KAZUYO SEJIMA is a Japanese architect. She is known for designs with clean modernist elements such as slick, clean, and shiny surfaces made of glass, marble, and metals. She also uses squares and cubes, which can be found in her designs in various degrees. Large windows allow natural light to enter a space and create a fluid transition between interior and exterior. It's this connection of two spaces from which she draws her inspiration.
Read More“Super/Natural” — an immersive, dome-shape work of art in stained glass by Judith Schaechter — is really best experienced from the inside. Step through its small portal, and in the right light you will be surrounded by the polychromatic glow of birds, stars, insects and fantastical plants and roots. Earlier this year, I was able to experience it myself in Schaechter’s home studio and felt a curious combination of serenity and awe.
Read MoreNisreen Abu Dail and Nermeen Abu Dail wanted to make something special for their young niece, Shams (“sun” in Arabic). As the founders of the 16-year-old design studio Naqsh Collective in Amman, Jordan, the sisters turned a retrospective eye to their own Palestinian heritage and translated the bold patterns of traditional embroidery into a marble bridal chest. Nisreen, an architect in Amman, said the chest was inspired by a Palestinian wedding custom in which women assemble trousseaus from an early age. On the wedding day, “There is a tradition that the bride will sit on top of a chest that is filled with her precious wares,” she said.
Read MoreChintz, khaki, calico, gingham and yes, pajamas: India’s role in the global textile trade has been so profound that its lexicon has shaped the way we describe fabrics, patterns and clothing. Similarly, Indian design motifs have remained durable worldwide symbols: If it’s eternally chic paisley you want, look no further than a silk scarf from Yves Saint Laurent. One word not typically associated with Indian aesthetics, however, is “modernism.” The world’s appetite for color and exuberant detail has kept the country’s tiger, peacock and teardrop motifs in circulation.
Read MorePalm Springs is a multicolored marvel in the desert, and visiting—especially during Palm Springs Modernism Week—can feel like stepping out of a time machine and into a Doris Day movie. Perched at the edge of California’s Coachella Valley, a dry, rocky landscape gives the surroundings of this city of about 45,000 people a muted color palette, but the vivid hues of midcentury-modern architecture (think canary yellow front doors, crisp white breeze blocks, and the occasional pink flamingo) give it the feel of a Slim Aarons photograph come to life.
Read MoreIn “Domestic Bliss,” a tenderly realized portrait of American life in the 1990s at Alexander Berggruen gallery in New York, the artist Stephanie Shih draws us into a fraught family narrative. The ceramic objects on view play various roles in the interior drama: Cigarette butts and a crushed beer can signal temptations acquiesced to; the complete “Buns of Steel” workout series on VHS and Suzanne Somers’s ThighMaster offer proof of an investment in personal improvement. Viagra tablets point to lust, perhaps hope. Frozen dinners — one for each member of the titular “Nuclear Family” — sit atop a white Panasonic microwave oven, suggesting an uneasy coexistence.
Read MoreGaze into an antique mirror—you know you want to—and imagine what the interior design trends for 2025 might be. What do you see? If you’ve followed AD PRO’s reporting on color trends, or checked in on the wellness amenities, AD100-approved retro designs, or in-demand layouts covered in AD PRO’s member-exclusive 2025 Interior Design Forecast, you probably have some idea. (Hint: Tactile and natural materials like terra-cotta and rattan aren’t going anywhere.),
Read MoreAt first glance, the shimmery green and deep orange surfaces of Anina Major’s sculptural works look as though they would clink audibly if you dared tap them with something metal.
“Beneath the Docks” takes the form of a basket with a handle, covered with an algae-colored glaze. The angled posture of “Hermit Armor” captures the stance of a cautious crab on the go. Their surfaces also bear the unmistakable pattern of woven fiber, material that’s soft and yielding, that twists and stretches, then inevitably frays and falls apart.
Read MoreFinnish American architect Eliel Saarinen once advised, “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” It’s an approach that gives us perspective on scale, proportion, context and the importance of fine details, even as one considers the big picture.
Read MoreSand is hard to resist. Adults associate its pliant, fluffy texture with the white beaches of a tropical vacation. Kids immediately jump in to play with sand wherever they find it. The sandbox, both in its physical form and as a metaphorical space for working through ideas, unites people of all ages in experimental experience. Like water and air, sand is at once transient and eternal.
