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The Dwell 24 Up-and-Coming Designers to Watch Alexander Girard Step Inside the Midcentury Master’s Last Surviving House At Home in the Modern World
Good Design Endures Timeless Ideas for Today
A hotelier creates an indoor/outdoor retreat for his family in the Elgin Valley.
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diamond chair, 1952 by harry bertoia - womb chair, 1948 by eero saarinen - made in the usa by knoll
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September/October 2018 “We’ve been quite true to Engels’s vision. We even tried to match our furniture to the way he had it.” Simon Mason, resident Page 78
CONTENTS
features
78 Landmarks & Engels
88 Mod Side of the Barn
Light streams into the kitchen of a refurbished International Style house in Elewijt, Belgium.
In a small town outside Brussels, a couple restore a modernist villa by Belgian architect Lucien Engels that was long his family home.
An elemental shape and generous outdoor living space define a family’s retreat in the bucolic Elgin Valley of South Africa.
TEXT
TEXT
PHOTO BY
Sonia Zhuravlyova
Graham Wood
COVER PHOTO BY
Greg Cox ABOVE:
Tim Van de Velde
PHOTOS
PHOTOS
Tim Van de Velde
Greg Cox
96 Their Own Girard After purchasing a 1950s home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a couple discover its unique status as the last surviving residence by midcentury master Alexander Girard.
106 Here’s Looking at You An architect creates a home for his family in the heart of Casablanca that dares to be different. TEXT
Catherine Bolgar
TEXT
PHOTOS
Deborah Lubera Kawsky
Amanda Large & Younes Bounhar
PHOTOS
Brian W. Ferry
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September/October 2018 27
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The Drape chair by Sara Jaafer, one of the rising creatives featured in The Dwell 24.
CONTENTS
60
72
departments 15 Editor’s Letter 18 Community
134 Sourcing See it? Want it? Need it? Buy it!
136 One Last Thing Designer Jonathan Olivares talks about the tool that’s never left his side.
Get a full year of Dwell at dwell.com/subscribe.
27 Modern World
54 Conversation
72 Outside
Meet The Dwell 24, this year’s crop of emerging design talent from around the globe (between birthplace and workplace, some 30 countries are represented), all of them 35 or younger. While they’re trained across disciplines, our focus is on the ideas they’re introducing to product design. Take, for example, Kusheda Mensah’s interlocking furniture pieces that are meant to encourage socialization, Dozie Kanu’s concrete bench held up by metal car rims, or Erez Nevi Pana’s vegan textiles. We explore what drives them and inspires them, and how they create impact.
MIT Media Labs professor Neri Oxman explores the connection between the material and natural worlds.
The reimagining of a landscape in Vancouver produces a secluded oasis that transforms the way a family relates to the outdoors.
48 Process A concrete workshop in northern Italy details the making of a popular Foscarini light fixture. Lindsay J. Warner PHOTOS BY Jamie Chung TEXT BY
INTERVIEW BY
Kelly Vencill Sanchez Sam Kerr
ILLUSTRATION BY
TEXT BY
Amara Holstein Ema Peter
PHOTOS BY
60 Focus At the edge of historic Charleston, South Carolina, a homely ’50s duplex becomes a bright loft-like space for a couple and their art collection. TEXT BY
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy Chris Edwards
PHOTOS BY
114 Renovation Five years in the making, a gleaming artist’s space and residence rises from the remains of an auto repair garage in San Francisco. TEXT BY
Lydia Lee
66 Backstory Mystery surrounds the provenance of a house in Portland, Oregon, that is rumored to be an unknown work of Frank Lloyd Wright. TEXT BY
Brian Libby Brian Flaherty
PHOTOS BY
122 Interiors An architect and her husband bring their quirky sensibility to a bungalow on the North Fork of Long Island. TEXT BY
Arlene B. Hirst Matthew Williams
PHOTOS BY
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To see your home in a new light, switch your switch.
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editor’s letter
Good design is not applied onto things. It is integral to their essence. It has context. One skill of architects is that they solve problems holistically. They think about the details, obsess over them, and then support a vision to manifest them. Architecture is, after all, a series of decisions. And the impact of those decisions can reach across generations. Take two homes featured in this issue, both from the 1950s and both in need of some work. The first, designed and doted over by beloved modernist Alexander Girard, who aspired to live up to the Japanese ideals of quality and harmony, has aged so gracefully over the years that its most recent restoration required neither an architect nor a general contractor (p. 96). The second, a burly cinder-block duplex whose renovation architect described it as “probably the ugliest house” in Charleston, South Carolina, needed to have its roof torn off and insides gutted before it could provide its new owners any sense of peace or tranquility (p. 60) The daylight between these buildings’ design intent is blinding. One was planned for obsolescence, to the extent that it was planned at all. The other was built to endure, to be rational and therefore timeless. And what is rational? Rational is any design that embodies clear thought—thought that considers all needs, both those we have now and those yet to come.
Lara Deam, Founder, CEO lara@dwell.com / @laradeam
Good Design Endures DWELL
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Dwell Editorial Executive Editor Luke Hopping Managing Editor Camille Rankin
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Contributing Editor Kelly Vencill Sanchez Technical Editor Bruce Greenlaw
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letters
Your July/August issue arrived last week and was the best ever (said often). The homes featured were excellent, showing great architecture, industrial and natural fabrication . . . plus the magic of steel windows. Thank you and keep it coming.
COMMUNITY
—Cherrie Badolato
From Dwell.com It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve read Dwell. Not due to disfavor, just busy being a tech nomad. Dwellingless. Post dwelling? Anyway, I just chose the May/June issue from the library shelf because I remembered how I felt when I last read it. So inspired. So resonant. I feel the same way about it now. —T.S. Mayfield
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I enjoyed reading the questions and answers in “Build the Future” [July/August] and have another question I’d like to see Dwell explore. With 3D printing and increased factory-sourced homes making home building smarter and more efficient, where will the new homes be built? Will these technologies increase suburban sprawl and reinforce preference for single-family
homes? Will they lead to more teardowns, and if so, how will we better manage environmental impacts like pollution and landfill waste associated with home demolitions? —Catherine Brick
“Land Before Time” July/August Location, location, location. Santa Barbara—indeed, the lion’s share of the central coast of California—is truly picturesque . . . and expensive to build on. But as a guest, put me on the list. Not a fan of the concrete block. A little goes a long way. The wood does warm things considerably and adds texture. —CRAIG HAYNES
It’s beautiful—so sleek—and its connection to the outdoors, with the 180-degree views, is magnificent. I love the concrete, steel, and glass along with the warm wood tones. Bauhaus all the way. —JENNIFER POLIXENNI BRANKIN
Harmonious connection to the outdoors. I can almost smell the fragrance of the fog. —COLLEEN MALONEY
“Twice Burned” July/August Really beautiful home. Very well done and thought out in every respect. —RANDY KIRSCHMANN
If I were to design a house, this is the place I would call home. Thank you! —THOMAS MORAN
WONDERFUL, it is my dream house. A touch of color here and there would add to it. —RICK GONYO
SEPTE M BER/OC TOBER 2018
DWELL
PHOTOS: ERIN FEINBLATT ( LEFT AND TOP); ADAM ROUSE ( BOTTOM RIGHT)
The Santa Barbara guesthouse (above) featured in “Land Before Time” and on our July/August cover (top) functions completely off the grid. “Twice Burned” tells the story of a couple in northern Maryland who used charred wood in rebuilding their home after a fire (right).
DESIGNED WITH PURPOSE
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dwell asks
What’s the story behind your most unbelievable furniture score?
I had just exited the freeway on my way to Banning, California, when I saw a man tossing stuff in a large trash bin and what looked like teak legs sticking out of the top. My heart began to pound. I pulled over. The guy asked, “See something you want?” That’s what I wanted to hear. We opened up the bin and there it was: a solid teak, open-back, curved-front Svend Aage Madsen desk in pristine condition. I was beyond excited. Andrew In the mid ’60s, my parents discovered a set of Harry Bertoia Diamond chairs at a garage sale in Casper, Wyoming. Three lounge chairs and a rocker for $5 each. $20 for more modern goodness than you can fit in a pickup. E. In 1980 I rented a cottage outside
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Glasgow. Nearby was an abandoned barn that had been used for breeding pigs (the Scots call them “piggeries”). One day a great storm ripped the roof off the piggery and inside were piles of stuff covered in tarpaulins. I pulled a tarp off and saw an elegant bookcase. I asked my farmerlandlady about it and she said I was wel-
come to it. It cleaned up beautifully—and turned out to be by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I kid thee not. Her father had commissioned Mackintosh to build a house in 1900, but by the 1960s, roof-rot, leaks, and mold had taken a toll and he had it demolished. But he saved the furniture, to be installed in a new house. The
bookcase didn’t fit, so it was sent to sleep with the pigs. Tony Jones On one of our visits to a monthly flea market in Centreville, Michigan, we spied an Eames Side Shell chair for $15. We asked the sellers if they had any more, and they said they did and would bring some next month. We
went the next month and bought another for $15. This went on for a couple of years. They never had more than one. We ended up with four blue, two green, one yellow, and one orange, as well as a La Fonda chair, all upholstered. Tom Berry A few years ago, I stashed an envelope in my dresser with
the intention of squirreling away money for a trip to Paris. My intention changed when I saw a photo of a white sheepskin lounge at Galerie Half: Bruno Mathsson’s Pernilla One chair. Naturally, I crossed off “Paris Trip” and changed it to “Bruno Mathsson Fund.” The opportunity finally presented itself last year: a chance listing by the original owner of a chair that had been stored in her barn for the last 40 years. It was in sorry shape, but I wanted to be the one to restore it. A few months and many dollars later, she’s a beauty. Vanessa Miller
SEPTE M BER/OC TOBER 2018
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ILLUSTRATION: RAYMOND BIESINGER
COMMUNITY
Dumpster dive? Online auction? Garage giveaway? We asked our community to share the tales of dumb luck and dogged persistence that led to their most treasured pieces. Add your too-good-to-be-true furniture adventure at dwell.com/best-find
60th Anniversary PH Artichoke Pendant Light in Brass from Louis Poulsen. Exclusively at YLighting.com or Call 855 451 6758.
dwell.com
Land of Pod RM-3 (short for “raw materials, three ways”) is Dwell’s new podcast exploring the secret life of building materials and how they shape our world in unexpected ways. Here, our host, writer and architect Dan Maginn, walks us through the concept.
dwell.com/raw-materials
COMMUNITY
What sparked the idea of RM-3? The idea of telling the backstory of materials came to me in response to the “Process” stories in Dwell, which tap into craft and materiality. I also like to cook, so the idea of “three ways” comes from that tradition. Do you have a favorite material? I am easily fascinated, so I have many favorites, but steel and I go way back. I love the fact that steel is basically processed dirt, and in time, it will go back to being dirt. But while it’s steel, it’s so proud and industrious.
What do you hope listeners will take away from the podcast? It would be great if the podcast sparked an appreciation of the process of making things, in addition to appreciating the thing that has been made. Understanding a bit about how materials are processed and come together can amplify the experience of a well-designed building or object. 22
PHOTO: JONATHAN PILKINGTON
What was the first project you designed? One of the first projects that I led was a high-end barn in Weston, Missouri, in 1996, for one of my all-time favorite clients. The dialogue for that project included her, her farm, a 100-year-old barn frame, and a lot of corrugated copper.
Each episode of RM-3 examines three use scenarios for a single material. In the first episode, host Dan Maginn, seen poring over samples in his Kansas City office, does a deep dive into zinc, a workhorse in the modern world.
SEPTE M BER/OC TOBER 2018
DWELL
houses we love
Bay Watch A master suite addition maximizes views of the San Francisco Bay. TEXT BY
In 2012, a home with a water view wasn’t even on Chris and Laura Porter’s wishlist. The couple didn’t think they could find one within their budget in Marin County, California. So when a realtor showed them a 1955 modern house on a forested two-acre lot in Tiburon, facing the San Francisco Bay, they were sold. “It feels like you’re in Tahoe,” says Chris of the site, which has easy access to sea kayaking and cycling loops. Several years later, the couple embarked on a master suite expansion to free up existing space for guests and take greater advantage of the site. Chris asked architect Cary Bernstein, who had redesigned his company’s office and who shared his 24
Eleni Andris
PHOTOS BY
Cesar Rubio
affinity for Japanese design, to do the job. The addition she created is elevated two feet higher than the main house, due to the site’s grade, yet relates with flat roofs, short overhangs, and dark-stained cedar siding. Bernstein tied the suite to nature with a covered deck that acts as a bridge between the old and new structures (and a perch where Laura likes to read when it rains), fossilized limestone around the fireplace, and nine-foot-tall windows for watching ferries and pelicans go by. The result evokes a spa, luxurious but not decadent. “Before, we didn’t spend much time in the bedroom,” says Chris. “Now,” Laura says, “we linger in the mornings.”
“That the project feels of one piece, to me, is always the first marker of success.” Cary Bernstein, architect
SEPTE M BER/OC TOBER 2018
DWELL
COMMUNITY
Clockwise from left: Chris and Laura Porter’s new master suite connects to the rest of the house via an indoor/outdoor bridge that comprises a covered deck and small library; Bonelli windows and Fleetwood sliders look out on a landscape designed by Christine Ferris. In the bathroom, blue-gray Heath Ceramic tiles and Linen Brix tiles by Naoto Fukasawa line the shower. A pair of CH07 chairs by Hans Wegner face a stunning view of the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. MDO panels the color of California poppies accent the home’s exterior.
More at Dwell.com Do you have a project you’d like to see published in Dwell? Share it at dwell.com/add-a-home.
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Inspired by chefs. Created for you. Michelin Three Star Chef Christopher Kostow for Samsung Chef Collection appliances. Š 2018 Samsung Electronics America, Inc.
