Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2022 i Architectural Digest

SUN SALUTATION MORNINGS START IN THE KITCHEN, WHERE SUDBURY YELLOW EVOKES THE RISING SUN. AS TABOURET EXPLAINS, “IT WAS REALLY ABOUT UNDERSTANDING WHERE THE LIGHT IS AT DIFFERENT TIMES.” MOOD ENHANCEMENT “IT’S A MATTER OF TELLING A STORY, TRANSITIONING FROM ONE ROOM TO ANOTHER IN A NATURAL WAY,” THE ARTIST SAYS, MUSING ON THE CHOICE OF RED EARTH, A DUSTY SHADE OF TERRA-COTTA, FOR THE DINING ROOM. BUFFER ZONES WHITE WALLS OFFER VISUAL BREATHS, BUT ALSO OPPORTUNITIES FOR FUTURE COATS OF COLOR AND PAINTERLY INTERVENTIONS. TABOURET CONSIDERS IT ALL A WORK IN PROGRESS. “I’M SURE IN TWO YEARS IT’LL BE MORE AND MORE ALIVE.” NIGHTCAP THE FAMILY ROOM’S AZURE WALLS HELP EASE EVERYONE’S EYES INTO THE EVENING HOURS. FOR A SIMILARLY NOCTURNAL NOTE, TRY FARROW & BALL’S WINE DARK, A…

Eleven years ago, designer Mónica Calderón and her husband, architect Ezequiel Farca, transplanted their family from Mexico City to Los Angeles, lured by the siren call of LA’s flourishing arts scene and its deep connections to Latin America. “There are many similarities between Mexico City and Los Angeles as far as climate and culture, and we simply fell in love with California,” says Calderón. “But part of our heart was still in Mexico, just not Mexico City, which had become so busy.” After visiting the Yucatán capital of Mérida during a spring break sojourn with their four sons, Calderón and Farca decided to reaffirm their Mexican roots by building a second home there. “We wanted to give our children a totally different experience than they have living in the Santa…

What do Elsie de Wolfe, Renzo Mongiardino, Harrison Cultra, Georgina Fairholme, and David Kleinberg have in common? Yes, all are boldface interior decorators of uncommon importance and signal influence, but more importantly, they all lavished their expertise on the selfsame house. That would be the redbrick beauty on Manhattan’s far East Side that architect Mott Schmidt created in the early 1920s for Anne Vanderbilt, she being a moneyed widow who was giving up her late husband’s fabulously pinnacled Fifth Avenue castle for something a bit less egotistical and a lot more elegant. “The proportions are so magical—that’s what seduced us,” says Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and, with Anna Wintour, one of the forces behind the annual Met…

“To create one’s own world takes courage.”—Georgia O’Keeffe Of all the issues the AD team produces yearly, it is the December Art issue that I most find brimming with sheer surprise and wonderment. Of course, artists of all stripes tend to ignore convention and do things their own way, resulting in exciting, memorable homes and interiors that very often break rules, push boundaries, and are utterly sui generis. The creatives who share their personal domains this year are conducting experiments in environment: Quite literally, many of them are living in their own artworks, which are themselves constantly evolving. Japanese artist Mariko Mori, known for her site-specific, light-sensitive sculptures, acquired land on idyllic Miyako Island in the East China Sea, then spent five years observing the sun and the landscape and…

After Notre-Dame de Paris burned in 2019, French politicians promised to rebuild the 12th-century cathedral as it was. But the city of Paris, which has pledged to be the greenest city in Europe by 2030, decided to take advantage of the restoration to rethink the surrounding gardens and esplanade, known as the parvis, as an eco-friendly public space. In September 2021, the mayor launched a pro-environment design competition for the site, and last June, the jury unanimously selected a team led by award-winning Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets, whose proposal will turn the Île de la Cité, the island in the Seine where Notre-Dame sits, into a sustainable microclimate. “The Île de la Cité is the cradle of Paris,” Smets explained during a recent visit to his Brussels studio, alluding…

