Indice dei contenuti per June 2013 in Dwell

The above quote appeared in the Chicago-based monthly journal Inland Architect & Builder in 1883, and evidently not much has changed, at least when it comes to highlighting good design at home. Our residences are the antidotes to a frenetic world, but without furniture, these spaces would be empty shells offering nothing but basic shelter. How we adorn our spaces defines us by transmitting clear messages to the outside world: This is what I need, this is where I feel at ease, and this is the environment in which I ready myself for tomorrow’s challenges. But there is a clear difference between the thoughtful selection of furnishings and the heedless accumulation of “stuff.” Good furniture at its best is the intersection of art, craft, and industry. The “right” pieces address…

Each spring, Dwell hits the ground running to scout furniture, lighting, and accessories during the design industry’s biggest fair, Salone Internazionale del Mobile. Here are just a few of the pieces we love for 2013. A. Cloud sofa by Marcel Wanders for Moooi. B. Orient lamp by Jo Hammer-borg at Lightyears. C. Map Tapestries by Hannah Waldron for Konstfack at Spazio Rossana Orlandi. D. Stone Edge tables by Nendo for Caesarstone. E. Shibuya vases by Christophe Pillet for Kartell. F. Mangas collection by Patricia Urquiola for Gan. G. Kelly chair by Claesson Koivisto Rune for Tacchini.…

The canon of modern couches already has a pair of Eameses, but it took a small clutch of Italian furniture mavens to create the Charles. Antonio Citterio’s 1997 design for B&B Italia is now well into its second decade of popularity, with a pair of successful updates—2003’s deeper Charles Large and 2010’s polypropylene Charles Outdoor—already on the books. “I try not to copy but to perceive and assimilate aspects specific to the work of great masters,” says Citterio of the Charles’s nod to the Eameses, but he notes that the similarities between his sofa and the couple’s mid-century designs “are more in spirit than in fact.” Citterio has designed scads of sofas at this point, not only for B&B Italia but for storied brands like Vitra and Flexform as well.…

A Dropit wall hooks by Asshoff & Brogård for Normann Copenhagen, $33–$40 per pair normann-copenhagen.com • B Pieces of Time wall clock by Ding3000, $118 momastore.org C Hopper table by Janus et Cie, $11,312 A turbocharged version of the traditional picnic table, with modern materials (powder-coated aluminum, iroko wood), a bent form that facilitates easy entry and egress, and four sizes that can seat up to ten. janusetcie.com • D April tables by Alfredo Häberli for Nikari, $2,067 These smooth occasional tables—produced for Nikari’s monthly “Designs for Nature” series in 2012—are made of ash, oak, and birch. nikari.fi E Boya lamp by Outofstock for Environment Furniture, $360 environmentfurniture.com • F Olmstead Chair by Totokaelo, $4,800 God is in the details of this handmade lounge: The stretched leather is held together with bright…

A X3 watering can by Paul Loebach for Kontextür, $100 The company’s first product for use outside of the bathroom is a utilitarian beauty, a minimal vessel inspired by Eastern European motorcycles. kontextur.com • B Rio wall sconce in plated nickel by Jonathan Adler, $195 jonathanadler.com • C Levels pendant lamp in copper by Form Us With Love for One Nordic, $510 onenordic.com • D Cylinder salt-and-pepper shakers by Ladies & Gentlemen, $60 ladiesandgentlemenstudio.com E Mu cutlery by Toyo Ito for Alessi, $87.50 per five-piece place setting Luckily for your tablescape, the recent Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect also designs flatware. His new collection features slim handles shaped like hexagonal chopsticks. alessi-shop.com F Breeze tables by Monica Förster for Swedese, $1,495–$1,995 Förster’s slim accent table debuted a new look at the 2013 Stockholm…

When two actors purchased their West Village abode, it came with a 180-degree view of the Hudson River—and a frenetic series of odd angles and partitioned-off spaces. Designer Suchi Reddy renovated the interiors, keeping the bank of windows unobstructed while folding in a fleet of modern furnishings and built-ins. “My directive was to create something very comfortable, calm, textural, and modern,” explains Reddy, who used a palette of reclaimed oak, bleached wood floors, blonde millwork, and white plaster. “It’s a space where you want to linger,” she says. Project: West Village Renovation Designer: Reddymade Design, reddymadedesign.com Location: New York, New York dwell.com/nyc-renovation Spy even more rooms and furniture in this West Village abode.…