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MARLO KARA, ISAURE BOUYSSONIE, SARA JAAFAR, KUSHEDA MENSAH, JAE YANG, HANNA ANONEN, JENNIE ADÉN, AYAKO ARATANI, EVAN FAY, ENY LEE PARKER, SALMAN JAWED, INÈS BRESSAND , JOSE VILLA SENE, RAIKO VALLADARES, HIROTO YOSHIZOE, QUINCY ELLIS, MARISA MÜSING, ÁLVARO GÓMEZ-SELLÉS, DAVID POMPA, VLASTA KUBUŠOVÁ , MIROSLAV KRÁL, RICH MNISI, MEI-LAN TAN, VICTOR LEFEBVRE, AGUSTINA BOTTONI, DOZIE KANU, EMILIANA GONZALEZ, JESSIE YOUNG, CECILIA XINYU ZHANG, YEMI AWOSILE, EREZ NEVI PANA
ec h i s sp e c i a l s
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FOUR
Drawing from countless submissions, innumerable visits to fairs and galleries, and—yes—Instagram, we bring together two dozen of the most promising creatives and duos, 35 and younger, who are testing the limits of art and design. DWELL
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modern world
FOUR
MAR LO KAR A AND I SAU RE BOU YS SON I E LO CATION
I NSTAGRAM
Tunis, Tunisia
@marloisaure
Franco-Tunisian Isaure Bouyssonie, 30, and Swiss-Greek Marlo Kara, 28, settled near Tunis after graduating from ECAL to be closer to the craftspeople who manufacture much of their work. Their studio, Marlo & Isaure, has gained success for both their own Mediterranean inflected designs and those of a growing number of international talents whose work they also produce. “We are the link between designers and manufacturers,” Bouyssonie says. Beyond their own creations, they’re currently collaborating on an armchair with Tunisian designer Ashref Chichini and a series of cushions by Swiss graphic and tattoo studio Happypets. —DORA VANETTE
Marlo & Isaure’s handmade, coneshaped Kheops paperweights (above) come in five shades of Tunisian marble. Kusheda Mensah’s configurable seating collection, Mutual (left), features 20 abstract upholstered shapes designed to foster social interaction. The copper cubeshaped Tilt candleholder (below) by Sara Jaafar appears to balance on a corner.
KUSH EDA M ENSAH LO CATION
I NSTAGRAM
London, England
@modularbymensah
Large abstract forms zigzag, curve, and tumble in captivating shades of ochre, ivory, and powder blue, like oversized building blocks, in Kusheda Mensah’s debut furniture collection. Mutual, released this year, is a 20-piece set of modular upholstered seating that invites playful experimentation and promotes interpersonal connection. This is what the Ghanian-British designer hopes all her work will inspire. “I want my pieces to encourage human relationships and socialization,” says Mensah, who is troubled by the rifts social media has caused in how we bond. Mensah, 27, holds a degree in surface design from University of the Arts, London, and works both independently and collaboratively from her studio in East London. —TIFFANY ORVET
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SA R A JA A FA R LO CATION
Beirut, Lebanon I NSTAGRAM
@1millimetre
After studying at the AA School in London, Sara Jaafar, 32, went to work at Heatherwick Studio. “They were working on 27,000-square-foot projects,” she recalls. “It was a great experience, but I felt I had to move back to the scale that I really loved.” In 2014, she returned to Beirut, where she had lived after growing up in Nigeria, and founded 1millimetre studio (the name is a reference to her attention to detail). Following her first furniture line— which included the flat-pack, leather-and-copper-tubing Drape chair—Jaafar is now designing pod hotel rooms in north Lebanon. Her primary material? Terrazzo embedded with shards of glass gathered from nightclubs, in response to Beirut’s garbage crisis. —DV
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HANNA A N ON E N
JA E YA NG LO CAT ION
I NSTAGRAM
Seoul, South Korea
@umzikim
LO CATION
Helsinki, Finland I NSTAGRAM
@hannaanonen
His grandfather slipped south across the 38th Parallel during the Korean War, and he’s spent large parts of his life hopping from South Korea to British Columbia to Italy and back again. Yang, who studied aerospace and mechanical engineering at Seoul National University before interning at the Samsung Design Center in Milan, started his own studio in 2011 to erode the barriers between disciplines. “Realizing that there is no solid boundary between design and engineering, I founded UMZIKIM, meaning ‘a movement’ in Korean, to define how engineers can design,” he says. The studio’s output, including an eye-shaped steel mirror and a series of Impressionist-inspired acrylic vases created in conjunction
Since graduating in 2013 with a master’s from Aalto University in applied art and design, Hanna Anonen, 29, has worked with Arabia, Iittala, and Hakola, as well as with Helsinki Design Week. Her pieces entice with their playful simplicity and curious medley of colors, such as her Cocktail light, which was inspired by the swirling ingredients of mixed drinks. “I’m influenced by everyday life, observing and recording the accidental color combinations in my surroundings,” says Anonen. She was nominated for Nordic Designer of the Year by Formex, won gold among young creatives in Grafia’s Best of the Year contest, and holds additional degrees in industrial design and in carpentry and cabinetmaking. —TO
Rossana Orlandi Gallery, and ICFF. —ELENI ANDRIS
A collaboration between Jae Yang’s two studios, UMZIKIM and Hattern, the multicolor Mellow vase line (above) has a gauzy, transparent finish.
J EN N I E ADÉN LO CATION
I NSTAGRAM
Stockholm, Sweden
@jennieaden
For Jennie Adén, there’s no need to hunt the globe for ideas. Her inspiration is rooted in the organic materials she finds close to home. “‘Dig where you stand’ is the principle that drives me,” explains Adén, 26. “Which materials and techniques should we be using to benefit from our own natural resources in a sustainable way?” To answer this, Adén looks to the forested idyll in western Sweden where she grew up, collecting and experimenting with wool, slate, polypore fungus, elk skin, and more to create blankets, lamps, and hearths that put provenance on display. Organic matter was the focus of her 2018 graduate project at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm, “Down to Earth,” and can be seen in her work for Crooked Concept, Svenskt Tenn, and others. —TO
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Designed by Jennie Adén with Hanna Stenström, the wool Fortuna armchair (left) borrows its shape and name from the Chinese fortune cookie. Hanna Anonen’s plastic, waterproof Ripsiraita mat (right) is inspired by the stripes and patterns of rag rugs.
SEPTE M BER/OC TOBER 2018
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We’re honored to win the 2018 National Design Award for Product Design.
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AYAKO ARATAN I AN D EVA N FAY I NSTAGRAM
Pontiac, Michigan
@aratani_fay
Ayako Aratani, 34, and Evan Fay, 29, are studio partners determined to go their own ways. Aratani’s Roommate lamp, which has a cloud-like shade of bent wire, and Fay’s Lawless sofa, a rigid framework woven with foam ribbons, aren’t obvious companions. But when
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the designers met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, they discovered they had similar interests despite stylistic differences: a desire to break from the rigors of industrial design, make things by hand, and celebrate incongruities. Since graduating in 2016, they’ve
shared a Detroit-area studio and resources while maintaining individual authorship of their creations. “All production for our pieces is done by both of us, and we show together under the name Aratani Fay,” says Fay. “But our products are different.”
PHOTO: JAMIE CHUNG
LO CAT ION
—TIM MCKEOUGH
SEPTE M BER/OC TOBER 2018
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ENY LEE PAR KER LO CAT ION
I NSTAGRAM
Brooklyn, New York
@enyleeparker
Eny Lee Parker’s first love was art. But as a teenager, she painted a picture of a bathroom so compelling that her high school teacher suggested she might want to think about designing spaces instead. That set Parker, 29, who was born in Brazil, down the path to studying interior and furniture design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Since establishing her studio in New York in 2017, Parker has been turning out plump, sculptural furniture and lighting with hand-formed ceramics, like the Oo floor lamp (see p. 27), which sprouts glass globes from two upturned trunks and helped her win this year’s ICFF Editors’ Award for emerging designer. —TM
Hand-thrown terracotta jugs form a base beneath the glass top of Eny Lee Parker’s Ballard table (above). Inspired by a children’s toy top, the Lattoo stool (right), designed by Salman Jawed, actually spins on its stand. The pleated-leather Kona sofa (below) by Inès Bressand is the first piece of soft furniture made by Mabeo.
SA L M A N JAW E D LO CATIO N
Karachi, Pakistan I NSTAGRAM
@j.salman
IN ÈS BRESSAN D LO CATION
I NSTAGRAM
Marseille, France
@inesbressand
After completing her master’s at the Design Academy Eindhoven, French designer Inès Bressand, 29, moved to Ghana for three months to explore the possibilities of straw in building, the subject of her thesis. What she found was an abundance of skilled craftspeople and new ideas. The result? Her sculptural Akamae bag collection, made of elephant grass. Bressand has worked similarly with weavers in India and potters in Provence. “As I share workshops, there’s a human connection, rich in cultural background and discussions,” she says. Her most recent work is a line of industrial-looking, galvanized sheet metal lamps for Botswana-based furniture maker Mabeo. —TO
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Architect Salman Jawed, 32, founded Coalesce in 2008 with fellow graduates from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture. The multidisciplinary firm made a name for itself at Dubai Design Days in 2015 with its installation Daalaan, an “abstract courtyard inspired by our childhood games,” says Jawed. For the space, he contributed Lattoo, a rosewood stool in the shape of a spinning top that gained widespread praise. But their proudest project to date has been the creation of the first National Pavilion of Pakistan for the Venice Biennale, in 2018. Coalesce not only designed and built it; they also raised funds, since there was no support from the Pakistan government. “It was an amazing feeling to make history,” he says. —CAMILLE RANKIN
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“Industrial design has been depressed in Cuba for a long time,”
A graduate of Tokyo’s Musashino Art University, designer Hiroto Yoshizoe, 32, balances commissions for hotels and restaurants with personal forays into product design. In 2017, he was Grand Prix winner of the Lexus Design Award for PIXEL, a wall of hollow building blocks that channel and transform light. The year before, he was a finalist for Plants-Skin, a ceramic planter that changes color when the soil is dry. “I had a mortar pot, and I knew when to water my plant by how wet the mortar was,” he says of the idea’s genesis. To get a similar effect, Yoshizoe used hydrochromic ink, which he knew about from his family’s bookbindery business. “I enjoy exploring innovative materials,” he says, “but I like having an analog dimension. Technology is important only in the engagement it allows the design to have with people.” —CR
suizas, the colorful, humidity-resistant, and highly elastic PVC-cords that crisscross Havana in the form of clotheslines, here hand-woven around recycled steel frames. The original design called for hard-tosource aluminum, but the duo learned to do without. —EILEEN SMITH
Hiroto Yoshizoe's Plants-Skin planters (above) use hydrochromic ink to reveal underlying color in the ceramic when the soil inside is dry. The Emptiness chair (right), one of multiple seats in Raiko Valladeres and Jose Villa Sene’s Vibra line, is inspired partly by string instruments. Quincy Ellis cofounded Facture Studio to explore color-shifting, molded epoxy resin designs, like the Gradient console (below).
QU I NCY E LLIS LO CATION
I NSTAGRAM
Brooklyn, New York
@facture_studio
Quincy Ellis, 31, had spent years fabricating art for talents such as Fernando Mastrangelo when he came to a realization: “I didn’t think there was enough being done with resin.” So Ellis, an industrial designer who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, founded Facture Studio in 2015 along with Nebojsa “Shoba” Sheric, an artist from Sarajevo. Since then, he and his partner have been developing tables, shelves, and wall pieces with simple geometries that exploit multiple layers, saturations, and opacities of resin. “We’re still so intrigued by resin’s Popsicle properties,” says Ellis. —TM
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Queens, New York
@musingselles
Don’t ask Álvaro Gómez-Sellés and Marisa Müsing to design just a chair. The New York architects, who met while working at the architecture firm SO – IL, design groups of furniture in which pieces “converse” with one another. “We never design a single piece,” says Gómez-Sellés,
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29, who grew up in Spain. “We always design sets to create a theatrical environment.” Even then, their creations rarely reveal their purpose at first glance. Set No. 5, a trio of plump, toothy objects, appears to be just sheeny pedestals until you move in for a closer look and discover
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SEPTE M BER/OC TOBER 2018
PHOTO: JAMIE CHUNG
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Mexico City, Mexico I NS TAGR A M
@studiodavidpompa
David Pompa, 32, started in lighting design in his mother’s native Austria but found his muse in his father’s homeland of Mexico. On a trip to Oaxaca following his studies at Kingston University in London, Pompa was introduced to barro negro, a clay that turns black when fired and has been used since pre-Columbian times. “We took that material, which has incredible texture and shine, and used it in a minimalist form,” says Pompa, who now works with more than 60 local artisans to fashion lights out of all sorts of traditional materials, from onyx to volcanic cantera rosa. Last year, his studio became the first Mexican brand to show at Euroluce in Milan. —ES
The Can light by David Pompa (left) is housed in a lustrous ceramic casing made of barro negro, a Mexican clay that turns smoky black when fired. Crafting Plastics! Studio pioneered an eco-friendly “bioplastic” to create a series of round, hand-crafted light fixtures called Collection 4 (above). The shaggy strands of material were dyed using plant pigments. Rich Mnisi’s sinuous chaise lounge (below) is wrapped in navy-colored leather.
RICH MN ISI LO CATION
I NSTAGRAM
Johannesburg, South Africa
@rich_mnisi
South African designer Rich Mnisi, 25, has already made a name for himself in the world of runway fashion with his irreverent, pop-inspired garments. This year, he ventured into furniture with a navy leather chaise and bronzeand-leather stool. Titled Nwa-Mulamula, after his late great-grandmother, the two-piece, limited-edition line is conceptually tied to Mnisi’s latest fashion collection. The organic form of the chaise represents the physical presence of the matriarch, while the stool, shaped like an eye suspended over a golden puddle, stands for her tears. For Mnisi, the collection, presented as part of Southern Guild’s “Extra Ordinary” show, is only the beginning of a more definitive foray into the home. —DV
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V L ASTA KU BUŠOVÁ AN D M I RO S L AV KRÁL LO CATION
Berlin, Germany / Bratislava, Slovakia I NSTAGRAM
@crafting_plastics
The plastic in a typical water bottle can take more than 450 years to degrade, clogging landfills and waterways. Working with scientists at the Slovak University of Technology, designers Vlasta Kubušová, 29, and Miroslav Král, 32, have cut that timeframe down to around 90 days. The duo, who are based in Bratislava and Berlin, launched Crafting Plastics! Studio in 2016 to explore oilfree “bioplastics,” using renewable resources like corn starch. Across four collections, Kubušová and Král have found various product applications for their material innovations. For their Kickstarted debut, they 3D-printed a line of bioplastic eyeware. The collection was a finalist for the Slovak National Prize for Design. —TO
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MEI - L AN TAN AND V ICTOR LEFEBVRE I NSTAGRAM
Oakland, California
@ume.studio
Although UMÉ Studio is based in California, the story of its founders, Mei-Lan Tan, 28, and Victor Lefebvre, 32, is international in scope. “Mei-Lan has Indonesian and Chinese roots. I’m French and I studied and lived in Japan,” Victor says, adding that their lifestyles are still itinerant.
