Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2024 i Dwell

Generally, around here, we tend to look toward the future. We’re always asking: What can a home be? What should it be? What are the ideas, structures, forms, and flourishes that open up possibilities for better ways to live? This year, the planning for our annual American design issue coincided with a federal election, miring us in an exhausting present. The atmosphere as we finalized the issue saw the nation choking on cultural strife, political and social violence, and a normalization of suffocating hate—particularly against people of color, queer people, and women. It’s all set against a background of horrifying wars and large-scale weather disasters fueled by climate change. Staring at the glow of my various feeds, I’ve started to feel a little like burnt toast. The exhausting wash of…

With its postcard-perfect beaches and bustling military bases, San Diego is often dismissed as a conservative oasis and sleepy surfer town. In fact, it’s among the largest cities in the country, with major architectural landmarks including Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute and, more controversially, Selldorf Architects’ redo of Venturi Scott Brown and Associate’s postmodern addition to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Designer Nicholas Bijan Pourfard grew up there and got his start as a guitar luthier before venturing into furniture and lighting design with his eponymous brand. Pourfard is well versed in the local history of 20th-century modernism, as he’s currently renovating a house by Walter S. White for himself. But he’s also interested in another aspect of the region: San Diego and Tijuana have a symbiotic design relationship,…

Decades ago, John Waters and his merry band of Dreamlanders put Charm City on the map with their trash-into-treasure brand of DIY filmmaking, but Baltimore’s contributions to visual and material culture also include some of today’s most influential and accomplished painters, sculptors, and designers. “Baltimore sees art in everything and understands its value in enriching our day-to-day lives. It’s a city of artists,” says Shawn Chopra, cofounder and creative director of the city’s beloved design retail resource Good Neighbor. Chopra and his wife moved to Baltimore in 2011. “We built a beautiful and diverse community of friends and connections and fell in love with the city and its people,” he says. They delved into the city’s design traditions, beginning with Maryland’s history of forestry, woodworking, and carpentry. They also studied…

Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Lauren Halsey built sets for church plays, an early passion that has evolved into a celebrated art practice. “I had an appreciation for sculpture,” says Halsey. “I remember pretty profoundly that carving things was moving for me.” Her large-scale, site-specific installations mix ancient Egyptian forms and other architectural motifs with contemporary Black iconography to evoke striking spatial narratives. The work explores the potential of sculpture and architecture, blending fantasy with reality, the mundane with the spiritual, and archival images with visions of the future. The result is often a funky Afrofuturist approach to monument making. Halsey’s work has appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, and, currently, the Serpentine Gallery in London, but next spring, she returns…

In the early days of the Covid pandemic, when most public places were strictly off-limits, Amy Dantzler, an accomplished open-water swimmer, and her wife, Julie Anderson, got in the habit of taking early-morning trips from their home in the Hollywood Hills to L.A.’s South Bay. “Amy would get up at 4:00 a.m. and drive to Manhattan Beach because all the pools were closed,” Julie says. “Sometimes I’d join her to run on the sand. One morning I turned to her and said, ‘Why don’t we buy a house down here?’” Amy, a real estate agent, liked the idea a lot—so much that she floated it by Bryan Libit, an architect and interior designer who frequently joins her for a swim. “We were walking back to the car from the beach…

If you strolled down Santa Cruz’s Fair Avenue toward the ocean a decade ago, you would pass rows of single-family homes, a church, and a sight that would stop you in your tracks. On an overgrown field spanning four contiguous lots stood a collection of cryptic brick structures ornamented with abalone shells and arcane symbols. More or less abandoned since the mid-1960s, it was a strange sight, even for a town celebrated for being unconventional. Known informally as the Yogi Temple, the Watts Towers of Santa Cruz, and the Court of Mysteries, it was created by an eccentric Pennsylvania brick mason named Kenneth Kitchen and his stonemason brother, Raymond. Over the years, the oddball property—which included a dwelling, a well house, a gate, and two obelisks—changed hands and fell into…

