Table of contents for March/April 2018 in Dwell

Are architects too in demand? It’s not a question I ever thought I’d ask. One of the principles that animates Dwell is that everyone who’s able to work with an architect should. But what I’ve been hearing lately from people in the Bay Area is that firms are turning away clients by the boatload because they’re too busy. Maybe that’s good news, maybe the industry is on the verge of a boom. Yet I find it hard to believe that all architects in all parts of the country—let alone the world—are swimming in new business. My theory is that people are too keen to work with big-name architects with award-winning portfolios and top clients. They are overemphasizing professional experience and underemphasizing personal connection, simpatico. To them I say, young architects…

You just need to design for a storm surge or flood. An office building I designed in the Caribbean had a parking garage that was 10 feet off the ground, with the building above. The elevator was always parked on the second floor in case of a surge. Similarly, homes there are built on stilts, with parking underneath. Richard Finnegan on Facebook Simply get rid of the Federal Flood Insurance Program. If State Farm wants to insure [these homes], that’s on them. I don't think the taxpayer should subsidize stupidity. Paul Cluverius on Facebook For the safety of homeowners and first-responders, I believe that there are areas that need to be turned back into undeveloped areas. Give them to Mother Nature to take care of. Camille Moore Woodside on Facebook…

When Karen Jack, an elementary school teacher, and her artist husband, Grant, were looking for a home in Cambridge, New Zealand, they knew they wanted to replicate the walkable village lifestyle they’d enjoyed living in Britain several years before. So it felt appropriate to enlist their friend and roommate from that time, Christopher Beer, an architect who had also moved to Cambridge, to help. The Jacks spent about $600,000 on the project, including the land, saving money by building parts of the interior themselves. The result is a 1,710-squarefoot three-courtyard home with an art gallery and coffee kiosk—smack in the middle of town. Shortly before the business opened, the Jacks recounted how their busy little home came to be. “With this kind of house, you’re not really looking outward toward…

• SANDPIPER (PALM DESERT) Many of the stylistic hallmarks associated with architect William Krisel’s Palm Springs tract houses—patterned concrete-block facades, thin clerestories, deep setbacks— can be found in abundance at the Sandpiper, a low-density, 306-unit condo development that was erected in Palm Desert between 1958 and 1970. • SUNNY LANDS (RANCHO MIRAGE) You can find buildings by A. Quincy Jones in Palm Springs proper, but none like Sunnylands. Built for a pair of philanthropists in 1966, the ritzy 25,000-square-foot estate has hosted Bob Hope, Queen Elizabeth II, and no fewer than seven U.S. presidents under its distinctive roof—a pink pyramid intersecting with modernist flat lines. ▪ THE NORTH SHORE YACHT CLUB (NORTH SHORE) In a time before the Salton Sea was toxic and smelled of rotten eggs, everyone from The…

PRO BAN The purpose of residential zones is to offer a place for people to live long-term. But in Palm Springs, a radical change has occurred. Our neighborhoods are being converted to commercial use, as “mini-hotels” take over single-family homes. The scale of this phenomenon is unprecedented. To date, there are close to 2,000 registered short-term rentals in Palm Springs, the highest per capita rate in a city of our size. In Palm Springs the typical profile of a short-term rental owner is not a mom and pop renting out an extra bedroom to make ends meet—the vast majority of short-term rentals are run as full-time commercial resorts, where the owner is absent. Even with perfect enforcement policing the behavior of tourists, short-term rentals are simply incompatible with residential neighborhoods.…

1938 The Great New England Hurricane slams the East Coast, destroying scores of homes and businesses on Fire Island. 1939 Carpenter Mike Coffey starts rebuilding the village of Saltaire with shingle cottages. 2011 Michael Silber buys a Coffey house 50 yards from the beach, with plans to renovate. 2011–2012 A zoning dispute delays construction. 2012 Hurricane Sandy washes away at least a dozen Fire Island homes and damages hundreds more. Silber’s cottage is spared. 2013 The renovation, which includes FEMAcompliant upgrades, begins. 2015 Construction ends. The new house is now elevated eight feet above the ground.…

Imagine my surprise and joy to discover “Home Schooled” in the January/February issue. I came of age in Washington Heights, New York, at the end of the ’60s. There was a nondescript block with a large supermarket and a public library separated by a narrow flight of cement stairs. Those steps led to Sylvan Terrace and The Morris Jumel Mansion. The houses on this hidden street were almost as fascinating as the mansion. Finally, I could visit one of these fabled row houses. [Owner and designer] Tom Givone did a stellar job. The house looks great and seems to work beautifully. —Candida A. Friedman Last year we embarked on a huge renovation project. It included a “floating staircase” with walnut treads that are supported by the wall on one side…