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“Oakland is the place where we stop and regroup.” The duo, who met while working in Basel for Herzog & de Meuron, established their practice in 2016. Since then, they’ve expanded their network of collaborators, producing sculptural soaps, concrete serving trays that look like giant buttons,
and more. Now they are developing a line of silver cups with Indonesian artisans. “We spent time in Bali understanding the local crafts and the silver vessels they use to hold holy water,” says Mei-Lan. “These items have very specific intentions of use: one item, one action.” —DV
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PHOTO: JAMIE CHUNG
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AGUSTINA BOT TO N I LO CAT ION
I NSTAGRAM
Milan, Italy
@agustina.bottoni
DOZI E K AN U
Argentinian designer Agustina Bottoni, 34, spent years working in fashion before shifting her focus to product design and settling in Italy. Since starting her practice in 2016, she has produced a diverse body of work—from a series of mobile-like kinetic vases to a collection of sculptures that incorporate brass wind chimes. “Sound is a feature that is mostly overlooked in design,” Bottoni says. “We are immersed in the digital world, so it is quite refreshing to have objects that we can experience through our less-used senses.” In an upcoming project, Bottoni is going back to her roots, combining fashion and design in a collection of elegant geometric tapestries. —DV
Agustina Bottoni’s handmade Calici Milanesi line (top) consists of three visually striking cocktail glasses inspired by a villa designed by Milanese architect Piero Portaluppi.
The pill-shaped Hole bench (above) by Estudio Persona features a seat of generously stuffed white upholstery punctuated by two circular openings.
LO CATION
Lisbon, Portugal I NSTAGRAM
@dozie.kanu
When the group show “Midtown” opened at New York’s Lever House in 2017, one piece in particular caused a sensation: Bench on 84s, a concrete seat supported by polished metal car rims. Its creator, Dozie Kanu, 25, who grew up in Houston, had studied film production design at the School of Visual Arts, but became enamored of statement-making furniture. “I’m interested in taking things that are useful and making them functional in a different way,” says Kanu, who is focused on gallery-grade design. “It’s the reverse of what Duchamp did, which was taking something functional and making it purposeless.” He is presently at work on his biggest project yet, converting a warehouse outside Lisbon into his own live/work space. —TM
Dozie Kanu’s Table on 84s, a slab of concrete sitting on an elbow wire car rim (below), inserts car culture signifiers from Houston into the dialogue beween art and design.
E M I L I AN A GON ZAL E Z AN D J ESSIE YOUNG LO CATION
I NSTAGRAM
Los Angeles, California
@estudiopersona
Emiliana Gonzalez, 32, and Jessie Young, 35, founders of Estudio Persona, both grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay, but barely knew each other before moving to L.A. and collaborating on an interior design job. Gonzalez was a product designer, Young was a conceptual artist, and both were interested in exploring the space where those two disciplines meet. The pieces they create are informed by the Brutalist architecture of Uruguay and feature elemental forms and subdued colors. Their UNA chair, for instance, has simple dowel-like legs and an oversized cylindrical backrest wrapped in buttery leather, while the Nido chair has a deep scoop of a seat supported by a simple crossshaped oak base—furniture that is as sculptural as it is inviting. —TM
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CEC I L IA XI NYU ZH A N G LO CATION
I NSTAGRAM
Bergen, Norway
@ceciliaxinyuzhang
From her studio in Norway, Beijing-born Cecilia Xinyu Zhang, 32, conjures designs that hover, dance, and play weightlessly in space, creating delicate illusions that are surprisingly functional and impossible to ignore. One example is her wall hanger Frame for Northern. Its nested steel rectangles can rest flat against the wall or fan out to create a 3D hanging space. For Roche Bobois, she created the Discrete shelf. Due out this month, it features glass shelves held in aluminium frames that seem to float. “It is not about a statement piece. It is simply about offering the user a sense of depth and lightness through an ordinary, functional piece,” Zhang explains. —TO
With an adjustable round reflector, Cecilia Xinyu Zhang’s Equant suspension lamp (above) offers indirect and diffused illumination.
YEM I AWOS I LE
Erez Nevi Pana created his outré saltcrystal-encrusted stool (left) by letting it soak in the Dead Sea for months.
@yemiawosile
Yemi Awosile has designed textiles for spaces and the body using bark and cork. Her Wool rug line (below) draws on industrial felt.
ERE Z NEVI PANA LO CATION
I NSTAGRAM
Eindhoven, Netherlands
@p_a_p_i_x_
Growing up near Tel Aviv, Erez Nevi Pana, 35, spent his childhood learning about plants in his parents’ nursery. Further encouraged at Design Academy Eindhoven, he has centered his career on design that doesn’t use any materials derived from animals. Now he’s working on a line of vegan textiles—using plants and minerals—created by following the principles of Ahimsa, an Indian philosophy based on the premise of nonviolence toward all living beings. “In traditional silk manufacturing, silkworms are boiled alive inside of their cocoons,” says Nevi Pana. “In Ahimsa Silks, or ‘peace silk,’ we collect the cocoons after the moth has left.” Earlier this year, he was the recipient of PETA UK’s Vegan Homeware Innovation award. —DV
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LO CATIO N
London, England I NSTAGRAM
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, textile designer Yemi Awosile, 34, isn’t interested in just the visual and functional qualities of fabrics, but also their potential for “sharing a narrative through material,” she says. That’s why she sends swatches of the new materials she develops—including cork-based wallcoverings and fabrics made of bark from East African fig trees that can be harvested without felling the tree—to material libraries where anyone can study them. Awosile has created projects for the Tate Modern, The Design Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum and is currently working on a permanent public art commission, which will be installed in London in 2022. —DV
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process
The Aplomb concrete pendant has an imperfect surface that gives it an expressive, handmade quality. The light was designed by Paolo Lucidi and Luca Pevere for Foscarini and is manufactured at family-run Crea Cemento in Lombardy.
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TEXT BY
PHOTOS BY | @JAMIECHUNGSTUDIO
Lindsay J. Warner
Jamie Chung
process
Cone of Uncertainty A daunting lighting design pushes a seasoned Italian craftsman to rethink the limits of concrete.
Ndiaye Mamadou, an artisan who arrived in Italy as a political refugee from Senegal, inspects a pendant after it is taken out of the mold. If it has any chips, cracks, or overly large holes in the surface, it is removed from production and recycled.
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Two short, quickly scribbled words nearly put an end to the Aplomb before the hanging lamp even reached the prototype stage: “Non fare.” Italian shorthand for, “It cannot be done.” That fateful sentence is scrawled across
the bottom of a faded sheet of fax paper dated June 6, 2008, below an original drawing for the funnel-shaped pendant by Paolo Lucidi and Luca Pevere. The designers had approached master craftsman Giovanni Piccinelli about producing the 49
process THE APLOMB PENDANT The elegantly industrial suspension lamp is completely handmade in Italy.
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MAKE THE MOLD
PREPARE THE MOLD
Giovanni Piccinelli, founder of Crea Cemento, makes all of the molds for Aplomb from fiberglass. About 40 molds are in production at any one time, and each can be used about 350 times before wearing out.
Ndiaye Mamadou wipes the inside of the mold with oil—a release agent—and then seals it with several metal pins that clamp the mold in place.
design in concrete for Foscarini, a highend Italian lighting firm. But upon seeing the specifications, Piccinelli demurred. Piccinelli, now 77, started working with concrete when he was seven, growing up in Valcamonica, a valley in the Italian Alps that he still calls home. In 1997, he started his own workshop, Crea Cemento, mostly working on large-scale building projects. But Lucidi and Pevere wanted him to execute a cast concrete pendant with thin two-centimeter walls, hung by a slender cylindrical neck, also of concrete. The concept seemed ludicrous to him. Carlo Urbinati, Foscarini’s founder and president, then took up the cause, asking Piccinelli and his two sons, Carlo, an architect and creative director of Crea, and Ottavio, its logistics manager, to reconsider. “When you’re being challenged, you’re probably in a good position to find something new,” Urbinati says. “Often, the real meaning of ‘it cannot be done’ is actually ‘I’ve just never done that before.’” Piccinelli went back to the drawing 50
board and began crafting fiberglass molds for prototypes. He had made thousands of molds during his decades-long career, but they had been for pillars and staircases, not fancy pendants. The scale of Aplomb was entirely different. “Non fare.” Yet Urbinati had chosen Crea because it had a reputation for being the best. Foscarini, based just northwest of Venice, was founded in 1981 with no factory. It still outsources all of its production. “This allows us to be as free as we can,” Urbinati says. “If you have your own factory, you’re tied to a specific means of production. It exerts an unconscious commitment.” Meanwhile, the economic downturn of 2008 hit the construction industry hard. As Crea’s other business dried up, Piccinelli and his sons kept working on prototypes for Aplomb, spending more than two years perfecting the recipe of sand, cement, leveling compounds, and other additives to produce a mixture that was fluid enough to pour, yet would retain its shape without breaking. Making matters more
complicated, Foscarini had certain requirements, such as a perfectly turned edge and a smooth finish unmarred by large pock marks. All of these elements could be thrown off by a simple change in temperature or humidity in the workshop. Finally, the team hit upon a recipe that produces a pendant that is sturdy yet delicate. (The name “Aplomb” refers to the construction tool that uses gravity to determine a vertical line—a plumb bob— and also to having an attitude of poise or self-confidence.) In 2010, the pendant officially went into production. “È possibile farlo.” It can be done. Aplomb was a tipping point for Crea. In the past 10 years, the family-run business has shifted to creating vases, pen holders, and tables for more than 70 Italian brands, from Alessi to Fendi. The workshop is still small—fewer than 10 people—but thriving. And that concrete recipe? “It’s a secret,” says Urbinati. “Someone in Asia tried to copy it and the pendant broke. That’s why we never reveal the full ingredients.”
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process
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MIX THE CONCRETE
CAST THE MOLD
The mixture of cement, sand, water, self-leveling compound, and other additives used to make Aplomb is proprietary, and varies according to the temperature, humidity, and presence or absence of color pigments.
Before filling the mold, Mamadou uses two vessels to decant the concrete to help eliminate large air bubbles, then lets it sit until the remaining bubbles rise to the surface. Then he slowly pours the mixture into the mold.
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LET THE CONCRETE HARDEN
RELEASE THE PENDANT
The mold is stored in a shelved locker for one day before the pendant is released.
Mamadou removes the pendant, using a special clamp and tapping the edges of the form with a hammer to help release the cast. It is then left to set for 7 to 12 days, depending on temperature and humidity.
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process
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7
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SMOOTH THE EDGES
TRIM THE TOP
The mold leaves a ragged edge of hardened cement paste at the top and bottom of the form. Artisan Buga Radu threads the pendant onto a lathe and hand-trims the rough edges with a die-grinder to create the bell edge.
Radu uses a jig and angle grinder to trim the stem to the correct height.
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SANDBLAST THE SURFACE
ADD THE PROTECTIVE COATING
Sandblasting gives the Aplomb its soft exterior, yet won’t obscure the signature imperfections that are formed by small air bubbles during mixing. Each pendant is sandblasted both inside and out for consistency.
Giovanni’s son Carlo Piccinelli dips the nearly finished pendant in a protective coating that repels stains and fingerprints. The Aplomb is then sent to an assembly factory in Pordenone, Italy, where it is wired.
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process
Although Foscarini had originally estimated a production run of 2,000 Aplomb pendants per year, Crea now produces some 2,000 per month, making it one of Foscarini’s top-selling products. The fixture, which is available in six colors, including natural gray, retails starting at about $700.
“We weigh the ingredients and mix them according to a special recipe, but the success ultimately relies on the sensitivity of the person doing the mixing.” — Carlo Piccinelli DWELL
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More at Dwell.com Go deeper inside the process behind Aplomb with more photos and a video at dwell.com/cone-of-uncertainty
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conversation
The Industrial Revolution heralded a new paradigm: “the World as Machine.” poses a model for the Digital Age: “the World as Organism.” This view aims to impart “a living quality” to the built environment, she explains. The resulting creations could be buildings made of a single surface material that can integrate multiple functions—“not unlike the human skin, which serves at once as both a barrier cess of design that thrills and inspires the ied medicine in Jerusalem and architecture in London before earning her PhD in design computation at MIT, where she heads the interdisciplinary Mediated Matter research group. “Design is bigger than ‘form follows function.’ It can lead to technological and even scientific progress,” she says. “A good designer can, by virtue of design—both the noun and the verb—not only solve problems, but also seek them out, long before they emerge.” Your work melds numerous disciplines. How do you decide what to explore? We don’t distinguish between the disciplines. Rather, we cycle through Inspired by the myth of Arachné, who was transformed into a spider by the goddess Athena, this 3D-printed, tion with Stratasys and W. Craig Carter and part of the permanent collection of MoMA, is imagined as a flexible armor optimized for both mechanical protection and flexibility.
The architect, artist, and MIT Media Lab professor sees buildings of the future as being designed more like organisms and less like machines. 54
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PHOTO: YORAM RESHEF
Neri Oxman
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them—from science through engineering through art; from exploration through invention through expression. The Material Ecology approach is always present and acts as a set of guiding principles no matter the scale, the materiality, or the context. It’s a system to address manifold issues without categorical delineation, whether it’s curing malaria or populating Mars. Walk us through your process. Each of our projects is explored as a twosome: the technology to create the project and the material composition to be employed—whether naturally sourced or synthetically engineered. Our projects necessitate that we invent the technologies to create them. Our 3D-printed glass pavilion, for example, could neither be designed nor built without first inventing a glass printer. Then, through experimentation, we discovered that when the nozzle releasing the stream of molten glass is raised above a certain level it begins to wobble, and we can trace out waves or loops. Unlike blowing or forming glass, printing enables the creation of internal and external surface features that are
nonidentical, that can concentrate and disperse light by virtue of their geometry. So really what we’re printing are optical lenses. We also collaborated with [Princeton professor] Pierre-Thomas Brun to create a reduced mathematical model describing the fluid dynamic behavior of the high viscous liquid “ropes” generated by our printer. So, the technology for 3D printing with glass generated new scientific knowledge that did not exist prior to this technology, and that’s very exciting, since it is usually the case that the technologies are invented upon scientific exploration. The opposite rarely occurs. How would you like to see 3D printing evolve? How useful is it for architects? Our inbox is bursting with appeals to design perfume diffusers, vases, you name it. But why print small when we can dream big? In terms of utility for architects, we still have a way to go, but there are several paths we’re excited to explore in the near future, including, for example, more complex geometries on a facade scale that can reflect and transmit light in interesting and meaningful ways, including solar
“Our inbox is bursting with appeals to design perfume diffusers, vases, you name it. But why print small when we can dream big? ”
From top: Members of the The Mediated Matter Group who contributed to the design and construction of the Aguahoja Pavilion, a full-scale architectural structure made primarily of biopolymers. Oxman’s Krebs Cycle of Creativity (2016) represents what she calls “four domains of creative exploration” in which “one realm can incite (r)evolution inside another.” Inhabited by living microorganisms, a mask from the Vespers series, created in collaboration with and 3D-printed by Stratasys, paves the way for personalized wearables capable of producing vitamins and antibiotics in response to environmental or bodily cues.
