Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2022 i Dwell

Love them—they make a simple activity more fun. Ian Zunt, Digital Marketing Associate Fun to look at, but they feel like a distraction from more elegant lines and focal points. Could see this for kiddo spaces for sure. Front door yes, anywhere else no. @antcity Imagine staring at these for 10 years? Pass. @jennndujour I had my dad make me wooden half circles for my kitchen, and they made the room. @1948midcentu ryranch Other direction. Smaller is better, none is best. @atelierwoodworks LOVE LOVE LOVE. But I know I’ll look back in 15 years and likely hate ’em. @cedarand stoneproject I just want to open or close a cabinet without getting my fingers pinched. @4theloveof.ivy Makes every room look like a child’s bedroom. It’s a definite no from me. @threesixtydiy…

“Our house has always been the place where people who don’t have anywhere to go know they can have a good meal, make new friends, and have a good time,” says stylist and designer Jillian Knox. She shares her San Francisco apartment with her husband, Elvis Santoyo, with whom she established housewares brand Casa Ojo, which celebrates Oaxaca craftsmanship. Their home embodies a maximalist exuberance, and many of their furnishings—like green wine glasses from Viand Vintage, napkin rings by Melina Kemph, and denim linens by Ubi Simpson of Mi Cocina—were created by people in their close-knit artist community or found at secondhand markets. “Our holiday gatherings have always had an open-door policy,” Knox says. “I even made a plate for my Uber driver once. The rule is always: Bring something…

“I like to keep things simple,” says emerging designer and artist Matt Byrd, who took the New York gallery world by storm last spring with a solo show featuring his puzzle-like carved stone lamps, stools, and vessels. “At the end of the day, I consider myself a stonemason who became a sculptor. My line of work is primitive and old. I think that transfers over into my home.” Byrd’s Raleigh, North Carolina, home hosts a slew of quirky items he found, was given as gifts, or made himself, like a woodpecker toothpick holder and ceramic wiener dog ashtray. “I love designer pieces, too.” A Milo Baughman chair is one of his prized possessions. “Gatherings at my place are usually casual,” Byrd says. “For Friendsgiving, I get to share food and…

In a city notorious for its rush hour traffic jams, Los Angeles couple Brad Breeck, a TV and film composer, and Jeana Sohn, a clothing designer, are blessed with a remarkably short commute. Their shared workplace, a two-level accessory dwelling unit (ADU) they added to their property in the Silver Lake neighborhood, isn’t more than a 30-second walk through their backyard and past a swimming pool that was built at the same time. Prior to the new construction, Brad and Jeana were working from home to be with their young son but badly needed a better setup. Jeana was working in their bedroom, which wasn’t ideal when clients would come over to try on clothes. Brad, meanwhile, was recording in the downstairs guest bedroom. “The noise was a pain in the…

Over the years, the lore surrounding this bunkeresque building on a block of more traditional homes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has grown along with the neighborhood. The textured-block structure was built in 1919 as a candy-making factory for a nearby sweets shop. Since then, its occupants have included a textilecleaning company, a contracting business, and—according to a neighbor—a Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor who lived there in the ’70s and added a greenhouse beneath a plexiglass bubble. In 2005, entrepreneurs Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston made it the East Coast headquarters of their startup incubator, Y Combinator. (Longtime neighbors allege the property was even once owned by two feuding brothers who nearly set it ablaze over a dispute.) But the building’s eccentric past wasn’t what drew Paula Chauncey to buy it in…

The idea for Columbus House No. 1, a modest, single-level home near downtown Columbus, Indiana, began when local resident Nick Slabaugh spotted a vacant lot for sale that he thought he could develop. He bought it, and—after an introduction by his friend Jonathan Nesci, a well-known designer also based there—called on Chicago architect Grant Gibson to, as the latter describes it, “introduce a new type of house” to the area. While the midwestern city is home to a slew of civic buildings by modernist masters like Eero and Eliel Saarinen, “the residential building stock is typical of small American towns, a mixture of Victorian houses and workers’ cottages,” Gibson says. “We wanted to build a house that’s tailored to how contemporary domestic life unfolds,” he continues, adding that the main…