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Gregory Han Writer “Extra Credit,” p. 52 Gregory Han is a former designer who now writes about the field, but his deepest passion lies outside human-made objects. “You can’t be a great designer without looking at the ultimate design, which is nature,” he says. Han and his wife, Emily, recently published a mushroom-foraging guide (Mushroom Hunting: Forage for Fungi and Connect With the Earth) and have a similar book about trees in the works. For this issue, Dwell sent Han to the home of a fellow nature aficionado: 11-year-old Surya Sharma. The two (and Surya’s parents) chatted about native plants and how the family created a backyard ecological hot spot. Julianne Escobedo Shepherd Writer “You Can’t Go Home Again,” p. 60 While Julianne Escobedo Shepherd researched and wrote her upcoming…

“Miami is fairly young,” says floral designer Elizabeth Jaime, who left New York City and returned to her hometown in 2019 to plant the seeds for Calma, and her studio has become the city’s go-to for adventurous arrangements. “There isn’t a long history of design to build off or even act in opposition to,” she says. “So I think Miami is still trying to determine what its style is.” Of course, there’s the city’s unparalleled (at least in the United States) Art Deco legacy, though it is no longer as influential as it once was, Jaime says. As for 21stcentury perspectives, she points to arriviste designers mining ersatz looks, like those she calls “Tropicália overload” and “’80s Miami cocaine den,” particularly in hospitality spaces. “Tourism is a major part of…

For the last 13 years, Monica Oquendo has owned a vintage boutique in San Juan that aims to cultivate local appreciation for Puerto Rican design and art in addition to fostering new generations of jewelry, apparel, and ceramic designers. Born and raised in the city, she graduated from the University of Puerto Rico and worked in advertising before opening her shop, Electroshock, in the Santurce neighborhood. Oquendo believes the past is inextricable from the future of Puerto Rican design. “Our colony status influences our aesthetic,” she says, “from the Spanish Revival themes to the actual uses of resources and the availability of material.” She points to the prevalence of wicker and wood furniture. “Many artists and workers are also redefining traditional pieces,” she says. Take, for example, losas criollas. The…

ca 1935 Kenneth Kitchen purchases four contiguous lots on Fair Avenue, constructs a one-story dwelling for himself, and establishes a goat farm. ca 1936–1946 With his brother Raymond, Kenneth constructs a temple-like main structure, a well, a well house, two obelisks, and an entrance gate, plus a fence around the property. ca 1952 The one-story dwelling is demolished. 1953 Kenneth leaves Santa Cruz, and the property sits vacant. 1962 Elias G. Karim, pastor of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in San Francisco, purchases the property, converts it into the St. Elias Orthodox Chapel & Shrine, landscapes the grounds, and plants palm trees. 1964-1988 The property is vacated, and the city gives it historical landmark status in 1976. It’s listed in 1988, but it goes unsold. 2016 Douglas Harr and Artina Morton…

48 Pops of Color Sarah Jacoby sarahjacobyarchitect.com 48 Linear pendant from Stickbulb stickbulb.com; 36-inch electric range from Ilve ilve.com; Wood Finger cabinet pull from Manzoni manzoni.us; Tara Ultra sink faucet from Dornbracht dornbracht.com; soapstone countertop abcworldwidestone.com 49 Isaac sconce from Schoolhouse schoolhouse.com; showerhead and knobs from Newport Brass newportbrass.com; Dimple sconce from RBW rbw.com; Classic Field wall tile from Heath Ceramics heathceramics.com 52 Extra Credit Hardy Californians hardycalifornians.com Greywater Corps greywatercorps.com 56 From A to Sea Studio MacDonald Libit gosml.com 56 Windows and patio doors from Andersen andersenwindows.com 57 Dining table by Susan Swingle susanaswingle@gmail.com; flooring from Amorim Cork Flooring amorimcorkflooring.com 58 Surfboard coffee table from Salty Home salty-home.com 59 La Jolla door hardware from Baldwin Hardware Direct baldwinhardwaredirect.com; kitchen tile from Ann Sacks annsacks.kohler.com; Durock countertops usg.com; exterior decking…

