A Well Travelled Kitchen

I have to admit, we have a burgeoning globe collection. (We're at 3 or 4 -- Christmas introduced a tiny new vintage tin globe from 1926.) I have to admit, though, I never considered using them as kitchen decor.

Obviously I'm not creative enough, because they look incredible in this kitchen tour from AT's The Kitchn. (More pictures, including more globes, here.)



And more vintage style geekery -- the backsplash is made of yardsticks. (Doesn't it work well with the butcher block cabinets?) Here's the how-to.


The kitchen (& great ideas) belong to Ashley Ann. And if you're not envious enough, she did the whole kitchen facelift for $500.

Escher up the walls and outside

Yesterday's Escher inspired housing designs were boring compared to these...

A house in Toronto

A mural in a bathroom

Wallpaper in a restaurant

And molds for three wonderful concrete pavers, so you can make your own and tile a driveway or patio.

Escher on the Floor

Yesterday's library had a floor inspired by M.C. Escher, which made me wonder what else was out there modeled on Escher's work (even if he was too late to be steampunk).

The fundamental mathematics that make Escher's work suitable for floors (or walls) is that they are tessellations -- interlocking shapes that fill a plane. The easiest, and most popular, seems to be the cube tessellation that we saw yesterday. I found it done in concrete, in carpet, in parquet, and in stone tile.

concrete stain by Tom Ralston Concrete

Carpet at the Morgan's Hotel in NYC. Here's a similar rug.

Parquet at the Hotel Palomar

A quick review of the Sunshine City floor in Tokyo, above, makes it easy to see how to constuct this tessellation from simple squares. You need three colors. Four squares of the lightest makes up the top of the cube, and then each side is made up of one whole square with two half squares finishing it up. It's all done on a grid, so while you might get dizzy installing it, it wouldn't be too hard.

Tomorrow: even more Escher for the home.