Table of contents for Nov-12 in Dwell

Most people wish they had more space, particularly at home. There are, of course, the lucky ones who’ve tamed their interiors, aligning possessions and place in perfect harmony—and we applaud you—but for most people, there’s never quite enough room, nor storage, to go around. Living successfully within a limited footprint requires a stark evaluation of one’s actual self, not one of an imagined persona. For example, my dream-state über-self lives in a minimalist aerie comprised of ethereal rooms devoid of clutter. Sadly, this bears not even a passing resemblance to reality, but through carefully selected furnishings and other tricks of the trade I’ve gleaned along the way, I’ve learned how to make my home seem more open and organized. Luckily good design can save us all, hapless hoarders and mincing…

“What makes a Marin County coyote look over the Golden Gate Bridge and say, ‘I’m going over there’?” wondered landscape architect Marcel Wilson, gazing over his backyard garden at the San Francisco Bay and hazy hills beyond. “The pressure to have your own territory.” Coyotes colonize empty parks in the city, but homebound humans are less lucky: A patch of green is hard to come by here, where houses like Wilson’s 1929 Spanish-revival number are built in block-long units and set into hills sliced by tunnels and roads. Meanwhile, the rugged peninsula’s once freewheeling streams have been stuffed into a subterranean ghetto of pipes and storm drains. So when Wilson found a relatively untamed spring bubbling up in a corner of this 1,250-square-foot yard, he bought the house and planned…

Whether you’re living in a tightly packed apartment or making a minimal footprint in a stand-alone home, choose furniture that flips, folds, morphs, and stows away to keep interiors tidy. Glass Console Table by Ozzio $4,995 Sided in smart white lacquer and topped with glass, this four-in-one table seamlessly transitions from holding mail to a casual dinner to a feast for 12. ozzio.com Scala Zero by Morelato $1,800 This combination side chair–step stool is made in Italy from solid wood—available natural or stained—and is pieced together using traditional joinery. resourcefurniture.com Double Murphy Bed by Casa Kids $4,500 An added bonus of this Baltic birch bunk bed—besides the fact that it tucks into a 12-inch-deep wall cabinet—is the intentional gaps around the beds’ moving parts, meaning no pinched fingers. casakids.com Ottoman…

Aleksander Novak-Zemplinski and Becky Nix met thanks to a student exchange program between the architecture schools at the University of Detroit Mercy and the Warsaw Polytechnic University of Technology. After stints working in architecture firms in Los Angeles, the couple now divides their time between Warsaw and Detroit. A little over two years ago, they moved into a roughly 1,000-square-foot apartment they bought in a spanking-new subdivision in Warsaw. “We decided to make it an experimental project,” says Novak-Zemplinski. So they set up a wood shop in what would be the living room, and, to the extreme puzzlement of the neighbors, proceeded to build just about everything in the apartment themselves, by hand. Novak-Zemplinski: We went for an industrial loft–type aesthetic and space. When we first saw the apartment, it…

Project: Blair House Architect: Bruce Bolander Location: Malibu, California Several years after architect Bruce Bolander built a house for his family in a chaparral-filled canyon in Malibu, California, the steep lot across the road came up for sale. Bolander knew he had to move on it or risk watching a coral-pink mini-McMansion go up smackdab in the middle of his sight line. “I wasn’t sure the lot was even buildable,” says Bolander, who bought the 2.5-acre site anyway. He spent the next four years wrangling permits for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom structure, its 900-square-foot footprint dictated—per city building codes—by the property’s previous house, which had been destroyed in the 1940s yet immortalized in a fuzzy old aerial snapshot. “The broad-stroke design happened pretty quickly,” says the architect. “The size was a…

