Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-12 i Dwell

In Living Color

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…

The Real Cost of Rip-Offs

Here’s how a designer makes money: One day she dreams up a chair. She spends months developing the concept, selecting materials, devising the exact curve of the arm, the dip of the back. Satisfied with the piece, she works with a manufacturer to produce it. The manufacturer refines the design, invests in tooling to build it, promotes it, and gets it to market. You, the consumer, buy it. This is an original, authentic design. Usually, a percentage of your purchase goes back to the designer, who reinvests it into her business, her next idea. In order to take risks and innovate—and, indeed, to make a living—a designer needs to profit from her successes. Same with manufacturers—they need money to contract and promote designers’ work and to keep their production quality…

6 min

Furniture Counsel

As San Francisco–based furniture maker and interior designer Charles de Lisle tells it, creating the perfect room isn’t about the items you buy or a certain aesthetic note. “It’s not really about specific objects; it’s about the process—adding and subtracting things or experimenting with crazy ideas,” he says. “I look at how pieces talk together and create a narrative. There has to be a story.” De Lisle guides us through a contemporary interpretation of a living room, sharing his expert tips, tricks, and furniture picks. 1. Hancock Bookcase by CB2 $199 cb2.com “A lavish bookcase or an inexpensive one won’t drastically change your space since it’s a backdrop to the things stored within it. These shelves are perfect if you need a tall object to fill out a room. The…

5 min

TYLER’S DESIGN TIPS

Stick to your instincts and avoid trends. “If you’re a fan of a particular era then keep an eye out for things in that style and add them gradually. They will always work well together.” Do your research. “The difference between the most expensive quote and the cheapest we received for building materials was almost double. If you are in a rush you will get ripped off, because people will recognize that and charge a premium.” Storage is critical. “It’s something that always gets overlooked but it’s actually the most important thing. I calculated the linear footage of the books I own to make sure everything would fit!” Futureproof your space. “Analyze what you have now and anticipate how much storage you’ll need in five or ten years.” Consider handmade…

ALL THE HOME’S A STAGE

Project: Housemuseum Architect: Lyons Architect Location: Melbourne, Australia In the early 1990s, Corbett and Yueji Lyon started collecting works by a select group of Australian contemporary artists. Faced with a burgeoning accumulation, they conceived the Housemuseum to both showcase and live with their art. Corbett, one of Melbourne’s preeminent architects, designed the building, perhaps the world’s first purpose-built mixed residential-gallery space of its type. The not-quite-private home’s exterior is quite forbidding—hard and angular, its dark gray zinc-metal surface is punctuated with long horizontal slit windows. The building asserts a guarded relationship with the street, sitting like a parapet of faux industrialism among the generous Victorian and Edwardian stylings of the surrounding leafy, well-heeled neighborhood. —CORBETT LYON The interior, however, has none of the facade’s austerity. It’s warm and inviting, with…

Striking a Cord

Though most of her work today deals with photography, London artist Maisie Broadhead struck gold with her cable drawings in 2009 while still a student at the Royal College of Art. “I was inspired by things around the house that are usually overlooked,” she says of the utilitarian-cum-baroque “drawing” she made over her own fireplace with the cord of a common task lamp. First she replaced the old cable of a lamp taken from her RCA workbech with 40 feet of electrical cord (and added a new plug) purchased at the local hardware shop. Then she painstakingly affixed it above the fireplace using cable clips and a reusable wall adhesive. The 31-year-old Broadhead, who devised the project while taking a jewelry class, claims that she “came at things from more…

LETTERS

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…

Mid-Century Remastered

—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…

Graphic Carpet Ride

Like typography savants, textile cognoscenti occupy a healthy chunk of the modernist population—as they should, since woven accessories are essential for warming up a stark, streamlined interior. These five selections, from dhurrie to hand-knotted, make a case for vibrant colors and patterns underfoot. A. Tresse by Samuel Accoceberry for Chevalier Édition $7,534 French industrial designer Accoceberry’s braid-like rugs for Chevalier are hand-knotted in Nepal from wool or a wool-silk blend. chevalier-edition.com B. Jambo by Madeline Weinrib $375 and up Weinrib’s reversible flatweave carpets, like this one inspired by African prints, are hand-woven in India from natural cotton. madelineweinrib.com C. Alexandra by Sandra Figuerola for Gan $1,300 and up Figuerola’s design emulates a type of vernacular Moroccan textile that combines three techniques: embroidery, weaving, and knotting. gan-rugs.com D. Kalahari by Missoni…

