T H E U R B A N W I L D: Ideas and inspirations

Saturday, January 31, 2009

Slats & I just realized where the blog name comes from

For several weeks now I have been obsessed with the idea of putting slats on the living room wall next to the fireplace, my take on the Eichler bead board. I found that there are quite a few wood slat products out there, from retail display systems that go horizontally, to acoustic ceiling baffles. Yesterday at Ikea, I found the perfect prototyping solution—the Mandal headboard. Amazingly, it is just under eight feet tall so it fits the wall perfectly when I rotate it sideways. I told Mark that I have three obsessions—lines, floating planes and slats (which are basically planes made of lines). The slats are unusual, but I like them. I suspect it's the way they express the intersection of Japanese and ranch house sensibilities. I guess I could actually use several of these headboard systems placed together on the wall (at the cost of about $750) but I'm not sure how I feel about the knotty pine.

As the project goes on I find that my raw materials are second-level raw materials. They're not wood and metal as much as products that I can reconfigure. So rather than trudging into the forest to cut down a pine tree or Home Depot to find a pine board, I trudge into Ikea to find a pine headboard. Note that you really have to go to the Ikea "forest" for this to work. In a catalog picture (top), you can't see the material clearly. Hiking into Ikea to find raw materials. That's what it means to live in the urban wild.