A fashion-savvy home decorating magazine for the new generation of design professionals and consumers who know exactly what they want, ELLE DECOR covers fashionable and inspirational products that bring couture chic to every room of your home.
This issue, ELLE DECOR’s annual love letter to living and decorating with art, is also a celebration of architecture and interiors that are masterworks unto themselves. Take our cover story, a 1970s residence in Venice, California, by legendary architect Frank Gehry, today stewarded by German-born creative director Florian Marquardt. Gehry’s early projects have a rugged beauty—corrugated-metal on the exterior and exposed wood framing inside give them a charmingly rough-hewn quality. But as Janelle Zara’s article (page 82) makes clear, this house is also immensely livable and comfortably accommodates contemporary furniture and a cache of beautiful abstract works. Elsewhere in these pages we feature on-the-rise artists, game-changing curatorial talent, must-see exhibitions, and our favorite new shoppable objects for the home. I’m especially excited for readers to dive into this month’s Point…
1. HOTEL SANDERS I treated myself to a vacation at this Copenhagen hotel a few years ago. It’s more eclectic than a lot of Danish design. hotelsanders.com 2. PAPER-WEIGHT My collection for Menu taps into my affinity for objects with heft, whether actual weight or a presence of form and spirit. menuspace.com 3. ARRANGING THINGS I found myself through styling, and my book challenges readers to look at their things differently. rizzoliusa.com 4. COCKTAIL NAPKINS I can’t cook, but I can make a drink. And I like to pair glassware with fun cocktail napkins. (I use mine as coasters.) rwguild.com 5. TERRA-COTTA DISHES Whether serveware or a nut bowl, I always try to pick up something unique to give as a host gift. ilbuco.com 6. THORVALDSENS MUSEUM, COPENHAGEN The scale…
One can’t get away from the phrase collectible design these days. These two deceptively simple words joined forces nearly 20 years ago and have since gained steam, spawning a contemporary design market with an increasing number of galleries offering pieces touted as collectible—and the rise of a collector class wanting to be affiliated with this much-hyped movement. Historically, collectible implied scarcity or provenance, and with vintage or antique pieces, scarcity was often a given, even if said works were originally mass-produced. But when it comes to contemporary furniture and accessories by living designers, it’s become a loaded word, implying that these pieces are worthy investments that will increase in value. But often the appreciation doesn’t occur for decades, if at all, and the secondary market for contemporary design is virtually…
VISIT ROME Since 1803, the Villa Medici, a Renaissance palace, has been home to the French Academy in Rome. Now Fendi artistic director Kim Jones and the brand’s architecture department have teamed up to transform six of the villa’s historic salons. Newly restored and open to the public, the rooms feature fresh palettes, Fendi Casa furniture, and pieces by designers such as Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Toan Nguyen. villamedici.it SEE NEW YORK CITY Boasting the largest collection of Spanish and Portuguese art outside the Iberian Peninsula, the Hispanic Society Museum & Library reopens its main building and upper terrace in Washington Heights this month after a six-year renovation by Selldorf Architects and Beyer Blinder Belle. The restoration includes a refresh of the Spanish Renaissance–style Main Court, with…
IF RAFAEL DE CÁRDENAS IS NOT QUITE a household name, it may be because four walls can’t contain the architect and designer’s prodigious talent. His is a name often dropped at cocktail parties—shorthand for design with a global perspective and studied sensuality. Since founding his eponymous firm in 2006 in Manhattan’s Chinatown, de Cárdenas has worked his magic on everything from yachts to villas, retail boutiques, and city apartments. This spring, de Cárdenas launches his first furniture collection with a capsule line for Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams. With influences as disparate as 1940s French Art Deco and Demi Moore’s apartment in the 1985 film St. Elmo’s Fire, the collection lends itself to the idiosyncrasies of city life while appealing to this all-American, North Carolina–based brand’s loyal customer base. De…
EARLY AMERICAN STREETWEAR, PLAYTIME DESIGN, EXPERIMENTAL NATIVE American craft—all are disparate subjects that Alexandra Cunningham Cameron has contextualized and made fresh over the course of the past 15-odd years. In her current role as contemporary design curator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York, she spends her days interpreting the museum’s existing collection and expanding the canon of design through new acquisitions. Her path to the Cooper Hewitt was a nontraditional one. She came to the museum in 2018 not with a Ph.D. but from the arts publication Miami Rail, where she served as editor in chief. She had previously been the creative director of Design Miami and an independent curator of shows at contemporary art museums across the United States. During that time she threw her…
