Modern and Hippie Modern

In Islamorada. More here and here.
We've always loved that top one, but the wood, overgrown tropicalia, and wraparound porch of the bottom are awesome.
And I'm calling it Hippie Modern, but with boat in the front yard and the Corvette in the carport you could just as easily call it Kenny Powers Modern. Or just Kenny Powers' house, I guess. When did that become my style? uh oh!

related (and on the same street):

The Cobra-Ferrari Wars 1963-1965 by Michael Shoen

All images from The Cobra-Ferrari Wars 1963-1965 by Michael Shoen (1st edition, 1990). The quintessential book on the 1960's battles between Cobra and Ferrari for the GT World Championships.
I found this at a thrift shop a few months ago and it hasn't been far out of reach since. It's amazing.

Related, a vintage 60's Carter's jacket found around the same time.

Bitter CD

1970's Bitter CD, from Erich Bitter's car company, (Bitter).
Plus girl posing, in vain.

Everything's Gone Green

Recent green things from yard sales, a couple landscapes, and a car.

From top:

24"x36" framed silkscreen by Tony Johnson, signed on the back "To Mom, thanks for everything. Tony"

The Who flyer at a garage sale

L.L. Bean Swiss Army knife

Frog pond and old hippie houses in front of Linda's parents' house, Long Island, Maine

Greenpeace New England cap from 1982

Vintage Vera towels

Prehistoric vegetation looking like a museum diorama behind Linda's parents' house

1970 Porsche 911S, from Fantasy Junction

Another Swaine Adeney Brigg umbrella, $3!, in British Racing Green.

(related)

Why Don't You...?

Paint your garage doors to match your car?

Midnight and yellow

Top: Casa Bricall in Vilassar de Mar, Barcelona, 1975, by Studio PER. From habitat: Areas of Communication, 1976.

Above: 11 Harrowhouse-ish 1963 Ferrari 250 LM (with Dubai plates). From the 1980 Octopus book Great Marques: Ferrari.

You drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an $80,000 BMW.

and painted it too. That's my name.

ABC

Alexander

Bitchin'

Calder

Le Man

Steve McQueen in Le Mans (1971)

How awesome is the Porsche 917?
If I weren't going to paint our front door in the Push Pin graphic style of 1984, I would definitely use these great old Porsche colors, and put our number inside the white circle. And how do we turn that headlamp design into a pendant lamp that would turn on as fantastically as McQueen's do during the dusky hours of Le Mans.?
Sometimes I think I find more design inspiration in cars than anywhere else.

Brutalism & BMWs

Brutalist pegboard- notice how the lights can be moved to any hole.

Above, from Suzanne Slesin's 1987 book "Japanese Style", including Toyo Itoh's awesome ping pong courtyard, Tadao Ando's supercool partially bermed brutalism, and Kenji Hongo's vertical bunker with its 1978 BMW 530i parked in the rock garden garage.

Below: the cover of next month's Brutus Casa (from Japan). Related? Probably not, but those older BMWs do go nicely with giant slab architecture.

Read more about the cover house above over at What We Do Is Secret

Aiuto!

1968 Alfa Romeo Ambulance, with matching machine gun-toting jeep and motorcyle, from the always awe-inspiring inventory of fantastico automobili at Fantasy Junction. If you like cars, this is the place for you (though if you're a millionaire it'd be even better); and for the design aficionado the photo documentation is intense, down to the last little switch, button, logotype, valve, toolbag, etc.... - you'll be there for hours.

Below, a beautiful Ferrari 250 GT from 1964, and the Hobbiton Dashboard of a 1966 Bizzarrani Strada.

Tanner Krolle

$2, from the moving sale of a young British doctor and his wife. 

Tanner Krolle has a long history of making luxury leather suitcases and gladstone bags for the well-heeled English, especially those who drove Aston Martins (always optional was a custom-fit set of Tanner Krolle luggage). This particular suitcase was made in London for Harrods, and has that nice country-look of leather and canvas with big brass fittings, a plaid interior and long leather belting if you choose to strap it to your car boot. 

The young doctor said it was a wedding present, and he used it on their around-the-world honeymoon, and it was a good one, but now it just takes up too much space. 

Two for the road

In need of some attention this spring are my dad's old Vespa, which he brought back from Rome in 1967 and I commandeered from my parents' barn 2 years ago to bring up here. It hasn't been ridden much since 1983, and thus is in serious need of a tune-up. But the priority is definitely our scraggly yard, which seems to be filled with bittersweet, mandrake, and hemlock popping up in all the wrong places. So the long hours of grease-monkeying and green-thumbing begin, but you couldn't ask for two more enjoyable projects for spring.

Giorgetto Giugiaro Logica

A find from last year is this Necchi Logica sewing machine. It's not often great designers take on sewing machines, but when they do the results usually go straight to museums' permanent collections. The Logica was designed for Necchi by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the great Italian automobile designer and leading proponent of the awesome "folded paper" school of design. Besides Linda's sewing machine, his most angular and notable designs are the Volkswagen Rabbit, the Nikon F4, the Delorean, a slew of Italian Supercars, but most fun- and most like the Logica- is his Lotus Esprit, a car I used to build out of Lego tirelessly after seeing James Bond submarining around in his.

one of Linda's Logica-assisted coats