Project: Palomba Residence Designer: Ludovica+Roberto Palomba Location: Salento, Italy In the rarefied world of Milanese design, high-profile stars usually work alone. Partnerships between husband and wife are even scarcer. Ludovica Serafini and Roberto Palomba may be the exceptions that prove the rule. Since 1994, they have collaborated on an amazing number of projects: designing bathroom equipment, kitchens, furniture, and lighting for an almost endless list of companies, including Boffi, Cappellini, Salviati, Foscarini, and Zanotta, and winning several prestigious awards, including a Compasso D’Oro—Italy’s highest design prize—in the process. When the couple decided to look for a vacation home, they turned their gaze far from the hectic world of Milan, their home base, and started house hunting over 600 miles away in the southeastern part of Italy, in Salento—sometimes referred to…

Project: Aumas Apartment Designer: Jean-Christophe Aumas Location: Paris, France Even the quickest visit to Jean-Christophe Aumas’s 10th-arrondissement flat in Paris immediately divulges a pulse-quickening array of influences: Here it’s flashy interior designer David Hicks, there sunbaked California, there Gio Ponti. Whatever whimsical drama Aumas has conjured in his home, a fun house of carefully curated bric-a-brac, splashes of unexpected color, and rare vintage furniture, he’s come by it honestly. As the artistic director of the creative agency Voici-Voilà, he designs store windows and special events for the likes of Louis Vuitton, John Galliano, Lacoste, Céline, and others. For Galliano, he once filled a window with a gigantic wave of shredded paper, and a display at the French department store Printemps involved live birds and sheep. The woolly quadrupeds were apparently…

French designer and engineer Jean Prouvé self-identified as a factory worker rather than as an aesthete. The elegant lines of his chairs, tables, desks, shelving, and lighting, which he produced in mass quantities from 1929 until the early 1950s, are testaments to his innate skills in furniture design. Prouvé’s reputation as a master of everyday furnishings experienced a renewed interest in the late 1980s, when Parisian gallerist Patrick Seguin began snapping up and selling his pieces, initially produced for schools and factories. His first Prouvé purchase was a set of Standard chairs, and he kept collecting out of respect for the designer’s visionary modernism, which unites form and function. “The essence of his work consists of an almost crude structural logic that’s beautiful in its simplicity,” says Seguin. Lauding Prouvé’s…

5 TWEETS @jessicajpackard: I should be tackling my to-do list right now, but wine + my new issue of @dwell won me over. #interiorsissue @3RLife: Flipping through @dwell magazine over lunch—inspired to read the Fountainhead again. And buy a new sofa… @LeslieWalsh: Just read @dwell article about airport lounge in Gander, NFLD. Sinatra, Kennedys, and all that design. Style on the rock. @ladyrock13: Dear Sunday, I am the boss of you. For the next 20 min. can’t wait to catch up on @dwell! @ejharker: The one magazine I refuse to throw out: @dwell Thank you for the Editor’s Note about Hermann Muthesius in the March 2013 issue. I grew up in Kiel, Germany, during the 1960s, and my elementary school was named after this brilliant architect. Dwell helped me create…

HOW TO SHOP FOR A SOFA Down cushions? Hardwood frame? New York City interior designer Timothy Brown gives us a quick tutorial on what to inspect when you’re inspecting. Cushion the Blow I prefer foam-wrapped cushions with some down. The down is soft, and the foam retains the shape of the cushion. With pure down, the cushion needs to be fluffed every time you get out of your seat and it looks sloppy. Frame Game Skip plywood or particleboard and look for a hardwood frame with eight-way hand-tied springs (all the springs are tied together, more evenly distributing the weight of the sitter). Going Vintage The shape is what really matters here. The fabric, in 99 percent of cases, will be changed, and the insides will be replaced with fresh…

A Lambswool cushion in Grenadine by Wallace Sewell, $200 wallacesewell.com • B Meltdown lamps by Johan Lindstén for Cappellini, from $653 cappellini.it • C Brick Pastel dhurrie by Oyyo, from $660 These colorfast flatweave rugs—woven by craftspeople near Jodhpur, India—are made with organic cotton and colored with vegetable dye. oyyo.se • D Yorky lamp by Hlynur Atlason for Artecnica, $86. This quirky, zoomorphic silicone lamp is designed to sit, stand, or hang from the wall. artecnica.com • E Wireframe sofa by Industrial Facility for Herman Miller London duo Sam Hecht and Kim Colin riff on Herman Miller’s history of wire-frame furniture with this suspended sofa roughly half the weight of a similarly proportioned canapé—meaning it’s easy to move around a room and cheaper to ship. store.hermanmiller.com • F Hanagasumi canisters…