Read MoreThere are certain decorating tropes—wall-to-wall carpet, mirror walls, conversation pits, chintz fabric—that remain consistent in their ability to elicit strong feelings but tend to wax and wane in genuine popularity. They follow larger trends, and their fortunes rise and fall at the mercy of the marketplace. What seems charming and idiosyncratic one moment (cottagecore, anyone?) seems dated and overly fussy the next. One trend that illustrates this perfectly is the curiously retro practice of skirting furniture, which has been having a moment for a few years now and accumulating on mood boards and showroom floors.
Read MoreCeilings can, and should, dazzle. A stellar example can signal thoughtfulness about the design of a whole space, and function as a kind of decorating Easter egg: Look up, and you might be rewarded with gestures of wit, virtuosic craft, optical tricks, or sumptuous color. So what ceiling trends are raising the roof right now? We spoke with inventive designers with distinctly different aesthetic points of view to find out what inspires them when it comes to designing a room’s fifth wall.
Read MoreWhen architect Elizabeth Baird first visited her client’s site in Central East Austin’s Rosewood neighborhood, she was underwhelmed by the existing structure, but immediately knew the scale of the property made it a gem hiding in plain sight. “The original building was brick, from the 1960s, and the lot was overgrown, nothing special, really,” she says. “But when I stepped onto it with the real estate agent, we were both amazed by the sheer size of the lot, which in this neighborhood is kind of unheard of.”
Read MoreIn the mid 1930s, legendary Vogue editor in chief Diana Vreeland began writing a column for Harper’s Bazaar called Why Don’t You? in which she would encourage readers to try something new, almost as an absurdly glamorous dare. Among her suggestions was the idea that readers might decorate their homes entirely in green, with a verdant mix of houseplants and glazed porcelain. But Vreeland’s personal favorite color was red, specifically “the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.”
Read MoreKitchen technology is evolving apace, with AI and other innovations pushing products ever closer to Jetsons territory. But some of the hottest kitchen trends right now have a distinctly vintage feel, from archival tile colors to retro flooring and the return of the breakfast bar. We asked some busy architects and designers what trends they’ve spotted so far in 2024.
Read MoreWhat’s the first thing you would do if you learned that a cataclysmic disaster was about to unfold? If there was no cell service and you couldn’t reach your loved ones, you might reach for a go-bag, a portable generator, or a liferaft. If you frequently think about disaster preparedness and doomsday design (it’s difficult not to these days), you might conceive of your home either as a potential emergency shelter, or as a place from which you might have to evacuate one day. Since the advent of the nuclear age, we’ve become accustomed to thinking of “the end of the world” in a terrifyingly literal way, less as one of several surmountable calamities, and more like a hard stop on civilization itself: doomsday.
Read MoreImagine a natural setting, blending an array of whites and soft grays, some deep greens that range from bluish to reddish, browns and blacks, and a slightly muted brass that glimmers in the light. Now imagine that this was the entire color palette you had to work with. This is the chromatic world of Emily Brown, the Austin-based designer who launched her practice Emily Lauren Interiors in 2018, and won our Rising Star Award last year.
Read MoreGiven the verbal prompt “Palm Beach in the late 1960s,” your mind’s eye would undoubtedly conjure something fabulous. But this imaginary Florida aerie wouldn’t conform to one specific style, like Art Deco or Hollywood Regency; it would probably be a layered mix of Spanish-style architecture with chinoiserie furniture in a Lilly Pulitzer color palette. Palm Beach style evolved from a unique mix of 20th-century architectural movements, which combined in a way that tells the story of its clientele and shifting tastes. So for production designer Jon Carlos and set decorator Ellen Reede, bringing the tropical technicolor world of the new Apple TV+ series Palm Royale to life was a challenge full of historical rabbit holes and creative complexity.
Read MoreWhen did athletic shoes turn into collectibles? True sneakerheads have been scouting rare treasures for decades, but in July 2019, when Sotheby’s sold a pair of 1972 Nikes for $437,500 at its first dedicated sneaker auction, the shoes became an asset class to reckon with.
Read MoreIt’s rare to meet someone who’s totally indifferent to Martha Stewart. She has her superfans, detractors, defenders, apologists and critics. For some of us, she’s a figure best known for a moment of downfall: five months spent at a minimum-security prison in 2004 and 2005 after being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction and lying to federal investigators about a stock sale. For people in their 20s, she probably seems like an eccentric, highly entertaining serial entrepreneur.
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