Welcome to our newly revamped weekly Home & Garden Index, in which we let the folks interviewed by New York Times reporters about design, decorating, and architecture speak for themselves. Most weeks, this highly exacted and carefully controlled sociological study gives us a sense of how, exactly, the other half lives. Today's paper presents a more modest viewpoint than usual, however. Onward to the countdown!
10. Made by Bokja, a Lebanese company, they were upholstered with vintage and contemporary textile scraps, so “every piece of furniture tells a unique story,” she said, “because every piece of fabric comes from somewhere else.” [link]
9. “And for the first time in 19 months,” Ms. Berger said, “I felt like a human being.” [link]
8. “That’s one of the things I love about Michael,” she said. “He’s comfortable with my past. I don’t have to erase my past to be married to him.” [link]
7. “It’s nice living together,” she said. “You can drop by and have lunch. You can take a break and go to the park. Life is more spontaneous. And I’m comforted by having someone there at night.” [link]
6. “Those things would become things I played with, and today I present them in drawings. They are very simple, but very familiar objects everyone can relate to.” [link]
5. “Every time I went out, I took a trash bag and picked up the cans and kept a tally,” Mr. Diedricksen says. “It was something like $100. That went to the mom-and-pop printer.” [link]
4. “The idea was to see if I could build a homeless shelter for under $100,” Mr. Diedricksen says. “Or you could make it into a tree fort.” [link]
3. “The original idea, I had a brainstorm, how could you build something that one man could tow and pull and park but affordably and quickly,” Mr. Diedricksen says. “A lot of these were, what could I build for homeless people where they could sell their own street-wares, as outlandish as it sounds.” [link]
2. That spring, they bought the 8,000-square-foot house, built in the early 1900s by an English railroad executive, for about $300,000. “For the size and the price, it was amazing,” Ms. Webster said. [link]
1. “We had a low budget,” said Mr. Buday, 45. And given the size of the house, “we had to be very careful.” [link]