Photo by Céline Clanet One of the most intriguing debuts at 2012’s Salone del Mobile in Milan was that of France’s La Chance, who presented a Jekyll & Hyde–themed furniture collection in a split-screen display so that objects on each side “mirrored” each other. Pieces on the refined Jekyll side featured neutral hues, natural materials, and matte finishes, while, on the playful Hyde side, those same pieces were rendered in audacious colors and high gloss. La Chance’s Jean-Baptiste Souletie and Louise Breguet had found an unorthodox way to tell two very different stories through a single object. One year later, the floor of their Empire-style office—once a swank residential apartment in an early modernist building in Paris—is crowded with latter-day La Chance pieces: Pierre Favresse’s Magnum tabletops (Jekyll), a shiny…

Project: Dolomitenblick House Architect: Plasma Studio, plasmastudio.com Location: Sesto, Italy For a six-unit residential building in Italy’s northeast, architecture and design firm Plasma Studio took a decidedly contemporary approach to the regional vernacular. The color palette of existing houses in the area informed the choice of materials—blonde larch wood and dark gray pre-oxidized copper—and building codes mandated a pitched roof, but the structure boasts a highly geometric form (the firm’s signature move), courtesy of balconies that jut from the facade, echoing the roof’s slope. In profile, the domicile has the prototypical gable, but from all other angles it takes on the look of abstracted folding planes that express the steep site, says architect Ulla Hell of Plasma Studio.…

Photos by Justin Keena To kick off our Hello, Again partnership, the Lincoln Motor Company and Dwell recently played host to a star-studded crowd of designers, architects, and tastemakers in Palm Springs for the finale of Modernism Week. The guests convened at the one-time Max Factor family estate, the Fontenell, for cocktail hour and were then whisked away in a fleet of new Lincoln MKZ sedans to surprise dinner destinations—six breathtaking homes. After being treated to tours by the homeowners, guests dined on delicious cuisine by chef Michael Beckman of Workshop Kitchen + Bar. Rousing conversation—ranging from the week’s events to upcoming design projects—continued at the afterparty back at the Fontenell. Guests included Moby, Mad Men’s Jessica Paré, Frances Anderton, Eames Demetrios, designer Trina Turk, photographer Jonathan Skow, designer Jack…

Architect Paul Archer has made a career of adapting and extending historic English houses for dozens of clients in and around London. But when his mother and stepfather decided to move out of their 17th-century stone farmhouse, they wanted him to start from scratch to achieve, as he puts it, “something modern and low-maintenance.” Making a tall order more vertiginous still, they also wanted zero-carbon energy demands and to have plenty of space to garden. Doing their bit, Fred and Edna Wadham found a peaceful site in a wooded village outside Bristol, in southwest England. There, Archer elected to put the house at the center of the lot and to place large windows facing the surrounding landscape in every direction. With the advice of his sister, Sally Merrett, an environmental…

Project: Ampersand House Location: Brussels, Belgium In 2010, Ike Udechuku and Kathryn Smith moved into a neoclassical house in the Saint-Gilles district (opposite) and set out to create what Udechuku calls “a gallery of the living experience.” Several times a year, they partner with European galleries in presenting rare and choice furniture, objects, and art in their home. They live with the items they borrow—eating breakfast at a one-of-a-kind Danish dining table, sipping wine on an iconic sofa—and welcome collectors and visitors into their home to experience (and purchase) design icons in situ. “These pieces are intended by their makers to be used, not to be in a museum,” says Udechuku. Here, Smith sits on a vintage rosewood bench designed by the Swiss-born British architect Richard Seifert. Udechuku and Smith…

Erika Heet Contributing editor Erika Heet spent several hours touring the modest Eichler house graphic designer Mark Neely shares with his partner, Paul Kefalides (My House, p. 65). She says, “The house has so many wonderful modern furnishings in it, and Mark would stop at each one and relay a tale of where and how he and Paul found it—every piece has a story.” Arlene Hirst A former editor at Metropolitan Home who is now a contributor to the New York Times and Modern magazine, Arlene Hirst has a passion for all things Italian, especially design. It was a real treat for her to be asked to write about the vacation home of Ludovica and Roberto Palomba, two of Milan’s most versatile practitioners (Backstory, p. 76). The duo’s public relations…

In the realm of frequently featured settees, there’s a certain caterpillar-like modular sofa system you’ve seen over and over again—for four decades, in fact. In 2013, the Togo sofa, designed by Michel Ducaroy for Ligne Roset, celebrates 40 years of influence. One would be hard-pressed to think of another piece of distinct, groovy, polarizing design that’s experienced the unmitigated success of the Togo. Ducaroy was known to describe his creation as a “tube of toothpaste folded over on itself like a stovepipe and closed at both ends;” this low-slung, cocooned style of seating helped usher in a new mode of sofa that is still fresh today. Ligne Roset president Pierre Roset says that the “creative, anticonformist, and comfortable” Togo was far ahead of its time, forging a typology that fits…

