Table of contents for November 2013 in Dwell

Living in diminutive quarters is an experience that never leaves you. The inherent challenges never cease: the problems of storage and clutter, the battle between acquisition and display, and the constant renegotiation of space and belongings. The upside is that while the memories of the skirmishes reverberate, so too do the victories—for if an area is truly tiny, any subsequent home you inhabit will feel palatial in comparison, and you’ll be able to incorporate the same solutions again and again. While small, much like affordable or green, is a tricky adjective—one person’s cottage is another’s sprawling estate—clever design responses make way for thoughtful living, no matter the size of the home’s footprint. Problems of perception and spatial inequity are not new to Dwell. In years past we have featured “Small…

Ben Anders When he’s not spending his spare time restoring his London home or dragging his children to design shops and exhibitions, photographer Ben Anders is happiest traveling and adding to a vast portfolio of personal work that includes gauchos in Argentina, the rugged mountains of Iceland, and lush Bavarian landscapes. He shot “High & Tight” (p. 120). “Getting the yellow Fiat involved was great fun and perfectly complemented the owners’ sense of humor.” Dominic Bradbury Journalist and writer Dominic Bradbury lives in a village in Norfolk, England, with his wife, Faith, and their three children. He has authored a dozen books on architecture and design, including his most recent, The Iconic Interior (Abrams, 2012). The story of Paul Hinkin and Chrissy Pearce’s Deckhouse (“High & Tight,” p. 120) fed…

Project: Crown Heights Apartment Architect: Studio Modh Architecture, studiomodh.com Location: Brooklyn, New York Like many apartments in early 20thcentury row houses, architect Philip Ryan’s Brooklyn abode was the epitome of spatial inefficiency. “You were constantly running into doors,” he says. An early renovation goal of Ryan’s was to reconfigure the 580-square-foot apartment’s geometry: “I wanted two linear rooms: one zone for cooking and eating and another for living and sleeping.” He removed interior walls and crafted a hallway spanning the length of the residence to increase the flow of light and air throughout. “Even when you’re in these relatively tight areas, the eye doesn’t focus on the smaller moments—you’re getting borrowed views from the other rooms, making the space feel more generous,” he says.…

Rookie firm Patch Work Architecture used locally sourced Lawson cypress to clad the exterior of a 970-square-foot house in New Zealand. Vibrant painted accents contrast with the otherwise neutral structure. Steel trusses, painted in abluehue called Lochmara from Resene, are visible through the fiberglass panels on the veranda. Project: Dogbox Designers: Patch Work Architecture, patchworkarchitecture.co.nz Location: Whanganui, New Zealand In 2010, Ben Mitchell-Anyon, Sally Ogle, and Tim Gittos took out a loan, quit their day jobs, and embarked on their inaugural project together as Patch Work Architecture. The assignment was simple: Find an inexpensive plot of land and build themselves a small house. “We were all keen to build something exciting and experimental, yet modest and simple at the same time,” says Mitchell-Anyon. They purchased a hilly plot in Whan-ganui,…

Project: Family Studio Architect: PATH Architecture Location: Portland, Oregon Linear Thinking Strips of white-oak flooring line the interior of the studio, created by designer Jeff Vincent and PATH Architecture. The George Nelson Bubble Lamp Saucer pendant is from Modernica; the kitchen cabinets and appliances are by Jenn-Air. All accessories are from Canoe and Relish. modernica.net jennair.com canoeonline.net shoprelish.com Piles of homework, lacrosse sticks, bills, and other domestic detritus litter every surface of a Tudor-style house in Southeast Portland, Oregon. Three teenagers clamor for attention, and a cat and dog roam underfoot. It’s not surprising, then, that when these homeowners decided to redo their garage and backyard, they envisioned the new space as an oasis of calm where each member of the family could quietly pursue their own interests. “They wanted…

