Ebay's scrappy startup days are years behind it, and like any other billion-dollar company it faces distinct challenges that stem from being ginormous: How can it launch new products that don't get nibbled into oblivion by bureaucracy? How can it make sure the best ideas emerge, when all its managers have slightly different visions? How can you do all that nimbly enough to stay ahead?
If you want more proof that France has exited the economic recession, look at its design scene. The country has seen more design galleries emerging in the last three years than in the previous decade. Nouvelle Value: The New French Domestic Landscape, a new exhibit at Israel's Design Museum Holon (the furniture designer Ron Arad's first building), offers a snapshot of the recent creative frenzy, with work from such rising talents as A+A Cooren, Pierre Favresse, NOCC, Ionna Vautrin, and Pool.
Designers love to say that their furniture "tells a story." Italian designers Studio Formafantasma take that one giant step further with Domestica, a chair commissioned by the Dilmos Gallery that tells the history of their nation.
Xantippe Hairdressers in Bruges, Belgium, is the perfect hair salon for stylish dudes who hate going to the hair salon. With its dark oak parquet floors, white walls, and man-friendly decor -- note the geometric sandstone wall in every shade of brown and the Moooi chandelier, which looks like a giant insect -- it's the antithesis of all that fussy crap ladies have to put up with.
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Few parts of America are waspier than Fairfield County, Connecticut. Buy a house there, and it practically comes with acceptance letters to Exeter and Princeton. Which makes what Amsterdam design studio UXUS have done in Wilton nothing short of revolutionary. They've taken a 1930s hunting lodge -- a WASP-approved monument to Colonial Revivalism, with Georgian touches -? and given it a tres-chic European makeover.
![Poetic Art Installation Harnesses The Blistering Texas Sun [Video]](/multisite_files/codesign/imagecache/642x368/article_feature/Texas-Sun-Installation.jpg "Poetic Art Installation Harnesses The Blistering Texas Sun [Video]")
Most of us know of plaster-impregnated fabric as the stuff doctors use to set broken bones. Phoenix architects Atherton/Keener use it as canvas for a large, dynamic art work "painted" with the sun's rays.
We've all noticed (OK, blatantly stared at) women whose good looks are spoiled by piles of makeup. (Watch The Real Housewives of Orange County for a parade of examples; seriously, these ladies wear false lashes to buy groceries.) The Dutch artists and directors Lernert Engelberts and Sander Plug (who go by Lernert & Sander) take tragic makeup to the extreme in their latest short film, Natural Beauty, in which 365 layers of makeup are spackled onto the handsome face of Belgian model Hannelore Knuts.
You might own some tools that you never use, or perhaps you have a backyard that you just don't have the time to do anything interesting with. Until recently, those pieces of property mostly served as nagging reminders that you didn't have enough time to do everything you wanted to do. Today, they can look like revenue streams, not wastes of money.
Using goods only when needed is a fundamental cultural change.
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