Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i Architectural Digest

Tapped to revive the 18th-century Palazzo Salviati Cesi Mellini as the new Six Senses Rome hotel, Patricia Urquiola did a deep dive into the history of the Eternal City. “The research started from materials, colors, and details that speak of Rome,” says the architect. “The heritage, the classicism, and the original architecture guided the whole concept.” Interiors feature local mainstays like travertine, cocciopesto, and mosaics, all the while calling to mind a tranquil garden oasis thanks to the abundant plantings, splashes of green marble, and a digitally printed landscape mural. (Hung above the reception desk, that artwork is based on the frescoes at Livia’s ancient villa.) Meanwhile, the spa’s baths, encompassing a caldarium, a tepidarium, and a frigidarium, nod to the myth of Apollo and Daphne in bas-relief. As part…

When people talk about Sedona they often talk about energy—the calming effects of the Arizona desert light and terrain, the sudden realignment of one’s mind, body, and spirit. Facilitating that bliss has always been the core mission of Mii Amo, a beloved spa nestled in the region’s picture-perfect Boynton Canyon. Today, the all-inclusive resort is vibrating at a fresh frequency thanks to a two-year update that celebrates its extraordinary setting. “Every detail is grounded in the landscape,” reflects architect Dana Tang of Gluckman Tang Architects, the New York–based firm responsible for the redesign. Materials—think tinted concrete, wood, adobe bricks, stucco—pay homage to the area’s vivid earth, while clever tweaks to the overall floor plan forge new indoor-outdoor connections. In the terra-cotta-hued living area, case in point, an indoor pool has…

Safe decorating is an international issue, it seems: gray and beige upholstery, a signal lack of patterns to delight the eye, and walls painted 50 shades of white. Even Lima, the capital of Peru, is not immune. “Lots of white, very light, modern, that kind of thing” is how Bettina Iolas, a Lima native, describes the aesthetic status quo. She subscribed to it as well for many years, before embracing chromatic change. “One day, I was going around my house, and all I saw was gray and beige,” she recalls. “And I decided I needed more color in my life.” Which explains why she flew to New York City one day and had lunch with a friend, the decorator, stylist, and writer Carlos Mota, whose most recent book, G: Forever…

Echoing the philosophy of William Morris, the great Victorian Arts and Crafts designer who lived nearby at Kelmscott Manor, everything in the six-acre Gloucestershire garden that Jinny Blom has created for Sanjeev Shah and Mansi Amin is either beautiful or useful. The late-19th-century former rectory, which the couple bought when they moved out of London in 2017, is perched atop a promontory, 30 miles west of Oxford in the heart of the Cotswolds. To the south are breathtaking views overlooking a quintessentially English pastoral scene of hedged fields and woodland that has remained largely unchanged for centuries, with the Monarch’s Way, the route used by King Charles II when escaping from Cromwell’s troops in 1651, running through it. “One of the things Jinny understands is the setting and the history…

In a city of hills, it’s all about the views. That’s certainly how architect Monica Sanga approached her recent redesign of the 1886 Victorian house in San Francisco that she shares with her husband, software engineer Arjun Banker. From the street, the home appears to be a one-story cottage atop a bluff. But inside, original doors open onto three levels of terraces, with panoramic vistas of the city and the East Bay. “It just feels like this little antechamber that takes you to another world,” says Sanga, who founded her own firm in 2017 after cutting her teeth at Snøhetta and Spiegel Aihara Workshop. Banker and Sanga purchased the home four years ago, living in it for a year before embarking on a renovation to emphasize the surrounding natural beauty.…

On Lagos Island, in the heart of the Nigerian metropolis, the city’s first public pool has sat empty since the 1970s. Some Nigerians remember its 3 later years as an infamous spot to canoodle, but its heyday began in 1928, in the era of Art Deco. After being denied financial support from the then colony’s British government, philanthropic doctor John Randle put forth his own funds to build it. At the time, the neighborhood was a hotbed of segregation politics. The British had opened a nearby members-only club in 1926, prompting Yoruba locals to start their own two years later. A few blocks away, Broad Street Prison—now a public park by local architect Theo Lawson—jailed activists for political protest. When Randle, a lifelong champion of social equity, debuted the pool,…

“When you travel, your taste changes. Your eyes absorb new things.”—Bettina Iolas “I liked color, but I didn’t love color the way I love it now.”…

Madrid’s landmarked colonias date back to the 1920s and ’30s, when clusters of modest patio homes were built on what were then the outskirts of the city to provide affordable housing for working and middle-class families. In the decades that followed, as the urban boundaries billowed out, many of these leafy residential pockets remained untouched, becoming some of the most coveted addresses in the Spanish capital. Interior designer Isabel López-Quesada, a lifelong Madrileña, set her sights on a particularly charming colonia north of El Retiro park, Cruz del Rayo, when she was much too young to own real estate. “I had just started dating my husband and he took me to a party in Cruz del Rayo,” remembers López-Quesada, who was only 19 at the time but was already a…

We were inspired by Venice—the architecture, the history, the monumentality,” says AD100 designer Vincenzo De Cotiis over Zoom, swinging open the shutters of the Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, a Baroque-style palace in the city where he has recently taken up residence on the piano nobile. It’s a misty afternoon in February and a few small boats are traveling along the waterway that has facilitated trade, transit, and cultural exchange for centuries. “When you’re here, you understand what happened in the 15th century,” continues the designer’s wife, Claudia Rose De Cotiis. “How Venice became a world market.” This palazzo watched it all unfold. Likely constructed around the 15th century by the Miani family, it was bought by the Lolins in the early 17th century. Following plans by the Venetian architect Baldassare Longhena,…

I grew up in Beirut during the war, and there was a saying I often heard that translated to ‘If you wake up and your car is bombed, then be grateful that only the car is destroyed.’ You consider yourself lucky to be alive.” Tony Salamé—the founder of the 34-year-old Lebanese luxury department-store chain Aïshti; a collector of con-temporary art since 2000; and more recently the sponsor of a breathtaking department store and a mixed-use complex, both designed for Beirut, respectively, by Zaha Hadid and David Adjaye—is reflecting on the experiences that molded him into an arbiter of culture. The entrepreneur and philanthropist admits that not everyone who came of age during the Lebanese Civil War emerged from the conflict with a zest for human endeavor. But thanks to his…

It’s hard to put a label on Raffaella Bortoluzzi’s architectural style. In addition to her other designs, Bortoluzzi—who was born in Venice and helms the New York architectural firm Labo Design Studio—has crafted a wavy zinc-clad vacation home for the arts philanthropist Maja Hoffmann that juts up like a sculpture from the jungled hillside of Mustique. She fashioned a jaunty multicolor modernist box for decorator Muriel Brandolini’s Hamptons getaway. She infused the New York branch of luxury jeweler Pomellato with full-out Deco glamour. Her own Little Italy apartment, with its custom-made blackened-steel kitchen, is an ode to minimalist industrial chic. “It’s very difficult in a culture like ours, where everything is imitated, to have a confidence in your own hand, as Raffaella has,” recalled the late architect Rafael Viñoly, for…