Project: Peter Fehrentz Apartment Designer: Peter Fehrentz Location: Berlin, Germany The old wood floors throughout the open-plan space are painted a dark eggplant. The vintage PP19 armchair is by Hans J. Wegner for PP Møbler. The painting above it is by Ruben Toledo, a friend of Peter Fehrentz, the resident. A trio of Tom Dixon lights hangs over the Pirkka dining table, with bench seating by Ilmari Tapiovaara for Artek. The Berber rug is from Morocco, purchased from the Paris shop Caravane. “I could see immediately what walls should stay and what should be ripped out and changed. I had a fantasy about how to transform it into a very personal place.”—PETER FEHRENTZ Until recently, Peter Fehrentz lived full-time in Hamburg, Germany. But he longed for a pied-à-terre in Berlin,…

Tasked with transforming a 93-square-foot brick boiler room, built in 1916, into a guesthouse, architect and metalworker Christi Azevedo flexed her creative muscle. “Whether it’s 100 or 1,000 square feet, it’s about going in and looking at opportunities,” she says. In this case, she saw a chance to experiment with light, volume, and materials. The architect spent a year and a half designing and fabricating nearly everything in the structure save for the original brick walls. “I treated the interior like a custom piece of furniture,” she says. She raised the roof five feet and added a full kitchen, a bathroom, closets, and a sleeping loft, accessed via a steel ship’s ladder and a glass walkway. “When you step inside, you don’t feel like you’re in a small space,” says…

GET FUNKIS Interior stylist Saša Antiæ has lived in his Stockholm, Sweden, apartment for 15 years. It was built in 1938, during the height of funkis, the colloquial term for Swedish functionalism—a movement characterized by clean lines and a lack of ornamentation. When he recently decided to update his tiny kitchen, Antiæ devised a modern scheme that honored the apartment’s heritage. “I wanted it to be really graphic but quiet and beautiful,” he says. Antiæ explains that the secret to living in a small area lies in eliminating visual clutter, not just by culling objects, but also by balancing design elements. He requested an extra-thin slab of Carrara marble for the countertop so that it would recede into the space, not overwhelm it. The room is outfitted with cabinets from…

—Jakob Clark, posted on Facebook Just received the “Designers at Home” issue of Dwell (September 2013) and thoroughly enjoyed each project. There is inventiveness and innovation throughout the buildings, interiors, and furniture in each of the featured houses. I wish that all design magazines inspired me like this issue. Chris Clarke Brisbane, Australia I picked up the September 2013 issue of Dwell when a friend told me there was a piece on Paolo Soleri in the magazine (“A Radical Proposal,” p. 30). I enjoyed the entire publication, especially the Soleri feature. I would love to see more on this visionary genius. Soleri, yes! More, please. Laurie Krcmaric South Bend, Indiana Editor’s Note: Soleri created many incredible drawings and sketches during his lifetime, more than we could ever print. We suggest…

Bernal Hill, one of San Francisco’s sunniest and least-developed spots, is a bare peak rising some 450 feet out of an otherwise densely packed neighborhood of charming turn-of-the-20th-century homes and shops. But whereas many manmade gardens are watered to be verdant year-round, Bernal Hill’s winter green and summer brown are a refreshing marker of the seasons. And that is exactly what designer Peter Liang desired atop his recently remodeled 2,000-square-foot home on the hill’s southern slope. “I wanted to plant a green roof for its thermal mass, but I wanted it to be as natural as possible,” Liang says. “To achieve that, what better partner could I have found than nature itself?” Now his 580-square-foot green roof is like a piece of the hill; its indigenous vegetation—seeded by birds and…

Project: Cousin Cabana Architects: Un.Box Studio, un-boxstudio.com Location: Austin, Texas In a family’s pint-size lake retreat in Austin, Texas, ipe siding and decking meet concrete floors and steel-and-glass windows. Stained cyprus was used for the ceiling and soffit. The custom barn-style sliding door conceals the family’s collection of giant inner tubes and other boating equipment. Purchased in the 1970s, Sandy and Dudley Youman’s narrow Lake Austin waterfront encompasses five heavily wooded acres with 120 feet of lake frontage. For years the only buildings on the property were a dilapidated shack and a boat dock, until Sandy Youman decided she wanted a modest family-style “cabana that is married to the land.” She hired Austin architect Jared Haas of Un.Box Studio, and the result is a simple mini-house that crams multiple functions…

