Dwell Jun-12

In her 1897 book, The Decoration of Houses, Edith Wharton wrote that many people believe designers and architects possess “some strange craft like black magic” to successfully create house and home. While I don’t agree that one must confer with a higher power to build a pleasant living environment, I do respect the intuitive power of sensing possibility within empty space. Clearly, we at Dwell believe fervently in architects. But we find equal value in the talent of interior designers, those who can skillfully merge texture, material, and color to lend a humanizing touch to even the strictest of forms. Ultimately, the best projects are a marriage of several creative professions and tell a story about how curiosity and imagination can unite architecture and interior design. My home is not…

Reading the latest Dwell issue (Less Is Modern, March 2012), I was again struck by the number of stories that featured architect’s own homes. I hope your readers understand that these projects are spectacular because the owner-designers have poured their hearts and souls into making new things happen and have taken chances that might not otherwise be possible in a architect-client relationship. The cost of developing the project usually doesn’t include the design effort since it is all bundled up in “sweat equity.” It is a challenging discussion with our clients to explain that dedicating this amount of creative energy to a project comes with a price that is above the norm. We have been lucky to have many clients who understand this and have let us create magnificent spaces…

Tiffany Chu Writer and designer Tiffany Chu fell in love with Finnish design the moment she stepped into Alvar Aalto’s Baker House dormitory on her first day of university at MIT. After a stint living in Copenhagen several years ago, she realized that interviewing Juhani Lemmetti (Design Finder, p. 112) gave back to her a Scandinavian sense of appreciation for simple craft and reasonably priced timelessness. Rico Gagliano Journalist and audio producer Rico Gagliano (“Rugged Good Looks,” p. 92) cohosts the public radio arts-and-culture show The Dinner Party and is a regular contributor to the business program Marketplace. In his remaining ten minutes of spare time per week, he writes with the sketch comedy troupe The Ministry of Unknown Science, collects records, and dreams of more storage space. Alyn Griffiths…

The Museum of Modern Art in New York established the world’s first curatorial department for architecture in 1932. At the time, it was a bully pulpit of sorts for Philip Johnson, who would identify and later create his own work in the vein of the International Style. Fast-forward 80 years, when MoMA appoints Pedro Gadanho as the institution’s curator of contemporary architecture. Gadanho is the antithesis of Johnson: approachable, globally minded, and a practicing architect who has steadily built a volume of work on a mostly local scale in his native Portugal. One week after his move stateside, we sat down with Gadanho to chat about his interior architecture (including a recently finished house south of Lisbon) and what he hopes to address in his new role, such as the…

—Jerry Helling When Jerry Helling, president of Bernhardt Design, received a phone call from Charles Pollock in November 2010, he had been on Pollock’s trail for an entire year. Why spend so much effort to track down a designer whose last piece of furniture in the United States—the Pollock Executive office chair for Knoll—was produced almost a half century ago? For one, Helling’s obsession with that very chair (“It’s so sleek and yet kind of overstuffed, a combination that doesn’t seem to go together but jells into this iconic image”) and for another, his unwavering opinion that Charles Pollock’s name and oeuvre should be hallowed in the halls of mid-century design. Bernhardt encouraged the designer, now 82, to give shape to “what comes naturally,” which in the CP Lounge Chair…

Attending an open house is rarely a religious experience, but that’s how it went for interior designer Tracy Beckmann in late 2007. One night while cruising the website architectureforsale.com, she and her business partner, furniture designer Ryan Trowbridge, spotted a little-known John Lautner building on offer in Desert Hot Springs, California, with a showing the following morning. The 1947 complex consisted of four bunker-like spaces with roofs suspended from I-beams, designed for a 600-acre master-planned residential community that never came to be. The next day, Beckmann and Trowbridge hit the road at dawn for the two-hour drive from Los Angeles, with visions of transforming the site into a hotel and architectural mecca. The place had been on the market for two years and was a borderline wreck—“there was so much…