girls in the field

signet rings

these are mid 19th centuary and I'll assume French - the one with the rat trap is amazing

life's great longings

Three of my main waking obsessions are material - the roof over my head, the clothes on my back and the food in my belly. Some others are not: the family I'll see over Christmas and New Year, the woman in my bed next to me as I type this. Then there are the unfulfilled longings, my yet unbuilt house, my yet unborn kid and my dog(s)... I want dogs so badly and the one I want the most is an Irish wolfhound to come cantering around Wimbledon on my runs and generally amaze small children with its humungousness.

etsy finds: pottery

so yeah, my interest in putting a roof over ones head is about steel and timber and bricks and stone and all things boy-ish - but you can still want to feather a nest right? etsy is unbelievably full of shit for something with such cult status and its getting worse but here are some interesting ceramic bits.

this is a french butter dish

hair cut decisions

my favourite modern house: casa kike

by Gianni Botsford Architects on a beachside plot in Cost Rica this is a beautiful house. the budget was apparently £55k and I know local labour might have been cheaper but that's phenomenal if its true. It is beautifully simple and really appropriate for its context.

socio-economic life

why are some things important and others not? why are the majority of us concerned with the latter? a small idea that is not mine:

if we take 1000 people across the globe at random and put them on a scale to measure their mass and then add the world's heaviest man we change the meter-reading by about 30 basis points. The exception is of negligible importance to a fairly small sample.

if we take that same sample and measure their wealth a sample of a thousand people is probably worth £1-2m. the richest man in the world is worth over £50bn. The movement is not 30 basis points, it is 500,000,000.

I'm not a car person, I only need 2 cars in my life: a Bristol 406 and a 90" Landy Defender.

Elena Borghero

watch this name - my girlfriends design blog and the start of a bigger ambition

after mentioning him on the blog Mush thought these wouldn't look out of place on here: some really beautiful pics of hats from Bates, hatters on Jermyn Street.