In 1991, after Isabel Germain separated from her husband and inherited some money from her mother, she decided to build a one-of-a-kind refuge on a remote beach outside Tongoy, Chile. Luckily, her $20,000 budget went far with her architect of choice: her son, Mathias Klotz. Klotz—who sketched the layout on an airplane napkin and says that, to date, “it’s the only project I have completed without making changes”—designed the beach house as a low-cost dwelling that requires little maintenance. To this day, the Klotz family still spends the summer and occasional long weekends in their getaway. As for its architectural legacy, Klotz says of his earliest completed project, “It represents what I consider to be the essential aspects of a building.”…

Architect Irene Sævik’s summer retreat lies an hour’s drive from bustling Oslo. In true Scandinavian form, principles of simplicity and respect for nature govern the house’s design. Originally built in the 1960s by the Norwegian artist Irma Salo Jæger, the 430-square-foot cabin sat unoccupied and in partial disrepair for years before Sævik purchased it and decided to expand. “It had an appealing expression that inspired me to develop it further—to transform the site and make a stronger connection between house and landscape,” Sævik says. She added an office, bedroom, sauna, and bathroom in a series of individual pavilions joined by decks, bringing the total area to just under 970 square feet. “I tried to make a place where one could stay alone, as well as a good place to be…

In the living area of actor Vincent Kartheiser’s Hollywood cabin, redesigned by Funn Roberts to maximize every last inch of space, an Eames lounge chair and ottoman mix with a couch and coffee table by Cisco Home from HD Buttercup. The table in the main room (opposite) is from West Elm. Project: Cabin Loft Designer: Funn Roberts Location: Los Angeles, California Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser has all he needs in his compact, 580-square-foot Hollywood abode. Cabin Loft Floor Plan A Living Room B Kitchen C Dining Area D Bedroom E Closet F Bathroom It’s a story as old as the movies—actor moves to L.A., hits it big, and buys himself a Hollywood manse. But iconoclastic Mad Men star Vincent Kartheiser, a Minnesota native, who purchased his own little slice of…

What’s a dedicated modernist to do once the onslaught of high chairs, diaper-changing tables, and infinite toy bins alights? Parents don’t have to give up their figurative edge, even if it means swapping that razor-sharp concrete counter for a friendlier butcher block. Read on for insight from full-time architect and full-time dad Dan Maginn, who’s learned how to share space with even the tiniest modernist Destroyer Unit (and enjoy it!). My son Lawson is three feet tall, with chubby cheeks and a shock of mouse-colored hair—virtually indistinguishable from any other microhumanoid of the same age. My three-year-old is also an alien: a standard-issue Mark III Destroyer Unit from the Planet Entropia, which circles his apricot jam–colored sun many light years from here. Over time, my wife and I have learned…

I brought my two sons with me to Dwell on Design, and it was great to watch their eyes light up at the prefab houses they could tour! To see new ideas and creativity spark in their minds is invaluable. When we got home, they started creating new structures on Minecraft (a computer game) related to things that inspired them at Dwell on Design. Jeffrey Yip Every year at Dwell on Design I get to see so many new products and items. This is a great showcase. Nice to meet designers and industry people and hear talks at the show. June Takahashi Editor’s Note: Miss this year’s Dwell on Design? Flip to p. 72 for our wrap-up of the show. I have always thought that the Edgeland House (“Living Edge,”…

You live in a small house, and you love it! Before you moved in, you got rid of your old hockey pads, pruned your T-shirt collection from 50 to 15, and felt totally liberated dumping those college textbooks. But you still need some furniture. And like it or not, furniture takes up space. Which, let’s face it, you’re a little shy on. Thankfully, we’ve rounded up this class of top-drawer furnishings to outfit a diminutive space. Need your chair to convert to a bench and back again? Gotta be able to tuck that side table into a closet when more than two guests show up? Looking to cut some of the bulk out of your living room without, you know, sitting on the floor? Take notes and learn to live…

