A sea of gold

Church of light, Osaka

Tadao Ando is a Japanese architect who works with light a lot. Just a little light, given some structure, can create interesting and dramatic effects. The shifts in weather, how the sun moves through the gaps and what season we have gets so much more clear when the light is concentrated and cuts through a wall.

Not modernism

Makes me happy.

Blow your mind away

Never goes out of style.

Knowing your environment

Knowing the room you're going to work with is very important when you're working with any kind of architecture. A room can be vast and it can be tiny. No matter what you need to get a feel for it and understand it. The above are two pictures taken during a workshop I was part of during my years at SLU, when we worked with spaces. By moving around in the room, sitting still, using our own bodies to build structures, we learned how room structures work. It was a very interesting workshop in that it brought up a lot of things we tend to take for granted, or think we know, and we got insights in how room structures affects us and how we can affect a room, and change the impression of a space.

A good experience is to empty a room completely, move around in it, stand in different places and think about where you prefer to be and where you don't wish to be. Why is that? Bring the furniture back in, one at the time and place them carefully in the room, based on what you found out when the room was empty. You'll get a whole new room. It's a bit more difficult to do that in a garden, but it's still possible to feel the space and think about improvements.

Contemporary baroque

Tage Andersen definitely has a recognisable style. I'm not crazy about everything he does, but in the right context it works very well. This is from Rosenborgs Slot in Copenhagen, where this industrial baroque blends in quite nicely.