Interior design

Soft-geometry, established in 2019 by Indian designers Utharaa L Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary, creates collectible furniture and objects that serve as poignant reflections on the universal yearning for softness in an often harsh world. With the narrative backdrop of Zacharias and Chaudhary’s own experiences of living and working between cultures in India and the US, soft-geometry’s objects explore the suspension between contemporary geometries and ritualistic hand-building inspired by Indian craft traditions.

A brief exploration of “BANAL” MODULARITY VS “RADICAL” MODULARITY:

Banal Modularity can still LOOK and FEEL very gorgeous, you know?, and ADAPT to suit new arrangement needs. So it’s like, “boom! My sofa is now two chairs!”, or a Chadwick sofa that is super-curvy-snaking, twirling, goes-around-a-pole, etc. etc.

But, Radical Modularity is present when you can, like, do something that maybe the Capital-D Designer of the thing didn’t anticipate. THAT is not “ADAPT”-ing, that is “INDIVIDUATED F*CKERY”. And the benefit of that is clear: it’s Highly Personal; and, it reveals you as a person who can think LATERALLY.

How Many Plants was built by a particularly passionate houseplant obsessive, but it's here for all plant parents, seasoned enthusiasts and first-timers alike. By cutting through the disparate and often contradictory advice that seems to grow like weeds around all corners of the internet, HMP strives for clarity. With confidence-boosting plant guides and deep dives into everything from what we mean when we say "bright indirect light" to a very-calm-totally-not-freaking-out identification of the little critters ailing your plants, HMP is here to help you on your journey to plant-based happiness!

Hand-in-hand with a passion for plants comes a love for design. With an eye for interiors, each plant guide highlights handy cues for narrowing in on the "big frilly leaf with wide-load growth potential" perfect for that cozy corner of your bedroom.

Of course, décor is not instant, not flat. It is produced as reactions to one’s interests and personal version of The World, and is also - at its best – the result of time passing and EVOLVING desires and things being accumulated to fill the emotional and practical needs of the time / a time.

The apartment I’ve lived in this past year quite frankly and very succinctly encompasses everything I kind of hate about architecture, about design, about the ways people in the profession are expected to live their lives for the benefit and the consumption of others.

...We weren’t using the apartment the right way; namely, we didn’t decorate or live like an architecture critic and a mathematician theoretically should. Our apartment wasn’t photogenic. There were too many bikes in the living room. We still had a garbage $300 Wayfair sofa that felt like sitting on cardboard. There was clutter. This beautiful apartment wasn’t meant for our kind of ordinary and this was made known several times in subtle and rather degrading ways, after which our lease was not renewed, to the relief of all parties involved. Even if it meant moving again.

The longer I lived in the apartment, the more I hated it, the more I realized that I had been fooled by nice finishes and proximity to transit into thinking it was a good apartment. As soon as we’d got in there, things started to, well, not work...All of the niceness, the glitzy brand names, the living materials were not meant for everyday use, even by gentle individuals like ourselves. They were made solely for looking at, as though that were the point of all habitation.

NOTABLY, the airport:

1. Has mastered the meditative “OUTWARD FACING CHAIR” arrangement
2. Skillfully, and uniquely blends upscale Suburban décor with genuine ‘industrial’
3. Makes sense of the most hideous floors (and if you can do it is a great prize!)

...What is particularly curious about the airport is that usual linear progression of time feels suspended. Which means, they are spaces that are:

= deeply contemplative and existential

And, ergo really give us a fresh sense of how we, individually, operate because

= airport time is essentially “FREE TIME”, because regular time has “stopped”

Once you spend enough time in either of these domains, you also start seeing a world that feels like a secret place that most others don’t experience. I’ll admit that I scrutinize a restaurant’s choice in foliage a little more than I should — what plants they have, where they are, and whether they look healthy. Similarly, I can’t help but notice whether any care has been taken with the menu’s typography and the interior design decisions. I fully recognize how ridiculous this is, but I still find myself having to resist those details from coloring my overall experience.

A FRANKENCHAIR is characterized by its construction from disparate chairs or incorporation of non-chair elements to form a singular “CHAIR” with a distinctive and unconventional composition that is ABSOLUTELY better than the sum of its parts.

In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.

Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.

...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.

In the digital age, physical maps had been widely expected to die out, since people could easily track their every move as dots on screens. But instead, interest has intensified.

...Cartographic décor can help sate fundamental human needs to feel oriented. “Maps are inherently trusted — there’s something about them that makes people feel secure,” said PJ Mode, a map scholar and collector who is donating his holdings to Cornell University. His main focus is “persuasive cartography”: maps meant to sway public opinion, for instance by advocating abolition in the early 1800s, or women’s suffrage or warmongering in the 1910s. Mr. Mode likes to quote what the writer and aviator Beryl Markham imagined that maps wanted to say to their users: “follow me closely, doubt me not. … Without me, you are alone and lost.”

Christopher Alexander is so wild. 80% of his ideas about home design make me go "wow, how come I never thought about it before?", and then he'll randomly come up with something like putting guest alcoves in your master bedroom so that you can all have big sleepovers together.

1. Generally speaking, SINGLE-COLOR interiors are a true delight; WE SHALL EXAMINE WHY THEY CAN WORK and WHY POO-BEIGE IS A (CURRENT) EXCEPTION
2. Particularly speaking, we shall investigate THE COLOR RED, for the reason that it has the LONGEST WAVELENGTH OF HUMAN-VISIBLE LIGHT i.e. expends the least energy in getting places, which is an approach to existence we currently APPRECIATE