A great hotel should welcome its guests with thoughtful amenities and a timeless sense of style, but when you’re the Waldorf Astoria, New York's Art Deco Grand Dame, there’s no use in disguising a majestic history. Nowhere else in Manhattan can you meet a friend 'by the clock' and find yourself at the foot of a spectacular timepiece commissioned by Queen Victoria for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, or casually admire Cole Porter’s Steinway piano on your way to the bar.
Read MoreMother-daughter team Debbie and Sarah Dykstra set themselves a challenge most people wouldn’t take on: building a home using the plans from a 1959 design by Frank Lloyd Wright. Starting September 3, you can watch the whole process on The Last Wright: Building the Final Home Design of America’s Greatest Architect, which premieres on the Magnolia Network and will stream on HBO Max the following day. Executive-produced by Chip and Joanna Gaines, this four-part series follows the complex construction of RiverRock House, which is based on the last architectural plans—a Usonian house known as Project #5909—that Wright drafted before his death in 1959.
Read MoreA few years ago, my husband and I began looking for a china cabinet. We needed something with big glass doors that would protect its contents and harmonize with our existing furniture, that wasn’t a 1930s reproduction of a piece of Rococo case furniture, wasn’t something we would have to assemble ourselves, and wouldn’t cost as much as a new car. We’d been meaning to do this for years, and it was only when it became clear that our ceramics collection was on a high-stakes collision course with our cats that we got really serious about it.
Read MoreFor much of his six-decade career, the artist Susumu Shingu has made sculptures that interact with nature. When his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, “Susumu Shingu: Elated!,” opens at the Japan Society on June 20, visitors will encounter “Silent Water” (2024), which comprises two rotating aluminum-and-stainless steel polygonal hemispheres powered by water collected from a garden pool in the museum’s foyer — a nod to Shingu’s early water-powered creations for Expo ’70, the first world’s fair to be held in Osaka.
Read MoreThere are numerous human markers to consider in the context of a domestic setting: gender, age, culture, geography, and style among them. Think through each one, and you might envision spaces personalized with various mementos, or a particular color palette, depending on the demographics of its primary inhabitant. But if asked to sketch a typical living room with limited instructions, many of us would start with a rectilinear sofa and some chairs, then add a coffee table, a television set, and perhaps a pair of lamps on a set of end tables. Art over the sofa, small decorative objects, and books might complete the scene.
Read MoreIf you recognize the great domed silhouette of Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, England, it might be because you remember either the 1981 television production or the 2008 film version of Brideshead Revisited, based on Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel of class, aristocratic English Catholics, and World War II. In both adaptations, Castle Howard stood in for the stately house at the center of the drama. But the Baroque palace’s own story is even more captivating than any fictional account, as Remy Renzullo, the young American interior designer currently working on the still-private residence’s update, can attest.
Read MoreKAZUYO 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.”
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