• chevron_right

      The experts: perfumers on 20 ways to make you, your house and your laundry smell fabulous

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 10:00 · 1 minute

    From picking a perfect fragrance to spraying your radiators and getting rid of the worst stinks, here is how to make sure your life always smells sweet

    From a fancy fragrance to a simple bowl of oranges, scent can transform how you feel about yourself, another person or a place. But how can you work out what suits the moment? And the best way to get rid of a stink? Perfumers reveal how to make your world smell fantastic.

    1. Smell is an extreme sensation
    “Scent provokes a visceral reaction,” says Ezra-Lloyd Jackson , a perfumer and artist who makes wearable fragrances under the brand name deya and creates scent installations for art exhibitions. What fascinates him about working with scent is the process of transforming “something that is grotesque or alarming into something that is familiar and comforting, or vice versa”.

    2. Your reaction to a smell is linked to memory
    Maya Njie makes perfumes inspired by her Swedish and Gambian heritage. She tried to capture this feeling in other artistic forms before realising that what she really wanted was to portray the way it smelled. “We know that our sense of smell is directly linked to the part of the brain where our memories are stored,” she says. “So it makes a lot of sense that fragrance and smells are connected to our memories. If you smell something that someone has worn, or you go to a house that belongs to your grandparents, smelling makes you feel way more emotional than a photo ever could.” Jackson describes this as “internal time travel. It is another form of communication that isn’t linguistic.”

    3. It is possible to train your nose
    “That is what perfume is all about,” says Jackson. He didn’t have a very orthodox route into perfumery: “I went straight into a laboratory and got to work, but most people will train at one of the schools in France, where the first year is all about learning 500 smells.” Brighton-based French perfumer Elodie Durande , who works for Somerset label Ffern, honed her craft at the University of Montpellier. “You start out by working on your olfactory skills, remembering smells and describing smells,” before receiving a wide-ranging education about the perfume industry, she says.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      AI can help us find the right policies to fix the housing crisis | Letters

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 18:35

    Dr Omar A Guerrero says technology could scrutinise policy proposals and formulate holistic solutions. Plus letters from a pensioner who was evicted after asking his landlord to fix damp problems, Daniel Carter and Martyn Williams

    Nick Bano makes a compelling argument that discussions about increasing the housing supply are misguided if their aim is to fix the UK housing crisis ( The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis, 19 March ). His data and succinct description of the historical context are consistent with qualitative and quantitative evidence provided by various UK housing scholars.

    As part of my work as a computational economist, I try to understand the connections between housing wealth inequality and the set of incentives that are shaped by institutions such as the market and the government, ie “the rules of the game”. For this purpose, I develop artificial intelligence models consisting of a computational representation of every household and property in the economy (with their most relevant characteristics and behaviours), and the rules of the game that incentivise them to engage in interactions such as purchasing and renting real estate.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      April design news: the history of hi-fi, the future of energy and a pizza watch

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 09:00


    A preview of the Milan Furniture Fair, the latest exhibition at Vitra Design Museum and the relaunch of London’s best 60s boutique

    This month’s design news is pretty nostalgic. Jonny Trunk’s wonderful history of hi-fi catalogues reminds us of the world before downloads and the relaunch of boutique Granny Takes a Trip brings back 60s psychedelia. And, as the new exhibition at Vitra Museum shows, looking to the past for answers to modern problems may well be the best solution.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Hidden gem: a jeweller’s remodelled terrace in west London

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 5 days ago - 14:00 · 1 minute

    Changes and clever touches mean there are surprises a plenty behind the front door of this Edwardian home

    From the outside, Marisa Hordern’s Edwardian terrace in London’s north Kensington looks just like any other on the street. A tiled path leads up to a grey front door with two clipped olive trees standing outside the red brick facade. “I like seeing people’s reactions when they come in,” says Hordern, the founder and creative director of Missoma , a jewellery label that started life around her kitchen table 16 years ago. “Inside, it really is quite different from what you might expect…”

    Hordern moved from a nearby maisonette five years ago. At the time, she was single and approaching her 40th birthday. “I decided it was time to lay down some proper roots and buy a house,” says Hordern. “The street is full of young families, and I remember my neighbours asking: ‘Where’s your husband? Where’s your partner? Where are your kids?’ I did feel a little bit like the odd one out, but this was just something I wanted to do for myself. Sometimes you just need to stop waiting for things to happen and do it yourself. I’m a big believer in that.”

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Banish creases with £4,000 ironing board from Harrods that comes with crystal keychain

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 5 days ago - 13:11


    Swiss brand Laurastar collaborated with fashion designer Germanier on gadget said to half ironing time

    What do you buy for someone who has everything? The answer, one suspects, is not an ironing board.

    But for the big spender who, let’s face it, almost certainly never folds their own laundry, there is a new bougie appliance: a £3,999 ironing board.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Emission impossible: the maddening, nightmare quest to decarbonize my home

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 21 March - 11:00

    Here’s what happened when two climate reporters tried to ditch natural gas

    • This story is co-published with Grist

    My wife and I live in a green, two-story colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac in Burlington, Vermont. Each spring, the front of our home is lined with lilacs, crocuses, and peonies. The backyard is thick with towering black locust trees. We occasionally spot a fox from our office windows, or toddlers from the neighborhood daycare trundling through the woods.

    It’s an alarmingly idyllic home, with one exception: it runs on natural gas. The boiler, which heats our house and our water, burns it. So do the stove and the dryer and even the fireplace in the living room.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Tackiness, sentiment, tradition: readers share what attracts them to holiday fridge magnets

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 19 March - 19:37

    Some collectors want the tackiest items imaginable, but for others they are heartfelt reminders of the past

    For Caroline Walker, 65, holiday fridge magnets aren’t merely practical souvenirs holding up the shopping list but “meaningful little reminders” that bring her back to a time or place in her life. The first in her collection was a little magnet from Dnipro, Ukraine. It was a gift from the leader of a group of Ukrainian students to whom she taught English. “I look at it now and I wonder where they all are, if they’re OK, how many of them died, how many of the boys are fighting,” she says.

    Walker is among dozens of people who contacted the Guardian to share their emotional response to holiday fridge magnets in light of a new study conducted by Liverpool University that suggests these objects may also provide an important means of accessing happy – and not so happy – memories of past trips.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 19 March - 10:00

    Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism

    Speaking against his own government’s renters reform bill last autumn , the Tory grandee Sir Edward Leigh told MPs: “I was able to buy my first house – although it was a bit of a struggle – for £25,000. The opportunities for young people are so difficult now”. Younger people are “overwhelmingly reliant on the rental sector”, Leigh conceded, but the problem as he saw it was one of supply: “We have to build many more houses, and we have to free up the rented sector.”

    What never seems to occur to Leigh, his parliamentary colleagues, or indeed his entire generation, is to look seriously at what has changed between their time and ours. The forthcoming general election is once again likely to be dominated by claims about a housing shortage and a dire need to build more homes. Housebuilding is an article of faith across the political spectrum.

    Continue reading...