We’re happy to report that the state of American design is strong—particularly when it’s viewed less as a monumental national style and more as a summation of unique, local movements. While social media has expanded access to independent makers, it has also had a homogenizing effect, creating a sense that the same aesthetics hold sway everywhere. In actuality, design all over the country still retains a connection to the traditions and innovations of its particular region. We asked experts from San Diego to San Juan to tell us what gives objects created around them a unique flavor. The result is a country’s worth of design, all with a distinct sense of place.…

Although it might not always get the flowers it deserves, North Carolina is one of America’s great hubs of design. There’s the ongoing legacy of the Black Mountain College, of course, where everyone from Walter Gropius to Buckminster Fuller helped generations of students push the midcentury avant-garde. More recently, a pair of triads—the Research Triangle, composed of universities around Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, and the more commercial trio of Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and High Point, home to the namesake semiannual fair—are fueling growth in tech and business sectors. And, to a degree, design. Craftsperson and designer Mike Newins moved to the state in his mid-20s, and in both his personal practice and his fabrication studio, Make Nice, he finds inspiration in everything from Light and Space art to cyberpunk to…

In 1951, entrepreneur and brickmaker Archie Bray established the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts on the site of a former brickyard in Helena, Montana. Since then, the Bray has established world-class artist residencies and, in the process, nurtured a vibrant ceramics ecosystem in the Western town. “Many artists settled in Montana as a result of their experience at the Bray,” says Steven Young Lee, who did a summer residency there in 1998 and came back eight years later to serve as resident artistic director of the program for some 16 years. That includes names like Deborah Butterfield and John Buck, who both put down roots there. They added their own aesthetic to already-established communities of Native American artists like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish-Kootenai) and Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow)…

Mere minutes after setting foot in the sloped backyard of Poonam Sharma and Ali Jeevanjee in Mount Washington, a hillside Los Angeles neighborhood, the couple’s 11-year-old son, Surya, starts listing Southern California plant and bird species with the alacrity of a Pokémon enthusiast. He’s eager to show off the family’s cascading garden, which vibrates with blooms and the hum of pollinators. But the garden wasn’t always so diverse and engaging. Poonam and Ali, principals of LOC Architects in L.A., bought the home in 2013, and until 2021 a lawn was the defining landscape feature. The family would eventually find help in Keely Luna and Parker Davis of Hardy Californians, a landscape design studio that specializes in sustainable native plant gardens. Impressed by Surya’s enthusiasm and knowledge, the pair quickly recognized…

“This interplay of light, color, and movement aligns to the clients. They are plural in who they are as people and the things they engage in.”JAMES CARSE, ARCHITECT On a sticky summer night in New Orleans, in our candy-apple-red dining room, my husband, his life partner, and I ate red beans and rice and scribbled lighting cues on a script for an adaptation of the 1980s cult horror/comedy flick Evil Dead II. That fall we would stage it in a motel pool roiling with synchronized swimmers, puppets, and trapeze performers. The mezzanine above us brimmed with costumes. A fog machine, PA system, and strobe—among many other lights—awaited deployment. Soon, in the double-height living room crowned with an aerial-rig-ready vaulted ceiling, we’d teach cast members how to set them up and…

Sallyann Corn: While visiting friends in Austin, Texas, we traveled to Lockhart to try a famous barbecue joint. Joe Kent: After eating, we walked around and found an antique store. Suddenly, Sallyann jetted off to a corner and came back with this. She said, “I don’t know what it is, but I’m buying it.” SC: It was leaning against a pile of records, and I thought, What the hell is that? It’s about waist high and is made of steel in this brick red color. It almost has the proportions of a pogo stick. JK: There’s something about looking at an object like this and not being able to tell immediately what it is. It’s purpose-built, but the purpose isn’t apparent unless you’re in the know. It was a moment…