Architect: Tim Seggerman Design and Building Workshop Location: New York, New York When your anthropologist client’s notion of home is shaped both by a single-room hut in a West African village and the tiny New York City apartment she has inhabited since 1980, you’d better get very comfortable with working in cramped quarters. Such was the case when Brooklyn architect Tim Seggerman was tapped to renovate a moldering brownstone studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for a college professor. The apartment, a 240-square-foot shoebox with a sleeping loft over the kitchen, was in dismal shape, without a true line or flush surface. “You couldn’t imagine a place that was more messed up,” says Seggerman, a man of serene bearing who might easily be confused with the actor Tom Skerritt. His…

There are many benefits to living in a smaller home. Generally speaking, living smaller costs less than living bigger—less to build initially, and less to operate on an ongoing basis. Living smaller is more sustainable—it translates to a reduced resource impact on the environment, both short-and long-term. And living smaller can be far easier—once constructed, a smaller house has fewer house-parts to operate and maintain. Like a hot sports car, a Good Small Space benefits from the vibrancy and dynamism of hyper-efficient design. Something exciting happens when compact programming meets high performance in a well-designed space: We feel more connected to the world beyond our walls because less stuff separates Us from It. Edit Your Life Good Small Spaces start with Good Small Occupants. Now, it could be that you’re…

Holy cow! You featured a fantastic yellow and the best pink on the cover of your July/August issue and didn’t tell us what they were. Please, please, what are the colors? Leanne Stremcha Sent via email Editors’ Note: We love the bright colors, too! They’re Benjamin Moore’s Pink Punch 2006-50 and American Cheese 2019-40. To achieve the saturated hue seen in this house, contractors at Los Angeles’s DCON added pigment to the stucco mixture and applied a custommatched lacquer stain to the final coat. dcon.la daviscolors.com I enjoyed reading about architect Jayna Cooper’s livable modern design within a tight budget (My House, July/August 2012). My only concern is that she engaged in “bid shopping” her subcontractors, which is considered unethical in most of the building industry. I am sure Ms.…

“Six or seven years ago, we had a big retro focus in Scandinavia—everyone bought lights and furniture from the 1950s and ’60s,” says Kristian Byrge, creative director of the Copenhagen-based furniture company Muuto. The work of iconic figures like Arne Jacobsen, Poul Kjaerholm, and Bruno Mathsson cast long shadows over young designers; as a result, “development was locked,” says Byrge. “Designers were looking to the past, reinterpreting existing designs rather than doing something new.” So in 2006, he and his business partner, Peter Bonnen, launched Muuto, commissioning pieces exclusively from architects and designers living and working in Nordic countries, with the goal of helping usher in, as Byrge puts it, a “great new era of Scandinavian design.” In addition to building a successful brand (the company’s name is a play…

In 1938, Charlotte Perriand designed an idiosyncratic inhabitable capsule called the Refuge Tonneau with the help of Pierre Jeanneret. Inspired by her own mountaineering hobby, Perriand devised the lightweight structure to withstand the robust winds common at high altitudes. The one-of design, built and exhibited by Cassina at Salone in 2012, resembles a space shuttle with its aluminum-paneled, 12-sided exterior, though its homey interior fits right into the Alps-cabin mode: Four single beds are attached to pine-clad walls with leather straps and can fold down for seating during the day; two double beds on the mezzanine level bring the shelter’s sleeping capacity to eight. The miniscule but efficient kitchen includes a steel washbasin (where snow can be melted for water) and crannies for storing a camping stove, backpacks, and ski…

After years of city living, Maggie Treanor was ready to move to the country, though she didn’t know how far her journey would take her. She first migrated in 2002, from the Ontario city of Guelph to a small town nearby, which “was like going on vacation,” she says. “Amazing sunrises and sunsets. I knew then that I wanted to move into the landscape.” A decade later, not far from Auburn, Ontario, in a rural corner of Huron County, she’s done it. Her living room looks directly onto cornfields, without a road or a power line in sight. The 925-square-foot house she calls home blends into the landscape somewhat; with a galvanized steel shed roof and siding, it looks like a high-design little brother to the barns on the surrounding…

