Table of contents for July/August 2017 in Dwell

Here is the best idea for life: Choose to be extraordinary. No matter who you are, you can overcome obstacles with imagination and focus. This is the practice of good design—finding the right tools to identify hidden opportunities. Learning how to see, as George Nelson advised, is essential, because it is the invisible details that shape our lives. This is not a solo enterprise. We are at our best when we collaborate; communities thrive when citizens share a commitment to the future. This is perfectly illustrated in Columbus, Indiana, the site of many an architecture student’s pilgrimage. Here, a family’s dedication to modern design led to a rich, and arguably unmatched, urban tapestry. Today the city represents something important, and through the efforts of a new generation of locals, the…

Writer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy House of Tomorrow page 46 Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is a Charleston-based freelance journalist. Born in Manhattan and raised in London, she formerly worked at The Daily Telegraph, covering topics ranging from beauty to business. For this issue, Tuohy, a self-described “techie and Trekkie,” contributed to a package on the future of smart homes. Of all the connected devices in her house, she says her Nest thermostat may be the smartest of all. “It might make a conspiracy theorist very antsy,” she notes. “But if it keeps me cool in a hot Charleston summer, it’s worth it.” Technical Editor Bruce Greenlaw Dwell Listens page 26 Bruce Greenlaw got his first taste of woodworking when he built his own offthe- grid cabin in the High Sierra in 1976.…

Today’s cars are technological marvels. They can be started remotely and use cameras in reverse—some even drive themselves. But when it comes to our homes, why do we still turn a metal key to get inside, exert ourselves to open windows, and walk to the door to see who’s there? The auto industry is just a software chip away from creating the KITT of our 1980s dreams. Meanwhile, the Jetsons are laughing at us from the Skypad Apartments. This inequality is about to change, however, thanks to something the automotive star of Knight Rider introduced us to: voice control. “We think voice is the future— we believe it will fundamentally improve the way people interact with technology,” says Daniel Rausch, VP of Smart Home at Amazon, whose Alexa voice assistant…

While studying silk-screening in college, Lillian Montalvo was encouraged to test the limits of her imagination. She obliged, throwing dry spaghetti onto a table and watching as the pieces fell into a pleasing arrangement. That linear pattern, which she says evoked the “randomness” of nature, stuck with her. Fast forward a few years, and Montalvo, now a landscape designer, was updating the backyard of a home northeast of Los Angeles. Planted with mature oaks, figs, and a variety of citrus trees, the garden had been added to over the years, but it lacked a sense of coherence with the house’s midcentury lines. And then there was the question of what to do with the sizable mound of dirt where an oak tree once stood. Taking the architecture into account, Montalvo…

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@kathy_sandler on Twitter Dwell has been a tremendous source of inspiration for me as I transform a circa-1900 building in downtown Spartanburg, South Carolina, into my town house. I am writing just to say that your introduction to the March/April issue is spot on and excellent! “Unexpected creativity in difficult circumstances” is an awesome expectation for all of us to consider. I am challenging my team to do just that and to look for opportunities of excellence in design and not to do things the way this small Southern town has always done them. —Jennifer Evins Just reread the March/April issue and was charmed for the second time by the article on Benny Hammer Larsen, weaver of the cord seats on the Hans Wegner chairs for Carl Hansen. I wonder…

1. Are the flush doors so well disguised that we just can’t see any of them in any of the pictures? The only one shown in the article is the master bedroom media door (above). 2. Please help me visualize how a door can be flush in a 2x4 wall regardless of how it swings? Each door closes flush with the wall when viewed from outside of the room or space behind it, regardless of whether the door opens inward or outward. 3. Are the hinges hidden? Yes, we used Tectus concealed hinges. 4. Could we see what the knobs or levers look like? The minimal, custom black metal pulls are not concealed and can be seen in the master bedroom photo (top left). 5. Normally the door jamb would…

