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Category / Inspiration Vault

Nasa Astronauts and Soviet Cosmonauts are having a Yard Sale

To celebrate the 47th anniversary of the first time man landed on the moon, astronauts, cosmonauts and rocket engineers of the great space race are having a giant yard sale next month– also known as the Bonhams annual Space History Auction. Even if I wasn’t the type of kid that went to space camp and I…

The French Banksy of Fake Facades

The French are already really, really good at beautifying their towns and cities, but not every façade can look like it’s straight out of a postcard– that is unless you enlist the services of Patrick Commecy. Let’s just say this guy is the Banksy, the Michelangelo (or the Frida Kahlo) of fakery… This was the wall before: A…

Inside the Castle in the Middle of the Death Valley Desert

On my first California road trip a few years ago, one of our stops I was looking forward to the most was Death Valley’s mysterious Scotty’s Castle, a sprawling Spanish style manor built in the middle of nowhere in the roaring twenties. We were dangerously low on gas but determined to find this isolated oasis, and to my…

The Abandoned Ruins given New Life

I can’t help but notice a rapidly growing trend happening in architecture that involves giving new life to what may look like the most hopeless of ruins. Ever since I showed you the modern Scottish home built within a 150 year-old abandoned farmhouse, I’ve been hugely intrigued by these modern interventions of age old crumbling…

Who Knew Bill Cunningham Made Haute Couture Hats?

“Who the hell is that tourist in the blue jacket with the fancy camera?” I wondered. It was my first Fashion Week experience: I was shadowing photographer Eddie Newton, holding up a reflector as he shot passing fashionistas outside of the Chloé show. While the hoards were running left to capture Anna Wintour, then right to catch Kanye West,…

One Guy’s Quest to Save the 1960s Time Capsule Homes of America

Miles McDermott might just be the youngest person to restore a time capsule home. An award-winning designer, local tastemaker and fellow old soul living in Phoenix, Arizona, he’s just spent the last few years transforming his own mid-century style home– which he found looking worse for wear on Craigslist– into a virtual museum of 1960s interior…

Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s

I was tumbling through Tumblr, one of my favourite places on the internet to discover history’s lesser-known muses and there, on page thirty-something of my browsing, I stopped at a photograph of an androgynous woman taken by Marianne Breslauer, a name unfamiliar to me. As I began googling her work, my screen was soon taken over by black…

Crumbling Communist Murals the Soviets Left Behind

In the early nineties, well after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, did you know there were still over 300,000 Soviet soldiers in Eastern Germany? In 1991, there were still 4,200 Russian tanks, 690 aircrafts, 180 rocket systems and over 200,000 civil employees and relatives of officers, among them about 900,000 children. Until the final withdrawal…

The Cave-Dwelling Flamenco Dancers of Andalucia

“Gypsy” conjures up all kinds of stereotypical images of a wandering foreign community that live in caravans and vardos on the outskirts of cities. But today I fished a rare photo story out of the LIFE archives that gives us a fascinating glimpse into their lesser-known heritage. Shot by Dmitri Kessel in 1949, we’re taken inside a mid-century…

The Story of Messy Nessy’s Makeover

Six years ago almost to the day, I launched this blog. I had no idea what I was doing, I barely understood what the term “blog” even meant, but I knew I had something to share so I signed up to the blogging platform WordPress, (which wasn’t much harder than creating a MySpace page), chose…

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