Project: Coil Architect: Akihisa Hirata Location: Tokyo, Japan In most multistory homes, stairs connect floors. But in the 921-square-foot Coil house, located in a quiet residential neighborhood in Tokyo, they are the floors. Defined by 44 steps of varying depths and widths, Coil is a dynamic swirl of continuously ascending spaces, designed by local architect Akihisa Hirata for Sakura and Ryo Sugiura, a young couple with two children. Keen to trade their rental apartment in the suburbs for a home of their own, the couple purchased a 15-by-47-foot site, commonly known in Japan as an “eel’s nest.” To maximize the tiny, oblong lot, Hirata divided the permissible building volume with conventional walls and floors as little as possible. Instead, he planted three beefy, square-shaped wooden columns along the plot’s center…

“Listen!” said Peter Zumthor, the Swiss architect, in a lecture delivered at Germany’s Wendlinghausen Castle in 2003. “Interiors are like large instruments, collecting sound, amplifying it, transmitting it elsewhere.” Since sound, unlike instantaneous sight, travels over time, the ear also remembers. For Zumthor, sound is the memory of childhood. “What always comes first to my mind is the sounds when I was a boy, the noises my mother made in the kitchen,” he recalls. “They made me feel happy. If I was in the front room, I always knew my mother was at home because I could hear her banging about with pots and pans and what have you.” As an adult, Zumthor designed a small chapel in Sumvitg, Switzerland, that formally suggests a ship. “I put a slight warp…

The products, furniture, architects, designers, and builders featured in this issue. 25 In the Modern World Marcel Wilson bioniclandscape.com Muuto muuto.com Designmuseum Danmark designmuseum.dk Thomas Bentzen thomasbentzen.com Vermont cladding by Everite everite.co.za Refuge Tonneau by Charlotte Perriand for Cassina cassina.com Dwell on Design dod.dwell.com 46 My House BioLINIA biolinia.com Custom CNC milling by Koskisen Oy koskisen.com Mezzo sofa by BoConcept boconcept.us 54 Off the Grid Lisa Moffitt lisa.moffitt@ed.ac.uk Triple-glazed casement windows, French doors, and sliding doors by Loewen loewen.com NT-175U1 175 Watt Single Crystal Silicon Photovoltaic Modules by Sharp sharpusa.com Radiant in-floor heating by Radiantec radiantec.com Steel siding and roofing from Easy Building Products easybuildingproducts.ca 64 EastEnders Studiomama studiomama.com Rental Agents thelondonagent.com themodernhouse.net Pewter Bowls by Studiomama for Wentworth Pewter wentworth-pewter.com Pilot coat hanger by Studiomama for Trip Trap triptrap.dk…

Iain Aitch Author and journalist Iain Aitch traveled to London’s East End to report “EastEnders” (p. 64). “I was pleasantly surprised to find a compact slice of Scandinavian design amid the market stalls and UK equivalent of dollar stores so close to where I live,” he says. “The short bus ride home was a bonus, as was the assortment of bargain off-brand cleaning products, envelopes, and sticky tape.” William Bostwick San Francisco–based, Cleveland-bred writer William Bostwick has given up trying to grow anything besides tomatoes and hops in his overgrown garden. So he relished a morning visit to Marcel Wilson’s manicured backyard oasis (In the Modern World, p. 25), where he and Wilson bonded over Midwestern upbringings, Japanese hot tubs, and urban coyotes. David Engelhardt Living in small spaces is…

Eight years after construction began, this lakeside weekend home 80 miles outside Johannesburg, South Africa, received the long-awaited finishing touch that makes it an eye-catching thermal wonder. Project: House “No Less” Resident/Designer: Gavin Rooke, rookegallery.com Location: Deneysville, South Africa Gavin Rooke isn’t an architect or a professional builder; he’s not the sort who figures he can frame up a small weekender and move in in six weeks’ time. But that didn’t keep the 41-year-old Johannesburg art gallerist from taking up a T-square and hammer in 2004 to start work on a 330-square-foot weekend house in tiny Deneysville on the Vaal Dam. “Being a modernist at heart, I believed that a home could be designed by a layman as long as the function of a building took precedence in all decisions,”…

We were thrilled to welcome some 30,000 attendees this past June to Dwell on Design, a weeklong festival of architecture, art, furniture, and fun that is now the largest design event in the land. Now in its fourth year at the Los Angeles Convention Center, Dwell on Design was its biggest and best yet. We kicked of Dwell Design Week on June 15 with a meet-and-greet with the architects whose work was featured on our pair of modern home tours; peppered the next six days with Dwell editor–led discussions and parties throughout L.A.; and finished of the experience with three inspiration-packed days of exhibitors, demonstrations, and onstage lectures at Dwell on Design. Members of the design trade made up the bulk of the crowd on Friday, June 22, where they…

Project: 2 Voss Street Designer: Studiomama Location: London, England A neighborhood that locals reflexively associate with poverty and gangster-ism may not be the most obvious place to open your first holiday rental. But an alleyway in Bethnal Green, a corner of London’s East End with a rough-and-tumble past, is precisely where industrial designer Nina Tolstrup and her husband, Jack Mama, a creative director specializing in sustainability, have opened their compact accommodations. Well of the Trafalgar-to-Piccadilly circuit, the home’s charms are apparent as soon as you enter the spacious ground-floor kitchen, dining, and lounge area. A former carpenter’s workshop opposite the pair’s family home and Tolstrup’s Studiomama workshop, the two-story guesthouse is a stylish lesson in getting more from less. At just 485 square feet, the house can’t compete with the…

Project: Marra Road Architect: Dowling Studios Location: Sonoma, California When a young San Francisco couple with two little children sought a comfortable weekend retreat, they happened upon eight rolling acres in Sonoma County surrounded by grassy meadows, redwood groves, and the kind of small vineyards that abound just an hour north of the city. The home, completed in spring 2012 by architects Leslie and Julie Dowling, identical twins and protégées of Michael Graves, is comprised of two linked 1,000-square-foot wings. The volumes echo architect Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, though it avoids the 1949 structure’s iconic exhibitionism. The simply detailed, taut, flat-roofed home’s two wings form a T-shape. One wing runs north to south, parallel to a pool, and contains the open-plan living spaces. It is…

San Francisco philanthropist Ann Hatch has long dedicated herself to the making of artful objects. In the 1980s she founded the Capp Street Project, an arts residency in a Mission district home; in 1997 she cofounded the Oxbow School, an arts program for high school students, in Napa, California. But her most recent project may be her most inclusive. For the Workshop Residence, launched in August 2011, Hatch invites a single designer, artisan, or maker to reside for one to two months in an apartment in an 1860s Victorian building in the industrial Dogpatch neighborhood. During that time, the resident is expected to create and produce limited editions of useful, affordable design objects, which Hatch sells downstairs in the Workshop’s studio-store. Each resident is provided with a production budget and…

In traditional Japanese houses, clever carpenters often combined staircases with storage to maximize living space. This project in Fukushima Prefecture inspired Nihonmatsu-based architect Kotaro Anzai to borrow the approach and create a custom-built kaidan dansu, or staircase cabinet, to connect the living room to the second story of a 1,078-square-foot home. “We were able to create a clean, uncluttered space, but in a playful way,” says Anzai. He gave the stairs a sleek, modern look by using attractive linden plywood for the main sections and sturdy ash for the treads. He then affixed number-shaped handles to help organize the cubbies. The residents, a thirtysomething couple, stash their favorite ceramic dishes and sake cups inside for easy access when friends stop by for dinner or drinks. However, Anzai didn’t design the…