Wikipedia defines the hobby of collecting to ‘include seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloguing, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever items are of interest to the individual collector’.

Some collectors are generalists, accumulating merchandise, or stamps from all countries of the world. Others focus on a subtopic within their area of interest, perhaps 19th century postage stamps, milk bottle labels from Sussex, or Mongolian harnesses and tack.

For me, over the years, my small highly collectable, rather exclusive collection of hand blown glass birds, by reknowned Finnish glass designer Oiva Toikka has been somewhat superseded by a larger collection of birds. You see, roughly around the time my nickname became ‘Bird’ my dear friends and family took it upon themselves to start buying me bird themed presents. I should clearly state, I had no hand in this decision, it was as if a great big fluoro light went on in the collective brain of those around me. From here on in, I was going to be easy to buy presents for. And that they did. Bless them.

We’ve been checking out the work of Rune Guneriussen in Norway. He’s got the installation in nature thing going on.

Like Andy Goldworthy (see my previous blog post earlier this year), most of his installations are temporary, and recorded for prosperity through photograph. The photograph as a medium ultimately becomes as important as the installation.

Guneriussen’s work on objects such as tables, lamps and chairs started in 2005, and has been photographed on location all over Norway. The objects are ‘cast’ in landscape scenes, as if part of a story.

As an artist he believes that his work should be ‘questioning and bewildering’.

We love his quirky compositions.

Following up our series of posts on curvy homes, I came across this stunning home in Durban, South Africa. But this one’s a double whammy.

Those of you who’ve seen our nest, will know I have a thing for curves. Curves.....ahhhh.. But I also have a thing for straw. At our house, the walls are made from strawbales, so we were able to create long ambling organic curves with the bales and a chainsaw (see my blog post on our home from last year).

What’s fabulous about the Wright house in Durban, is the way they’ve combined the straw and curves. Not strawbales, as we’ve used at our home, but straw thatch.

South Africans are renowned for their thatched roof homes, its a traditional building technique used for centuries. This take on traditional technique with a very modernist building style is highly unusual...and yet it works. The texture of the straw is divine, and works well with the smooth flowing curved structure.

Hyper-minimalist poster designs of the classic children’s stories we’ve grown to know and love by former design gun for hire, Christian Jackson of Square Inch Design.

There are more here.

What’s not to like. :)