Dwell的March/April 2024目录

Your results may vary. Property in Portland, Oregon, doesn’t cost the same as in Portland, Maine. Good plumbing contractors charge different rates in Sacramento and Santa Fe. And whenever we ask anyone anywhere for the grand total of what their home project cost, the math is hard to pin down. Do you count the garden they finally finished three years after the renovation? Or put a price on the afternoons they and their friends spent DIYing some final touches? The numbers are slippery, but in our weekly online Budget Breakdown column and here in our annual issue about what good design really costs, we gather as much info as residents are ready to share in order to tell stories about where people choose to save and to splurge. We include…

What if you could build a big house and fill it with your friends, children, grandparents, babysitters, and anyone else who makes your life rich and full and you all owned it together? For many people, it sounds like a dream; for a developer or a bank, it sounds like a nightmare—or at least a major financial risk. But architects at French 2D, a Boston firm helmed by sisters Anda and Jenny French, have made it possible. Their new Bay State Cohousing community just north of Boston in Malden, Massachusetts, combines 30 apartments in a three-story building with shared outdoor space and exterior walkways around a semienclosed courtyard. It has an attached “common house” with a shared kitchen, living and dining room, and spaces for art and music. Flourishes are…

The little house with the funny angles, where the Chandlers live with their two kids and a dog, was once a garage, built in the 1950s in St. Helena, California, in what was once a walnut orchard. In a way, the space in and around their home, a 500-square-foot, rusty-metal accessory dwelling unit (ADU), is an evolving monument to was-onces and used-to-bes. The fountain used to be planter boxes. The rain screen was once a bunch of stakes in a friend’s vineyard. And the rollers that slide open a storage space in the kitchen? The Chandlers scored those at an estate sale—they were skateboard wheels. Ryan and Maddie Chandler are the two halves of Chandler Workshop Architects, a firm with a handful of Northern California projects to its name. In…

The Modern Republic, a vintage shop started by Kenya Abdul-Hadi (near right) and Steve Brown, offers some of the most eclectic furniture and home wares in Philadelphia—but New York played a key role in its success. Their story began 15 years ago in Philly, when collaborating on a fashion show at the mall where Abdul-Hadi’s first store, focused on street wear, was located. After closing that space in 2008 and starting a new, vintage-focused project in 2018, they struggled to make sales. “The people in this area weren’t as savvy as some of the items that we were collecting,” explains Abdul-Hadi. So they took their shop to a marketplace where there was more demand, commuting every weekend to New York, where they maintained a booth at the Brooklyn Flea. That…

Mason Trinca Photographer “Invitation to Enter,” p. 54 After college, Mason Trinca worked as a photo-journalist for various newspapers around the country. In the decade since, he’s added many commercial and editorial clients to his portfolio, yet has maintained an approach rooted in documentary. For this issue, Trinca photographed a men’s shelter in Bellevue, Washington, which required depicting the architecture without any of its primary residents in the frame, in order to protect their privacy. A challenge, when trying to bring architecture to life. “How do we respect the community but at the same time tell this story?” asks Trinca. “Showcasing the workers and the volunteers involved helped demonstrate the humanity of the space.” Anjulie Rao Writer “French 2D,” p. 38 Chicago journalist and critic Anjulie Rao covers a wide…

Alex “Fitz” Fitzgerald volunteers in the kitchen of the PorchLight Eastgate shelter in Bellevue, Washington. One day last summer when he was cooking, shortly after the facility opened, a deer wandered up to the back patio, where everyone could see it through the cafeteria’s floor-to-ceiling glass windows. “It lifted everybody up,” says Fitz, who was formerly unhoused. “People started breaking out their cell phones, taking live feeds, ya know? Being close to nature has a psychological effect. It makes them think about their wellness.” A direct connection to nature is exactly what Block Architects had in mind when designing the 100-bed shelter to replace the previous facility used by PorchLight (formerly Congregations for the Homeless) elsewhere in Bellevue. “These are men who have been perpetually homeless,” says the firm’s Jennifer…

“Don’t even bother,” the upholsterer told me. I was on the phone, asking for a theoretical quote to reupholster a five-year-old or so midrange sofa, which cost more than $1,000 when new. That task, the upholsterer told me, would run me several times more than the couch was originally worth, and, owing to its construction, it was now worth nowhere near its sale price. The upholsterer proceeded to lecture me, in a helpful, passionate, and sometimes kindly manner, about how sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage, constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue, simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples. Until recently, people had no reason to suspect that a $1,200 sofa…

I don’t know how I ended up collecting so many scissors, but I know where it started. I remember going to places like the dentist and the car mechanic as a kid and being impressed with the ones they used. Later, going to workshops to develop my practice as a furniture designer, I saw a lot of craftspeople using the kind of scissors seamstresses use. When I lived in London ten years ago, I started looking for a pair like that to start a collection, and my wife bought one for me as a present. Now I have around eighty scissors. I got some of them online, others from secondhand markets, and a few from workshops I’ve attended. Artisans like scissors for their function, but I like them for how…

Splashing Out When you’re dreaming of ways to really level up your space, you often ask questions with an obvious answer: Do I need a wine fridge? Shouldn’t my shower have half a dozen sprayers? That answer of course is usually, for logistical reasons, no. But it’s also sometimes worth considering a compromise. Maybe sticking with your dorm room French press is fine, but you really need that pot filler. Or you’re content to wash your old dishes in a new sink worth writing home about. Here are some splurges that don’t necessarily make sense, but maybe sometimes they do. Day to Evening Today’s kitchens are more than a place to make meals. They’re where we start our mornings and where we can return throughout the day for tiny top-ups…

When Masha Tsimring and Nicholas Hussong set out to renovate the kitchen in their Queens, New York, apartment, they encouraged architects Lane Rick and Can Vu Bui of the firm Office of Things to make it zanier. “I was really interested in it not being an HGTV-like home renovation,” Nicholas says. But they were also aware of limitations. Rick says the team was guided by the question “How do you get the most you can from as little work as possible?” Masha and Nicholas, who are theater-industry designers, wanted to change many things in their 900-square-foot place. But Rick and Vu Bui recommended concentrating their efforts in order to stretch the budget. Uniting the generic galley kitchen (think white cabinets and faux-granite counters) and adjacent room (which the previous residents used…

At first glance, Emilie Taylor and Seth Welty’s New Orleans residence appears to clash with the city’s storied aesthetic. After outgrowing their Seventh Ward home, the Weltys found an overlooked property near the Mississippi River levee in the city’s Black Pearl neighborhood. “When we saw the house on the lot, it was pretty clear that it was beyond fixing,” says Seth. But the plot was unusually large and also near the river and Tulane University, where Emilie serves as the director of the architecture program. They tore down the existing house and designed a new 2,800-square-foot home composed of two horizontal boxes stacked on the front of the lot. The larger one, capped by an angled roof, is clad in workaday, metal siding. It sits on top of the smaller…

While 630 square feet may seem compact to some, for Mai Tran and her husband, Le Pham, the accessory dwelling unit (ADU) they designed for themselves was a palatial upgrade. In 2015, after an arduous Bay Area house hunt, Mai and Le purchased a single-family home for $695,000 in Albany, California. They moved into the 300-square-foot basement level, while renting out the rest of the house, with the intent to save up to build a tiny home in the rear yard. “That front house was a test for us to live minimally,” Mai says of the couple’s three-year stint in the main home’s pintsize basement, an exercise that brought them to one shared realization. “We love space, like empty space, to contemplate, instead of an abundance of objects to look…