I've been shopping around for a mirror to replace one that broke last month, and keep coming across trumeau mirrors. Trumeau mirrors (pronounced troo-MO) are set in tall wooden frames with a large section of painted or sculptural decoration at the top. But what are these unusual mirrors, and where did they come from?

Do you know any real-life morning people? The kind who hop out of bed five minutes before the alarm and immediately spring into alertness? If you're like me, those people are exotic objects of your envy, while you try to will yourself to sleep at night and have a stress injury from hitting the snooze button too much. Sleep researchers say the most important sleep and wake-up cue for your body is light. Is the light in your life messing up your sleep cycle?

Readers, I know you're shy, so I've decided to be proactive and answer the burning window-vocabulary questions I know you've been quietly ruminating over for years. What's the difference between a mullion and a came, an oriel and a bay? Are your windows sash or casement? Are a transom and a clerestory the same thing? What did Edith Wharton have against picture windows? Read on and find out!

Yes I know, you think 'conversation pit,' you think of bad shag carpeting, questionable combinations of green, orange and brown, and maybe the occasional key party. But like a lot of things that were popular in the '70s (platform shoes, flared jeans, California cuisine), conversation pits can be great, when done properly…

Caspar David Friedrich, Woman At A Window (1822)
There was a time not so long ago that glass was a precious material, so highly valued that only the wealthiest homes had glass in their windows. And for millennia, of course, people had no glass at all in their windows. So how did we get here from there?

You know the feeling: euphoric from scoring the apartment you wanted, you're moving in, getting settled, and suddenly you realize: your cell phone doesn't get reception — your new home is a dead zone! Or, maybe you are finally falling into bed your first night in a new place, exhausted from the move, and just as you're drifting off your eyes snap open again: is that incessant banging coming from your radiator? And will it never go away despite the ministrations of several accredited plumbers?

Ideally, our furniture can reveal something about how we live and what we value. But in reality, other factors like cost, space and what is available in the marketplace ends up limiting us or diverting us from our true values. We might believe that form should follow function, but own an uncomfortably lumpy hand-me-down desk chair. Or we might fantasize about a huge snuggly sofa, but only be able to haul a spindly loveseat up the stairs. So it's inspirational to look at the Shakers, a religious sect who designed their homes and furnishings to be strictly in line with their values and ideas, and in the process, helped shape modern style in general.

A silver fork with animal hoof finial, from Byzantium (possibly Syria), 4th century AD

The youngest member of the flatware family, the fork has only become an essential utensil in the last couple hundred years — after all, who needs a fork when you have fingers, aka the perfect tools for picking up morsels? Many historians see a parallel between the rise of the fork and the rise of civilization. You can also read it as an index of attitudes toward hygiene and luxury. So…what the fork?

Last year Maxwell shared his surprising freezer method of 'washing' jeans, and last week Jill posted about freezing all her wool clothes and decor to get rid of moths (pictured). It got me thinking about the various other inedible things we should and do store in the fridge and freezer. Though I have an apartment fridge with decidedly ungenerous proportions, I always keep batteries in the fridge and candles in the freezer, but are these genuinely good ideas or old wives' tales? Let's take a look at some of the things you might want to store at chilly temperatures.

We're all familiar with Pantone's color chips, cheery blocks of color labeled with a numerical code. Pantone chips are icons of design, lately found everywhere from Christmas ornaments to coffee mugs. But who is Pantone, and why have their colors taken on such authority?