Workspace dreams

When you're suposed to use most of your day sitting by your computer you start wishing you had a good chair, nice table and proper lighting. Right now I really don't. These pieces from Design Whithin Reach have been tickling my fancy lately.

Dordoni worktop table


Eames aluminium management chair

Tolomeo desk lamp

More from Istanbul...

On my trip to Istanbul I read in some magazine about a Turkish photographer Levent Özcelik and his new book "On a Winter Day, (If) I... - A Day in Istanbul". It has beautiful pictures and texts on Istanbul in wintertime.

I didn't have time to look for it in bookstores and the only net shops I can find it in are in Turkish. But I found the pictures and texts at artist's web page in the "projects" part. Here are some...

"I can't exactly remember which day's tomorrow or which evening's preparation it was. What's the matter anyway? It was a winter day and I was in a mood like saying '(if) I were really me, I would just leave home and wander around the city'."

Pictures and quote by Levent Özcelik


I'm definitely going to try and get my hands on that book.

Secto Design

Birch is such a common material in finnish design furniture (for example by Alvar Aalto) but not at all that usual in lighting. I find these lamps by Seppo Koho really beautiful. Secto Design manufactures also floor, table and wall lighting but the ones I like best are these pendant lights.

Secto 4200 (left) and Octo 4240 (right)

Victo 4250

Such a big part of the magic of these lamps is the way they look when lit and the kind of shadows that they throw.

In my opinion even this picture doesn't really do them justice but I hope you can kind of see what I mean. It's from Restaurant Kastanj in Oslo.

All pictures from Secto Design.

Some Strange Activity

Okay so first of all I have been blogging way too much today. (I really have some actual work to do but I just can't get started...)

Anyway, a minute ago I checked how much visitor activity my blog has had lately and the amount of visitors has increased about tenfold today from normal average. That's a bit odd isn't it? Even odder is that all the extra visits are from all around US and results of google search of "city at latitude 60 degrees" or something similar. So what in the world has made the Americans google our latitude so frantically? If you know and/or are one of those googlers, please let me know! This really intrigues me, I feel as if I'm cracking the Da Vinci code or something.

Picture: perso.orange.fr

(I only just came up with doing the same google search myself to see if I find some answers there. I seem to be a little slow today... I still have my holiday brain on.)

Tin Can Mania

Lisa at Mitt lilla hus had a post about her tin can collection the other day. It inspired me to share mine with the world as well. These are just the ones I managed to "smuggle" to Sweden as the biggest part of my collection remains on the other side of the Bothnian Bay. Once they have all been reunited later this year there will propably be another post on the subject...

I only now realized just how international this collection is. Two of the tins have been purchased in Netherlands, two in Japan, one in Britain, one in Hong Kong (I haven't actually been there, my dad brought it for me), one in Turkey and only four of them in Finland. Impressive :)

Istanbul the way I've seen it

Back from Istanbul

So I am back from my holiday trip to Turkey, more accurately Istanbul. It was a wonderful trip and Istanbul is now definitely among my favourite cities in the world. Only when I started to unpack my suitcase I realized just how bad the air quality in Istanbul must be; all my clothes reek as if I had lived past ten days in a very dodgy bar.

We have tried to count exactly how much money we spent and on what and it seems that about one third went to kebap, one third to entrance fees and one third to my souvenirs. But it was all definitely worth it.

I had actually been to Istanbul once before but I was about ten years old back then so my memories were not that clear. The city proved to be much more modern and European than I had expected and at the same time much dustier, busier and larger than I could have ever imagined. It always impresses me to see how people are living their everyday lives on top of so many layers of ancient history.

I am going to post some pictures from my trip soon but here is one already.

The top picture from LivingEtc, the bottom picture by me.