Why a 22-centimetre-deep bookshelf beats a 30-centimetre one for actual reading.
Most bookshelves are too deep. The thirty-centimetre standard fits twice as many books and reads as half a library. A shallower shelf forces…
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Issue No. 24 — Spring
Slow rooms, soft hands, warm light.
We don't decorate. We compose. Three years of weekend projects, paint chips on the floor, and rooms that actually feel like home.
FIG. 01
Garden, late afternoon.
The long read
Lavender in pots through a wet Lisbon winter — what worked. Three terracotta pots, the smaller variety of English lavender, gritty soil, and the thing nobody mentions about overwintering: drainage saves more plants than warmth.
Three lavender plants, two of which made it through their first winter. We changed two things on the third — and now all three come back every May.
Recent writing
The under-stair cupboard we built by hand on a long weekend.
Under-stair voids are sold as wasted space because nobody bothers to fit them. A weekend of careful joinery later, ours holds a vacuum, a to…
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How a brass key-hook collection grew, slowly, into a wall.
We have eight brass key hooks, none of them matching, all of them found at flea markets over four years. The wall they live on is the only t…
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Re-grouting our bathroom on a Saturday — and the small things that made it look new.
Our bathroom needed a renovation we could not afford. We re-grouted instead. One Saturday, fifteen euros, and the room looks five years youn…
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Testing four whites in real light — what we got wrong before.
We picked the wrong white twice and a third time was guaranteed to be expensive. Four tester pots and a weekend of light-watching saved us f…
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A serving tray from oak off-cuts and a single afternoon.
We had three short pieces of oak in the off-cut bin and a Saturday with no plans. By dinner the tray was glued. By morning it was carrying c…
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