As you may remember, some time ago I traveled to a faraway land to eat beef donuts, blow glass, relive some childhood textile fantasies and take a lovely unexpected holiday in Scotland on the way home. I also attended an exceptional wedding, which you can now read all about in the May issue of ID.

What began as a summer speaker series held at the studio of celebrated Finnish architect Alvar Aalto evolved into a collaboration among an all-star cast of designers—Dai Fujiwara from Issey Miyake, the Bouroullec brothers, Hella Jongerius, Louise Campbell, Ilkka Suppanen, Miguel Fluxá and Jaime Hayón of Camper—which they decided should take the symbolic form of a wedding. But then it became more than symbolic, when Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri Engeström, a Finnish couple who now live in San Francisco with their baby Eliel, were tipped that there was a wedding in need of a bride and groom by their friend Laura Sarvilinna. Laura, along with Päivi Jantunen, are exceptional publicists for Helsinki’s finest designers (as well as my very gracious hostesses during my visit).

You can read the entire article including some gorgeous photos of the very lucky couple, and then be sure to check out the wedding’s website for more information about the couple and the designers, appropriately named It’s a Beautiful Day.

Oh, and Bridezillas, eat your heart out: Ulla-Maaria told me she never once picked up a wedding magazine.

You think I’m joking, but in the March/April issue of ID, my editors actually paid me to go to the restroom at a gas station. As part of their feature “What it feels like…” writers were dispatched to the far corners of design and reported on their experiences. I headed to the restroom at Helios House, the “little better” gas station by BP. I love ID’s toilet humor; right next to me on the page is another bathroom report from Ernest Beck, who perched on NY’s first automatic public commode.

Each year, ID picks the 40 best of something in the design world and dubs it the ID 40. For this year’s issue, which is on newsstands now, they picked 40 awesome creative workspaces, and I think they assigned me the very best one.

I got to spend an afternoon over at Ball-Nogues, the Echo Park studio of the adorable duo Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues. Actually, studio is really not the right word; it’s still very much the dusty three-car garage it was before they moved in. Well, actually, right before they moved in it was an underground death metal club. I am so not kidding. To claim the space for themselves, Benjamin and Gaston painted the garage fluorescent orange and hired a neighborhood kid named Ziggy to tag it with magic mushrooms (and perhaps on magic mushrooms). From this tiny orange shed on this quiet residential street emerges their world-famous larger-than-life installations, like Liquid Sky, which draped over MoMA’s PS1 museum in Brooklyn last summer, and Maximilian’s Schell, the shimmering vortex at Materials & Applications here in LA that got tons of press last year. Now you can check out the article online due to the wonders of Texterity.

Which is funny because I also got to write about Materials & Applications in this issue of ID. M&A is a little front yard in Silver Lake where directors Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess curate these massive temporary site-specific wonders, and currently, it’s home to Density Fields by Oyler Wu Collaborative. Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu created this somewhat menacing structure out of aluminum tubing and flagpole rope that reaches out towards the street like it’s about to take out someone on the other side of Silver Lake Boulevard. You gotta see this thing in person to truly appreciate it, something I highly recommend doing before it gets disassembled to make way for the next installation in March. Here’s the Density Fields piece, as a PDF.

There is one workspace online I’d love to send your way: The studio of my friend Marian Bantjes, who works in a house on Bowen Island, just west of Vancouver, British Columbia. And once you read it, you’ll understand how she has both the inspiration and the inclination to do all that gorgeously-obsessive work.