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PHOTOS: COURTESY THE MEDIATED MATTER GROUP, JONATHAN WILLIAMS ( AGUAHOJA) , YOREM RESHEF ( VESPERS)
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Crystal Springs
conversation
You grew up in a modernist house in Haifa. How did that shape your thinking about the built environment? I was privileged to have grown up with expansive views of the Mediterranean in a house designed by my parents. It was small but spacious and filled with artifacts collected during family trips: arabesque tiles from the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, Scandinavian textiles, miniature Delft houses, Nolli maps of Rome. It was full of joy and a relentless urge to discover and create. My parents’ love of modern design has definitely shaped my taste and thinking; it has also shaped my desire to rebel against the less fortunate characteristics of that movement—or any movement. When did you first experience the natural world as a source of inspiration? My grandmother’s house neighbored ours,
and I spent many afternoons in her garden counting clouds and picking mushrooms. It was small but there was not a single plant or fruit tree that was missing. That was my world growing up. What’s the next frontier at the intersection of the built, the natural, and the biological? We’re inside the eye of the storm as we experience a shift from nature-inspired design to design-inspired nature, where decisions we make and structures we deploy in the built environment will affect our natural resources, our natural and cultural evolution. From a Material Ecology perspective, we are approaching a material singularity where there will be little to no distinction between “natural” and “artificial.” Designed objects, and the technologies to create them, will exhibit functionality and behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, naturally derived ones. That’s Material Ecology’s ultimate Turing test. Imagine an entirely artificial heart digitally printed and biologically augmented that perfectly matches its host and even outperforms it. In this respect, I find the discourse involving biomimicry and sustainable design overrated and even boring. Why would we invest in sustaining things as they are, only to welcome the sixth extinction? Time to grow.
After releasing the first optically transparent glass printer in 2015, Neri Oxman and her Mediated Matter Group experimented with the printer’s nozzle diameter to form loops and coils (above)—“like honey on toast,” Oxman says—thus creating optical lenses at architectural scale. The Carpal Skin glove (left) is a prototype for a customized splint that maps the pain profile of each patient and limits movement as needed. PHOTOS: COURTESY THE MEDIATED MATTER GROUP, MIKEY SIEGEL (CARPAL SKIN)
harnessing. Equally exciting is the ability to print spatial pockets and channels to contain fluids or other media, augmenting an architectural facade with photosynthetic media, for example, or biofuel. Imagine the Centre Pompidou in Paris without functional or formal partitions, where the structural support, environmental sensing, and visual connectivity are all coalesced within and expressed through a single materials system.
“We’re inside the eye of the storm as we experience a shift from nature-inspired design to design-inspired nature. ” NERI OXMAN 58
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Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Chris Edwards
Charleston Coup A cinder block duplex in South Carolina is recast in the mold of a New York City loft.
The transformation of a 1950s eyesore into an elegant, gallery-like home was a creative challenge for architect Kevan Hoertdoerfer and all involved. The poem “Roll the Dice” by Charles Bukowski is painted on the facade. “It expresses how we felt about the project,” says resident Karen Baldwin. “Everybody roll with it—everybody do their thing.”
When architect Kevan Hoertdoerfer was asked to turn “probably the ugliest house in Charleston” into the proverbial swan, he was both thrilled and apprehensive. “It’s a dream to have a client who gives you an open book,” he says of the instruction to do anything he wanted. “On the other hand, you’re compelled to do something really powerful.” The resulting metamorphosis of a squat 1950s cinder block duplex into a concrete and glass neighborhood standout leaves no trace of its ugly duckling origins. Located in Wagener Terrace, the building was chosen in part because it sits just outside the purview of the historic city’s stringent architectural review board. The owners, interior designer Karen Baldwin and her partner, share a passion for 1970s art and sought an unconventional space that evoked their idols, like Andy Warhol and Richard Diebenkorn. “We wanted a New York–style loft, with lots of open space and light, so local artists and artisans could have the creative freedom to add to it,” says Karen. 60
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Keeping the footprint, Hoertdoerfer replaced the upper part of the cinder block construction with a concrete-supported, double-height loft space. The ground-level side windows were enlarged and filled with translucent polycarbonate panels. Two walls of glass—one upstairs in front and one downstairs in back—flood the home with light. Perhaps the most striking feature is the sculptural galvanized steel roof, whose unconventional angled design is based on the sun’s movement. Neighbors were divided during its construction, speaking out at a city meeting. “One person said, ‘Contemporary architecture like this is killing Charleston,’” recalls Hoertdoerfer. “But another said, ‘Diversity is great, we love its creativity.’” Today, the home has
A floating wood staircase hand-painted by artist Tess Thomas adds more than a pop of color (right). On the upper level, the master
suite looks across the open space to an expansive deck (below). The walnut and Corian kitchen island (bottom) anchors the first floor.
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settled into its role as a local wayfinding marker. “It’s known as the modern house opposite the dog park,” says Karen. Inside, the eye goes immediately to a floating staircase along one wall. Inspired by Diebenkorn’s abstract works and created by local artist Tess Thomas, its wood treads are painted in a variety of bright hues, each combination unique. The color-blocked surface continues on the landing that leads to the roof deck, which looks down on another piece of art, the front garden. Designed by landscape architect Robert Maerlender, it features green circles of astroturf stamped
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onto a gray canvas of shale and framed by an angled wood fence. The circles repeat in the backyard, as stepping stones and as holes in the wall of a concrete-and-stucco cabana, which includes mesh side tables designed by Karen and built by artisan Eric Doran from a piece of airport conveyor belt. The home’s aviation-themed metalwork, including canopies over the back and side doors, resulted from frequent trips to the scrapyard. “It’s just the greatest space,” Karen says of her new home. “We put the music on, dance, and cook and are so happy here.”
Hoertdoerfer’s vision for the open-air cabana included holes in the wall for plants to poke through. Karen designed the seating and the chandelier, which was fabricated by artist Eric Doran from a piece of metal Karen found in his shop.
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backstory
TEXT BY
PHOTOS BY | @BRIANFLAHERTY
Brian Libby
Brian Flaherty
A flattering rumor holds that a midcentury gem in Oregon is an unrecognized work by America’s most famous architect.
Not Quite Wright
For more than 70 years, claims have persisted, without much evidence, that a home in Portland, Oregon, is a lost work by Frank Lloyd Wright. Regardless of authorship, the structure—a flat-roofed, cedar and glass ranch—endures as a sterling example of postwar American architecture. Its recessed entryway features panes of translucent glass.
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When Kelsey and Scott Bouska bought a postwar home in the West Hills area of Portland, Oregon, in 2016, they had no idea anyone had ever suggested that its architect was Frank Lloyd Wright. “We didn’t hear a word about that until after the transaction was done,” Scott says. The Bouskas, who both work at Nike’s world headquarters in nearby Beaverton, instead were attracted to the natural setting. “It’s so serene,” Kelsey says. “You feel like you’re in the wilderness.” The house,
shaped like a boomerang, is designed to maximize that feeling, with floor-toceiling glass in the living room and a master bedroom framed by windows on three sides. “It's like you’re living in a snow globe,” she adds. Mahogany cabinetry and marble countertops, part of a recent remodel by the previous owner, also give the home an understated elegance. The Frank Lloyd Wright claim, investigated by local historian Tanya Lyn March, seems to be an urban legend. Actor
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backstory
Windows offer wraparound views in the master bedroom (above). The nightstands and bed are from the Matera line by Sean Yoo for Design Within Reach; the Stem lamps are from Rejuvenation. The last owner painted the walls Gentleman’s Gray by Benjamin Moore. A Lollygagger lounge chair by Loll Designs sits on the back deck (right).
Margaretta Ramsey and her naval officer husband, Walter, had the house built in 1947 after he was transferred from New York City, where she had recently starred in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Later, she would go on to act in film and television. According to a 1947 article in The Oregonian, says March, the Ramseys told friends that Frank Lloyd Wright had written the design on a napkin and that they had then hired a young local architect, Derald K. Harbert, to complete the blueprint. By 1954, when the house was put up for sale, newspaper ads named 68
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Wright as the architect, although one classified coyly added a question mark after his name. But there is no written record of Wright designing this house. “We probably get an inquiry about a house every other week,” says John H. Waters, preservation programs manager for Chicago’s Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. “The things people suggest are Wright houses vary from plausible to completely implausible.” The West Hills home features some details that are uncharacteristic for
Wright, like vertical siding, but Waters notes that, given the way the design addresses the garden with walls of glass, it looks more like the great architect’s work than many such claimants. “I can see how someone would link Wright’s name with it,” he says, adding, “It is not absolutely impossible that there’s undocumented work out there. It’s pretty unlikely, though, at this point, given Wright’s fame.” Waters is intrigued by a theory March suggested: that Wright’s son, architect
The Ramseys told friends that Frank Lloyd Wright had written the design on a napkin and that they had then hired a young local architect to complete the blueprint. N
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Current owners Scott and Kelsey Bouska worked with Landscape East & West to replenish the halfacre property (top). The living room is furnished with an Eames lounge and ottoman, a Line
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credenza by Nathan Yong, and a Tolomeo Mega floor lamp by Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina for Artemide (above). The fireplace, also painted by the last owner, is Wrought Iron by Benjamin Moore.
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backstory
Mystery Box Tracing the known history of an enigmatic midcentury home. 19 47
The Ramseys’ house is completed; Wright designs the First Unitarian Society of Madison meeting house in Shorewood Hills‚ Wisconsin. 19 49
Wright wins the Gold Medal from The American Institute of Architects. 19 54
The Ramseys sell the house‚ with realtor A.C. Spencer using Wright’s name in a classified ad in The Oregonian. 19 6 4
Five years after his death‚ Wright’s only known Oregon building‚ the Gordon House in Silverton‚ is finished; Margaretta Ramsey moves to Beverly Hills after her husband’s death‚ resuming her career in acting. 19 6 7
Ramsey appears in the movie Riot on Sunset Strip‚ one of four films she acted in. 19 72
The house is called a “Wright” design by realtor Peter Campbell in an Oregonian classified ad for an open house. 19 75
Ramsey appears in the series finale of Mannix on CBS. 2 0 16
The Bouskas buy the house just after the previous owner completes a restoration.
The 3,700-square-foot home has four bedrooms. The owners, who are expecting their first child, just finished transforming one of them into a nursery,
featuring mahogany cabinets (above and below). The crib is from Crate and Barrel, the dresser is from Room & Board, and the hanging planters are by Sandbox Ceramics.
Lloyd Wright, might have produced the basic boomerang design for which Harbert then created blueprints. “Maybe Margaretta Ramsey was hanging out with this Wright,” March offers. The Bouskas, who moved into the house shortly before their wedding, aren’t concerned with proving the Wright provenance. Instead, they’ve focused on landscaping the half-acre property, which had become overgrown with thorns and invasive plants, filling the interior with artworks and midcentury furniture, and converting a bedroom into a nursery for their first child, due in September. “It’s part of the charm of the house,” Kelsey says of the Wright legend. “It makes it interesting when there’s a story behind it.” But the design itself is what drew them in. “We walked in,” Scott recalls about first seeing the house, “and said to ourselves, ‘We have to have this.’”
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outside
TEXT BY
PHOTOS BY | @EMAPHOTOGRAPHI
Amara Holstein
Ema Peter
A black-stained Western red cedar fence now runs along the perimeter of Sharen McLean and Mark Derraugh’s property in Vancouver, part of a complete revamping of the couple’s outdoor space. The project was spearheaded by Sharen’s daughter, Andrea McLean, whose daughters and nephew make the most of the urban oasis.
Enclosure Act Sheltered by a fence, a low-key landscape gives a family in Vancouver a new lease on outdoor living . 72
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Hana Bea, 6, follows the concrete pavers (left) that lead from the front yard to the side entrance. The cedar decks were left to bleach in the sun for one summer and then finished with a light gray wash (above). Metal
Solair chairs are in keeping with the tricolor palette of black, white, and green. For plantings, landscaper Aaron Teer helped select leafy specimens like the lion’s mane Japanese maples on the lower level (below).
With its sleek linear form surrounded by massive vine maple trees, Sharen McLean and Mark Derraugh’s house on a quiet street in Vancouver feels like a faraway escape in the heart of the city. Yet until recently, the landscaping was “lackluster” and didn’t fall in line with the modernity of the house, says Sharen’s daughter, Andrea McLean, an architectural designer with her own practice who is working toward becoming registered. “The front yard was literally just a way to get from their cars to the front door,” she explains. “And the backyard was in such bad condition, they didn’t want the grandkids playing out there.” After spending the previous 15 years slowly renovating the home’s interiors, 74
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outside
Andrea tackled the front yard in 2013, starting with a Western red cedar fence that both visually encloses the whole space and keeps the grandchildren—including her own kids—safe from the street. A mass of rhododendrons was replaced with a wood seating platform next to a patch of easycare artificial turf, and such traditional touches as topiaries and boxwoods were removed. “It was all about taking out finicky things that didn’t serve us,” says Andrea, who tied the new fence and house together with a coat of midnight-black stain. Then in 2015, a massive storm blew down the back fence, and the rickety carport toppled over. “So we were like, Andrea, now what do we do?” says Sharen. Bulldozers came in, the old deck went out, and a capacious deck now slides through a wall of glass from the kitchen, stepping in tiers of increasing privacy down the back of the house. A new garage was built
as a “mini-me of the house,” says Andrea, and then painted white to lighten its girth. Instead of bright flora, all the plantings have a monochromatic forest feel. “It was a conscious decision not to have any colored flowers—it’s more about textures, the way things move in the wind,” explains Andrea, who worked with landscaper Aaron Teer to select the plants. White concrete pavers run along one side of the house, three giant katsura trees wave over a basalt pathway next to the garage, and verdant ferns abound. Now, the grandchildren romp around in the daytime, while Sharen and Mark sip wine and chat with passing neighbors in the evenings, owls hooting overhead. Mornings are spent puttering around with coffee on the back deck in their robes. “The outside has become our living space,” says Sharen. “It’s just created a different dialogue with the house.”
