Room Ideas

DIY Tiny Rental Kitchen Redo

Polo

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It can be hard to figure out how to make a plain rental kitchen feel welcoming—especially on a tight budget. KC Cibran (@thecasaverde) knows the struggle. She lives in a pre-war rental apartment in New York City, where the appliances are “ancient” and the kitchen “looked old and dingy when I first moved in,” KC says. “I really didn’t like the overwhelming white and dreaded cooking in there.”

But she couldn’t afford to go all-out on decor. “I’m on an assistant’s salary in New York City so almost everything in my apartment is very low budget!” KC says. So in redoing her apartment’s kitchen, she challenged herself to stay under $100 for the whole thing and use items she already owned whenever possible. “My main goal was to just put my

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Garden

Paul Maher’s Paintings Dwell On The Fringes Of Urban Wilderness

Polo

Paul Maher’s urban coastal landscapes rarely contain people, yet their marks are everywhere across his compositions. ‘You can tell a lot about a place by the traces people leave behind,’ he explains. ‘The informal paths, the obstacles, the place where vegetation has been untouched and where it is neatly groomed,’ he says. And it’s these echoes of human existence that intrigue him most.

In Paul’s paintings, the shapes of solitary buildings are reflected in still bodies of water, treetops shimmer in the ripples of the tide, a boat is docked at a small pier. His scenes all quiver with the promise of human life that never quite materialises. His measured, delicate brushstrokes mediate these tranquil settings to his canvas, in a perfectly restrained pastel palette. He is inspired by his contemporaries, Australian landscape painters like Peter Gardiner, Tom Carment and Junko Hagiwara.

Paul’s home studio in the heritage

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