c r e at i v e voices
In 2003, Australian-born architect Craig Bassam and American creative director Scott Fellows took Milan’s Salone del Mobile by storm with their Tractor Stool, an instant classic that distilled their shared vision—to combine modernist principles with refined craftsmanship and luxurious, natural materials—into a single, elegant form. Since then, their multidisciplinary studio, BassamFellows, has applied that aesthetic, dubbed Craftsman Modern, to architecture, furnishings, and even apparel. Summer 2021 saw the partners with a pair of exhibitions: “BassamFellows: Carve, Curve, Cane” at R & Company gallery in New York, which installed their sculptural furniture among Jean Arp bronzes; and “Modern in Your Life: Design and Art at the Schlumberger Building,” curated by James Zemaitis and Erica Barrish, in which their own work joined rarely seen pieces by Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jens Risom, and others to fill the studio’s new Ridgefield, Connecticut, headquarters. The single-story atrium-style HQ—a 1952 Philip Johnson office
working from home
building, the architect’s first nonresidential project, which Bassam and Fellows have delicately renovated—is just a few minutes from their own restored residence, the 1950 Hodgson House, also by Johnson. On a recent rainy afternoon, the two gave us a tour of their steel, glass, and brick home away from home.
BassamFellows turns an abandoned Philip Johnson office building in Ridgefield, Connecticut, into a dazzling headquarters with a residential vibe
MICHAEL BIONDO
Craig Bassam and Scott Fellows in Philip Johnson’s 1952 Schlumberger Research Center Administration Building in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which they’ve transformed into the BassamFellows headquarters. SEPT.21
INTERIOR DESIGN
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