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“Enclosing the house could have detached it even more from the neighborhood. But instead, my parents are out there all the time now, and neighbors stop to chat with them over the fence.”
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McLean chose artificial turf for the front yard, where Hana Bea and her sister, Pilar, 9, play as Sharen looks on (left). Katsura trees, climbing hydrangeas, and basalt stepping stones create a pleasing passageway between the lower back deck and the new garage (above). “What could have been leftover space, I wanted to be a promenade,” says Andrea.
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ANDREA MCLEAN, ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNER
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Landmarks Villa Engels, the home of the esteemed Belgian modernist Lucien Engels (1928–2016), was falling apart when its second owners bought it in 2013. Yet due to its heritage status, any changes they planned would have to be approved
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by the provincial preservation office. Engels completed the elongated, cantilevered residence in 1958, the same year he finalized the master plan for Expo ’58, the Brussels World’s Fair that famously featured the Atomium.
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Engels
A Belgian couple abide by strict preservation rules to breathe new life into an International Style villa by architect Lucien Engels.
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TEXT BY
SONIA ZHURAVLYOVA PHOTOS BY | @T V DV PHOTOGR A PH Y
TIM VAN DE VELD
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Opposite, clockwise from top: Resident Simon Mason, joined by his daughter, sits on a leatherupholstered Bertoia side chair. The futuristic fireplace, designed by Engels, is flanked by a BeoLab 20 speaker by Bang & Olufsen. A refurbished Wenge wood cabinet in the kitchen is coated in reflective gloss and an orange strip of MDF; all of the pendants are either original or made-to-measure replicas of Engels’s designs. A pivoting glass door leads from the secondstory kitchen to an elevated terrace and onto the lawn (above). The Mezzadro stools are by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni.
More at Dwell.com Explore more images of Villa Engels at dwell.com/landmarks-and-engels
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When Simon Mason first saw his future home in the Belgian hamlet of Elewijt, near Brussels, he thought all it needed were some modern electrical outlets, maybe a new kitchen and bathroom. But in truth, Villa Engels, designed in 1958 by the modern architect Lucien Engels, who lived there with his family for the next half century before moving into assisted living, was far from ready to accommodate Simon, his wife, and their two young kids. Featuring an elongated glass volume supported by pilotis above a reflecting pool, the two-story house turned out to be in a sorry state when Simon, the head of a local chemical distribution company, bought it from Engels’s family in 2013. Major issues had been papered over for years. Case in point: During the 1970s oil crisis, its vast floor-to-ceiling windows, which by then were hemorrhaging heat, made the house too expensive to keep warm, so the architect had resorted to boarding some of them up, and they had remained that way. But to fix it up, Simon would have to tread lightly around its creator’s vision—in 1992, while Engels still resided there, the house was landmarked for historic preservation.
Engels, born nearby in 1928, began his career by building housing developments for local workers and went on to complete other socially informed projects, such as holiday homes for working-class families along the Belgian coast. He also did the master plan for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels and designed many of the Belgian pavilions at later fairs. In 1956, Engels went to America to tour some of Mies van der Rohe’s houses and had the opportunity to meet the Bauhaus master himself. The young architect presented Mies with an early drawing for his T-shaped villa in Elewijt, which Mies ripped up and replaced with a new sketch that swapped a partially slanted roof for a flat one. By the time Simon took possession of the 3,200-square-foot house, many of its concrete slabs were cracking and needed to be upgraded and reinforced. To help him with that and the rest of the restoration, Simon turned to architect and midcentury specialist Lotte Van Hemelrijck and to Thomas van Looij, an architect at Studio 22 in Antwerp who had refurbished another Engels residence, the Lambiotte House in Waterloo. “We wanted to keep the spirit of the house,” says van Looij. What that
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With an assist from preservation expert Lotte Van Hemelrijck, architect Thomas van Looij led the restoration, which included refinishing or replacing a wall of sun-damaged Wenge wood panels (opposite).
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Likewise, the drafty windows on the south facade (this page) all had to go. “That alone cost more than my previous house,” says Simon. “The heritage people wanted the glass to have the same shine and coloration.”
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An Eames leg splint, a Florence Knoll credenza, and a chair by Engels furnish the office. In the entrance, a team with the general contracting firm Martha uncovered an abstract mural that Engels painted himself
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and then plastered over (opposite). He also made the geometric door handle. Simon speculates that Engels sourced the marble, found all over the house, from Expo ’58, after the pavilions had been dismantled.
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“Like many architects of that era, he designed everything himself, from the door handles to the tables and chairs.” SIMON MASON, RESIDENT
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Clockwise from below: The preservation office allowed the family to add a swimming pool based on a water feature that was shown in some of Engels’s original drawings. A Voido rocker by Ron Arad for
Magis sits by the outdoor shower, also new. Bluestone slabs float across the reflecting pond, which was inspired by Engels’s travels in Japan. Much of the concrete and metalwork for the multilevel,
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House Lucien Engels ARCHITECT
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Lucien Engels
Studio 22 Architects
Elewijt, Belgium
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L-shaped terrace had to be redone (opposite). The Pantagruel picnic table is by Dirk Wynants for Extremis; the 1966 Adjustable Chaises are by Richard Schultz for Knoll.
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meant, according to Simon, was keeping a few elements particularly in mind: “the marble, the original staircase, and all of the Wenge wood, which was the ‘in wood’ at that time.” But retaining such elements did not necessarily come easily. The Wenge panels that line the back wall of the upper story, for example, had been warped by sunlight coming through the south-facing windows, as well as pierced to hang pictures and put in outlets. Van Looij and his team numbered each slat and removed and restored them in order to return the wall to a pleasingly warm shade of brown. Some were too damaged and had to be replaced. Engels had used the same wood to build a snazzy cocktail bar and coffee table. “Like many architects of that era, he designed everything himself,” says Simon, “from the door handles to the tables and chairs.” That’s why the house is so proportional. Simon notes that the width of the bar is the same as that of the cantilevered stair-
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case that greets visitors in the entryway. The restoration, according to van Looij, was “a balance between working on the design and updating the home’s structural integrity.” And the process was a revelation for all involved. As peeling paint was stripped back, the builders came across a surprise layer of straw that Engels had used as insulation, as well as an abstract mural that he’d painted downstairs but then plastered over. (The mural was refurbished; the straw had to be tossed.) When Simon and van Looij consulted the original plans and considered how best to bring the house up to date, they decided to give the ground floor over to the children, transforming what had been the architect’s painting studio and his wife’s sewing room into bedrooms, while the garage, too narrow for any modern car, was converted into storage. The open-plan second story, which has direct access to the garden via an elevated, multilevel terrace, is the domain of Simon and his wife, Els. The living room is
peppered with midcentury classics, nearly all of which were purchased secondhand, and then reupholstered, to save money. Simon concedes that there were stumbling blocks during the three-year restoration. The cost of updating the window frames on the southern facade was astronomical. What’s more, Engels had miscalculated the opening of the chimney, so the strikingly angular fireplace on the upper level never worked, not even when the home was new. The villa’s historic listing meant Simon couldn’t correct Engels’s mistake, so his only option was to retain the concrete shell of the fireplace and build in a discreet fuel burner. Despite these frustrations, Simon is clearly proud to be the keeper of Engels’s legacy. “We dismantled the house one tile, one piece of wood, at a time, and then rebuilt it to its former glory,” he says. “What we’ve shown our neighbors and the wider world is what’s possible with a house of this kind.” 87
In South Africa’s scenic Elgin Valley, a simple rural form sets the foundation for a hotelier’s family retreat . 88
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PHOTOS BY
Graham Wood
Greg Cox
dwellings A blackened-timber pergola (opposite) extends from the modern barn that architect Greg Scott designed for Jody and Deirdre Aufrichtig in the Elgin Valley, an apple- and grape-growing region near Cape Town. Made of narrow slats stabilized with randomly
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scattered blocks of wood, it covers roughly half of the outdoor deck. The interior of the house is completely “skinned,� as Scott puts it, in knotty spruce. A lamp from Weylandts sits atop nesting tables from James Mudge Furniture Studio.
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“The window seats are like little pods off the living area. You can imagine sitting there and having a nap or reading a book while the kids build puzzles or play with Legos.” GREG SCOTT, ARCHITECT 90
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In the living area (opposite), Scott chose low-slung furnishings to enhance the feeling of space. The chairs are by Block & Chisel, the coffee table is from Weylandts, and the sofas are by the architect.
Scott set the windows into deep recesses (top) and devised the pergola to break up the mass of the house and integrate it into the site (left). The dining table is an extension of the kitchen counter
As co-creator of the Daddy Long Legs Art Hotel in Cape Town and the Elgin Valley’s Old Mac Daddy—where guests sleep in converted Airstream trailers— entrepreneur Jody Aufrichtig knows better than most that location is everything. And he knew just the spot for the vacation home he and his wife, Deirdre, envisioned for themselves and their four children: a westfacing site between a dam and an apple orchard not far from the Old Mac Daddy. The couple also knew just the architect for the job: Greg Scott, who had designed the
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(above), which features a blackened brass surface that “underpins the industrial aesthetic we were working with,” says Scott. The small pendant is from Diesel with Foscarini and the strip pendant is from Spazio.
hotel’s modern barnlike main structure. Scott welcomed the idea of revisiting the rural-turned-contemporary theme. “It’s a very pure architectural form, and if you can stay true to it and put in some beautiful apertures and open up the ends, it relates well to its context,” he says. Such a structure also lends itself to a straightforward and efficient building process—a plus in a relatively remote location like the Elgin Valley, a region of vineyards, orchards, and nature reserves about an hour southeast of Cape Town. 91
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“The pergola is where the strong architectural forms dissolve into something that’s a little more organic and natural.” GREG SCOTT
Boxy spruce-framed windows punctuate the 1,615-square-foot structure, which is clad in corrugated metal (opposite). Jody’s favorite spot is outside on the deck (above). “I spend most of
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my time there. We’ve got two braais, and I braai just about every night,” he says, using the Afrikaans word for barbecue. “It’s not about the food for me,” he adds, “It’s about
standing around the fire.” The platform sofas were designed by Scott, the dining table is by James Mudge Furniture Studio, and the Hee lounge and dining chairs are by Hay.
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dwellings The home is perched beside a two-acre reservoir, a favorite spot for bird watching. Scott incorporated rough stones excavated on the property into the bathrooms (opposite, left), creating a contrast with the clean lines of the rest of
the house. The tub is custom. A steel ladder in one of the children’s bedrooms leads to a loft sleeping area (opposite, right). The bed, by Scott, sits atop a spruce base. The artwork is by Willem Boshoff.
“The house is deliberately small, not just to simplify and declutter, but also because our time in Elgin is all about being outdoors.” JODY AUFRICHTIG, RESIDENT 94
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Elgin, South Africa
PHOTOS: STYLING BY SVEN ALBERDING/BUREAUX. ILLUSTRATION: LOHNES + WRIGHT
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Scott and builder OJW began with a prefabricated steel frame, which they enclosed and clad in corrugated metal sheeting, adding solar panels to keep the home’s creature comforts sustainable and its ecological footprint small. Set into deep recesses, the windows frame views over the dam and the valley beyond and create what the architect calls “a slightly irregular spread of light” throughout the interior. Serving as a transition between the house and the large deck, a blackened-timber pergola extends the lines of the building and acts as a screen against the sun and wind. To prevent the long timber pieces from warping and twisting, Scott interspersed them with wood blocks. “The idea
was to create filtered light, so it feels like you’re under a canopy of trees,” he says. The motif continues inside, where a mirrored wall in the living room playfully blurs the distinction between inside and out. Balancing the pale, knotty-spruce paneling, Scott introduced custom black furnishings and details like a blackened brass kitchen counter, created by Craft Metal Works. “Black is a wonderful way to sew spaces and objects and elements together,” he says. The simplicity suits Jody and his family. “I don’t have technology around the place,” he says. “There’s no clutter, and actually, I’m much happier here. People walk into the place and smile—that’s the foundation for me.” 95
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THEIR OW N GI R A R D A MICHIGAN FAMILY FINDS THE LAST of a LITTLE-KNOWN, THOUGHT-TO-BEEXTINCT BREED: A HOUSE by ALEXANDER GIRARD. TEXT BY
DEBORAH LUBERA KAWSKY PHOTOS BY | @BRI A N W FER RY
BRIAN W. FERRY
When Rob and Mary Lubera started pulling threads to uncover the origins of their new home—the lone midcentury house amid rows of Tudor Revivals in suburban Detroit— not even architecture scholars could have anticipated what they would find. Theirs is the last surviving
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residence by Alexander Girard (1907–1993), a modernist visionary who made his name in textiles but tried his hand at virtually everything, architecture included. The shoji-like laminate screens, seen in the entryway, are characteristic of his Japanese-influenced work.
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Extra Reading Deborah Lubera Kawsky is the author of Alexander Girard Architect (A Painted Turtle Book, 2018).
