Is your home full of GOOD GERMS??
Is your home full of GOOD GERMS??
It should be! Our 2023 Home Goods Special Report kicks off
Welcome to Blackbird Spyplane.
Our guide to the Pants of the Year is here.
Our brand-new G.I.F.T.S. list is here.
— Jonah & Erin
Toward the end of every year, we devote a week to an Unbeatable Home-Goods Recon Report. Friends, this is that week.
Because the true jawnoisseur knows that getting yourself properly fitted is only one part of the Mach 3+ lifestyle equation. Getting your cribbo “fitted” is just as important, because:
In this topsy-turvy modern world, you want your refuge to be a calming, characterful, ennobling, pimp & flavor oasis,
When you step out of a banging cribbo, the clothes you’re wearing will, on an intangible yet undeniable level, look better for it, and
If you post fit pics at the crib and people glimpse a Mach-negative-7 situation in the background?? It’s a disillusioning peek past the “Jawn Oz Curtain” that will threaten to give the lie to your whole swag 😜 …
We’ve long been vocal in our distaste for spaces that feel soul-stiflingly sterile. If there’s one thing uniting the pieces we rounded up for you this week, it’s that they will help your home crackle with a sense of carefully yet idiosyncratically hand-made charm… a fecund vitality… and an unruly richness of SPIRIT.
F**k living in an antiseptic “clean room” of airlocked pre-fab charmlessness — cultivate your home into a bussin’ microbiome of G.O.O.D. G.E.R.M.S. (Gangs Of Objects & Décor Giving Eclectic Refined Motley Spirit) instead!!
Now, some of you might be saying, “Spyplane, décorwise I’ve got germophobic leanings and thus tend toward a kind of bland, off-the-shelf ‘tastefulness,’ even though I know this isn’t the illest path. Please help me wrap my head around this germy home concept…”
Easy. Check this out —
During a trip back to her native Bucks County, PA, earlier this year, Erin toured the truly out-of-control self-built home of the visionary 20th century woodworker Wharton Esherick one county over…
You rightly hear a lot about another Southeastern PA woodworker — George Nakashima the GOAT — but Esherick is a less-heralded king & Spyplane Patron Saint of Home Swag, because his spot was so gloriously, virtuosically germed-out.
Shapes tend toward the oblong… nothing is “matchy” but somehow everything matches… a wooden chessboard sits upright to do humble double duty as a piece of wall art… lots of the furniture is bluntly hand-hewn with a d*mn ax … children’s drawings are tacked up on the ceiling… there are simple pulley systems for covering and uncovering doorways and windows … the overrall vibe is “considered but thrifty,” as signaled by the hammer handles repurposed into chair legs or impromptu lampshades fashioned from scraps of paper, rawhide and even a pot lid … It’s a d*mn vibe abbondanza!
A little goes a long way. Look at Esherick’s hand-carved cabinet latch above middle right — you too can extract mad power out of just swapping out regs pieces of hardware around the crib with ingenious ones like this, so we’ve rounded up a bunch of knobs & hooks below. Or look at the little painting above bottom left, which has been mounted to cardboard and then hung using two strips of tonally harmonious ribbon and two thumbtacks!! An object lesson in the fact that you don’t need to be finicky about this s**t for yr spot to sing.
Now obviously Esherick was a master woodworker and made a lot of his own s**t custom, which is not possible for most of us. But G.O.O.D. G.E.R.M.S. are something anyone can achieve if they know where to look. And lucky for you, we do!!
We’ve designed this “germ edit” in such a way that you could cop 10 things or just one thing, and it alone will be potently germy enough to enswaggen your spot and inoculate it against JOYLESSNESS.
By the way, our past Home Goods Specials remain extremely sick and germ-rich. Here’s 2020 Part I & Part II; 2021 Part I & Part II; 2022 Part I & Part II.
Let’s get to 2023 — !