Last year, you released lowcost, flexible social housing designs as open-source plans, free to all. Why? It’s a manual— for design, for working for communities, for beginning a discussion about policy. We wanted to prove the market wrong, and argue that within the same set of rules, things could be better. We all want a better world. Do you think in a world in which robotics and open-source plans become more widely implemented, the authorship of architecture will become less relevant? If you have an object, it has an author. I guess architecture represents the last scale at which such a notion of authorship is recognized. Beyond it, for instance, who is the author of a highway? I’m more interested in the number of forces at play. The more forces,…

1 TOILET Practically standard in places like Japan, smart toilets have been slow to catch on in the U.S. New this year, the TOTO self-cleaning, auto-opening, wall-hung Neorest AC Washlet aims to alter Americans’ habits. 2 LEAK DETECTOR Water sensors can’t stop a leak, but they can warn homeowners about them early by sending phone alerts. Honeywell and D-Link make versions that work directly through WiFi, meaning no hub is needed. 3 SHOWER Who knows how much H20 is wasted each year by people waiting for their showers to warm up? U by Moen, shown this year at CES in Las Vegas, lets users preheat their water from their phone or a digital controller. 4 TOOTHBRUSH Although they’re pricier than the drugstore variety, smart brushes that record your cleaning habits…

Simon Pearce was trained to follow in the footsteps of his father, a potter. But he had something else in mind. “It seemed like everyone was making pottery and no one was making glass,” he recalls. So Pearce set out from Ireland, where he was raised, to learn the trade of glassmaking, traveling throughout Europe and apprenticing in places like Orrefors in Sweden and Venini in Italy. The journey lasted almost four years, and at the end of it, he came home to open his own glass factory in Kilkenny. After a decade he grew frustrated with the red tape and other inefficiencies he found doing business in Ireland at the time and set his sights on the United States. There, he sought three things: a beautiful place in which…

There’s a saying, according to Nick Gelpi, that architects don’t design details in Miami, they shop for them. That’s because strict product-approval guidelines can leave designers with a limited palette of materials to choose from in this hurricane- prone region. While the challenge would discourage some, Gelpi embraced it head-on when he traded a post at Steven Holl’s internationally recognized firm in New York City for his own practice in Miami Beach. With his 1960s ranch house in Mid- Beach as a testing ground, Gelpi wrapped the facade in a grid of curved tiles made of a wood-based concrete from Belgium, a new hybrid that he has helped fine-tune in the United States. Here, he shares the interwoven story of his home’s origins and an emerging material’s potential. “With every…

When a Toronto couple with shared interests in land conservation and craftsmanship approached Lee and Macgillivray Architecture Studio (LAMAS) to build a new home on their 200-acre property in North Hatley, Quebec, a fertile partnership took root. The couple, an artist and a farmer, had bought the land—originally two adjacent farms—15 years earlier and wanted to replace the derelict homestead on one of them with a new house now that they had retired and were spending more time there. While attending a dinner party in North Hatley, the couple were delighted to learn that their hosts’ son, James Macgillivray, was a Princeton-and Harvard-trained architect. The timing was perfect for everyone, as Macgillivray had recently left Peter Gluck and Partners in New York to launch his own studio with his partner,…

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With a little imagination, attending Maple Bear nursery school can seem like being in a giant game of Tetris. Inspiring that kind of creative thinking is exactly what Renesa Studio set out to do when it transformed a dilapidated home in New Delhi into the school. Intent on avoiding a traditional white-walled classroom, the team created a colorful environment, full of reading nooks, social areas, and outdoor spaces. Lead architect Sanchit Arora notes, “A child needs a space that breathes, feeds, and creates a learning pattern to facilitate his or her holistic growth in life.”…

The day that Alexa, Lutron Caséta, Sonos, Rain Bird, Nest, Logitech, and Haiku all stopped speaking to each other. I had to divine a shutdown/restart/resync sequence that got all the kids playing together again—while my wife insisted no more f-ing automation. Robert Grenader We had an LG Smart LED TV that would turn itself on and off. We searched the net for a few days and found a similar issue that someone in Asia had experienced and resolved by putting a small computer fan on the television’s board processor. The processor has a tendency to heat up too much and, in a self-preservation effort, turns the set off. No shop in our area would touch the modification. So, following the saying “Any port in a storm,” we opened up the…

