Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i Architectural Digest

Enrique Olvera knew just the vibe he wanted to conjure at Carao, his new restaurant at the not-yet-year-old One&Only Mandarina in Mexico’s Riviera Nayarit. “The same feeling as when you’re sitting under a palapa right next to the sea,” muses the world-renowned chef, best known for Pujol in Mexico City and Cosme in Manhattan. Situated at the southernmost edge of the resort, with panoramic views of untouched coastline, Carao strikes that note and then some. Rain-forest vegetation cocoons the dining rooms, which are outfitted in organic materials and arranged around a central hearthlike kitchen. These sublime spaces give way to an adults-only pool that juts out toward the surf—the perfect spot, chef says, to raise a glass at sunset. (He recommends the guava margarita or one of the many biodynamic…

Ever the exquisite one-stop shop, Waterworks has just debuted a dashing array of vanities in styles ranging from Regency to minimalist. (Pictured, from top, are the Belden, Bridle, and Pullman single vanities in midnight and clear oak.) Each can be customized with options from the brand’s newly streamlined fixtures suites and is available for quick-ship delivery to make the soonest possible statement. From $7,107; waterworks.com…

Inside, Guillot references the infinite dome of the sky by making the ceiling and walls “vanish together into a high vault.” “The story is the sky,” exclaims the landscape architect Perry Guillot when describing the inspiration for his playhouse and garden in Southampton. As this statement attests, Guillot approaches his projects with a vision that encompasses nothing short of the cosmos while hewing close to a minimal approach—a limited palette of plantings and materials, a purity of form, and a sensitive consideration of the history and natural features of a given site. The results are poetic landscapes that intimate the larger narrative of our place in nature. Having made his home in the small hamlet of North Sea on Long Island for 14 years, Guillot is known for the artfully…

THE husband-and-wife architects Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa are, García-Abril says, “doers, to the extreme.” Not too many years ago, they built a house by piling up bales of hay, casting a room-size concrete boulder around the bales, then letting a calf named Paulina eat the hay for an entire year. That left a cavity in which they installed rudimentary furniture and fixtures, creating a house they named the Truffle. As architects, they didn’t exactly design the building; they let nature determine its final form. “We like to be surprised by our own projects,” García-Abril says. That approach has made Mesa and García-Abril superstars of architecture’s avant-garde. “They are fearless about embracing innovation,” says J. Meejin Yoon, the dean of Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Yoon, who worked…

“Cheerful yet strange, the Russian floral is one of my favorites.”—Asia Baker Stokse “Farrow & Ball’s Black Blue can read as a very dark green.”…

The architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi are well known at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where their curvilinear, green-roofed visitor center opened in 2012. Now they have transformed a sparsely planted hillside along the northern edge of the 52-acre garden into a spectacular overlook. Its spine is a switchback path, 680 feet long and perfectly wheelchair accessible, that at its highest point commands views of the garden’s Cherry Esplanade. “It’s a way to see the garden from above,” Manfredi says. It’s also a connector, making it possible for wheelchairs and strollers to bypass the monumental stairway that has dominated this axis of the garden for most of its history. By providing accessibility, the overlook “solves 110 years of unfinished business,” says the garden’s president, Adrian Benepe. The path, held in…

In her first foray into the arena of furniture design, Maria Sharapova—tennis star, entrepreneur, aficionado of art and architecture—reaffirms the maxim that less is more. Her collection for Vancouver-based Rove Concepts gathers strength from elegantly distilled forms, refined details, neutral colors, and a marked emphasis on versatility and function. “I wanted to make sure that all the pieces work as extensions of people’s lives—pieces that complement the things they already live with,” says Sharapova, who honed her design bona fides during her travels across the globe as well as the process of crafting her own home in Los Angeles (AD, July/August 2019). “It was important that the collection look and feel as beautiful today as it will in five or ten years.” The initial offering encompasses a mix of multifunctional…

Two years ago, long before the COVID pandemic sequestered the world at home, actor Daveed Diggs would return to Southern California every few weeks from filming the TNT series Snowpiercer in Vancouver to find that his house had been ever so slightly altered. One week he encountered a strip of photobooth snapshots that had been lovingly framed and placed over the fireplace. Another week he discovered his treasured record collection tucked into a nook under the stairs in a room specially carved out for him. And yet another visit revealed a pair of prints of Barack and Michelle Obama from the comically ironic “Celebs on Sandwiches” series hanging above the primary bedroom’s nightstands. “Every time I showed up, there seemed to be some sort of surprise waiting for me,” says…

