Recycle the waste from Fanapi

A close view of my dear new dining table

Taiwan has 2 big nature enemies---Earthquake and typhoon. 

We are so used to have these 2 enemies attacking us we get worried if they don't show up for too long. Like this year, the radio stations keep broadcasting that we have to watch out!! Because we haven't get any typhoon this summer! If the typhoon comes during this autumn it must be a HUGEEEE disaster! We are so deeply damaged by all the bad typhoons and earthquake, we never think positive when it comes to typhoons, I never hear anyone in Taiwan says " Yes! we won't have typhoon attacking us this year!"

So, everyone in Taiwan now is extra worry about this upcoming Typhoon---Fanabi.

This is our first typhoon this year and the weather forecast is panicking. We are informed that this typhoon is so powerful we have to prepare for any disasters cause by either too much rain or too windy or just too much ....

Under this scary atmosphere, B and I still decide to go to studio today, we have to finish all the work in 2 days and take off to Sweden, we get no choice but risking our lives!!

Mr/Ms. Fanapi typhoon seems not that powerful as we expected in Taipei city, maybe it damages lots other cities in Taiwan but it simply feels like a rainy and windy day in Taipei.

But when we are on the way home [we can walk home from studio, I think that is the best work out for me~] We found this...

A lot of tree branches are blowed away! Poor trees!

Poor bicycles and trees are falling everywhere, I cann't believe their owners just leave their bicycles outside on a typhoon day .

I decide to make those poor tree branches a happy ending of their lives !!

I love this small vase I bought at Nordiska galleriet in Stockholm 2 month ago. They are handmade and each one naturally look slightly different from the other.

I put the rest of the branches into my the other beloved Royal Copenhagen vase.

My gift from Fanapi Typhoon.

This is what I have been doing.

Here is my line: LazyWife--talking about design out of experience!

A lot of people are asking what's our next step, to be honest, we also have no idea at this moment, hahaa. Who knows? Maybe it will lead us somewhere? Here is little preview about lazywifeNO1--the whole process and design features demo are under development.

I designed my dinning table! Lazy wife product line

When we bought this apartment, we were sooooo excited to find out what kind of furniture we want to put in here. We had the IKEA home back in USA so we were so looking forward to have something unique and personal this time. Unfortunately, we found that the furniture we likeed were either too expensive for what it was or just not good enough to our expectation. So we started to find the furniture shops can deliver our own design in Taiwan.


My series called " Lazy wife" simply because I am one lazy wife,hahaa.


To get married and to maintain a life style is hard especially for a career driven woman  and this is a interesting issue for me to discuss and to find out a better way of marriage living through the furniture.


This dinning table is the third piece of this line and I like it bit more than other two because I am clear about what I want  when I design it.


Here are the pictures we took in the factory couple days ago, it is on the way to deliver to us! 

sofa!!

Sofa pix are coming soon~~

Here you can sneak a peek of THE sofa!!

 

Customization---easier say than done

Back in Los Angeles, during the school time, we had a complete IKEA home. We swore so many times that we won't  do it any more once we graduated.
Easier say then done.....sign....We still shopped in Ikea when we lived in Stockholm and Taiwan. Please don't get me wrong, there were many good design pieces in Ikea but it was like you picked up some Lego pieces from the same toy box and trying to arrange them in a slightly different way than other people did. 

Customization was the key to us in this project in order to create something new but what we got from the workers is big"NO !!"  They told us either " it's too expensive!" " too much trouble" " you will regret" or simply " WE DON'T DO THINGS THAT WAY !"

The rules we set for this remodeling projects are:
1. Use as many local materials as possible.
2. Design as many parts as we can

So, Here is the first part we made under these 2 rules.
I liked the old American hexagon shaped tiles but it was too small and impossible to find in Taiwan:

I also was thinking about using marble as tiles because the entire East-North coast mountain in Taiwan is marble. Green material! Oh yeah~~
2009 when B's parents visited us we went hiking there ---Taroko, Taiwan. It was beautiful~

So I combined two things I like and made 5cmx5cm Hexagon shaped marble tiles and they looked great.
We used them in the kitchen and master bathroom

More Sketches in baby-step speed!!

First time to sketch for a space was not easy to me...

I found that I lack of the sense of the real space proportion in my apartment especially because we have low celling and meanwhile I was trying to think about the thickness, relation between objects and users, materials and finishing in a larger scale at the same time. The strange thing was although all the process sounded really like any other design tasks but interior design was somehow too different to me compared to design a car. I was like an adult got trapped in a baby's body and tried to run....

Here are some examples that I started to planned out the space and doodled out some ideas about living room and my walking closet.

And---SKETCH!

After deciding the floor plan, I started to sketch up some ideas of how I want the space looked like. Sketch! Almost my favorite part of the designing [ OK, I actually love to see the final products the most.] I started with rough sketches to figure out how many items I want

to put in the space and how the aesthetic gonna be .

We both thought putting color themes into different spaces especially we won't have obvious walls in between the areas. As a cooking antreprenor, I sketched the open kitchen first. When I picked up the makers to shade the sketch, I thought about BLUE ---I imaged using a kind of wood dyed with deep and rich blue paired with stainless steel top!

Cooking station + Kitchen counter