1 TOASTER Even the simplest appliances are being rewired. Normal toasters have a mechanism for letting you know when your bread is ready (“pop!”), but the Griffin Connected Toaster can notify your phone. 2 OVEN The day of robot chefs is coming. The Tovala combination oven (available for preorder), uses a barcode scanner to cook a selection of meals that the company sends subscribers via a delivery service. 3 WINE COOLER For true oenophiles, the Plum wine cooler identifies, chills, and preserves any standard 750 milliliter bottle, then serves it at the ideal temperature. The only drawback? The tabletop unit holds just two bottles at a time. 4 FAUCET Finding the sweet spot between scalding and freezing on a faucet can be annoyingly tricky. Faucets with digital displays, like those…

1 GARAGE DOOR OPENER Many garage doors can be operated using dedicated controllers. Ryobi makes an opener that has a built-in WiFi antenna so it can be controlled remotely with an iOS or Android app. 2 IRRIGATION Alone, the Edyn Garden Sensor is capable of monitoring your plants’ health and sending insights to your smartphone. Paired with the Water Valve, it can actually water the garden for you. 3 SECURITY CAMERA Wire-free, infrared outdoor cameras like Arlo by Netgear and Canary Flex can provide peace of mind by enabling residents to check on their property from almost anywhere. 4 DOOR LOCK Perhaps the greatest advantage digital locks offer over traditional deadbolts is the ability to use a phone as a key. August, Yale, Kwikset, and others have models that let…

“When everything is painted white, you can really feel the spatial flow and the sectional geometry, which is interesting because it goes from being a rectangle to a square.” ED PARKER, DESIGNER AND RESIDENT Ed Parker and his wife, Barbara Tutino Parker, spent the first 10 years of their New York City life in a rental loft above a factory in Bushwick, Brooklyn. But eventually the couple, who met while students at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was an exchange student from Rome, grew tired of renting and decided it was time to buy a place of their own. With the city’s notoriously high cost of real estate, they knew it wouldn’t be easy. It took them two years to find the right fit, a 1,000-squarefoot apartment in Park Slope.…

“As an architect, when I face Saint Peter I am able to say that out of the buildings I did during my lifetime, one of the best was this little church.” EERO SAARINEN, ARCHITECT IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE TO FOLLOWERS of midcentury modernism that Columbus, Indiana, is one of the most important design destinations in America. A laboratory of ideas spurred in the 1940s and 1950s by the patronage of the forward-thinking Miller family and its Cummins Engine Foundation, the city of 46,000 is home to a staggering number of public works created by the most recognizable names in 20th-century architecture: Saarinen, Roche, Weese, Noyes, Pei, and Pelli, among many others. The city demonstrates how an enlightened practice of culture can alter history and change lives. In the following…

A leaky four-story former water tower may not be the first place that springs to mind when picturing bright, clean living quarters. But following a refurbishment in a small town in southern England, a landmark Victorian-era brick tower is now a cozy retreat and “a special place to sit and unwind,” says owner Sheryl Wilson. Nine years ago, Sheryl and her husband, Andrew Hollins, both amateur equestrians, bought the property, which includes a cottage next to the tower, a courtyard, and even stables for their horses. They’d previously renovated some unconventional homes, such as a former chapel, so fixing the tower wasn’t quite a leap into the great unknown. But it was their most ambitious undertaking to date, Sheryl admits. “Our plan was to peel back layers of the previous…

Since launching their Los Angeles-based prefab company Connect Homes, Jared Levy and Gordon Stott have worked with scores of modern-design lovers to build their dream homes. But when they received a query from prospective clients complete with concept drawings rendered to look as though they’d been plucked from the architects’ own canon, an incredulous Stott emailed back asking, “Who are you?” The couple—disability rights attorney and mental health advocate TJ Hill and Emmy-winning production designer Jay Heiserman—had clearly done their homework. And their dilemma was one that many of Stott and Levy’s clients share: Their older home was ripe for replacement, but they had neither the budget nor the time for a ground-up custom build. Moving wasn’t an option. They loved their Santa Monica neighborhood—an established enclave on the border…