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Rob and Mary Lubera sensed something special from the listing for the singlestory, post-and-beam structure in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, but they weren’t sure what. It was 2009, and Rob, an estate planning attorney, and Mary, a CPA, had spent more than two years looking for a new home in the affluent Detroit suburb. On a whim, they asked their realtor to add the property to their list, consisting otherwise of historic-style houses. The distressed condition of the exterior suggested that it had been vacant for some time. As the realtor opened the door, he said confidently, “This will only take a few minutes.” But the Luberas were captivated by what they saw: an open layout, exposed steel joists, a giant hearth, Japanese-style doors, boldly colored glazed-brick walls, and, most striking of all, windows that stretched from floor to
ceiling. “The natural light was incredible,” Rob recalls. After the tour, the realtor asked the couple what they thought. To his surprise, they replied in unison, “I love it.” Even before they closed, the Luberas started looking into the home’s history. The blueprints revealed that it had been built in 1950 for banking magnate John McLucas and his wife, Kathleen, and designed by one Alexander Girard. The name meant nothing to the couple, until they looked it up on Google. Hundreds of hits suddenly plunged them into the world of one of America’s most prolific interior, furniture, and textile designers. Girard, they discovered, was the New York–born, Italy-raised multihyphenate who had been recruited by Charles Eames to head Herman Miller’s textile division from 1952 to 1973, leading the firm away from the dour fabrics of wartime
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toward the lively colors and patterns of the Space Age. Having moved to Detroit in 1937 after a five-year stint with his first practice in New York, Girard made a name for himself in Michigan and beyond when he curated the landmark “An Exhibition for Modern Living” at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1949. Across 10 weeks, nearly 150,000 visitors were exposed to radical new designs by Florence Knoll, Jens Risom, the Eameses, Isamu Noguchi, and others. The Luberas also learned that Girard had studied architecture in London and, between 1947 and 1951, had designed several houses, including for himself, near Detroit, all of which were later torn down. Bit by bit they realized that the McLucas House was the last surviving residence anywhere that was designed entirely by Girard. Yet hardly anyone knew of it—not the Detroit Institute of Arts, not the
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The house centers on a courtyard, complete with slate pavers, a dogwood tree, and rock gardens (opposite). Vines spill over primary-colored, glazed-brick walls (top), which recall Girard’s eye-popping graphics. The
brick walls extend indoors (above), where Girard used a hearth to organize the living area, presaging his and Eero Saarinen’s revolutionary concept for the conversation pit at the Miller House.
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BIT BY BIT THEY REALIZED THAT the McLUCAS HOUSE WAS the LAST SURVIVING RESIDENCE ANYWHERE THAT WAS DESIGNED ENTIRELY by GIRARD.
The Luberas didn’t use a general contractor or architect, but they did enlist the counsel of legendary Detroit designer Ruth Adler Schnee, who in 1964 helped Girard plan the color scheme for a streetscape in Columbus, Indiana. Window
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alignments create long views through the house and atrium (above). Both the sofa and side table are from West Elm (opposite). The pillow is adorned with a stylized sun that Girard created for the New York restaurant La Fonda del Sol.
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New stone walkways, laid in a swirling pattern, surround the 4,600-square-foot house. In the dining room (opposite), the sliding-panel cedar cabinets feature a glass display case reminiscent
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of the tokonoma found in traditional Japanese architecture, to which Girard professed a “profound debt.� In the kitchen, original pale orange Formica counters were replaced with crisp white ones.
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“ THE PEOPLE WHO KNEW GIRARD WAS the ARCHITECT DIDN’T KNOW WHO HE WAS, and the PEOPLE WHO KNEW ABOUT GIRARD DIDN’T KNOW HE WAS the ARCHITECT.” ROB LUBERA, RESIDENT
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dwellings In the living room, the slanted, open-joist ceiling rises to almost 10 ½ feet. A fusuma door leads to the dining room. The torso sculptures are by Janice Trimpe. In the master bathroom and dressing
Michigan State Historic Preservation Office, not even Girard’s family. As Rob puts it: “The people who knew Girard was the architect didn’t know who he was, and the people who knew about Girard didn’t know he was the architect.” The couple were stunned. “We had no experience with modern design,” Rob says. But their immersion led to appreciation, and they committed to returning the house to its original state. They were aided in their quest by a larger resurgence in interest in Girard, including a 2011 monograph by designer Todd Oldham and a 2013 “Michigan Modern” symposium at the Cranbrook Art Museum. As word of the home’s existence got out, famed Knoll textile designer and former Girard collaborator Ruth Adler Schnee, then in her early 104
90s, came onboard as the Luberas’ consultant, using McLucas family photos, original drawings found in the Vitra Design Museum, and her years of experience as her guide. Rob remembers thinking, “Who better to restore a Girard residence than someone who worked with him?” Luckily, major reconstruction wasn’t necessary. But the facade, made up of rectangular bays of plywood and glass framed in wood, had seen better days. “All of the nearly eighty posts had been painted black,” Rob recalls. “Each one had to be sanded by hand to reveal the cedar finish.” A floating wood-screen wall leads to a fuchsia front door and appears to punch through the envelope, continuing for several feet into the vestibule. The living room is flanked by an L-shaped hearth on one
room (opposite, left), pink-andwhite floor tiles were found hidden under ’70s shag carpeting. A custom duvet in a Girard pattern covers the master bed; the sconce is original (opposite, right).
side and the dining room on the other. Here, the feeling of openness is overpowering, with a ceiling that rises toward a wall of windows facing an open-air atrium. Mary describes the atrium as an “interior landscape, an oasis from the sights and sounds of the outside world.” It’s also the only place where the home’s red, yellow, and blue brick accent walls converge. The type of glazed-ceramic masonry Girard used was developed specifically for Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center and made by Claycraft, and in 1950, it was not yet commercially available. The owners theorize that he got early access to the material through his role as color consultant on the project, then being built. Across the atrium, in the master suite, another piece of history was uncovered
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More at Dwell.com Find a video and extra photos of the last surviving Alexander Girard house at dwell.com/their-own-girard
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when Schnee had the carpet torn up and found a floor of pink-and-white harlequinpatterned tiles. The discovery—another illustration of Girard’s gift for color and detail—was a high point of the project, which included replacing counters and appliances and recently came to a close. But the wider mission of sharing and safeguarding Girard’s legacy never ends. The McLucas House has become a beacon for midcentury experts, from the head of the Vitra Design Museum to the scions of the Eames family, many of whom have attended the Luberas’ annual black-tie art party to run their hands along the uneven bricks or inhale the scent of the freshly sanded cedar. As Rob says: “On most days we feel like curators, not owners. No one person can own something like this.”
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Entrance Dining Room Living Room Atrium Porch Kitchen Laundry Sitting Room Sewing Room Bedroom Bathroom Dressing Room Master Bedroom Study Bar Terrace Garage
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A dramatic stairwell rises through the center of architect Mehdi Berrada’s bold new home in Casablanca. At the top, a steelframed retractable skylight casts graphic shadows. The walls of the
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stairwell are made of board-formed concrete painted black (opposite). “Everything in the house is experimental,” Mehdi says of the atypical dwelling, “the materials, the layout, the garden, the exterior.”
HERE’S LOOKING AT
BALANCING GLOBAL STYLES WITH MOROCCAN STANDARDS, a MODERNIST CUBE in CASABLANCA CATCHES the EYE WITHOUT STICKING OUT. TEXT BY
CATHERINE BOLGAR
PHOTOS BY | @2SPACEPHOTO
AMANDA LARGE & YOUNES BOUNHAR
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In the living room (above), a burned spruce ceiling—inspired by shou sugi ban, the Japanese technique of charring cedar—contrasts with rendered concrete walls and a polished white concrete floor divided into rectangles by thin brass insets. A Toot sofa by Piero Lissoni for Cassina is paired with Mad Queen armchairs by Marcel Wanders for Poliform and Pebble coffee tables by Air Division for Ligne Roset. The antique rug was bought at the Casablanca souk. An expanse of floor-to-ceiling glass sliders opens to the garden and a lap pool (top).
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In a family photo, everyone might share the same eyes or nose or smile, but you can immediately spot the one with an extra spark, the spirit of adventure. So too the Casablanca, Morocco, house of architect Mehdi Berrada. Though similar in size and shape to other area homes, it stands out while blending in. It’s an original. “It belongs, but it doesn’t. It isn’t a house that says, ‘Look at me,’” Mehdi says. “It’s a house that says, ‘I’m free.’” Mehdi was born in France to Moroccan parents and they moved to Casablanca when he was three. He grew up there in houses designed by his architect father, who created bright, white homes with pure lines that melded Le Corbusier’s International Style with local vernacular. Today Mehdi has his own firm, designing houses, factories, retail spaces, and hotels. He loves the city’s contrasts. Palm trees line elegant boulevards, while the ancient medina is a river of humanity channeled through a maze of alleyways, filled with
pedestrians jostling with vendors for space. On Mehdi’s narrow residential street, the din diminishes, and even more so behind his perimeter walls. Thick tropical vegetation—false bananas, yellow canna lilies and fig trees—surrounds the house. “It’s a nest in the middle of city noises, a bunker in the jungle,” he says. Mehdi and his wife, Sanae, an energy executive, previously lived in an apartment, but the birth of their twin boys made them seek more space. They found an unoccupied house on a small lot not far from the city center and set about replacing it. After six months of design and two years of construction, they moved in. Immediately, there’s a clue that their home is different. The steel gates were treated with vinegar and seawater to obtain a rusty finish. Workmen who come to the house offer to put Mehdi in touch with a painter who can “fix” them, but he refuses. “I like things that age naturally,” he says. Over time, the oil from people’s
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“BLACK IS NOT DARK. IT’S NOT SAD. IT ABSORBS the LIGHT and LETS YOU SEE DETAILS.” Mehdi Berrada, ARCHITECT AND RESIDENT
The kitchen island is clad in charred oak; the cabinet doors are made of raw steel sheets. Inside, the shelf supports are steel rebar. “I like questioning the use of basic materials,” says Mehdi. “Rebar is not considered
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noble, but I think it’s beautiful, fun, and economical.” An artisan made the pendants based on a design by Mehdi, and the faucet is by Roca. An Eames bird sits with a color-coordinated piggy bank, a souvenir from Mallorca.
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“I AM BECOMING an ARCHITECT EVERY DAY. SCHOOL DOESN’T TEACH YOU—LIFE DOES.” Mehdi Berrada
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Among the home’s many distinctive details are floor-to-ceiling doors, like the one to the master bedroom. The herringbone floor is waxed charred spruce. Weathered steel bars on the north windows provide shade and security
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(opposite). Their hard lines are softened by abundant greenery. Mehdi planted fig trees along the south facade, not only for the fruit, but because their broad leaves block the sun in summer and fall off in winter, letting sunlight pass.
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“WHEN YOU USE RAW MATERIALS YOU GET SURPRISES. IT’S a WANTED LACK of CONTROL.” Mehdi Berrada
Mehdi and his wife, Sanae, have six-year-old twins, each with his own bedroom. The early-bird son’s room faces east, while the south room is for the son who likes to sleep in. The tipi
was a gift from Mehdi’s father, also an architect. The boys sit on the staircase (opposite), which leads to a large basement playroom. LED strips under the custom handrails provide light.
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hands has removed the rust and returned the steel to black at the spot where they grip the gate. “I love it,” Mehdi says of the unplanned detail. “It’s wabi-sabi.” The house’s cube shape maximizes the use of the rectangular plot. Like in traditional Islamic and Spanish architecture, the interior is hidden from the street. The windows are covered with wide strips of rusted steel. Besides adding geometric interest to the exterior, the bars provide privacy, security, and slatted shade. The house is built of concrete blocks, in typical Moroccan fashion, but in two layers, with rock wool insulation between them. Most of the walls are covered with a gray cement, sand, and small aggregate mix, left natural—an unusual choice in a place where paint and tile are more highly regarded than untreated concrete. Mehdi prefers materials that can be left raw and weather well: concrete, steel, and wood. “I use materials that are made to age,” he says. “They get character from it.” Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics, “In Praise of Shadows,” made an impression on the architect that is evident in his embrace of the concept of shou sugi ban. Once
burned, the spruce on the living room and dining/kitchen ceilings, as well as the bedroom floors, became a chocolate brown. The ceilings are left rough, but in the bedrooms, the chevron parquet is waxed to a gleaming patina. A wall in the living room is paneled with charred oak, which turned black. Mehdi combined the kitchen and dining area in an open-plan layout. That, too, is unusual by local standards. In Morocco, even middle-class families often have household staff, and the Berradas employ two women to cook and clean. But in most cases, the staff work and eat in an enclosed kitchen, separate from the residents. In Mehdi’s view, though, “the kitchen is a place of life” and shouldn’t be hidden away. “We have a culture of cuisine that’s very important,” he says. “Preparing meals is not just going to the supermarket.” Also, the staffers are considered “part of the family,” he says. “They eat with us. So the kitchen and dining room are one space, open.” The living room’s glass wall slides open to the tropical “jungle” on the south side. Birds sing and butterflies dance in the oasis of calm, though the thrum of Casablanca is
not far away. The double-pane glass and concrete construction keep the house cool enough in summer that plans for air conditioning were scrapped. The stairwell is capped by a skylight that retracts to create a flue, pulling in fresh air. Upstairs, Mehdi and Sanae’s suite is on one side; the children’s rooms and Mehdi’s office are across the hall. The twins’ rooms are big enough to one day fit double beds, but small enough that they’ll choose to come out to play together. “Architecture is more than just decoration and economics,” Mehdi says. “It’s how the space will influence the way the family interacts.” Indeed, the boys, Leith and Malik, now six years old, have an enormous playroom in the basement where they are free to write on the walls. A large window faces a light well filled with lush plants. The basement also has bedrooms for the staffers. The family moved into the house a year ago, and it is still a work in progress. A television room is being outfitted with an enormous mattress and cushions—a nest within the nest. “I tell clients not to rush to have everything complete. It’s time that makes the charm,” he says. “You have to leave space for things to come.”
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Lydia Lee
Garage Scale
The auto repair garage in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood was dark, rundown, and pungent with grease. But back in 2011, when Klari Reis and Michael Isard, first saw the voluminous space, they were focused on its potential for combining life and work. Klari, an internationally exhibited painter, was moving in with Michael, a tech researcher, and the plan 114
was to incorporate her studio as well as an art gallery into their new home. Architect Eric Dumican of Dumican Mosey was brought in to refashion the 1923 structure into a three-bedroom loft above a gallery/studio and a separate rental apartment. Dumican had gotten to know Klari and Michael a decade earlier when Klari’s studio was in the same building as
While creating a live/work space at a former garage (inset) for Klari Reis and Michael Isard, architect Eric Dumican carved out an atrium on the second floor to bring in light (above). Three sides open with Fleetwood sliders; the fourth is a living wall by Florafelt Pro System.