In Texas, where bigger is supposedly better, there’s a budding demand for very small homes. Fort Worth might be one of the last places you’d expect to find a waiting list for tiny housing, but if the city’s new White Buff alo micro-unit complex is any indication, the yen to live small is a nationwide trend. White Buff alo’s 63 units range from 540 to 995 square feet—grand by micro-home standards, but miniscule for Texas—and were fully leased in half the time developer Lang Partners predicted. The Big Apple is currently undertaking the adAPT NYC micro-housing project, a pilot program on public land in the Kips Bay neighborhood. Architects and partners Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang of nArchitects won the commission to design the 55-unit building in January 2013. And…

With a record attendance of nearly 31,000, Dwell on Design welcomed visitors from 34 countries and six continents from June 21 to 23 to the annual show at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Ahead of and concurrent with the show, Dwell Design Week (which ran June 14–23) included the Dwell Los Angeles Home Tours, two Meet the Architects Nights—in which we hosted the architects of the residences selected for the home tours—and showroom events with Dwell editors at Lladró, Marimekko, and Resource Furniture. This year, for the first time ever, we announced Dwell Labs, in which select designers from the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) reimagined eight units in the modern L.A. buildings Met Lofts and 1600 Vine, on display before, during, and after Dwell on Design. On the…

In Tokyo, Japan, where the houses are crammed cheek by jowl, two old friends from architecture school have created a 793-square-foot home out of canted concrete boxes. Project: Bent House Architect: Koji Tsutsui & Associates Location: Tokyo, Japan Tamotsu Nakada needn’t do much to reach his neighbors: He can simply extend his arm and touch two of their houses, each of which is a mere foot from his property line, from his small terrace. “Having more light and air was important to me,” says Nakada. But when Tokyo houses are packed in like commuters during rush hour, you need a smarter brand of density. Enter Nakada’s friend Koji Tsutsui, an architect based in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Tokyo. Designing around the property’s obstacles, Tsutsui devised a bent…

Project: The Deckhouse Architect: Black Architecture Location: Emsworth, England A DESIGN-MINDED PAIR ENSURES THAT THEIR TINY SEASIDE GETAWAY IN HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND, IS SHIPSHAPE. For such modestly scaled homes, Deckhouses generate a huge amount of affection. A total of 50 were built in the late 1960s and early 1970s at Emsworth Yacht Harbour in Hampshire, England, and each of them is just 538 square feet. These black-and-white cabins on stilts sit in neatly arranged rows within communal parkland, forming a secret enclave by the sea. But despite their off-the-beaten-track location, Deckhouses are hard to obtain; architect Paul Hinkin and his partner, Chrissy Pearce, had to wait for years until they finally managed to buy one for themselves. “People either love them or hate them,” says Hinkin, who is the founder and…

The products, furniture, architects, designers, and builders featured in this issue. 37 In the Modern World Thierry Gauguin gaugain.net Poliform poliformusa.com Lloyd Kahn lloydkahn-ongoing.blogspot.com Peter Liang, The Blue Truck Studio bluetruckstudio.com Landscape Architecture by Andrea Cochran acochran.com 5 Elements Design 5elementsdesign.com nArchitects narchitects.com Zeta Design + Build zetadesignbuild.com Panoramic Interests panoramic.com Four Lights Tiny House Company fourlightshouses.com Boneyard Studios boneyardstudios.com Urban Density Lab urbandensitylab.org Tony Gilchriest, Builder 323-318-0847 Foundry Architects foundryarchitects.com Element Design + Build elementarchitecture.com Pax and Komplement closet systems by Ikea ikea.com Tait Moring & Associates Landscape Architects taitmoring.com Herb Schoening Interior Design 512-542-0033 Contracting by True Build LLC truebuildaustin.com Womb chair and ottoman by Eero Saarinen for Knoll dwr.com Pillow in Peacock by Maharam for Design Within Reach dwr.com Oppiacei pouffe by Skitsch skitsch.com Prince Aha stool…