Summer's almost here, and it's time to finally do those interior painting projects you've been thinking about. At Apartment Therapy, we love to write about painting projects and colors, and would really like to hear from you as we plan our summer editorial calendar.

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This week, Maxwell posted about how he raised a yurt in his garden in only 4 hours. For modern Westerners, a yurt is a kind of refined tent, both primitive and sophisticated. But the yurt is a type of structure that has been around for thousands of years. Let's take a look at the history of yurts.

In the 1950s and '60s, Acapulco became a hot destination for the jet set. Airline ads and other images from the time depict a glamorous, fun beachy town in full technicolor. The rat pack vacationed there, Liz Taylor got married (again) there, Jackie and John Kennedy honeymooned there. And at some point during that era, someone designed the Acapulco chair.

Lately I find myself daydreaming about growing a garden and keeping a flock of prolific chickens. In real life, I am a confirmed city dweller with a shameful aversion to mud and critters, but the idea of a rustic life in which I grow my own kale and keep my own bees exerts a powerful pull. And I am not alone (right??) — the romanticization of light agricultural productivity has been a feature of urban life at least since the ancient Romans. Let's take a quick look at how we can trace this phenomenon back to ancient Rome and the Renaissance.

The textile designs of Mariano Fortuny are some of the most enduring designs of the 20th century. Beloved by interior decorators (and prized by their clients), Fortuny patterns don't seem to ever get old. Let's take a look at the story behind these fabrics, as well as the surprising other designs of Mariano himself.

The 20th-century designer John Dickinson died in 1982, but his work is more popular now than ever before. Coveted by collectors (did you see the episode of Million Dollar Decorator where a fight over a Dickinson side table was a whole juicy storyline?) and imitated by DIY-ers with matte white spray paint, his furniture is a combination of simplicity, functionality and surrealist whimsy.

In honor of this year's Small, Cool Contest, let's take a look at the celebrated Frankfurt Kitchen, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926, where reduced space meant increased efficiency, and was key to the kitchen's transformation into a rationalized modern domestic laboratory.

Two of the most iconic chairs of the twentieth century, the Egg chair (image 1) and the Seven chair (image 5), were designed by Arne Jacobsen — a reclusive Dane known as "The Fat Man" (image 2). His creations, which ranged from flatware to skyscrapers, helped define Danish Modernism while keeping the "fun" in "functionalism."

In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, silhouettes became popular as cheap, quick ways of capturing likenesses. Often created by amateurs, especially women, they are now known as sentimental keepsakes of the Victorian variety, sweet mementos of anonymous everyday people from the past memorialized in ink, paint, or cut paper, and even painted onto porcelain. Let's take a look at this traditional art form and also at its name, whose etymology is an interesting riddle.

Peacocks are everywhere these days, their iridescent feathers and decadent beauty inspiring decorative imitations both abstract and literal. But this is no recent trend. Peacocks have been a favorite ornamental motif for millennia. Let's look at a few snapshots of the peacock in design history.