Paper Artist, Mia Liu was born in 1980, in Taipei, Taiwan. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, followed with a Masters in Fine Art at the University of New York. She has won numerous awards for her work.

Made from reclaimed objects, her paper art is exquisitely beautiful. The artist punches holes into thousands of paper strips to form decorative patterns.

Sustainable design was given a big thumbs up in Brisbane last week at the inaugural Queensland Premier’s Design Awards.

Queensland Premier and Arts Minister Anna Bligh announced Alexander Loterzstain and Kent Gration as the winners of the inaugural awards.

Loterzstain was presented with the $40,000 Smart State Design Fellow, while Gration received the $10,000 Emerging Design Leader award.

Nice one boys. Great to see Queensland recognising its champions.

Many hotels around the world offer guests the chance to get closer to nature, but only this one, in the forests of Swedish Lapland, lets them disappear within it.

Treehotel is an eco based boutique design hotel located just outside Harads, a small town just 60km from the Arctic Circle.

Think abstract luxury tree house.

Drawn by Sweden’s best architects, a series of unique rooms including a giant birds nest, a mirror cube and a UFO sit high above the ground as a series of suspended sculptures. Each tree house is unique and there are plans to build another 20 over the next five years.

ODE  1. A lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, often elevated in style or manner, written in varied or irregular meter and expressive of exalted or enthusiastic emotion. 2. A poem meant to be sung.

Many of you will know that I grew up in Wales. That’s Old South Wales, rather than New South Wales. The land of song.  ‘We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside, we’ll keep a welcome in the vales, this land you knew will still be singing, when you come home again to Wales....’ Sigh.

This Christmas I’ll be going home for Christmas in Wales. We are taking our daughter home to the land of song for the very first time.

So it seems kinda fitting to share a special bit of Wales with you today. To share with you a building whose structure ebbs and flows with the songs of Wales, encapsulating the heart and soul of its nation.