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20 Articles

editor’s letter

“Every project should feel like a movie. This character felt close to my world. I knew his plot.”—Darren Jett In January, AD famously publishes the AD100 list, a prestigious global who’s who of established designers, living legends, and a select group of debuts. By the February issue, which is devoted to breakthrough performances, the editors are excited to shine the spotlight on rising stars. New ideas about how to live are essential to the industry; as in any creative field, progress is limited if we only celebrate the old masters. It has been fascinating to document the process for each of the designers featured this month: How do they approach their projects, their clients, and in several stories, their own personal environments? Darren Jett believes that lifestyle is as important…

editor’s letter

In Giorgio de Chirico’s 1927 painting Mobili nella Valle, an arrangement of furniture is dropped, rather surrealistically, into a desert landscape. Some 40 years after its creation, this strange, metaphysical scene would inspire Italian sculptor Mario Ceroli to realize the three objects from the artwork—a cabinet, an armchair, and a tall-backed seat—in planks of Russian pine. The throne-like Sedia Alta, Italian for High Chair, swiftly became the most recognizable piece of the bunch, making its debut as part of the scenography Ceroli developed for performances of Shakespeare’s Richard III at Teatro Stabile di Torino in 1968. By the early 1970s it was put into production by the radical Italian design brand Poltronova. “For me, furniture is a sculpture created to be touched, to be used,” says the artist, who lives…

As the COVID-19 pandemic roiled the world in 2020, Catherine Kwong succumbed to the siren call of The Sea Ranch, the quietly radical planned community that sprang up in the 1960s along 10 miles of glorious Northern California coastline. The landmark development—conceived by a group of pioneering Bay Area architects and planners as a progressive haven centered on harmony with the natural environment—provided the perfect pastoral escape hatch for the San Francisco–based interior designer and her family. “I’ve always been obsessed with The Sea Ranch from an architectural point of view. It casts such a spell—letting nature envelop you as you’re cradled in this incredible landscape right by the ocean,” Kwong says. The designer and her husband, Brian, settled on a home built in 1972 by architect John Haag, who…

I try to trick myself into thinking it’s the 18th century,” says the artist known simply as Lukas the Illustrator, speaking from his studio on Westport Island, Maine. To a soundtrack of orchestral chants or sea shanties, fanciful motifs flow from his old-school dip pen, conjuring scenes that hover between architectural ruins, theater sets, and sylvan dreamscapes. “Lately, I’ve been fixated on men riding scallop shells and fighting dragons,” he reports. Lukas grew up in Connecticut, traipsing through the forest behind his childhood home. He pursued art for a simple reason: It would allow him to spend time outside drawing from nature. He hadn’t yet graduated from Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied illustration, when his friend the fashion designer Harris Reed got him a job creating packaging…

Beginner’s Luck

Nathalie Farman-Farma has always been a detective of details. To create the enchanting folkloric patterns for which her textile and design studio Décors Barbares is known, she’ll pore over archival materials from the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia, and beyond. But her research spans contemporary channels too. “Somebody will post something on Instagram, only I’m looking at the dress that the lady in the background is wearing,” she confesses. Such was the case for her first foray into tableware. Realized in collaboration with the legacy earthenware atelier Gien, the 17-piece collection reinterprets a clover motif spotted in a black-and-white snapshot. She’s appropriately named the line Chance Folle, or Crazy Luck in English. Without any chromatic clues, Farman-Farma imagined her own fortifying palette of forest green, Turkey red, sunny yellow, ink…

Beginner’s Luck

“A traditional sari has nine and a half yards of fabric,” says New York–based architect Suchi Reddy, who was born and raised in Chennai, India. In homage to that figure, she and Palak Shah—a fourth-generation textile manufacturer and cofounder of the fashion label Ekaya Banaras—have unveiled nine and a half pieces of furniture, with a sculptural side table accounting for the fractional. To cushion their sinuous eucalyptus forms, the duo came up with their own spin on traditional Banarasi fabric: an archival herringbone motif overlaid with numerical zeros that nod to Brahmagupta, the Hindu mathematician who developed the concept of nothingness in 628 AD. Meticulously hand woven from silk and cotton, it appears on an array of seating—all of which recently debuted at New York’s Ateliers Courbet gallery. Both furnishings…