“There’s something charming about a home that bears traces of the labor that went into its construction—especially in this case, when that construction was done by the owner himself.”DAISY ZUCKERMAN, EDITORIAL FELLOW Weathering St(ee)L House by Derek Hoeferlin Design Derek Hoeferlin, principal of his eponymous architecture practice in St. Louis, Missouri, devised this 4,300-square-foot live/work studio in the city’s Forest Park Southeast neighborhood for Joe Pentland, an artist and electrical engineer who builds kinetic sculptures. Joe knew he wanted a “simple steel box” that was “bold yet contextual” to its site, says Hoeferlin, so the architect suggested oxidized steel for the industrialesque facade, which “day by day blends more and more with its surroundings,” he says. Joe did much of the construction, following YouTube tutorials for tasks like installing windows.…

“We love hosting,” says Ksenia Kagner, co-principal of New York architecture firm Civilian Projects. “Throughout the pandemic, and with two young kids who also needed to maintain social connections, we shifted our socializing to the backyard, even in the winter.” Through various interiors and buildings, she and partner Nicko Elliott have cultivated a colorful and expressive yet restrained aesthetic that is reflected in their self-renovated Brooklyn townhouse. “We value craft, material, and tactility and believe relationships between objects tell stories,” Kagner adds. “We try to create a home and work life based on empathy.” The duo drew inspiration from memories of visits to Kagner’s family dacha in Kazakhstan before winter’s arrival. “Family vacation spaces have a beauty because of the generational layers,” Elliott says. When setting up for a party…

“This gathering is a stripped-down, Western-style feast,” says Angie West, cofounder of Chicago fabrication studio, metal foundry, and glassworks atelier West Supply. Earlier this year, West painted her 1909 colonial revival/Tudor–style home, in Oak Park’s Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District, a charcoal brown. The choice grew out of her current preoccupation with the rugged geological forms, colors, and wildlife of the American West. It also informed the recent collection of castbronze objects she and business partner Alberto Vélez developed to launch their new design brand, Refractory. “Craftsmanship in objects and artifacts is so closely bound to necessity,” West says, “and the materials that nature provides.” The objects she’s chosen to include on her table reflect the energy of the brand’s first collection. DWELL RECOMMENDS…

If you type the words “togo sofa” into Google, chances are slim that your first result will be a link to an original Michel Ducaroy design sold by Ligne Roset. Instead, you may be directed to Wayfair, which sells a look-alike “Suede Armless Beanbag Chair” for around $700, about $3,000 less than the original’s price tag; an e-tailer hawking a “Ducaroy Portside 2 Seater Sofa” for around $1,900; or even an article from a reputable news outlet with the headline “The 11 Best Togo Sofa Replicas and Alternatives.” Do the same for the iconic Emeco Navy chair, a Herman Miller Eames lounger, or dozens of other classic designs and you’ll be greeted with similar results. “Copycats are everywhere,” says John Edelman, president and CEO of furniture retailer Heller and former…

“WHEN I TALKED TO AN ENGINEER, HE SAID THIS FOUNDATION COULD HAVE SUPPORTED AN EIGHT-STORY STRUCTURE ABOVE IT.”MICHAEL GOLDIN, DESIGNER AND RESIDENT When Deborah Oropallo and Michael Goldin began plotting a move from Berkeley, California, to a more bucolic setting in the late aughts, they envisioned open land, a place for Deborah’s art studio and Michael’s design and fabrication shop, and an opportunity to grow and raise their own food. Veterans of two repurposed mixed-used city spaces—a machine shop and a brass foundry—the couple and their two kids were itching for country life. In 2010, after prices proved prohibitive on other properties in rural Northern California, Deborah and Michael got wind of a 14-acre site closer to home, in unincorporated Novato in Marin County, that had languished on the market,…

LET IT GROW Bay Area landscape designer and horticulturist John Greenlee wants us to lose the “grow-mow-blow” mentality. “Millions of pounds of chemicals are put down on American lawns every single year,” he says. But he doesn’t want us to abandon grass altogether. Greenlee champions a wider and more native palette of grasses that have evolved to thrive in specific climates. At the ranch of Nancy and Tony Lilly in the Sonoma hills, an area plagued by drought and fires, he struck a balance between beauty and resiliency with a water-wise meadowgarden. Pollinator-attracting flowers are interspersed among grasses. To prevent the landscape from drying and becoming flammable, some strategic irrigation is required during the hottest months. The strategy is tailored to the context. “We should be celebrating regionalism in our…