Project: Ferris Residence Architect: Bruce Walker Location: Spokane, Washington Seeking a house that would exemplify their design-oriented lifestyle (together they ran a modern housewares and furniture store), Joel E. Ferris II and his wife, Mary Jean, hired Bruce M. Walker in 1955. A promising young architect, Walker studied at Harvard under Walter Gropius. Walker delivered a warm home attuned to its surroundings. Many of the exterior materials—red brick, white stucco, a black post-and-beam system—are used throughout the interior. He enlisted noted landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who added a fieldstone wall, Japanese rock garden, and brick terraces to the yard. “Growing up, my siblings and I knew we lived someplace special,” says Sam Ferris, Joel and Mary Jean’s son, who recently helped get his childhood home inducted into the Spokane Register…

Project: Rainy/Sunny House Designer: Mount Fuji Architects Studio, www14.plala.or.jp/mfas/fuji.htm Location: Tokyo, Japan When Masahiro and Mao Harada of Mount Fuji Architects Studio designed this tiny Tokyo home, they decided to cover the interior surfaces with oak boards hammered one-by-one into a honey-colored herringbone pattern. “Using a different material for the wall versus the ceiling versus the floor has become a symbol that signifies a typical ‘house,’” says Masahiro. “I wanted to get away from that and create something more like a cave. I thought that would free up the residents’ approach to how they proactively use the space.” The resulting effect is elegant and warm—and a perfect foil to the home’s steely gray staircase.…

The contemporary design scene is rife with reclaimed-timber furniture and reawakened cottage industries. Now weaving is about to have its moment in the spotlight. Fear not; this isn’t a wicker retread. Instead, industrial designers are devising ways to update even the most traditional of fabrication methods by picking up the mantle of Hans Wegner (who modernized paper-cord construction) and Thonet (of the classic caned-rattan seats). To wit, consider Alexandra Raben’s Intricate lamp—whose steel frame is wrapped with coiled wire and thread (right)—and Sebastian Herkner’s Bask collection for Moroso (below), out this year. alexandraraben.dk moroso.it Peanuts Gallery In a comic strip that appeared March 1, 1953, a Knoll Hardoy butterfly chair and an Eames LCW occupy a living room—the first appearance of mid-century modern furniture in Peanuts. Though author and illustrator…

Graphic designer Mark Neely and gastroenterologist Paul Kefalides had spent years collecting furniture for their apartments in Chicago and New York before a career opportunity for Kefalides materialized in California. Neely was game but had one stipulation: “I told Paul, ‘We can move out west if you can find a modern house that the furniture can go into,’” he remembers. It was 2005, during the market frenzy. Kefalides lucked into a connection with Eichler expert and real estate manager Catherine Munson. She showed the couple a house that had only two owners since its construction in 1966; both were architects who had made the home’s conservation a priority. Neely and Kefalides soon found themselves the new owners of the roughly 1,700-square-foot post-and-beam house, designed by architect Claude Oakland for developer…

Project: Los Feliz House Architect: Mike Jacobs Architecture Location: Los Angeles, California After nearly a year and a half of house hunting, Jayma Mays and Adam Campbell decided to make a Los Feliz abode in need of an overhaul their first home. By paring the 1920s Spanish colonial house back to its essentials and adding a well-selected group of mid-century and contemporary furniture, the couple created a showpiece of Southern California living. “We literally had no furniture so we were starting from scratch,” says Campbell. “We thought: Let’s give it a go ourselves, and if it looks disastrous then we’ll think about using an interior designer.” The medley of vintage and contemporary furniture, design-shop purchases, and lucky Internet finds occupying the four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom, 3,200-square-foot residence renovated by architect Mike Jacobs…

The products, furniture, architects, designers, and builders featured in this issue. 35 In the Modern World Dining table by WRK Design wrkdesign.com Morph side chairs by Zeitraum zeitraum-moebel.de ExoFly pendant lamp by Laurent Massaloux for ToolsGalerie massaloux.net toolsgalerie.com Liquid Leather by Glant glant.com Kitchen system by Henrybuilt henrybuilt.com Pearl Gray Corian countertops by DuPont dupont.com Sink by Elkay elkayusa.com Decorative ceramics from Cristina Grajales Gallery cristinagrajalesinc.com Mex sofas by Piero Lissoni for Cassina cassina.com Fat Fat-Lady Fat tables by Patricia Urquiola for B&B Italia bebitalia.it Throw from Creation Baumann creationbaumann.com Sonora pendant by Vico Magistretti for Oluce oluce.com Walton rug by Fort Street Studio fortstreetstudio.com Pillows from ABC Carpet & Home abchome.com Pop sofa by Piero Lissoni for Kartell kartell.it Mongolian wool rug by Niba Rug Collections nibarugs.com Flat Moon…