This story category covers home decor, home maintenance, garden design and garden maintenance.

Origami Boxes Cover Coloured LED String LIghts - Casey Phaisalakani

Make Easy Origami Cubes For String Lights

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Easy to make origami boxes add depth, elegance and fun to LED and other string lights.

Origami Boxes Cover Coloured LED String LIghts - Casey Phaisalakani

 

BEAUTIFUL & EASY | We’ve used a combination of origami light cubes and bare LED bulbs (in a ratio of 1 boxed light to three bare bulbs) on every Christmas tree we’ve decorated in the last dozen years. The origami boxes produce beautiful, diffuse squares of light, something you don’t normally see on a Christmas tree. Some years we’ve chosen to box only white string lights, but mostly we box multi-coloured ones. To make our boxes, we worked with vellum squares (available at art supply stores or online) that deepen and intensify whatever colour light they cover. Read more

Live Christmas Tree - Clinton Hussey

Find Eco Friendly Christmas Trees

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Here’s our 2011 guide to finding the eco-friendliest Christmas trees in and around Metro Vancouver.

Live Christmas Tree - Clinton Hussey

 

HOLIDAY 2011 | While artificial trees come in hues to match your decor, real Christmas trees are green in more than colour. They are a renewable crop often grown on land unsuitable for cultivating much else, they remove carbon from the air while they’re growing, and they can be chipped for mulch after use. Here are three ways to get an eco-friendly green tree this Christmas. Read more

An Attractive Way To Cover Over Ugly Tiles

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Pebble Tile is a shockingly easy and highly attractive way to cover over ugly old fireplace tiles.

 

DO IT YOURSELF | Before I moved back into my 1920s home, I had a lovely tenant with impeccable taste who lived there for several years. When she asked if she could repaint, I gladly gave her and her decorator the go ahead, and they mostly did a great job respecting the original design.

My heart sank though when I discovered that she had also painted the tiles on the fireplace surround and hearth. The results looked cheap and more than a little tacky. I was prepared for major expense and a big mess to replace the tiles. Read more

Secrets Of The Stars: Luciano Guibbilei

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The gardens of international superstar Luciano Guibbilei are filled with great ideas both for people who love to work in gardens and for people who just love to look at them.

 

FREE & AMAZING | I’ve collected lots of garden design books over the years, and one of my all-time favourites is a 1971 black and white photo essay on Villa Gamberaia. I’ve never visited this surprisingly sculptural 17th century garden in Florence, and although I’d love to see it, I feel like Hungarian architect Balthazar Korab’s photographs already capture Gamberaia’s startlingly dramatic moods and educate me in ways no single visit ever could.

I pulled Korab’s book from the shelf recently when I realized that several of his photos had been used in Luciano Giubbilei’s 2010 picture book The Gardens of Luciano Giubbilei. Giubbilei, a garden design rock star in England who will be giving a FREE LECTURE in Vancouver on November 19, traces his passion for the style of gardens he makes to a stint in the trenches at Gamberaia and a gift of Korab’s book. Read more

Hedge, France - Ron Rule

Choosing A Hedge: Which One + Why

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Hedging is one of the most versatile and cost-effective green materials you can use to carve up a garden.

Hedge, France - Ron Rule

 

MONEY WELL SPENT | Carving up the garden into outdoor rooms has been so popular over the past 20 years that some designers believe it’s time to retire the idea, but I think it still has value, especially for a small plot where a wide-open design has the potential to be anticlimactic. Garden rooms create opportunities for mysterious and surprising moments, and walls made of hedging material are the easiest, least expensive and most natural way to fashion these kinds of spaces. Read more

Anthropologie

The Look For Less: Anthropologie Home

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How to get an Anthropologie free-spirited, lived-in bohemian interior without the Anthropologie price.

Anthropologie

SHOPPING AROUND | What do French flea markets, mom-and-pop vintage furniture shops, Mildred Pierce’s kitchen, gypsy caravans, peasant-made pottery and every fabric bazaar in India have in common? Nothing, really—or everything, if you’re the man who shops the world to create the “look” associated with American megabrand Anthropologie, the fashion and furnishings lifestyle chain.

While Anthropologie is foremost a fashion emporium, its home décor products—which include furniture, lighting, hardware, rugs, curtains, wall coverings, bedding and housewares—have such a cult following the company opened a number of “decorator concept shops” in select U.S. stores to help customers put together “a signature Anthropologie interior”—a look that, despite its “free-spirited, lived-in bohemian overtones,” doesn’t come cheap. Read more

Appliance Buyers Guide Wolf 36" Gas Range

Pro-Style Wolf Ranges At Super Low Prices

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Vancouver’s Dirty Apron Cooking School is selling its commercial-style ranges at an appetizingly low price.

 

 

 

STEAL THIS STOVE (01.11.11) | Ever since the late 1970s, when homeowners first began to modify their kitchens to install authentic commercial ranges, the Wolf brand has been the go-to for serious home cooks. Wolf Gourmet, the company’s “commercial-style” home model (introduced in 1987), is a heavy-duty appliance with features that please both amateurs and pros. This is one of the reasons that two years ago chef David Robertson chose it as the teaching machine for students at Vancouver’s Dirty Apron Cooking School—that and the fact he has cooked successfully on Wolf commercial ranges for ages. Read more

Hunting For Ghost Chairs Repro Or Real

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High or low, original or repro, there is more than one way to track down Philippe Starck’s iconic chair that isn’t there.

 

SHOPPING AROUND | If asked to select one chair to represent the first decade of 21st century design, a lot of interior designers would point to the instantly recognizable Louis Ghost chair. Designed by Philippe Starck and introduced to the world in 2002, this elegant item, made of high-impact thermoplastic, is a cleaned-up contemporary take on another icon, the ornate 18-century French Louis XV chair. Read more

Undecorate Interior - Melanie Acevedo

It’s Time To Give Undecorating A Shot

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Today’s most fashionable interiors reflect the quirks and passions of the people who live in them. Welcome to the world of undecorating.

Undecorate InteriorDÉCOR TREND ALERT | In the world of interior design, undecorating is enjoying a moment. Undecorating, for the uninitiated, is what happens when stylish people forgo convention in favour of fearlessness, expressing their own eclectic, eccentric, creative, adventurous sides in the way they beautify their homes. The bible for the movement, published this past March, is Undecorate: The No-Rules Approach to Interior Design by Christiane Lemieux, a Canadian expat living in Manhattan. She is also the creative force behind DwellStudio, an immensely successful online emporium for modern décor that includes Lemieux’s own covetable textiles and bedding. Read more

Distilled White Vinegar - C. Phaisalakani

Ordinary & Amazing: Vinegar Cleans Up Good

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When it comes to certain kinds of cleaning jobs, distilled white vinegar really is the liquid miracle it’s touted to be.

Distilled White Vinegar - C. Phaisalakani

 

THIS STUFF WORKS | What is it about ordinary distilled white vinegar that encourages list making? Google “vinegar” and you’ll see what I mean. Here are a few of the crazy numbers vinegar lovers throw around in their effort to woo you to their website:  “74 Little Known Uses For Vinegar,” “1001 Things To Do With Vinegar” and, I kid you not, “A Billion Bitchen Things To Do With Vinegar.” Read more