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PHOTO: CESAR RUBIO
A former car shop in San Francisco offers everything an artist and her husband need: a home, a studio, and a gallery.
P R O M OT I O N
Big Idea, Small Footprint MINI LIVING Brings Their Urban Cabin Concept to Los Angeles In a continuation of their Urban Cabin concept, MINI LIVING brought their forward-thinking prototype to Los Angeles during the city’s design festival. The latest micro-living concept, an answer to the pressures impacting urban living, are tailored to the L.A. lifestyle. The L.A. Urban Cabin is the third in a series of five cabins: two resided in London and New York City, and plans to expand to Tokyo and Beijing are in the works. The concept addresses problems facing urbanites worldwide: a decrease in available living space and quality of life, and an increase in the cost of living. By collaborating with local design teams and tailoring the individual cabins to their locales, MINI LIVING hopes to combat homogeneous architecture—and the resulting loss of cultural identity. MINI
Developed on a rooftop in downtown Los Angeles, the 161-square-foot L.A. version is inspired by Southern California’s love for nature itself. The structure is made up of two elements with living and sleeping area on one side, and the bathroom and kitchen spaces both designed by the MINI LIVING architects. The central courtyard, a collaboration with LA– based architectural duo FreelandBuck, provides much of the local character. Featuring a hanging garden set on a trellis, the courtyard allows light and air to pass through the cabin, resulting in a contemporary urban oasis. MINI LIVING is an inspiring initiative by the brand MINI that is developing and exploring solutions to improve the way we live in cities.
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Wood beams and concrete walls emerge from cutaways in the drywall, revealing the building’s industrial skeleton. The kitchen (left) features SieMatic cabinetry, Neolith countertops, and a faucet by Dornbracht. Mike Geno’s paintings of bread and cheese hang near a Lee Materazzi photograph. The custom steel-and-oak dining table is by Ohio Design (above). Lee Cline made the painting in the guestroom (below), which opens onto to a new balcony.
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made it easier,” says Michael. “Making all the design decisions at once would have driven us crazy.” Simply getting the permits took two years. Then preparing the foundation turned out to be a pricey, yearlong effort. The soil—mud mixed with rubble from the 1906 earthquake—had to be stabilized with injections of cement every four feet before a new foundation could be poured. Once construction started, the architect used mockups and samples to get input from the couple and adjust the design, showing them, for instance, the differences among walnut-shell blasting, sandblasting, and ice blasting the walls to remove paint. (The first option was ultimately
PHOTOS: KIRSTEN HEPBURN
his office. “They’re both avid collectors, so how the architecture was designed to display art was really important for the home, not just for the gallery,” he says. The garage’s condition was such that only its concrete walls and beams could be salvaged. It would take five years to transform the 9,000-square-foot, twolevel structure, and the process would include everything from jacking up the left side of the building, which had sunk a foot during the 1989 earthquake, to giving the plaster cupids on the historical facade a pewter-colored coat of paint and a touch of red “lipstick.” But the lengthy timeline suited the couple’s deliberate way of working. “The fact that it took so long
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www.ligne-roset.com *Exclusions apply.
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Recalling the drive-in openings of the former auto shop (inset), hydraulic glass garage doors hang from both Klari’s studio (below) and the exhibition space (right), where a selection of her paintings
is on view. The steel-sash windows by Hope’s on the upper level are replicas of the originals, while the lower level has custom frosted-glass panels (bottom). The facade paint is Black Tar by Benjamin Moore.
selected because it better preserved the character of the concrete.) During renovation, the team was careful to ensure that new elements, like shear walls of boardformed concrete and floors of reclaimed solid oak, were all in keeping with the original materials. Dumican also focused on bringing natural light and outdoor space into the building, which has windows only at the front and back. His solution: a 20-by-20-foot courtyard on the second floor that features a living wall of succulents, like burro’s tail and string of bananas. Sliding walls of glass peel away on three sides and a motorized skylight opens above, revealing a new roof deck. Klari and Michael 118
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PHOTOS: KIRSTEN HEPBURN (STUDIO AND GALLERY) ; CESAR RUBIO (EXTERIOR)
“The fact that it took so long made it easier. Making all the design decisions at once would have driven us crazy.” MICHAEL ISARD, RESIDENT
P R O M OT I O N
How Young Designer Lauren Palmer Forecasts the Future of Kitchens
As the dynamic chief designer of Fisher & Paykel’s cooking and dishwashing division, Lauren Palmer is part of the team that helps to keep the New Zealand–based home appliance company at the forefront of kitchen design. Palmer has always maintained a strong interest in human-scale design. However, it is her personal passion for cooking and baking that serves as the catalyst for her process. “The thing that inspires me most is the life lived around the product, and how the customer will use it,” she says. “I like getting to understand how our customers live, shop, cook, and entertain.” A self-proclaimed people-watcher, Palmer observes how people interact with Fisher & Paykel products. “I feel F I S H E R & PAY K E L
that the tactile experience is just as important as the aesthetics of the design. The feel of the dial, the balance of oven door—everything needs to convey a sense of precision and solidity.” Thanks to this insight, Palmer’s vision for the future of kitchen design seems somewhat prophetic. “We’re thinking about how the kitchen can become more of a single system,” she says. “I see the blurring of boundaries as kitchens are blended into the living space. Whether you prefer hiding your appliances, or you want them to have a strong presence, having the flexibility and freedom to choose is important—because first and foremost, the product always begins and ends with the people who use it.”
Vehicle Wall Art supplied the loft’s most unusual feature, a 1965 Fiat Nuova 500 F mounted upside-down on the ceiling (below). Magnetic panels of blackened and waxed steel
display smaller artworks. The floating stairs replaced a ramshackle set of steps (inset). An Eames elephant sits by a kitchen nook; the painting is by Michael Shankman (left).
Dumican Mosey Architects San Francisco, California
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now have a two-year-old son who likes to ride his tricycle around the space, which flows into the living-kitchen-dining area. On the ground floor, Klari’s gallery features pristine white walls and LED track lighting for illuminating artwork. Her studio even has a separate prep room, where she mostly works with epoxy, her signature material. Dumican pulled the back wall in five feet to deepen a narrow patio, which can be accessed by hydraulic glass garage doors during art openings. The move also made way for a balcony above. But the grandest artwork of all, the one passersby stop and stare at through the window, is a red two-door Fiat hanging upside down from the ceiling of the loft. Inspired by a comment Klari made while browsing for light fixtures (“They cost as much as a car!”), the gutted sedan’s headlights can actually be operated with a light switch. The piece is also a nod to the Fiats of Capri island, where the couple became engaged and were married, as well as a fitting capstone to a project that flipped an old automotive shop on its head. 120
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ILLUSTRATION: LOHNES + WRIGHT; PHOTOS: KIRSTEN HEPBURN (KITCHEN NOOK ) , CESAR RUBIO (STAIRWELL)
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SOMA Residence, Artist Gallery, and Studio
Photos Brian McCarthy
announcing dwell on design TICKETS dwellondesign.com/fallhometours Watch for this exclusive opportunity coming in October. Step inside these one-of-a-kind homes and experience incredible architecture and design first-hand. These Los Angeles homes will feed your appetite for contemporary interiors and offer an up-close and personal look into design at its finest.
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Francine Monaco liked spending weekends on Long Island’s North Fork so much that, in 2001, she decided to buy her own place there. Francine, an architect at D’Aquino Monaco in Manhattan, chose Greenport—then a sleepy fishing village, now a burgeoning resort town—because she wanted a place she could get to without a car. Good train service and walkable small-town streets made that possible. One of the first properties she looked at was a quaint cottage plopped right next to
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Arlene B. Hirst
Matthew Williams
the village hall. Built in 1946, it “had a spirit and energy that was so positive that I felt sure it would work,” she says. The classic Cape Cod bungalow had some charming features, including a stone fireplace in the living room and a grass ceiling in the sunroom, and, at 1,400 square feet, plenty of space for one person. She made virtually no changes and moved in, accepting its less-charming qualities—Homasote ceilings and fake-wood paneling in the attic and a vinyl kitchen floor—as they were.
Over the last decade, architect Francine Monaco and her husband, David Bauer, have filled their bungalow on Long Island with rare furniture, art, and antiques. In the living room, midcentury Danish chairs join a camel saddle covered with an alpaca hide, used as an ottoman. Francine had round “lily pads” cut from gingham-patterned carpeting.
Collectors’ Edition A vignette-rich cottage in Greenport, New York, reflects a couple’s far-reaching tastes.
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P R O M OT I O N
Transform Your Home With Customized Smart Lighting Scenes NOON Home provides a simple and smart solution to personalize the ambience in your home. Josie Anthony has been passionate about lighting for 27 years. In that time, she’s seen the popularity of certain bulbs come and go—goodbye halogen, hello LEDs—but the importance of good lighting design has never changed. “Lighting is one of the essential elements of a room and can really impact everything else,” says Anthony, who was previously the president of Leucos USA and now helms JB Lighting Collection. Whether it’s the final look of the room’s design or how the homeowners use the space, “lighting affects people’s mood,” says Anthony. “You have to find a way to create ambience.” Now, NOON Home delivers a straightforward system that makes it easy for designers and homeowners alike to customize home lighting to their needs. NOON’s sophisticated smart light switches NOON
automatically create customized scenes that can be adjusted by the designer or homeowner to match the variety of activities done in a home. “The customer can control any room for any mood or task,” says Anthony. To that end, designers can select any bulb and fixture combination and NOON will automatically create the perfect lighting recipes (aka scenes). Examples include setting an ideal accent lighting scene to maximize dinner party ambience, asking Alexa for a brighter setting during meal prep, or scheduling all the lights to dim at a certain time to get you, and everyone living in or visiting the home, ready for bed. “People are often intimidated by a dimming system, but NOON provides a very friendly system. It’s really amazing,” says Anthony. “You will see what a huge impact a good quality lighting and a dimming system has on a space.”
interiors
Then, in 2008, she married David Bauer, a therapist, yoga instructor, and musician. That’s when the house, which until then had been little more than a place for her to hang her hat after a day at the beach, started to morph into a serious home. Perhaps the most visible change came in 2010 with the raising of the roof dormer above the cramped attic to create a new master bedroom and bath. In 2012, the couple took on the dated kitchen, opening it up for gatherings and redoing the cabinetry in a mixture of fir paneling and stainless steel. At the center, Francine designed a sturdy English oak table and surrounded it with vintage Thonet chairs reupholstered in various shades of leather. 124
Clockwise from top left: A painting by artist Erin Koch stands in the guestroom; the candlesticks were a garage sale find. The sunroom—or “museum of natural history,” as the couple call it—showcases an array of objects, including a massive chair
carved from a single tree trunk and a terra cotta elephant used as a side table. Colorful 1950s FontanaArte pendants hang over the dining room table. The living room features a pair of 1920s chairs by Hungarian-born New York designer Ilonka Karasz.
“Even though the house is small, you always have somewhere to escape to. Each room has its own personality and energy, so you can find your nook and relax.” FRANCINE MONACO, ARCHITECT AND RESIDENT
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Don’t Miss Our First-Ever Podcast RM-3 traces how raw materials go from their most elemental forms—a hunk of metal, a conifer tree—into the extraordinary objects and buildings that shape our lives. Fair warning: you might not look at homes the same way again. dwell.com/raw-materials
interiors
The new 400-square-foot master suite, situated under a dormer, features a bathroom that’s bordered in red glass mosaic tiles by Sicis (left). In the library (right), a walnut shelving unit by Poul Cadovius
faces a sofabed from CB2. Among the items on display is a motorized model fire boat built by Francine’s late father. “It’s what you do when you’re a retired engineer with time on your hands,” Francine explains.
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More at Dwell.com See more photos of this eclectic bungalow at dwell.com/ collectors-edition
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Their most recent projects took them outdoors, where Francine created a fence with a musical scale motif and David built a stone pizza oven. But the couple’s personalizations are clearest in the curios they’ve arranged throughout the home. Those pieces that were not bought at Greenport’s Beall and Bell, a favorite vintage shop of Francine’s, were studiously collected over the years. In the sunroom, an old children’s desk is brimming with disparate items—David’s violin and guitar, a bird’s nest, a fish skeleton, a candlestick—in a composition that evokes a Picasso still life, all beneath an old map of Long Island. Francine’s late father’s engineering tools appear in decorative schemes, and a carved boat that he made takes pride of place in the living room. In the library, mandalas— ritual symbols used in Hinduism and Buddhism—join a toy orrery, a model of the solar system. Shelves between the kitchen and dining area showcase pottery gathered on their travels. For Francine, the key to creating their home was time. “This house has been a long process, which gave us the ability to look for pieces that we really felt fit our aesthetic,” she says. “Because it didn’t happen at once, we could search out and pull together a home that feels uniquely us.”
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Modern Shelving Keep your books safe and on display. Modern Shelving for your life: Aluminum or wood shelves, poles, and cabinets. Order online or consult with our designer.
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Wetstyle The Element Raffiné Collection The Element Raffiné collection is the perfect embodiment of Scandinavian design: beauty through simplicity, featuring pure lines without any extra embellishment. The impeccable quality and finish of this minimalist collection lend an elegant and serene atmosphere to the bathroom.
