Spot Cool Stuff has seen multitudes of small, prefabricated structures. Even among that stiff competition, The Bunkie stands out.
First, there’s the way the structure’s design came about. It’s the product of an unusual collaboration between an architectural firm (BLDG) and a furniture maker (608 Design).
Mazel tov on your expected first born child. Now comes the first fun part of being a parent — coming up with the perfect baby name — and the first expensive and time consuming part — buying all the stuff you’ll need for when little Terwilliger enters the world.
Picking out baby furniture can be especially daunting. Much of it is as expensive as adult furniture. Except, unlike a quality sofa or bed, you can’t enjoy baby furniture for long before your little one outgrows it.
Or maybe you can. Some baby furniture is designed to grow with your child from baby, to toddler, to kiddo and even into the tween years and beyond. Here’s our review of five especially cool examples:
Spot Cool Stuff adores glamping travel. Glamorous camping can get you out into a natural environment in the same way tent camping does. But it combines that with touches of luxury like you might find at a high-end hotel. After spending much of our youth backpacking on a rock-bottom budget, we think we’ve earned a bit of luxury.
Much of what we write about glamping on this travel blog concerns resorts that combine aspects of roughing it with aspects of being pampered. (Our review of these 5 especially wondering glamping spots is a good place to start reading about those). We also appreciate products that let travelers create their own glamping experience. Our favorite of those might be this:
It’s like a personal hot-springs-to-go. If you have a tub-sized patch of flat ground, wood and 200 gallons (750 liters) worth of water or snow you can have your own spa virtually anywhere.
Once tasked with delivering messages for the Rebel Alliance, R2-D2 has been reduced to holding up your butt as, literally, a piece of lawn furniture.
Spot Cool Stuff previously reviewed 10 creative pieces of jewelry geeks will love. If are thusly geek-inclined but looking for less of a personal accessory and more for something around-the-house, consider one of these five pieces of geek-friendly furniture. Each was inspired by a video game or a science fiction movie:
Looking to construct a home chair using reclaimed materials? Three things you’ll need:
1) The proper equipment. If you don’t have that already you can hire tools here.
2) A sufficient quality of whatever material you are working in.
3) Inspiration.
To help out with the third item on that list, we’ve found three examples of chairs made from upcycled materials: skis, jeans and traffic signs.
It seems nearly from the moment Mrs. Spot Cool Stuff was pregnant, we’ve been inundated with information about the merits of sitting on an exercise ball. The list of benefits (more on them below) are most pronounced for expectant moms. But they most certainly are not exclusive to them. Whether you are pregnant or not, whether they were women or not, sitting on an exercise ball really does promote health and posture.
The problem is that, as a piece of furniture, an exercise ball is, technically speaking, butt ugly. And it’s hard to keep them in one place since balls, by definition, roll around. To help with both issues, Gaiam, a cool purveyor of healthy lifestyle products, developed the Balance Ball Chair.
Time was that products and materials were either recycled or not. These days, “upcycled” products are becoming increasingly popular. The difference between “upcycling” and “recycling” being that the former involves reusing a material without degrading its quality or composition. So, used beer bottles being turned into jeans or asphalt or new beer bottles are examples of recycling (because the old beer bottles are melted down into cullet before being reused). But used beer bottles being turned into, say, a Thai temple is an example of upcycling.
In the increasingly diverse (and, some would say, nutty) language around eco-friendly concepts, other terms for reusing material emerged. One can not only recycle or upcycle but also downcycle, freecycle, precycle and e-cycle. But there’s only one other -cycle we’re concerned with for this post: Hipcycle.
If you have kids who incessantly bang on whatever pots, pans, books, bowls, saucers, spoons and sibling’s heads they can get their hands on, the last thing you need is a furniture that’s designed to double as musical instrument. But if your home is in need a certain melodic touch, the furniture from Musical Furnishings is very cool.
Every item from Musical Furnishings is meant to be enjoyed as a bone fide musical instrument; all manner of tunes, from simple songs to complex scores, can be played on them. At the same time, each item serves as a useable piece of furniture. Your can eat on the musical tables (the tripled-layered polyurathane finish is resistant to spills), sit on the musical chairs and store stuff in the musical chests.
There’s a variety of Musical Furnishings items to choose from. A look at our favorites:
