Design We Like is a blog series highlighting everyday items that complement the aesthetic sensibility of Turkel Design. By sharing these selections from our team, we hope to reveal more about the thinking behind our own modern prefab homes: understated beauty, clean lines, high-quality materials, and work that is built to last. Durable rather than delicate, timeless rather than trendy, these are the essentials that are too well-designed to keep hidden in a drawer. There’s no sponsored content here—it’s a place for us to celebrate the things that we believe would fit in a Turkel Design home.
Each year, the rebirth of spring brings a renewal in our enthusiasm for spending time in the garden. We love the feeling of anticipation that comes with growing fresh herbs for cooking, or the fragrant freshness of a blooming flower garden.
Of course, gardening is work, and work requires tools. As we often write in Design We Like, tools should feel good to use and look beautiful while you’re using them. Even if your home lacks the space for an outdoor garden, these recommendations are particularly well suited for bringing the garden indoors.
Here are some recommendations for garden tools whose stylish form equals their frictionless function—thereby making them Design We Like.
Design for Growing
Water is essential for your garden, and an elegant watering can make a stylish accessory for your garden. The famed Danish design house Stelton makes one of our favorite examples. Relaunched for Stelton’s sixtieth anniversary in 2020, this steel watering can recalls designer Peter Holmblad’s 1978 original. At 13” x 9.65” x 5.12”, the can is relatively modest in size, which makes it ideal for bringing a sense of the outdoors to your indoor garden. It’s also attractive enough to double as a sculpture when you’re not using it to hydrate your plants.
Design for Maintaining
Gardens are sanctuaries, gateways to peaceful escape and quiet reflection. Every gardener is well aware of the constant need for pruning, cutting, and clipping required to create this sense of calm—hence the need for a sturdy yet sleek pair of gardening shears.
Designer Satoshi Watase created an unusually graceful example with these steel shears from Kobayashi Seikyo Co., Ltd. The scissors are available in two sizes—the 5.51” × 2.76” × 0.39” Harvester and the 6.3” × 3.15” × 0.39” Florist — ideal for both snipping herbs and pruning flowers. The generous loop of each handle makes them a fine fit for your fingers.
Design for Displaying
Finally, you’ll need a beautiful vessel in which to display the results of your green thumb. To showcase flowers grown in the garden of a modern home, why not pay homage to one of the icons of modernism? Finnish legend Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) applied his prodigious talent to a wide range of projects, from large public buildings to housewares. This vase set from Iittala—made from mouth-blown, then hand-cut glass—bears his trademark wave design. With two sizes, one for larger arrangements and the other for petite bouquets, it’s a striking display for your floral bounty.
Whether you long for a garden to be your personal springtime sanctuary or you are looking for a way to bring the outdoors in, at Turkel Design, we believe that connecting with the outdoors is crucial to our wellbeing. Our modern prefab homes prioritize this connection in order to create spaces that make your life better.
Let’s have a conversation about how you want to live.
