Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2023 i Architectural Digest

“I went down a complete Alexander Calder rabbit hole,” says Workstead’s Robert Highsmith, reflecting on the genesis of the AD100 firm’s new lighting collection, Pendolo. “Looking at his mobiles, looking at his two-dimensional forms, I began to explore the distillation of movement,” he continues, wondering aloud, “How do you create implied kineticism?” Pendolo explores that tension in adjustable fixtures that honor Workstead’s long-standing interests in flexibility and tactility, all the while branching out to a bigger scale. Available in three sizes and wrapped inside and out in burlap or linen, the shades come as large as 18 inches high, requiring an embedded wire structure to maintain the illusion of weightlessness. “The cone is a very monumental form, but it’s also very hollow,” Highsmith reflects. “We wanted the shades to have…

If had no children. By the time they were ready to stock the cupboards and fill the refrigerator, they had three. Somewhere there’s an upside to San Francisco’s famously labyrinthine bureaucracy for securing construction permits, it’s that the process affords plenty of time for homeowners to change their minds. Ten years ago, when Ruchi Sanghvi and Aditya Agarwal—two software engineers and venture investors with serious tech-titan credentials—embarked on a journey to find the perfect lot to build their dream home, the couple along the way, Sanghvi underwent a complete volte-face on her aesthetic predilections. “I was an extreme modernist when we started. I imagined a house with a perfectly symmetrical, rectilinear plan, and very little ornament,” recalls the Silicon Valley pioneer, whose résumé lists her tenure as the first female…

Once upon a time, there was a house that had seen better days. Back in the middle of the 19th century, it had been constructed as a private residence in Notting Hill, one of London’s prettiest neighborhoods. By the 1920s, it had come down in the world, reconstituted into a “ladies’ residential club” (read: boarding house for women), and then, after the Second World War, it had become a hotel. The hotel was eventually divided into apartments, one occupied by a young magician advertising for a beautiful assistant. Today, a different type of sorcery—aesthetic, architectural, familial—has brought it to domestic life again, a life ringing with lessons taken on an upright piano in the dining room, board games in the living room, and four lively children dashing in and out…

In the mid–20th century, winter-sports enthusiasts allied with deep-pocketed investors began to transform Rocky Mountain towns that had long ago gone bust, setting out to create ski and recreation destinations. In those early days, it was not entirely uncommon to see modernist structures take root, with many of the greats—Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Eliot Noyes, and Herbert Bayer—designing early works in places like Aspen and Jackson Hole. But in the closing decades of the past century, preferences shifted toward styles drawn more from Old West kitsch, making houses detailed with heavy rough-cut timber and stone. More recently, though, a new generation of homeowners and their designers is rediscovering the possibilities of modernism in these high-altitude settings. One of the architects putting their stamp on this landscape is Brian…

Someone is blushing—or should we say someplace? In Palm Beach, The Colony Hotel has just received a fresh coat of paint that builds upon its reputation as a “Pink Paradise.” Now splashed across its handsome façades is a custom bubble-gum hue by Farrow & Ball, one of several brands tapped to collaborate on the resort’s 75th-anniversary refresh. Leading the charge was Kemble Interiors, which expertly remixed preppy tropes and classic Floridian motifs into a series of sunny, upbeat spaces. The multiple guest-room concepts all feature statement headboards, whether scalloped or bell shaped, as well as rattan and faux-bamboo pieces from the property’s capsule collection with Society Social. A singerie mural by de Gournay, meanwhile, ushers revelers from the Living Room lounge to Swifty’s bar and restaurant. And outdoor furniture…

Luam Melake’s mother hated when her family would migrate to the living room as soon as a meal was over. People talked more in the dining room, she observed. These days Melake gets it. “Dinner is really important for a family bond, but it’s not just about the food, it’s about the furniture,” explains the New York–based designer. “If you’re sitting at a dining table, you can easily talk to everyone, you can see everyone—it’s the perfect situation.” The way furniture can reposition people to better understand one another is something Melake, who worries about Americans’ growing sense of alienation, thinks about a lot. “There are studies that say if you’re sitting three feet away from someone, you might interact differently than if you are five or six feet away,”…

“I love the combination of historic detailing with a more artistic mix of furniture.”—Chantal Spanicciati “They live a very modern life in this old house.”—Olivia Williams…

In 2014, Boko Haram terrorists razed the village of Chibok, Nigeria, displacing countless families and abducting 276 female high school students, of whom more than 100 still remain missing. Nearly a decade later, the region’s fight against jihadist insurgents is far from over, and thousands of people are still living in camps. But the United Nations Development Programme is helping to rebuild communities like Chibok so that internally displaced persons (IDP) can return home. This past October, 2,500 residents moved into a new settlement in Ngarannam, a three-hour drive northeast of Chibok. The community’s architect, Tosin Oshinowo, refers to the homes as “house proud,” noting that they’re self-sufficient, familiar, and safe. “It was very important to give people a comfortable place to rebuild their lives,” says the Lagos-based principal of…

When the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation opens on February 17, the 230,000-square-foot addition will both expand upon New York’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and further reveal it. The project includes new galleries dedicated to insects; a permanent butterfly vivarium; classrooms; a research library; and a state-of-the-art theater-in-the-round. But the Gilder Center also strategically foregrounds vast holdings of scientific material that have long been out of view. In the five-story collections core, which is outfitted with floor-to-ceiling vitrines, visitors will discover the smallest and largest connections in our biological world. The project’s architect, Studio Gang, has achieved all this by conceiving of the Gilder Center not as a carefully crafted architectural landmark—which it certainly is—but as a void within the museum’s campus. From the outside,…

“It’s not a rational process,” Laplace says of his approach to displaying art in an interior. “I let myself be guided by intuition.” There are many remarkable things in this Parisian piedà-terre—a Jean Royère cocktail table, a pair of Diego Giacometti bronze Pommeaux de Canne armchairs, lighting by Paavo Tynell and Max Ingrand, a Carlo Scarpa dining table, and stellar artworks by the likes of Andy Warhol, John Baldessari, and Max Ernst, including an iron-and-wood sculpture by the last enigmatically entitled A Microbe Seen Through a Temperament. But if there is one thing the project’s interior designer Luis Laplace covets more than anything, it is the book collection of his American-based investor client. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Laplace. “There are tomes signed by famous artists, limited editions,…