Nearing its fifth decade of use, the rear extension of Joris E. Maria’s brick villa in Leuven, Belgium, had become functionally obsolete. With a dilapidated roof that leaked and small windows that provided little light, the 430-square-foot space was dim and gloomy. Joris wanted a bright, cozy place to relax with his two daughters, as well as something with a clearer connection to the garden. So he turned to the same architecture firm he had entrusted to update the main house years earlier, ORG Permanent Modernity, led by Alexander D’Hooghe and Natalie Seys. “ Aesthetically, we explored how the bump could be asymmetrical and what the character of curvature is.”Alexander D’Hooghe, architect Along with project leader Sanne Peeters and her team, they proposed an inventive solution that Joris, a professor…

When artist and designer Rebecca Atwood picked up a wide, flat brush and started painting flowing indigo stripes in her sketchbook one day in late 2016, she wasn’t necessarily looking to create a new product for her Brooklyn-based hometextile studio, Rebecca Atwood Designs. “I was just painting simple lines as a way to warm up and explore some ideas— just seeing what was happening with the paint that day,” she says. “I loved the way it pooled and then stretched as the brush dragged it across the paper, softening the line as it moved across the page.” TIDAL WAVE FABRIC How a design created in Brooklyn becomes a textile spun in northeastern Pennsylvania. The wavy, undulating pattern, done in gouache, reminded Atwood of her childhood, spent on Cape Cod. But…

COFFEE KIOSK Accessible through a sliding millwork wall, the coffee kiosk doubles as a laundry room (the washer and dryer are hidden behind cabinets). A hatch window opens the space, which is outfitted with a refurbished 1997 Elektra espresso maker. KITCHEN COUNTERTOPS The Jacks saved about $6,500 by skipping counter-sized marble slabs and using one-by-two-foot marble tiles, sealed with silicone. “The counters are thin and highly polished, but the sides have a rough texture,” Beer observes. CABINETRY The owners’ biggest savings came from building the cabinetry themselves. Because the house has no garage, the couple wanted lots of indoor storage, which they mostly hid behind flush, full-height “secondgrade” cedar doors. DOOR PULLS & LIGHTS Grant made many of the light fixtures and door pulls himself using brass tubing. For the…

• ZEN HOUSE “Built before their famous Steel Houses, Zen House was the first home by Donald Wexler and Richard Harrison in Deepwell Estates, a quiet south end neighborhood. The post-and-beam dwelling has a boardand- batten exterior that doubles as both fence and facade, while the slatted roof of the entry paints the courtyard with stripes of sunlight and shade.” KURT CYR, PALM SPRINGS MOD SQUAD • FREY HOUSE I I “It might be diminutive in scale—it’s only 800 square feet—but there’s a wonderful sense of oneness that exists throughout Frey House II. A marvel of Swiss engineering— Frey was from Switzerland—the house rests seamlessly on its mountainside site and all of the furniture is ingeniously built-in.” MICHAEL STERN, THE MODERN TOUR ▪ EDRIS HOUSE “Designed by E. Stewart Williams…

Eva Kowalow leans over a table in her Lake Forest, Illinois, painting studio, paging through a sheaf of architectural plans. The plans, each drawn in pencil on yellowing tracing paper and dated 1959 to 1964, depict the 2,960-square-foot house that stands on the same five-acre wooded lot as the studio. On paper, it looks like two neatly stacked rectangles, the top one exactly twice as large as the bottom. In real life, it is a sleek glass-and-steel box floating amid the trees on a wood-paneled pedestal. Eva, an artist, pauses over one of the sheets and points out a never-constructed skylight atop the steel spiral staircase that pierces the building’s core. “We should think about that,” she says as she traces the lines with her finger. “That would be really…

“Homeowners often quit at the first sign of complexity or budget escalation when building a self-sustaining home,” says Clinton Cole, principal of CplusC Architectural Workshop, a design-build firm based in Sydney, Australia. But Geoff Carroll and Julie Young are different. To them, growing vegetables or tracking daily energy consumption aren’t chores to be outsourced. They’re part of living an environmentally responsible lifestyle. Both have senior positions at an Australian data analytics software company that helps clients confront the challenges of hyper-urbanization and climate change. With Cole as their architect, they wanted to create a home that reflects their work in sustainability. But their building, a 1980s terrace house in the inner suburb of Alexandria, suffered from poor thermal performance and a distinct lack of outdoor space. Cole’s first recommendation to…