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

In 1934, long before he was a poster boy for midcentury American modernism, Charles Eames and his then partner Robert Walsh designed St. Mary Church, a redbrick late Gothic Revival house of worship in Helena, Arkansas. Eames conceived its cabinetry, pews—thought to be his first furniture—and pendant lights. Those star-spangled globes, outfitted with adjustable aluminum shades, are now back in production as wall-mounted and hanging lamps thanks to Cassina’s new partnership with the Eames Office, brokered by Form Portfolios. Legend has it that when architect Eliel Saarinen saw pictures of the church, he invited Eames to teach at Cranbrook Academy of Art. The rest, of course, is history. cassina.com…

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Japanese Fusion

Nashville seems an unlikely place to discover anything even remotely akin to a Japanese kissa bar. A kissa—or, more traditionally, a jazz kissa—is a type of café that initially sprang up in Japan in the 1920s as a communal place for people to drink, socialize, and listen to vinyl records. “They’re typically very intimate, casual, DIY spaces, sort of cobbled together,” explains Roman Alonso of the AD100 firm Commune Design, which recently completed work on 888, a combination kissa and sushi restaurant improbably tucked in the base of the JW Marriott Nashville hotel tower. The brainchild of Harrison Soffer, a principal at the hospitality and real estate development firm Turnberry, 888 celebrates the spirit of the kissa along with the fertile design heritage of the country in which it originated.…

Japanese Fusion

A CENTURY OF STYLE

Featuring Barack and Michelle Obama, Frank Gehry, Truman Capote, David Hockney, Marc Jacobs, Jennifer Aniston, Diana Vreeland, India Mahdavi, Peter Marino, Kelly Wearstler, Oscar Niemeyer, Axel Vervoordt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Elsie de Wolfe, Jacques Grange, Rose Tarlow, John Lautner, Renzo Mongiardino, and many more. abramsbooks.com/AD100…

A CENTURY OF STYLE

Empire State of Mind

Historically speaking, trunk shows have always been moments to introduce luxury treasures to fresh eyes, as traveling designers took their wares on the road. Today, Louis Vuitton has put its own ambitious spin on that tradition in midtown Manhattan, wrapping its Fifth Avenue flagship (now under renovation) in a temporary façade that mimics a stack of its iconic monogrammed luggage. But at the brand’s newest Manhattan location, just east on 57th Street, there are more feats to behold. Designed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, four towers of iconic Courrier Lozine trunks rise to over 52 feet, each totem bearing a different pattern and structural configuration. One twists, another zigzags. The remaining rotate and stagger. “Are they hanging? Are they balanced?” muses Shigematsu, a regular collaborator of the brand. “We wanted…

Empire State of Mind

The Chicago-based interior designer Summer Thornton has built her name as a virtuosic mixer of color and pattern. But at times she must reserve her most daring concepts for herself. “I’m taking the ideas my clients won’t do,” she says, reflecting on the recent renovation of her own Chicago office, an 1877 Victorian house in Lincoln Park. After renting the top floor for several years, she decided to buy and restore the entire building—taking over the ground-floor bridal shop, digging a fortified foundation, and making updates in two phases amid client commissions. “It was my last priority,” she concedes, calling the two-year process “a cobbler-with-no-shoes situation.” Intended as both a showcase for client meetings and a home base for Thornton and her team of 15, the space couldn’t fall a…

“I’m a collector,” says Paloma Elsesser. “I love Milanese design, but I also love North African ikats and Dogon statues and masks from Mali.” When you travel so much, being home really feels like the vacation,” says supermodel and body advocate Paloma Elsesser. She’s sitting at an Ettore Sottsass table in her dining area in Brooklyn, a painting by Taylor Simmons hanging behind her. It’s been a long shoot day—and in an hour she’ll head to the airport to catch a flight to Los Angeles—but she’s effervescent as she speaks about her newly finished home. “We really leaned into that here,” she continues. “When I cut away all the noise of the job, what do I want to be surrounded by? For me, it’s color. It’s levity. It’s things I…

detail oriented

After visiting “every historic home on the Upper East Side” for research, Kapito says, imbuing the residence with authenticity was paramount. among the most cherished items in Alyssa Kapito’s Upper East Side apartment are a pair of vintage cane chairs that she picked up years ago in Barcelona “for a song.” Yet instead of expounding on their silhouette or pedigree—which would not be unexpected from an interior designer with a master’s degree in art history from Columbia and a seat on the Yale School of Architecture board—she homes in on their endearing imperfections. “My kids stick their fingers in the wicker seats, but it doesn’t bother me,” Kapito, sitting in her softly lit living room within a 1925 neo-Italian Renaissance–style edifice, admits with a smile. “I find it charming—it gives…

detail oriented

A photo stylist makes what looks good in three dimensions look even better in two. Stylists don’t simply work with a photographer to document a room, they try to capture its essence, doing whatever it takes to transform a space into captivating and memorable images. And few do that better than Mieke ten Have, who over the past decade and a half has worked with virtually every top interior designer and photographer. Ten Have brought a fresh approach to the images she worked on, which are color-drenched and evocative, perhaps best exemplified in her unconventional use of flowers. So startling were her arrangements—loose, blowsy, full of grasses and greens—that early on one of her editors asked her if she had used dead flowers for a shoot. (Okay, that was me).…