“For much of the pandemic, we all spent time eating at home in casual settings, perhaps even in front of the TV,” says Los Angeles up-and-comer Jialun Xiong, who designs furniture with a minimalist mien. Most of her pieces are crafted from black and white materials. “By creating a colorless dinner for two, I want to heighten the experience and have it reflect my design vocabu lary.” For Xiong, an intimate event should be a chance to slow down. “I want the mood to be sophisticated so that it shows appreciation for the people in my life.” The setting she imagined takes on a ceremonial quality. “I’ve brought in monochromatic elements, incorporated a duality of textures, contrasting details, layered shapes, and lines,” Xiong says. “I’ve paid close attention to the…

Just north of Charleston, South Carolina, is Mount Pleasant, a sprawling suburb filled with cookie-cutter residential developments and run-of-the-mill strip malls. At first glance, it’s not a place that seems to have anything to do with handcrafts and centuries-old design traditions, but behind the bland facades lies the center of the Gullah sweetgrass basketmaking community. Gullah people are descended from Africans enslaved on the southeastern United States coast, and the region’s relative geographic isolation has meant that the area has been able to preserve a distinct culture and language. Collectors often venture there in search of the baskets, which stem from a sewing culture developed on nearby plantations, with roots in West African traditions. For decades, a stretch of the town’s main drag, Highway 17, served as a sales point…

In 2017, lawyer Hanna Bui, who had been living and working in Silicon Valley for 20 years, sought a change of pace from suburbia. Her son was off to college, and she longed to live close to water. “I love to water-ski. I love the water. Water makes me happy,” Hanna says. The setting brings up some harder feelings as well, related to struggles of her childhood. In 1979, her family made a harrowing escape from Vietnam. They fled in a boat that took them—stripped by pirates of their belongings—to a coastal village in Thailand, where, for a short while, before the family found refuge in San Francisco, she had the chance to be a carefree teen, wading at the beach. To regain that feeling, she rented a houseboat in…

One evening in spring 2016, David Mostafavi was scrolling through Zillow when he came across a charming cedarshingle house in Princeton, New Jersey. He and his wife, Rachel, were living 20 miles northeast in a rental in Edison, where they had hoped to buy their first home. The location split the difference, commute-wise, between his job at a Staten Island, New York, ophthalmology practice and hers at a Princeton charter school, where she taught French. But nothing had stood out to them, David says. “In Edison, the houses are all the same size and feel. There really wasn’t anything aesthetically pleasing about living in that type of developer house.” David says the “quirky” corner house in Princeton, however, struck him as one of a kind. Built from prefab parts in…

Exclusively from For more than 20 years, Dwell has championed design that improves people’s lives. Now, we’re drawing on that expertise to make it easy to add more space to your home. The Dwell House is a 540-squarefoot, one-bedroom accessory dwelling unit (ADU) designed by Norm Architects. It’s constructed off-site and transported to your property in a seamless process developed by our partner Abodu. The Dwell House fits in most backyards and lets you have the extra room you need without the house hunt or months of construction. Call it an ADU, a backyard house, or an in-law suite (whatever name you prefer), the Dwell House is designed to accommodate all kinds of uses. “Backyard houses provide a solution to meet contemporary needs with the property we already have, whether…

Ren von Hasseln studied architecture before founding Ren Ceramics, and she drew from both experiences as she transformed her midcentury ranch house in Ojai, California. Ren led the renovation of the property and crafted ceramic details found throughout the interior. After a decade of living and renting in (now prohibitively expensive) Los Angeles, Ren von Hasseln and her husband, Kyle, set their sights on buying a home in Ojai—a small town two hours north of the city, where New Age sensibilities meet the foot of the Topatopa Mountains. When they closed on their 1956, threebedroom ranch house, the property was worse for wear, with threadbare carpeting, an overgrown yard, and an inexplicable hole in the kitchen ceiling. Ren, a ceramicist with a degree in architecture, took the lead in the…