Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2024 i Dwell

Back in 2021, recently vaccinated but not yet dining indoors, I came across a listing for a house in New Orleans. It looked like a typical shotgun from the late 19th century, a wooden box with some gingerbread filigree. But it was huge, as if someone constrained the proportions in Photoshop and dragged a typical home to four times its size. Swiping through photos, I realized that it contained a massive ballroom where a normal living room might be. It got even weirder. The kitchen had a curved archway. And was that an omega symbol in the wallpaper? Some kind of signet or sigil in the parlor? The house became a bit of an obsession. What was this place? But as with many a Zillow romance, I cast it aside…

Just a few years after getting married and settling down in Palm Springs, California, Keith Jordan and Aamer Mumtaz found themselves dreaming of the Bay Area. “We’re both urban people, and we wanted to live in a city again,” Aamer says. “There’s just so much going on in San Francisco.” They’d each lived there in the past, and Keith still owned an apartment in an 1880s Victorian in Lower Pacific Heights, so they decided to return in early 2020. Perched on a corner lot, the building has a gray-and-white facade with classic detailing, tall windows, and a bright red front door. Inside, the living and dining areas have original molding and ceiling medallions with icing-like swirls, which Keith and Aamer love—but the 1,196-square-foot one-bedroom lacked key features. Since Keith, a…

Eva Claessens’s decision to buy and restore a dilapidated 10th-century building in a tiny French village started with a dream. In the spring of 2020, the Belgian-born artist woke up with a vivid image of a home in Provence and took it as a fait accompli. “I bought all my houses because I saw them in a dream, as clearly as a photo,” she says matter-of-factly. “I always take dreams very seriously. They are so important.” Eva was in South America at the time, in the rural plains of Garzón in eastern Uruguay, which has been her main home for the last 15 years. Although the pandemic was still raging, she found a way to make it back to Europe. There were some twists and turns along the way, but…

Madeleine Davies Writer “Occult Following,” p. 62 During the pandemic, Madeleine Davies, previously an editor at Eater and Jezebel, swapped New York City for New Orleans to pursue a master’s degree in historic preservation at Tulane. This issue saw her taking a break from academic assignments to dig into the history and recent renovation of a 19th-century building owned by actor, writer, and producer John Cameron Mitchell. Renovations “can frequently go really bad when dealing with historic materials,” says Davies. “Even though I’m very new to the historic preservation field, it made me warm and fuzzy inside to see how hard they were working to keep the spirit of this home while also making it John’s.” Ameena Walker Writer “Great Minds,” p. 42 Born and raised in New York City,…

In 2023, Nifemi Marcus-Bello remade the moon. At Design Miami last December he showed a series of seating and sculpture made from rough, sand-cast aluminum. The pieces evoked celestial forms but also, as he notes, traced the path of materials migrating to and from Africa. The Nigerian designer’s work regularly poses questions about the complexities of global production systems and contemporary West African experiences by exploring centuries-old metalworking techniques and synthesizing abstracted forms taken from multiple sources, including a show about folktales told in lunar light. Tying multiple threads together is an important part of Marcus-Bello’s approach. After studying design in the U.K., he moved across Africa pursuing a desire to focus his practice there, first to Nairobi, then to Kigali, and finally returning to his birthplace, Lagos, where he…

Smart devices are integrated into every product or process you can think of, from ordering groceries to turning on the air-conditioning before you come back to your place. But too often aesthetics are an after-thought. Not for us. No matter what kind of residence you have, we have you covered with design-conscious devices that are as concerned for your decor as they are functional. Here are our recommendations for a few specific types of home. The Japandinavian Cabin Whether you’re in the Catskills or Joshua Tree, your style lives somewhere between Kyoto and Copenhagen. Your minimalist house or meditative cabin is just the right amount of rustic but with clean lines, well-honed details, and only the essential furniture. If your favorite color is blond oak or maybe charred wood, you’re…

In 2000, after being urged by a friend to look at homes in Snedens Landing, a neighborhood in the hamlet of Palisades, New York, that’s filled with historic residences, architect Rick Cook and his wife, Ellen, toured a four-bedroom built in the early 1970s. The exterior wasn’t especially intriguing, but then they stepped inside. “I was like, Oh my goodness, this looks like what Rick designed,” says Ellen. Rick had made a similar sketch when dreaming up his ideal home, though there were a few differences in the real building. “I really liked the way the proportions were tighter in the foyer and then opened up in the living room, where you get views of the woods,” he says. The 4,000-square-foot residence had been designed by architect Charles P. Winter,…

John Cameron Mitchell has always been drawn to religious iconography, largely inspired by his late mother, who would travel the world seeking out visions of the Virgin Mary. “She said she had messages for us,” John says, looking up at his favorite Mary statue, which he found at a flea market in Bordeaux. “The messages are always very banal.” This bit of personal history makes it especially fitting that John’s 19th-century home in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans served as a church for several religious denominations since at least the 1930s. The ground floor of the looming creamsicle-colored, two-story Italianate house is dominated by a 45-foot-long ballroom, perhaps constructed in 1934 as an auditorium for a Catholic church, fittingly named St. John’s. The building has also served as a…

When I left corporate fashion in 2010, I made a trip to South India to see if there was a way to work directly with weavers where my ancestors are from, in Telangana. Their craft heritage has become devalued because people want things faster and cheaper, but the community there has done an amazing job establishing a weaving center, Pochampally Handloom Park, which operates like a co-op and is supported in part by government funding. After that first visit, we started working together on creating throws and other textiles from my designs, which was how I started my rug and soft-goods company, Tantuvi. On one of my trips to visit the center, its director, Damoder Seetha, presented me with this mini charka, or spinning wheel, as a token of appreciation.…