Sculptor Paul Allinson creates custom jewelry, shoes, and furniture with wonderful gothic detailing. I’m enormously taken with the little bats clinging to this desk, but all of his work is really striking: Check out the heels of these boots and this awesome walking cane.

The prices for many items aren’t listed, but the jewelry at least seems fairly affordable. He also does custom work, including big dramatic pendants and unusual items like petrol caps.

Link (via Uncle Fester’s)

Artist Raventalker is a dab hand at gothic room makeovers. She’s posted before and after pictures of several projects, including a bathroom, guest room, dining room, and entry hall.

Although some of her wall murals might be a bit daunting to undertake (or might annoy a landlord), much of the atmosphere is derived from carefully-chosen accessories and fabrics. If you’re looking for inspiration for a makeover of your own, check out these lovely designs.

Link

Here’s a really brilliant decorative idea: Walls covered with scientific illustrations. The bathroom shown here is decorated with pages from Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, but you could use anatomical illustrations, Dürer or Bosch artwork, or pictures of mementos mori.

If you didn’t want to do a whole room, you could cover one wall and use it as your focal point. I’m really impressed with how eye-catching yet soothing this decorating scheme is.

(via Lady Lavona’s Cabinet of Curiosities)

That isn’t a set of words you really ever expect to see strung together in quite that order, but apparently the folks at The Pyramid Collection have a little too much time on their hands.

If you don’t think that your decor is quite gothy enough, now you can spook up the bathroom with a choice of creepy toilet seats. And regret it the first time you stumble into the bathroom, bleary-eyed, at 2 a.m. and scare yourself silly. (At least, that’s what I would do.)

Anyway, in addition to the monster commode shown here, they also offer a dragon and what they describe as “Gothic” in, presumably, the architectural sense: The lid looks like a knight’s shield and the seat features real chain mail embedded in clear lucite.

I’m…speechless.

Writer Richard Morgan was commissioned by the New York Times to write a piece on steampunk culture, which was then cut for reasons unknown. He’s put the article online, and it has some lovely ideas for adding steampunk elements to the home.

Her living room features a chemical flask as a vase, a brass steamship clock (a wedding gift), a three-foot-tall 1930s-era radio she found at a garage sale, an ornate brass lamp with red glass she bought at a bazaar in Istanbul, thick red velvet curtains, dark wood flooring, a dulcimer handmade by her husband’s grandfather and distressed Victorian floorlamps with frosted bowls. For a few dollars a pound, she scrounged a salvage yard for a sack of gears that she is using to replace the knobs on her bedside tables. Her bed itself is lit with a brass swing-arm lamp she bought at a thrift store for $10. Her pride and joy is a self-made sun jar in her kitchen, a shredded $6 solar light she put in a frosted hermetic jar to use as a nightlight (it charges during the day and glows at night).

I’ve long admired the steampunk ideal of “retro-futurism,” and love the vibe of mass-produced mixed with one-off craftsmanship. This piece has a lot of ideas for making simple design changes that have a big impact, such as replacing drawer knobs with old gears.

Link (via BoingBoing)

(Incidentally, the Times eventually ran its own piece on steampunk, which includes some interesting links.)

Skull-a-Day mentioned this fabric in passing, and I find myself immensely taken with it. The Echino collection is 44″ cotton in “home decor weight,” which could be anything from stiff calico to upholstery. I love the elegance of the images: The bats shown here remind me of old Japanese paintings, and the spiderwebs and insects on other fabrics are lovely rather than menacing.

This looks like an excellent way to bridge the gap between mainstream and goth; if you’d like a little darkness around the house but your partner (or your landlord, or your parents) isn’t so sure, decorating with fabric like this might be a workable compromise.

Bonus Link: Walter and Veronica did this nursery based on a swatch of fabric from the collection. I love the subtle little skulls.

Here’s a cheap and unique way to enliven that bare wall: Reproduction posters advertising absinthe.

The height of the absinthe boom in the late 19th century, coincided with the rise of the large lithographic advertising poster as a powerful commercial and artistic medium – pioneered by the work of Jules Chéret. Some of the greatest poster artists of the period – Cappiello, Privat-Livemont, Lefevre, Tamagno – created famous images to advertise the absinthe grand marques.

The Virtual Absinthe Museum has paired with Allposters.com to create vintage reproduction posters out of prints and advertisements from the museum’s collection. There’s some great Art Nouveau-type prints, along with darker and grittier works showing the downside of the Green Fairy. These would be a great way to add a dollop of bohemian decadence to a room.

Link (via Cynical-C)

This manufacturer “recycles” stainless-steel coffins collected from Southern California funeral homes. Their site says, “It is a health and safety law that funeral homes cannot resell used coffins to the general public,” but since they go on to imply that their recycling approach gives them a loophole I guess there’s no law against hosing ’em off and turning them into furniture.

The six cast-iron legs are each embossed with the universal biohazard insignia, which I think is a nice touch.

At $4500 these may be a bit pricy, but you can’t beat them for style. They might be worth keeping in mind for your next interior decorating project.

Link (via The Presurfer)

Victorian decorating schemes are a popular choice for many goths; the lush interiors and artful clutter appeal to our dramatic side, plus a lot of Victorian imagery involves death in some fashion: These are the guys who popularized memento mori jewelry and post-mortem photography, after all.

If you’re considering an interior decorating makeover, check out Bradbury & Bradbury, specialists in “art wallpapers.” Their Victorian section–they offer lovely designs from many other periods–encompasses a variety of traditions (Aesthetic Movement, Victorian Classicism), and includes coordinating wall, ceiling, and border elements. You can order sample kits of their roomsets, and there are plenty of components to mix and match.

They’re not cheap–the paper is hand-printed–but the designs are gorgeous and you could expect them to last for years. If you’re looking for a way to add gloomy elegance to a dining room or bedroom, these would be perfect.

p.s. – This company’s Dresser Tradition II-Ashes of Rose” pattern is the design used in the foyer of Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Lovely!

If you’re looking for a quick way to add a few skulls to your decorating scheme, you need look no further than Indonesia. Skulls are an important decorative motif in the Balinese culture, and items with carved or painted skulls are readily available in import stores.

Most Indonesian skull representations have a sort of funky folk-art vibe, so they’d fit well with casual furnishings. For a more formal decorating scheme, choose one or two interesting pieces and display them as objets d’art.

Here are some online sources to get you started:

Bali Handcrafts – Wooden wall decor and small items such as wastebaskets. Surprisingly inexpensive.

Balibo – This place appears to be wholesale-only, so you may need to either find a retailer that carries their stuff or club together with a couple of friends. They have some neat pieces, so it might be worth the extra trouble.

Maskarade – Several skull mirrors about halfway down the page.

Tribal Asia – Carved skulls, plus some other interesting decorative items like demon masks.

Asian Tribal Artifacts – These guys sell real human skulls. No prices are given online, so I expect you’d have to be a very rich goth indeed to have one of these in your collection.