Nice Things 🤗
Concentrating, Honing Process, Minimalist Drawers, and a Maximalist Hotel
Nice Things is meant to be a post between posts that collects the best things I’ve seen, read, heard, watched, bought, done, visited, or otherwise experienced over the last month.
How I Learned to Concentrate
I came across this article from Cal Newport shortly after I sent out last month’s, Sometimes It’s Nice To Do One Thing At A Time 😶🌫️, and thought there were a lot of parallels. Specifically the line, “you had to focus to survive,” really stopped me in my tracks. Now, I’m certainly no M.I.T. Ph.D, but it was really intriguing to know that the mind of a designer and the mind of a computational theorist need similar things to perform at their peak — even if those peaks are miles apart from one another. Newport calls out the “fundamental separation between busyness and productivity” as a way to frame the time it takes to land on the right solution. Problem solving isn’t always a linear pursuit, but having the time and space to concentrate certainly makes the path a little more direct.
Odd Man Out
While I was searching for Irish movies to put on for St. Patrick’s Day, I stumbled across the 1947 Belfast-set, Odd Man Out (available to stream on Max and The Criterion Channel) from Carol Reed. It’s not nearly as famous or acclaimed as Reed’s masterwork, The Third Man, which he would make a couple years later alongside Orson Welles, but it’s every bit as compelling, just in different ways. What I found so captivating — on top of the IRA-focused man-on-the-run plot — was how in Odd Man Out, you can see Reed working through the problems he’d eventually solve, at an expert level, in The Third Man. It made me think a lot about process, and releasing something into the world, even if it isn’t perfect, in service of getting there eventually.
UTIL KGT Wall Unit
My favorite things in this world are both beautiful and functional, and this new series of wall-mounted drawers from UTIL checks both boxes. Developed in collaboration with Studio CP-RV, the drawers are extremely functional, but the minimalist aesthetic and dynamic color palette are just really fantastic. Not to mention the modularity of the system, which really seals the deal for me.
Madonna Inn
On a recent trip to San Luis Obispo, I got a chance to visit the world-famous Madonna Inn, and boy howdy it did not disappoint. The hotel itself has 110 individually-themed guest rooms ranging from western-themed to straight up caveman, and from a captain’s bridge to a Swiss chalet. No two rooms are alike. And that doesn’t even account for Alex Madonna’s Gold Rush Steak House (pictured above), or the cafe, lounge, bar, bakery, event space, and three gift shops on site. The Madonna Inn is truly unlike any place I’ve ever seen, and well worth a pit stop if you ever find yourself in the Central Coast region of California.