Stack up those glossy magazines you can’t bear to throw out, buckle them down with a pillow on a pale Nordic-ish birch wood base, and voila! you’ve got a dandy designer footstool, or extra seating for a party…

More than mere designer furniture, the Hockenheimer stool (by German design firm NJUStudio) is a personal objet d’art that makes a statement about who you are and your individual style:

National Geographic?

Martha Stewart Living?

Or will you show off your treasured Rolling Stone back issues?

Heck, you can even show off your lifetime subscription to the Wall Street Journal, if that’s your style!

The Hockenheimer stool comes with a stand of birch wood handmade in a youth workshop in Bavaria, custom-made leather straps with buckles and rivets added by hand, and a unique hand-crafted cotton/polyester pillow to top it off.

The wood base comes in two sizes: Magazine style 305mm x 250mm x 70mm (approx. 12″ x 9.8″ x 2.75″); or Newspaper style 415mm x 305mm x 70mm (approx. 16.3″ x 12″ x 2.75″).

Available at Connox with prices starting at € 128.50 (VAT tax included) plus shipping from its home in Germany.

You know how the other day I went on quite a bit about personal taste in decorating? And about how some people manage to pour all kinds of money into making their home look… well, quite hideous, really?

Cartoon: Robert Weber
The New Yorker, April 3, 1989
by permission

That whole discussion of “good taste” in the home has reminded me of this favourite cartoon from The New Yorker…

And who doesn’t like to poke a bit of fun at pretentious rich folks?

Well, other gaudy rich folks, maybe…

Afterthought #1:

Here’s a little travel tip for my fellow femmes:

If you’re travelling alone in North America, and you don’t want to be hassled by optimistic convention-going salesmen in hotel lounges or on long flights… I’d strongly recommend picking up a copy of The New Yorker and letting ‘em see you enjoying it.

Don’t ask me why — perhaps it’s the implication that you might be too intelligent and refined to look twice at any man who tries to get dates in an airport? — but it works like a charm!

Afterthought #2:

My uncle always used to say, of pretentious people who were rude to him, There ain’t no couth like uncouth!: I’m pretty sure that wasn’t original to him, so feel free to make it your own. In fact, I’d love to know who came up with that quip, if anyone happens to know…

… okay, that’s all I’ve got here.

In a treasured old copy of The English Garden magazine I revisited recently, Helen Gunn wrote:

There is a general feeling, mostly unspoken, that English names are low brow and folksy. Latin implies education and expert knowledge, no matter if it also sounds affected.

She doesn’t deny that it is sometimes very useful to have a precise Latin name by which to identify a particular plant, but regrets the fading-away of more colourful traditional plant names like kiss-at-the-wicket, leopard’s bane, love-lies-bleeding, wake robin and Oswego tea.

There is such poetry in the English names that it seems an impoverishment of our literary heritage to lose them. I would rather think that I was growing sweet sultan than centaurea or bishop’s hat than the dreary epimedium. We could even reinstate some really old names, and refer to gladioli as corn flags and nasturtiums as lark’s heels.

Around here, for example, that tall white-flowering plant I love is called snakeroot, but we are quite able to identify it as cimicifuga if forced to do so.

Oh, but didn’t I read somewhere that the garden gurus have started changing the Latin names around? So now cimicifuga is supposed to be called by another name entirely…
Well, it’s still snakeroot to me!