Georgia Peach

Hill’s signature moves feature a heavy rotation of glass walls, open spaces, concrete floors, and the blue-chip minimalist art she helped introduce to the area back in the 1970s as an early champion of Sol LeWitt and Daniel Buren. For her latest project, the venerated designer ventured out of Texas in the company of a family of four, whose contemporary Houston home she outfitted four years ago. The owners, who relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, for work, wanted to re-create the feeling of their previous house with the furniture Hill had already selected and her unerring taste, which aligns so closely to their own that, say the homeowners, they “never” disagree. After striking out on a search for an outwardly modern home in the genteel capital city, they changed tack and…

Top Brass

@ Extended slideshow at dwell.com/magazine —Puja Vohra Stepping into the cool kitchen recess of an upper-floor apartment in a grand brick building along one of Brooklyn’s leafy avenues, one can be forgiven for not immediately identifying this home as a project driven by application of color. Walls are mostly painted gray, floors stained ebony. A slab of black walnut from North Carolina, beautifully grain-matched, folds over the top and side of the kitchen island. Ceilings are white, the linen curtains natural, and lighting fixtures, the designers’ own, are made from black steel-pipe rods. There is gray stone in the shower surrounds of both bathrooms. Outside, through tall windows, there may be a blue sky over Brooklyn or a shot of color off a Manhattan tower in the distance—the view from…

5 min

Finnish Lines

Nestled in a basement in Helsinki lies a new shop, Artek 2nd Cycle. With worn corners, chipped paint, and overflowing piles of Alvar Aalto stools greeting the visitor at the entrance, Artek 2nd Cycle is a bit rougher than its polished counterpart, Artek. The 2,400-squarefoot concept store, which opened its doors in October 2011, specializes in mid-century vintage wares, much of it harvested from estate sales around Finland. The store is located just around the corner from the Artek flagship showroom on Eteläesplanadi 18. Many of the items at Artek 2nd Cycle originate from such designers as Ilmari Tapiovaara, Arne Jacobsen, and Charles and Ray Eames, with special attention to selections by Alvar Aalto, who founded Artek in 1935 along with Aino Aalto, Maire Gullichsen, and Nils-Gustav Hahl. The shop…

4 min

CONTRIBUTORS

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…

John Lautner’s Desert Rose

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…

2 min

Spanish Idyll

@ Extended slideshow at dwell.com/magazine For Nienke and me, living and working in Valencia are almost the same thing. We are always in one or the other apartment. I am always sketching. I produce 2 percent of all my ideas. Many mornings I work from home and then scan my sketches in the studio and send them to my offices in Barcelona or Italy. Or, I sketch something and email it from the beach, the bar, or the airport. Our home, studio, and the city are totally related. I can work on a square meter of desk space anywhere if I need to, but our studio in the center of Valencia is so nice and full of light, with very high ceilings. Although it is older than our other apartment…

5 min

Collector’s Choice

Having an eye for a bargain is useful when you’re a student, and it was while studying graphic design in Falmouth, England, during the late 1990s that Kathryn Tyler began hunting for affordable mid-century design. Most of her friends’ apartments were filled with throwaway furnishings, but Tyler found that by scouring local thrift shops she could unearth classic Scandinavian pieces that were not only made to last but priced cheaply. “It’s far more satisfying to give new life to an old object than to just pick something from a catalog,” says Tyler, who founded her interior design company, Linea Studio, in 2003. “To my eye, the design of that time has a much better balance—I just love its simplicity.” Although she began collecting out of necessity, Tyler admits that “I…

4 min

THIS WAY, GENTLEMEN

A killer bachelor pad in Hollywood, the manliest chair of the 20th century, and expert advice from a king of interiors: This is our guide to the best in masculine design. Men, you now have no excuse for living with chintz. Combining the best traits of a bench and a butler, Hans Wegner’s 1953 Valet chair is the one piece of mid-century-modern furniture that the fastidiously turned-out chap overlooks at his peril. Marrying formal elegance—these handsome curves have been handcrafted in PP Møbler’s Danish workshop since it took over production in 1982—with a surprising functionalism, the Valet chair all but does away with the need for Jeeves. Simply raise the seat to hang your trousers; store your cufflinks, ties, and the like in the small niche the raised seat reveals;…

7 min