Money, religion, sex—these are just a few of the societal obsessions that Atelier Biagetti has addressed in its designs. The Milan-based studio, founded by husband and wife Alberto Biagetti and Laura Baldassari, has made a seat in the form of a giant gold bar, a light fixture with a latex curtain, and a vaulting-horse-shaped bench wrapped in shiny silver leather, among other playful domestic objects. Now they’ve made their way to humanity’s latest preoccupation: wellness. “It’s a kind of totem,” Biagetti says of Flower Tower, the duo’s latest addition to Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades collection. (They previously designed a dining table that evokes the waves of the Adriatic Sea.) Debuting this month, the modular light fixture is made up of rings of glass, handblown in the Venice area and stacked…

tilt your head back in Claire Tabouret and Nathan Thelen’s LA home and you’re in for a visual delight. There’s a robed noblewoman, a falcon on her arm—the Nine of Pentacles. A kneeling nude, pouring liquid from two jugs onto water and land—the Star. A couple, the Lovers, split in two by what resembles a compass—the Wheel of Fortune. It’s all imagery from a classic tarot card deck, illustrated in the early 20th century by artist Pamela Colman Smith, which Tabouret has whimsically re-created across the wood-beamed ceiling of her family’s 1920s home in Los Feliz. “That was the first thing we did while the house was still empty,” says Tabouret, a French painter whose moody, figurative works are represented by Perrotin gallery. She recalls the giant scaffolding she and…

Butterflies are forms of beauty, but in the work of Damien Hirst they are also tools of provocation. For a now legendary 1991 show, the artist attached live pupae to white canvases, allowing the insects to hatch, fly, mate, and die over the course of the installation. Concurrently exhibited paintings incorporated whole specimens onto glossy monochrome grounds—an innovation that anticipated his landmark Kaleidoscope series, begun in 2001, for which he assembled real wings into dazzling compositions reminiscent of rose windows. At Claridge’s hotel in London, Hirst has returned to that motif, albeit for the first time ever in stained glass. Measuring some eight by six feet, his laylight now beckons guests up the property’s main staircase, which climbs seven flights from the entrance to the Royal Suite to the dormer…

My father liked to swing on a chair,” recalls Catherine Prouvé, daughter of the French designer Jean Prouvé. “It’s why he designed one with stronger back legs.” She’s speaking about Prouvé’s Standard chair, first made in 1934, in which two 90-degree bends of tubular steel slot into hollow, folded steel back legs to form a lightweight but sturdy frame for a solid wood seat and back. Those robust back legs—often likened to airplane wings—would become a Prouvé hallmark, appearing in tables and architecture. They gave the seat extra strength, since, as Prouvé pointed out, “a chair always breaks at the back joint between the legs and the seat.” This became a template that Prouvé honed over the years. Seats soon shifted to molded plywood. An all-wood version, the Chaise Tout…

Daniel Arsham plunks an extra-large bronze padlock on the desk at his Long Island City, Queens, studio. The piece looks worn and eroded, like some artifact dug up from the neighborhood’s postindustrial grounds, its patina a subtle blue. And not just any blue. Created for Tiffany & Co., the work is the artist’s limited-edition sculpture for his latest collaboration with the luxury brand. Arsham lifts the shackle and opens the box to reveal a dazzling bangle: his take on Tiffany’s new Lock bracelet. Reflecting over Zoom, Arsham frames the padlock as part of a fictional archaeology. “It’s this idea of taking something from the present and pushing it into the future artificially,” he notes. “There’s a confusion that happens when you’re looking at something that’s from the era in which…

At first glance, very little might seem changed at The Audley, a traditional 19th-century pub in London’s Mayfair neighborhood. But the psychedelic ceiling, collaged by artist Phyllida Barlow, betrays exciting and curious things afoot. Reopened earlier this fall after three years of extensive updates, its building is the latest offering from Artfarm, the hospitality venture of gallerists Manuela and Iwan Wirth, two of the cofounders of Hauser & Wirth. Spread across five floors, the project includes the ground-floor Audley Public House and upstairs Mount St. Restaurant, as well as three levels of intriguingly themed private rooms. Expect “the unexpected to happen here,” says Ewan Venters, who joined Hauser & Wirth and Artfarm as global CEO last year. A beloved bolt-hole where City boys have happily drunk pints alongside ladies and…