On a trip to San Antonio to meet clients a few years ago, my partner, Mark Yoes, and I stopped by an art supply house to pick up a pair of scales. As we were browsing, we caught a glimpse of a backroom full of plaster models and other bric-a-brac. Intrigued, we struck up a conversation with the owner and found out we shared an appreciation for legendary local architect O’Neil Ford, who with his younger brother, Lynn Ford, a master builder, mixed vernacular roots and architectural modernism in Texas in the mid 20th century. At this point, the owner volunteered to show us something unusual. From the backroom, he produced a two-by-one-foot wood tablet, its face engraved with diagonal, chamfered, corrugated, and rounded carvings. He told us he bought…

Work in Progress What constitutes an office has never been more up for grabs. Thanks to the laptop and smartphone, most “desk jobs” can now be done from almost any location. Where (or whether) we should sit for max productivity is debatable. The cubicle and corner office endure, but open plans full of homey furniture and over-the-top amenities are on the rise. And the very idea that a company needs its own space has been blown to bits by incubators and coworking collectives. To help employees, bosses, and designers figure out what’s going on, we conducted an informal survey, asking our followers about three common office scenarios— traditional, coworking, and home. More than 2,000 people answered back. 1 Traditional Office Picture the classic corporate office. Fluorescent lights, nylon carpet, sea…

You’ve worked in fashion, interiors, photography, crafts, book publishing, and more. Through it all, one constant has been a focus on modern design. What does “modern” mean to you? Modern is a filter. It’s not a fabric. It’s about serving others rather than yourself. Alexander Girard felt he was there to make everyone’s life better. He sincerely knew he could do it, and he was right. It was like presents. He offered you presents. You edited the definitive book on Girard’s career, as well as several books related to the artist Charley Harper. What was it like getting to know these two giants of American design so intimately through their life’s work? These brilliant men, whom I had a frontrow seat to, were very different, and the circumstances were different, too.…

From the moment they met, Victoria Bartlett knew that she and designers Jaffer Kolb and Ivi Diamantopoulou were on the same wavelength. “When we got together, there was a true meeting of the minds—an organic, harmonious merger of thoughts and ideas,” says Victoria of her first encounter with the partners at New Affiliates design studio. The trio clicked to create an unusual new loft in an old Brooklyn building, Victoria is the founder of fashion label VPL (short for “visible panty line”) and director of Neverbefore, a new athleisure brand. In early 2017, when she was ready to move from a brownstone in Boerum Hill to a loft in a 1947 chocolate factory in Bedford-Stuyvesant, she called on Kolb and Diamantopoulou to renovate it. “The space was dark and cluttered…

GRACE HOME FURNISHINGS Founded by designers Michael Ostrow and Roger Stoker, Grace Home Furnishings offers interior design services and a thoughtfully curated selection of Hollywood Regency–inspired furnishings. “Their wallpaper selection is out of this world,” says Mobley. H3K HOME • H3K is a one-stop shop for Palm Springs residents in search of furnishings to go with their midcentury homes. Mobley is fond of their newly opened downtown showroom and their Mod Dog pet design collection. CHRISTOPHER KENNEDY • Relocated in the Uptown Design District, this local favorite doubles as a studio for designer Christopher Kennedy and a retail showroom full of original and retro-inspired furnishings. DESTINATION PSP • Destination PSP offers a selection of Palm Springs–inspired merchandise ranging from the essential (an extensive book and print collection) to the quirky…

When did you arrive in Palm Springs? How did you get started? My wife and I arrived in Palm Springs in 1956, and I went to various architects’ offices and showed them my work. First I went to Bill Cody, but he was gruff, and barked, “Well, what the hell good are you!?” I was only 23 or 24, and had always been a quiet kid, and he scared the hell out of me. Next, I went to E. Stewart Williams, I was very impressed with his work. But I ultimately went with Wexler & Harrison because they were my age. What do you consider the highs and lows of your career? Well, the low point came early on. After about six months at Wexler & Harrison, there was a…

Michael Silber spent twenty years on Fire Island in three communities, living in many houses before he found the one that was right for him. The house that put an end to his search was a 1939 bungalow in the village of Saltaire, just 50 yards from the beach. With its combination of distinctive architecture, good light, and oceanfront location, it completely won the Manhattan-based management consultant’s heart. The shingle cottage is one of many that were built by master carpenter Mike Coffey after the record-shattering Great New England Hurricane of 1938 hit the area. Michael rented it for three years before buying it in 2011, at which point he decided to renovate and expand. Through a mutual friend, he found Eric Schiller, a Brooklyn-based architect who worked for 15…