“I wanted the interiors to have a bit of an American folk-art feel.”—Mieke ten Have “I knew Mieke had impeccable taste. I had become enamored with her style.”—Coco Quinlan…

The Milanese pied-à-terre that Giampiero Tagliaferri designed for a young art collector offers a mini master class in Italian modern design. The idiosyncratic duplex penthouse is chockablock with treasures by a pantheon of 20th-century design titans on the order of Mario Bellini, Osvaldo Borsani, Angelo Mangiarotti, Gae Aulenti, Gio Ponti, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Joe Colombo, Tito Agnoli, and others. Works by laudable but lesser-known talents—Pia Guidetti Crippa, Giovanni Travasa, Gigi Sabadin—pepper the heady mix. All those melodious names sound like toothsome items on an Italian menu: “I’ll have a plate of Mangiarotti with a glass of your best Gio Ponti.” Delicious. But there’s much more to the apartment than a mere accumulation of objets de vertu. Tagliaferri has lovingly evoked the spirit of those avant-garde Italian interiors of the…

a unifying spirit flows through Charbrook, the rural Massachusetts homestead, workspace, and design lab of Lauren and Stephen Stimson, married partners behind landscape architecture firm Stimson. Gently rolling acreage unfolds like a necessary conversation—a little messy at times but deeply satisfying. Where sharp lines impose order, nature blooms to blur them, and rangy garden beds encroach on clean modern structures. Even the name evokes balance, a flame’s “char” meeting the cold, clear rush of a “brook.” “This tension between wild and groomed is a sweet spot,” says Stephen, who traces his sensibilities to mentors like Dan Kiley and Michael Van Valkenburgh. “Modernists with a capital M,” Lauren interjects, noting she came up under “ecologists and environmentalists saying, ‘We don’t need a row of trees. We need a giant stormwater basin…

MADE IN SÃO PAULO

Fernanda Pompermayer “My assistant says I’m like a tornado, picking up everything around me and putting it in my work,” says Pompermayer. There is certainly an element of chaos to her vessels and furnishings, which mix clay, glass, resin, and more in collage-like compositions. Her own path has been similarly intuitive. Born in southern Brazil, she moved to Latvia in 2018 for a residency at the Rothko Museum before heading to London, where she worked as a graphic designer. Pandemic travel restrictions, however, left her stuck in her hometown, a moment she seized for a career pivot. “I really wanted to create with my hands,” she recalls. So she ordered a bunch of clay and began testing out the Japanese nerikomi method, mixing pigments to create patterns. Seeking a larger,…

MADE IN SÃO PAULO

to woo their clients, decorators regularly come equipped with fabric swatches, tile samples, and other tactile hints at rooms to come. Darren Jett goes for an even more full-sensory experience. As part of his presentations, the designer prepares a soundtrack that embodies not only the interiors he’s envisioning but also the lifestyle he hopes unfolds there. In the case of the Manhattan loft that he recently renovated for finance executive Christopher Chiou, that playlist included disco hits, underground dance tracks, and George Michael classics—songs that capture urbane gay abandon. “Every project should feel like a movie,” Jett reflects. “This character felt close to my world. I knew his plot.” Chiou bought the apartment, a classic SoHo artist’s loft, in 2021, amid the city’s pandemic real estate slump. At the time,…

Peace Accord According to Jain mythology, the Samavasarana temple brought the faithful closer to enlightenment through its tiered architectural forms—each ascending space marking the accumulation of knowledge on the path toward enlightenment. Today, that spiritual vernacular endures in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where Serie Architects have completed its own contemporary homage: the new Raj Sabhagruh, centerpiece of the nearly 250-acre Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram. Set atop a crescent-shaped hill, the building rises from the 5,000-seat auditorium at its base, a column-free expanse distinguished by its monumental concrete arches. At its crown, meanwhile, a soaring 300-person meditation hall glows like a lantern thanks to over 1,000 integrated pin lights. And outside, the building’s angled façades bear some 800,000 bricks crafted from salvaged marble, their hand-chiseled surfaces yielding subtle texture. Whether…

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