Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i Architectural Digest

In early 2020, even before the world shut down, Jess Wheeler had her back-to-the-land moment, moving from London, where she’d worked as a florist and botanical set designer, to the Welsh countryside. “I wanted to make something that was more everlasting,” recalls the artist, who soon thereafter commissioned a local metalworker to translate oak leaves from her then backyard into brass candle sconces. When John Derian saw them, he ordered a bunch for his shop—and her new career was officially launched. Today, Wheeler’s abundant garden and grounds continue to feed her farm-to-table practice, albeit from her new home and nearby studio in picturesque West Dorset, on England’s Jurassic Coast. Foliage, produce, and branches all serve as rich fodder for lighting and other decorative objects. “At the moment we’ve got pumpkins…

Space changes everything. Depending on the context, a painting or sculpture can assume different personalities, its form redefining a room, its colors shifting in a given light. That process of rediscovery has been a source of joy for two art collectors who recently moved from their long-time apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to a historic town house downtown. Living across multiple floors, in discrete yet airy rooms of varying scales, has allowed them to see treasured works with fresh eyes. The couple didn’t set out looking to buy a whole house. During the pandemic, eager for a change of scenery yet reluctant to travel, they opted for an extended staycation, renting a single-family property in the West Village and falling in love with the area, whose off-grid streets reminded…

When the Canadian-born, New York–based tech entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield left Salesforce, which in 2021 had acquired Slack, the revolutionary workplace-messaging platform that he cofounded, his farewell email teased a new hobby. “Can I tell you something?” he wrote. “I fantasize about gardening.” “Everyone thought he was joking—but here we are!” says Jen Rubio, Butterfield’s wife, and a cofounder of Away, the sleek direct-to-consumer luggage brand. Less than five years later, the couple’s expansive Southampton gardens now include vegetables, herbs, berries, and allées of fruit trees, not to mention 1,000 shrubs and more than 5,000 perennials. “Stewart brings in ripe vegetables every day, and we plan our meals around whatever he’s pulled. He pickles things and sends jars to friends! The garden is really Stewart’s happy place. It grounds him, quite…

JAMES CHERRY DESIGNED HIS FIRST light fixture on a whim. It was 2019 and he was living in a cramped New York City apartment with three roommates, having recently graduated from the Studio Arts program at Bard College. “I needed a lamp,” recalls the artist. “I had these boxers that got a tear in them, so I made a little clay armature and wrapped the fabric around it.” That illuminated work would launch Cherry’s practice, which, six years later, is best known for ethereal lamps with a handmade feel. “They’re a bit embryonic,” he says, inspecting the specimens that have covered his worktables since he opened a studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this past summer. A spiraling partition table lamp, a pyramid-shaped pendant, and assorted amoeba-like forms are all made…

Ashtrays, sequins, Astroturf, cake pans—the everyday became extraordinary in the work of Bruce Goff, a self-taught architect who boldly reenvisioned postwar American domesticity. From the age of 14 until his death at age 78 in 1982, the Kansas native designed a series of experimental houses that incorporated found materials while pioneering building techniques. Design buffs will recognize his futuristic geometries. And now his work is primed for wider rediscovery thanks to a new show at the Art Institute of Chicago, safekeeper of Goff’s archives. “Goff bucked every trend,” says curator Alison Fisher. “He loved thinking about new ways of living, cutting against conformity.” On view December 20 through March 29, “Bruce Goff: Material World” comprises some 200 works, including not only architectural drawings and models but also personal effects like…

From her birth in 1933, to 1937, Eunice Kathleen Waymon, the musician and civil rights activist known to the world as Nina Simone, lived in a three-room, 650-square-foot house in Tryon, North Carolina, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was here that her prodigious talent as a pianist first emerged, a gift that would later carry her far beyond the town of 1,700, where a downtown mural and a bronze statue now immortalize her local ties. Yet few outside Tryon have known that the white clapboard structure, which had fallen into disrepair, was once her family home. Today, after years of planning, fundraising, and careful restoration, the house is entering its next chapter as a site of inspiration for artists, thinkers, and stewards of Black cultural…

Venice is, simply, different. Different from any other city in the world—and different from the idea of Venice that those who don’t live there have formed from watching movies or reading books about it. “For those who live in anonymous cities, who take the car and go to work without meeting anyone, the urban landscape here is completely different. Human contact is continuous in Venice,” says architect Luca Bombassei, who has recently taken up residence in the 15th-century Palazzo Contarini Corfù overlooking the Grand Canal. His apartment on the top floor piano nobile—one of the main “noble” floors used as living quarters by the Venetian aristocracy—sprawls over nearly 6,500 square feet, not an unusual size for a Venetian palazzo. Every inch is flooded with the light that enters on three…

Memory. Contemplation. Ritual. Movement. These were among the many words that the late architect Balkrishna “B.V.” Doshi, at home during the pandemic, scribbled on a piece of paper along with a drawing of a building and landscape. The illustration responded to an invitation from Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman emeritus of Vitra, to design “a shrine” for the brand’s headquarters in Weil am Rhein, Germany—a campus home to structures by Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, SANAA, Herzog & de Meuron, and more. Doshi’s sketch, realized posthumously, now joins them, its snaking curves of weathered steel leading to a circular room, open to the sky through a perimeter aperture, where a mechanized gong releases a recurring flow of sound. The idea of a journey is at the heart of the Doshi Retreat. Prior to…

In Egypt, a scarab is something that brings you peace in the afterlife,” says Mehdi Dakhli speaking about his new beetle-shaped cabinet, debuting at Design Miami this December. “When someone dies, you place [an amulet of] one in their coffn. But when you’re alive it can protect you from harm.” Turning that enduring symbol of good fortune into storage feels apt for the French designer of Tunisian descent. Explains Dakhli, “Open the doors and you might find some treasures.” Crafted by London artisans out of ebonized oak, with bronze legs and aluminum shelves, the piece stars in the show “Design Miami 2.0,” curated by Glenn Adamson to mark the fair’s 20th anniversary. “It’s a perfect example of the way Mehdi combines the ancient and the futuristic into a unified sensibility,”…

“A meaningful interior is layered with thought, memory, and intention.”—Fabiola Beracasa Beckman…

Much like the proverbial rolling stone, a coastal bluff with sandy soil is a tricky spot to gather moss. But Ugo Rondinone remained undaunted. Starting in the COVID lockdown of 2020, the Swiss-born artist spent years cultivating a verdant wonderland at his beach home on the North Fork of Long Island (AD, December 2018). “My vision was a landscape that features moss as its star attraction—a lush, tranquil ground cover that can be enjoyed all year round,” Rondinone says of his garden odyssey. Although the property already boasted mature trees and patches of existing mosses, lichens, and ferns, the artist’s path to arcadia was hardly straightforward. “The beginning was diffcult. We failed the first two seasons,” he confesses. “Moss takes a lot of patience.” To realize his vision, Rondinone found…