Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i Architectural Digest

“I love that balance of African, European, and Afrofuturism mixed with midcentury pieces. I love things that are extremely glamorous and also extremely brutal.”—Lenny Kravitz This is the second cover we have produced with Lenny Kravitz, a superstar who is both a rock legend and an AD100 designer—a rare combo indeed. AD photographed Kravitz for our May 2019 cover story on his bucolic Brazilian farm, and the atmospheric Open Door video of that vast property is widely considered one of our best ever. (I agree and will never forget the Portuguese word for farm—fazenda—which viewers learned from Kravitz himself in the video.) This time we visit his grand 1920s mansion in Paris, which he bought some 20 years ago and first shared with our sister publication AD France in 2010.…

“I have a whole love story around this couch,” says Yvonne Force Villareal of the carved hunk of foam, casually draped in fabric, that has been part of her life since she first met her husband, Leo Villareal, at the 1996 opening of a John Chamberlain exhibition. She calls the piece, purchased from that show and now installed at the couple’s Manhattan home, “the root chakra” of their family, its craggy surface comforting crying kids and worn-out adults over the years. The creative power pair are two of the lucky subjects of Living With Chamberlain, a new book published by Assouline that chronicles the artist’s work and its past and present custodians at home. Other members of this exclusive club include fashion designer Vera Wang, who gave a crunched-metal sculpture…

In the late 1970s, designer Joe D’Urso, the vaunted New York City loft whisperer, was contemplating the coffee table. To suit the large, open spaces he specialized in, he recalls, “there weren’t any really big options that I liked, so I decided to make one.” That original four-by-four-foot piece, which first landed in the SoHo home of Dean & DeLuca’s Joel Dean and Jack Ceglic, was constructed of raw steel and wired glass and set on castors, with an interior shelf where the couple could display objects and magazines. “It ended up looking like a room with a skylight,” D’Urso says of the work, which Knoll then put into production back in 1980. Now, the American furniture company has reintroduced that table in three different sizes and colors. The piece’s…

Superstar musician Lenny Kravitz has loved Paris since he first landed there in 1989, at 25, to promote his debut album, Let Love Rule. Finally, in the early 2000s, he felt it was time to find a piedà-terre: “a little apartment, maybe on the Seine—one bedroom, two bedrooms, maximum—where I could write and hang out,” he recalls. “One day, the real estate agent says, ‘I have something. It’s not what you’re looking for, but you need to see it.’” “It” was the grand mansion of Countess Anne d’Ornano, the widowed former mayor of Deauville, a 1920s confection set on a leafy cul-de-sac next to a clutch of embassies in the conservative 16th arrondissement. With her children grown, the countess found herself more at her Norman estate, with poetic gardens by…

FOR ALL THAT’S BEEN WRITTEN about design and architecture, relatively little ink has been spilled on the subject of storage units. They tend to be dismissed as backwaters of impulse, dingy pens filled with the lame beasts we collect in our travels but never cull. And anyone who’s had to keep his life’s possessions in such a place has probably had to fend off that nasty little cough of a word: hoarder. To Graydon Carter, a founder and coeditor of Air Mail and former editor of Vanity Fair, all of this seems terribly unfair. “No, hoarding is when you save newspapers,” he says. “What this is, is a collection of glorious finds from the past that just don’t fit my needs at present.” At Carter’s storage unit in Litchfield County,…

Jessica Helgerson’s new line of wool floor coverings offers a welcome dose of joy at a moment when felicity seems to be in seriously short supply. Aristotle said that “the secret to humor is surprise,” and Helgerson’s flatweave patterns are certainly chockablock with surprises: snails and slugs, beetles and bathtubs, ladybugs and lingerie. “The great thing about product design is that we don’t have to tailor our work to respond to a particular site or client,” says the globetrotting interior designer and AD PRO Directory member, who divides her time between Portland, Oregon, and Paris. “These rugs don’t take themselves too seriously.” Developed in tandem with Mira Eng-Goetz, a lead designer at Helgerson’s namesake practice, and manufactured in Rajasthan through Kush Rugs of Portland, the seven-piece collection draws inspiration from…