Veldt Marfa Conceived by an artist and an industrial designer. Veldt Jewelry is crafted with love in Marfa, TX. Wear your art. Titanium Pillar on fine box chain. veldtmarfa.com
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Bartels Doors & Hardware This stylish custom ladder by MWE is the designer feature that will bring your design together. Ladders are provided with everything you need to create the state of the art look. Suitable for loft spaces, kitchens, wine cellars, closets, and so much more. All of Bartels ladder hardware is made of quality stainless steel available in satin, polished, carbon black, copper, or bronze finishes to compliment your home’s distinct style. Ordering your custom ladder is simple, contact Bartels to learn more or hear about our many other hardware solutions. Bartels Doors and Hardware is the choice of educated consumers, offering luxury interior doors, exclusive door accessories, designer MWE library ladders, and up-scale barn door hardware. Toll-free 866-529-5679 bartelsdoors.com/dwell
BRIGHTEN UP YOUR KITCHEN by ThinkGlass Design, Quality, Functionality, Sustainability You lunch counter will be the focal point of your kitchen with our thermoformed glass. Integrate a LED lighting system and it will be undenlably a show stopper! Style : Contemporary | Color : Crystal | Texture : Brossa | Thickness : 36MM (1.5”) Photo Credit: Jimmy White Photography
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LACAVA For a Sophisticated, Unique Lifestyle The award-winning Linea vanity in Gloss White is shown with an Eleganza faucet and an Aquaplane sink. Our vanity collections, made in the USA, have been designed and built with attention to detail and feature various sizes, finishes and fashionable countertop and sink options. LACAVA, a family owned company of Italian origin, provides a complete bathroom experience from vanities, sinks and tubs to faucets, toilets and more. Tel. 773-637-9600 lacava.com
The BioGS 2.0 Air Purifier Recipient of the Red Dot, G-Mark, and Chicago Athenaeum Good Design awards, Rabbit Air’s quiet and impeccable BioGS 2.0 HEPA air purifier improves your environment by stripping it of harmful particles and pollutants. Four stages of filtration and deodorization, a five-year warranty, and lifetime 24/7 tech support will have you breathing a clean sigh of relief. Toll-free 888-866-8862 rabbitair.com
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Drivable Turf Artificial turf in combination with permeable concrete paving Drivable Grass is a permeable, flexible paving system that allows you to soften your hardscapes with various infill options while adding curb appeal to your residential and commercial projects. In this picture Drivable Turf, a pre-cut artificial turf was chosen for the infill. The simple design offers a modern and timeless look, while reducing the impact of our built environment. Toll-free 800-346-7995 soilretention.com
Charles P. Rogers & Co. Beds Stylish, functional, under bed storage solutions from $359. Handcrafted from solid plantation grown mahogany. Now online and at our showrooms. Free delivery to most U.S. addresses. Tel. 866-818-6702 charlesprogers.comÂ
Raydoor The Art of Division At Raydoor we like to think of art and functionality as one. Not only can our systems add to the look and feel of your space, but also create new areas of function and purpose. Raydoors do not require a floor track, allowing you to divide space intelligently without creating passive barriers. Opening the existing space as is or allowing it to transform into a completely new space. Tel. 212-421-0641 raydoor.com
Vahallan Hand-Painted Wall Coverings Wall coverings individually created by hand. View hundreds of colors/styles online. Moffatt (photo) mixes modern elegance with timeless textures. Sold exclusively through interior designers. vahallan.com
KĂźl Grilles Modern Grilles for the Modern Home Your design is a reflection of your personality and style. We want our floor and wall grilles to be one of the many inspiring details that complete your modern home. See our gallery and finish options online! Discount code: dwell0118 tw: @kulgrilles kulgrilles.com
Konzuk Jewelry Concrete Rings The elegance of our minimalist designs in signature grey, coal black, or diamond dust. Shop: konzuk.com
Concrete Wall Finish ConcreteWallFinish.com is your one-stop shop for achieving fantastic finishes on interior walls. Contemporary and refined, our wall finishes put the bold and beautiful at your fingertips. These water-based coatings imported from France are environmentally and user friendly. Their superb quality and easy application process make it a snap to achieve exactly the look and feel you want. Whether you’re a DIY rookie or a seasoned professional, we’re positive you will find just the finish you’re looking for at Concrete Wall Finish. Visit our on-line boutique and get started. concretewallfinish.com
Duda Stool Sinuous Brazilian design meets easy comfort in modern stool by Aristeu Pires. Select finishes delivered within two weeks. Hand finished of solid wood in counter or bar height. Toll-free 800-242-6903 sossegohome.com
Shaker 21st-Century Stove Inspired by classic American Shaker furniture design, this woodburning stove is designed by Italian architect Antonio Citterio with Toan Nguyen. Red Dot award winner. Sleek, spare, with a dramatic glass-viewing window. Heats about 1,200 square feet.
Stahl Firepit
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Contemporary, Intelligent, Dramatic Stillwater Dwellings Rooted in a contemporary midcentury modern aesthetic, Stillwater Dwellings’ homes are built using a systems-based sustainable construction method that provides design flexibility and cost predictability. The Stillwater team is comprised of highly experienced architects and project managers to guide you through the entire home design and building process—from determining site feasibility to handselecting finish options. Start with one of twenty-three floor plans and three finish packages upon which to shape your vision, or have us design a completely custom home just for you. Toll-free 800-691-7302 stillwaterdwellings.com/dwell
LéAna Clifton Marfa Train, Series I This body of work was photographed in Marfa, TX, 2013-2017. Abstract images of speeding trains through Marfa. Archival prints available. Work with the artist to create your own installation. leanaclifton.com
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Modern Digital Canvas Transform your space today with one of our super-cool jumbo canvas prints just $499. A modern digital canvas is the affordable, strong, art solution for any interior. With over 2,000 exclusive images created in our Hamptons design studio, we use latex inks printed on rich archival canvas. Everything arrives fully and stretched and ready to hang and ships in just three days. Jumbo $499, Large $399, Small $249, Sized 3' to 5'. Get a solid wood floating frame for just $59 on any size! Let an "m-dc" canvas occupy an important space in your modern life. Celebrating 16 years of happy customers. Shop 24/7 on our secure website. Toll-free 888-345-0870 md-canvas.com
Western Window Systems westernwindowsystems.com YLighting ylighting.com
sourcing The products, furniture, architects, designers, and builders featured in this issue.
Cary Bernstein Architect cbstudio.com General contracting by Weitekamp Remodeling & Construction Inc. wremodeling.com Strandberg Engineering strandbergeng.com Civil engineering by ILS Associates Inc. ilscels.com Herzog Geotechnical
herzog-geotechnical .com 24 Windows by Bonelli bonelli.com; sliding doors by Fleetwood fleetwoodusa.com; shelving system from Rakks rakks.com 25 Blue-gray tile by Heath Ceramics heathceramics.com; Brix Linen tile by Naoto Fukasawa, limited edition; CH07 chairs
by Hans J. Wegner for Carl Hansen & Søn from Design Within Reach dwr.com; Spoke bed from CB2 cb2.com; mini cord lamp from Design House Stockholm designhousestockholm .com; rug by Candice Olson for Surya surya.com; Orange Sky paint by Benjamin Moore benjaminmoore.com
60 Charleston Coup Kevan Hoertdoerfer hoertdoerferarchitects .com Powell Engineering peofsc.com Interior design by Karen Baldwin karenbaldwin3 @gmail.com Landscape design by Robert Maerlender designworksslc.com 62 Custom painted
staircase by Tess Thomas tessthomas.biz; kitchen island surface by Corian corian.com 64 Seating, chandelier, and side tables designed by Karen Baldwin and fabricated by Eric Doran frederickdoran.com
Landscape by Teer Co. teercolandscape.com Formosa Engineering formosaengineering .com PWS Contracting pwscontracting.com 74 Solair chairs from Vancouver Special vanspecial.com
66 Not Quite Wright
78 Landmarks & Engels
Landscape East & West landscapeeast.com 68 Nightstands and bed from Matera line by Sean Yoo for Design Within Reach dwr.com; Stem lamps from Rejuvenation rejuvenation.com; Gentleman’s Gray paint by Benjamin Moore benjaminmoore.com; Lollygagger lounge chair by Loll Designs lolldesigns.com 69 Eames lounge and ottoman by Charles and Ray Eames for Herman Miller hermanmiller .com; Line credenza by Nathan Yong from Design Within Reach dwr.com; Tolomeo Mega floor lamp by Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina for Artemide artemide .com; Wrought Iron paint by Benjamin Moore benjaminmoore.com 70 Crib from Crate and Barrel crateandbarrel .com; dresser from Room & Board roomandboard.com; hanging planters by Sandbox Ceramics sandboxceramics.com
Studio 22 Architects studio22.be Arch & Teco Architecture and Planning arch-teco.com General contracting by Martha bvba martha-bvba.be 80 Bertoia side chair knoll.com; BeoLab 20 speaker by Bang & Olufsen bang-olufsen .com 81 Mezzadro stools by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni zanotta.it 83 Eames side chairs by Charles and Ray Eames for Herman Miller hermanmiller.com 84 Chair by Lucien Engels, credenza by Florence Knoll, Eames leg splint, all vintage 86 Voido rocker by Ron Arad for Magis magisdesign.com 87 Pantagruel picnic table by Dirk Wynants for Extremis extremis.com; 1966 Adjustable Chaises by Richard Schultz for Knoll knoll.com
72 Enclosure Act
Not Quite Wright
Dwell® (ISSN 1530-5309), Volume XVIII Issue 5, publishes six double issues annually, by Dwell Life, Inc., 901 Battery Street, Suite 401, San Francisco, CA 94111, USA. Occasional extra issues may also be published. Copyright ©2018. All rights reserved. In the US, Dwell® is a registered trademark of Dwell Life, Inc. Publisher assumes no responsibility for return of unsolicited manuscripts,
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Andrea McLean Studio andreamclean.ca Woodquest Construction Ltd. woodquest.ca
88 Mod Side of the Barn Scott + Partners scott.partners General contracting by Overberg Joinery Works ojw.co.za Poise Consulting Engineers poisedesign.co.za
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PHOTO: BRIAN FLAHERTY
24 Bay Watch
Landscape design by Eco Creations ecocreations.co.za 89 Lamp from Weylandts weylandts .co.za; nesting tables by James Mudge Furniture Studio jamesmudge.com 90–91 Living area chairs from Block & Chisel blockandchisel.com; coffee and side tables from Weylandts weylandts.co.za; cork stools by Wiid Design wiiddesign .co.za; custom sofas by Greg Scott scott.partners; dining chairs by James Mudge Furniture Studio jamesmudge.com; counter by Craft Metal Works craftmetalworks .co.za; small pendant from Diesel with Foscarini diesel.com; strip pendant from Spazio spazio.co.za 93 Platform sofas by Greg Scott scott .partners; dining table by James Mudge Furniture Studio jamesmudge.com; Hee lounge and dining chairs by Hay hay.dk 95 Bed by Greg Scott scott.partners; artwork by Willem Boshoff willemboshoff.com 96 Their Own Girard 100 Sofa and side table from West Elm westelm.com 103 Countertops from Formica formica.com 104 Eames lounge, ottoman, and stool by Charles and Ray Eames for Herman Miller hermanmiller.com; torso sculptures by Janice Trimpe trimpesculpture.com 106 Here’s Looking at You Mehdi Berrada Architect mb@lmnts-lab.com General contracting by ETS Mohcine SARL Structural and civil
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engineering by UTECA 108 Toot sofa by Piero Lissoni for Cassina cassina.com; Mad Queen armchairs by Marcel Wanders for Poliform poliform.us; Pebble coffee tables by Air Division for Ligne Roset ligne-roset.com; Circles occasional tables by Maria Jeglinska for Ligne Roset ligneroset.com; Chinese antique armoire from Lignes d’Intérieur lignesdinterieur.net 109 Refrigerator, cooktop, and oven by Bosch bosch-home .com; faucet by Roca roca.com; cabinetry doors installed by EBAG (06) 76.99.34.74 111 Doors and door handles designed by Mehdi Berrada Architect mb@lmnts-lab.com
hermanmiller.com; custom table by Ohio Design ohiodesign .com; guest room painting by Lee Cline leecline.com 118 Hydraulic garage doors by Powerlift and Fleetwood Windows & Doors powerliftdoors .com; fleetwoodusa .com; artwork by Klari Reis klariart.com; windows by Hope’s hopeswindows.com; Black Tar paint by Benjamin Moore benjaminmoore.com 120 1965 Fiat Nuova 500 F from Vehicle Wall Art vehiclewallart .com; Eames Elephant from Design Within Reach dwr.com; artwork by Michael Shankman mikeshankman.com
114 Garage Scale
D’Aquino Monaco daquinomonaco.com General Contracting by Houseworks NY houseworksremodeling .com 122 Danish modern chairs, floor lamp, and camel saddle, all vintage; carpet rounds from Aronson’s Floor Covering aronsonsfloors .com; still lifes by Jane M Timken janetimken .com; Smoke Embers paint by Benjamin Moore benjaminmoore .com 124 Painting by Erin Ann Koch erinannkoch .com; pendants and chairs, both vintage; gray and white painting by Carin Riley silasvonmorisse.com 126 Glass mosaic tiles by Sicis sicis.com; shelving unit by Paul Cadovius, vintage; sleeper sofa from CB2 cb2.com
Dumican Mosey Architects dumicanmosey.com JP Builders 510-763-0411 Cabinetry installation by JW Sellars Furniture 415-621-5647 Environmental consulting by Herzog Geotechnical Engineers and AEI Consultants herzoggeotechnical.com; aeiconsultants.com 114 Living wall structure by Flora Felt Pro System florafelt.com; sliders by Fleetwood Windows & Doors fleetwoodusa .com 116 Kitchen cabinets by SieMatic siematic.com; countertops by Neolith neolith.com; faucet by Dornbracht dornbracht .com; oil paintings by Mike Geno mikegeno .com; photograph by Lee Materazzi leematerazi .com; ceramic planter by Klari Reis klariart .com; Eames Molded Plastic Armchairs by Charles and Ray Eames for Herman Miller
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122 Collectors’ Edition
Thermostatic Shower Valve For contact information for our advertisers, please turn to page 133.
lmk-collection.com | (212) 696 0050 Made in England
one last thing PHOTO BY | @MICHAELFRIBERG
Michael Friberg
Industrial designer Jonathan Olivares tells the story of the shop tool that’s journeyed with him from his childhood basement to the world stage.
Of all my possessions, this 65-pound vise is the one I’ve had the longest. My mother gave it to me for my 10th birthday. I’ve always thought there was something comical about giving a small boy such a big vise, but she insists it was purely practical and that she thought I would need something sturdy for the woodworking I was doing. As a boy I used the vise in my basement workshop for making toys. As a teenager I used it to put together skateboards. When I started my design practice in 2006, the vise was there to help me make models of my first furniture pieces, including‚ later, the Olivares Aluminum chair for Knoll. I admire the vise’s red paint and the patina it has gained over time‚ and the hard and soft geometries of the forged steel. Many of my furniture designs have been done in painted metals‚ including the Aluminum bench for Zahner and the Smith steel cart for Danese. Today the vise sits in my study and reminds me of the trust that my mother placed in me—take risks‚ work with good tools‚ don’t get hurt‚ have fun— and of the longevity and myriad functions of truly useful objects.
Boston-born, Los Angeles–based designer Jonathan Olivares’s red vise has been by his side for almost 30 years. He’s used it to create everything from childhood toys to an instantclassic chair for Knoll.
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