LAST YEAR, I FOUND MYSELF newly divorced, without much money and needing a new home. As I desperately scoured Milan’s rigid, ancient reale-state scene, the agents all insisted I would never find what I wanted for my budget. Finally I abandoned logic and put my energy practice to use. I drove over to my favorite street and began walking door to door, cheerfully interviewing every doorman personally, telling them how much I loved their building and wished to live there. “No, no, signora,” they all said, laughing at my American wackiness. Then the last one jumped up and down. His friend had just SMS’d an apartment available on the most beautiful street in all of Milan. “Vai! Vai!” Go now! Two days later, an apartment on the third floor of…

Not all gardeners are as lucky—or as plucky—as Ingrid Donat. Forty-one years ago, she got a knock on her back door from the workmen she’d hired to excavate a plot at her new home outside Paris. “They told me, ‘We can’t do anything more, because you have too much clay,’ ” Donat recalls. “I was so happy! I said, ‘Give me a piece, please.’ And they set this clay on my kitchen table, with the stones and the grass and everything. I started to sculpt a self-portrait. I was pregnant, and it began like that.” “It” is a career at the pinnacle of contemporary decorative arts, a busy practice that has changed Donat’s life and brought pleasure to collectors around the world. Donat sculpts furniture and lighting in bronze, and…

L ow, armless seats used for donning one’s shoes, slipper chairs emerged in the boudoirs of 18th-century Europe. And there they remained for hundreds of years, until the great American decorator Billy Baldwin dared to bring his short-legged, high-backed version out into the living room for all to behold. In the 1930s, while Baldwin was working for Manhattan decorator Ruby Ross Wood, the firm frequently used a large, armless chair that had been whittled down from the popular Lawson sofa, a square-backed, super-stuffed model developed at the turn of the 20th century for the home of Thomas W. Lawson, a noted Boston financier. Those originals appeared in many a Ruby Ross Wood Inc. project, but after Wood’s death in 1950, Baldwin reduced them to create a perch that had “the…

There’s a lot of folklore in our culture,” says the Cape Town–based artist Atang Tshikare, reflecting on the life lessons he absorbed through stories as a child growing up on the outskirts of Bloemfontein, South Africa. The tale of a rock rabbit, for instance, revealed the repercussions of laziness, while the fable of Tselane and the giant reminded him to listen to his mother. These vivid accounts filled his head, fueled his imagination, and inspired the drawings he’s made since childhood. But it wasn’t until 2016 that he expanded his fantasies in three dimensions. After collaborating with several designers to create illustrations for their furniture and textiles, Tshikare was approached by Southern Guild, the taste-making Cape Town gallery. With their support, he debuted a trio of zoomorphic wonders: a one-eyed…

“I love poppies because they’re fragile and temporary,” says jewelry and fashion designer Rebecca de Ravenel, whose debut tabletop line is abloom with the ephemeral flower. She’s been planting the seed for years—finding inspiration in Japanese glassware, dreaming up the motif while traveling through Jaipur, and eventually having it adapted as plates by Turkish artisans using a traditional Kütahya technique. Consider these pieces, each handmade to order, the first course in a feast to come. rebeccaderavenel.com…

“The house is really at its best when we are there together.”—Daveed Diggs “I know it’s so clichéd, but making this house a home has been really important to me—and it truly feels like our home now.”—Emmy Raver-Lampman…

“I surrounded myself with clippings, artwork, prints, and swatches of fabric I loved.” “Yes, I would make a few splurges on new purchases, but, no, the house would not be precious.”…

Asia Baker Stokes’s forebears had many mansions—or, at least, they were responsible for multiple suave residences that are revered by architecture scholars. The most famous is an elegant Neo-Federal on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which George F. Baker Jr., her banker great-grandfather, famously expanded with Delano and Aldrich, the inventive high-society firm that was beloved by plutocrats of a most refined stripe in the early 20th century—though Palm Beach’s legendary Amado (AD, November 2014), an Addison Mizner palazzo created for another great-grandfather, is no slouch. That being said, Baker Stokes’s own home is arguably the most charming ever to come into the family’s orbit: a 1930s former stable on Long Island’s tony North Shore. Unlike her ancestors, she cheerfully admits that she had little to do with it other than…