There is something compelling about people who know what they like—and stick with it. When Kate Rheinstein Brodsky moved with her husband, Alexander, and their three daughters into this Upper East Side duplex four years ago, she says, “I brought every piece of furniture from our old apartment.” She happily points out examples of her stylish recycling: the living room chairs, the Christopher Spitzmiller lamps she’s owned for 20 years, the dining room chandelier that held pride of place in her two previous apartments. The list goes on. In fact, she was reluctant to move at all. “I loved our previous apartment. It had everything I wanted. But the girls were getting older,” she says of Beatriz, soon to turn 17, Frederica, 14, and Delphine, nine. “Everyone was getting bigger…

Thinking back on a series of recent life shifts, Zak Profera—founder of Zak+Fox, the beloved source for fabrics, rugs, pillows, and wall coverings—takes a deep breath. “There were a lot of changes at once,” says Profera, who experienced the concurrent end to a long-term relationship, the passing of his beloved Shiba Inu and brand mascot, Shinji, and the opening of his expansive Manhattan showroom. Even so, he reflects, “you get on your feet again.” He credits that rebound in large part to his new one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, which he shares with his three-year-old dog, Kuma, another Shiba Inu. “I needed something that was enveloping and cozy and warm,” he says of his new home, situated on the 17th floor of a stately 1930s tower in Chelsea—the same building where he…

Lee Broom has always had a thing for drapery. As a child actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the British designer became enchanted with the set dressings. As a side hustle during his fashion-school years at Central Saint Martins he created moody, curtained environments for local bars and London raves. And as an intern for Vivienne Westwood, he observed how the late style icon studied the paintings of Anthony van Dyck to inform her cascading couture. “Things like that stick with me even now,” notes Broom, who eventually made the professional leap to product design when he established his firm in 2007. It all serves as the creative backbone to Overture, a collaboration with Calico Wallpaper that harnesses trompe l’oeil, a technique dating back to Roman and Greek empires, to…

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The most prominent building in Warsaw is an ornate skyscraper called the Palace of Culture and Science, which was a “gift” from Joseph Stalin in the 1950s. Many residents of Poland’s capital would like to see the tower, a reminder of decades of Soviet rule, torn down. Others have proposed keeping the historic building but surrounding it with exemplars of the freedoms promised by a democratic Poland. That group includes Joanna Mytkowska, the director since 2007 of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, which focuses on works made since communism fell in Poland in 1989, with an emphasis on politically provocative conceptual art. Mytkowska was determined to build her institution’s first permanent home on the same square as the Palace of Culture and Science, even if that meant spending…

AMONG THE MANY PECULIAR relics of the World War era are the utilitarian structures that were erected, like some Brutalist versions of Stonehenge, along the southern coast of England. Often referred to as “concrete ears,” these forms were a way of amplifying sound, of listening for incoming aircraft or other signs of war before the development of radar. But they were built too late, never used after technology improved, and never destroyed. They have long fascinated the American artist Kevin Beasley, and are now the inspiration for his new site-specific sculpture—and largest work to date—at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York. It will be unveiled on May 7 as part of the open-air museum’s new $53 million expansion, which aims to improve visitor experience with new buildings, landscapes,…

If restraint is suddenly all the rage in our nation’s capital, Ken Fulk blissfully missed the memo. Steps from the White House, the AD100 designer has pulled out all the decorative stops with restaurateur Stephen Starr to revive The Occidental, a legendary Washington, DC, restaurant, founded in 1906 and long known as “the place where statesmen dine.” Fulk, who grew up in Virginia and moved to Georgetown after college, set out to revive a bygone era of local glamour at The Occidental’s home adjoining the Willard InterContinental hotel. “As a kid, DC was always the big city,” he notes, waxing nostalgic for nighttime tableaux of limousines and tuxedos. “I wanted to celebrate the town of my mind’s eye, to honor the past and bring it forward.” Whereas the downstairs dining…