Every homeowner knows the feeling. A storm rolls through overnight, and the next morning you walk outside half-expecting to find something out of place. Your home’s exterior works hard all year, handling summer heat, spring downpours, heavy snow, and freezing winds.
The good news is that a little attention goes a long way. This guide walks through how weather affects each part of your home and what you can do to keep it in good shape.
Flooring affects far more than the look of a room. It also changes how footsteps, dropped objects and everyday conversations travel through a home. Selecting materials with acoustic performance in mind can reduce distracting echoes and soften noise between floors without sacrificing a clean, modern style.
The best results usually come from combining a suitable surface with underlayment, rugs and thoughtful room design. Each layer helps manage a different part of the sound problem.
Christopher Williams creates photographs that mimic high-end commercial advertising, industrial cataloging, and architectural photography, working with professional studios and technicians to produce a flawless, slick aesthetic. The artist then embeds subtle anomalies — a surface flaw or odd angle — into these seemingly perfect images to unsettle the viewer.
You repainted the walls, replaced the light fixtures, and bought the sofa you’d been saving for, and the living room in your Kansas City home still looks like it’s waiting for something. It took a visit to a friend’s newly renovated place to see what. Her walls were ordinary. Her furniture was older than yours. But the floor, a wide-plank oak that ran unbroken from the entry through the kitchen, made everything above it look intentional. You went home and looked down for the first time in years, at carpet that had stopped being a color and become a texture, and understood what your room had been waiting for.
Flooring is the largest surface in a home and the one people are least likely to think of as design. Yet it sets the tone for every room, connects spaces or divides them, and decides whether furniture looks placed or parked. Modern flooring options have expanded well beyond the carpet-or-hardwood choice of a generation ago, and the right one can change a home more than any other single project. Here’s how.
Few artists know how to make an everyday object feel larger than life quite like Jeff Koons. His Tulips sculpture (1995–2004) takes the familiar shape of a bouquet of colorful flowers and transforms it into an exuberant work of art with a decidedly impressive personality. This sculpture is one of five unique versions, and its production was an extraordinarily complex undertaking.
