Apartment Look

As we put the finishing touches on the plans for our home, our dreams of dinner parties in the finished open kitchen , of repurposed original sconces and refurbished original details , gave way to a less sexy obsession. The mop, the vacuum, our winter coats, the laundry. Specifically: Where would they all go and how could we banish them from sight? In the New York prewar apartments we’d lived in for years, closets were strictly optional and washer-dryers were nonexistent. What made glossy interior photos appealing , I came to realize, was what you didn’t see, because it was tucked into a hidden closet or built-in cabinet. Renovating our house gave us a shot at discreet convenience. Entering the first-floor apartment, pre-renovation, meant coming face -to-face with a faux-wood- grained cabinet door —in actuality, a false front. It was an arguably clever way to bump out the bathroom on the other side to make room for a turquoise jacuzzi-shaped tub. Otto’s initial plan for the enlarged ...

President Trump gave a contentious speech at a campaign rally in Phoenix on Aug. 22, attacking the media, GOP senators and "obstructionist" Democrats. Here are the highlights. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) PHOENIX — Just before President Trump strolled onto the rally stage on Tuesday evening, four speakers took turns carefully denouncing hate , calling for unity and ever so subtly assuring the audience that the president is not racist. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson proclaimed that “our lives are too short to let our differences divide us.” Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr ., led everyone in singing a few lines of “How Great Thou Art .” Evangelist Franklin Graham prayed for the politically and racially divided nation and asked the Lord to shut the mouths of “those in this country who want to divide, who want to preach hate.” And Vice President Pence declared that “ President Trump believes with all his heart … that love for Amer...

The city of East Palo Alto , a wedge of modest houses and light industrial sites in the heart of Silicon Valley , has been passed by in the great tech boom . A historically black area , it has seen a big Hispanic influx in the past two decades, with more than three out of four residents now coming from one of those two groups. It is still living down its reputation, gained a quarter of a century ago, as the murder capital of the US: one out of every 571 of its residents was the victim of a homicide in a single year. Things have improved since then. But over the same period, it has become the poor neighbour to some of the world's richest companies. In one of the ultimate signs of the divide between the haves and have-nots of the western US, the municipal government of East Palo Alto didn 't own the rights to draw more from the state's water reserves, which it would need in order to grow. In June this year, it took a gift of cash, from the private foundation set up by Mar...