The Designer Gardens

SKSN are embarking on a brand new project, to build a swimming pool at the school. This will allow many of the children to have therapy in the water and also help encourage activity with the local community.

As regular readers of our blogs will know, we have been supporting SKSN School for a number of years now through donations and trade links with a vocational training scheme. This is a big project for the school which would enable the physically disabled pupils to benefit from a swimming pool. The school is home to around 550 male and female pupils aged from 5-25, many of who have been affected by polio, are amputees or have been injured.

In 2003 Dawn Fraser, an Australian Olympic swimmer visited the school and realised the benefits that a swimming pool would bring to the children.

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Li Xiaodong Atelier has completed a meaningful work of municipal architecture for the village of Huairou, a small town outside of Beijing, China.  The Liyuan Library is a quiet, relaxing environment for literary study and entertainment.  Its interior is bright, warm and airy, featuring multiple terraced levels and a high, naturally lit ceiling.  Glass sections stretch across the walls and ceiling, even behind the bookshelves, letting light into the interior as filtered by the external fascia.  Thousands of bundled sticks, all reclaimed from the local environment, stretch across nearly every inch of the exterior.  Here and there, rectangular breaks in the stick pattern allow light inside like a standard window would do.  No matter the viewpoint, whether you’re sitting inside or viewing from a distance, the Liyuan Library is a remarkable work of architecture, one that could pass for a temple if it weren’t employed as a library.

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Get back to basics and let nature nourish you. In this workshop, you’ll learn how you can live cleaner, greener and healthier. Nature has the answers, and working with powerful aromatherapy essential oils extracted from plants can nurture you thoroughly — body and soul.

You can soothe conditions, boost wellness, care for your face and body, create throughtful gifts, plus clean and disinfect your environment while having fun with uplifting, wonderful aromatics. A

Just a week to go & no tree in the house yet … busy making drapes for a front room. But have managed to do a bit more decorating, as my OH scrambles about in the loft with a dodgy painful knee, trying to find the boxes which contain all the glittery stuff …. I’m still in the recovery phase of my gall bladder surgery, so not much help with the scrambling about on my hands & knees & shifting heavy boxes about. Finally, the lounge is looking a bit Christmasy, even if the tree has even been bought yet. A tri Read more…

Table lamps often have been treated like the prime maiden aunts of the lighting world, but as these examples show, they’ve recently undergone something of a makeover and are turning up in surprising roles in surprising places. Most people think ceiling fixtures when planning illumination for their dining areas, but in intimate—read, tight—spaces a table lamp creates a café ambience, particularly when they’re painted in unexpected contemporary colors. A nightstand lamp is a must, of course, but there’s no reason not to mix and match styles and to introduce styles usually reserved for more formal spaces. Here are m

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