Innehållsförteckning för February 2018 från Architectural Digest

The buildings are humble, functional. There are sturdy, redbrick churches and modest houses with deep porches beneath overhangs that ward off the heavy Southern heat. There’s even a barbershop, its row of seats where customers wait like a congregation kneeling before an altar. Seemingly unremarkable pieces of 20th-century America, these structures are in fact quite the contrary: extraordinary artifacts of the Civil Rights Movement, places where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, where Freedom Riders found shelter from mobs, and where social-justice activists huddled to strategize their nonviolent quest for human rights. More than a dozen such structures in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, have now been placed on the 2018 World Monuments Watch, a biennial list of cultural sites at risk of decay or destruction. The World Monuments Fund (WMF), which…

Writer Brooke Metcalfe has decorated many beautiful homes over the years—in New York, Buenos Aires, London, and beyond—but when she met her future husband, Julian Metcalfe, ten years ago, her primary concern wasn’t restoring a crumbling palace to pristine condition. It was creating a sanctuary for what would be their own Brady Bunch: “We had seven children to make feel at home immediately,” she explains. The couple wanted a weekend place that wasn’t too far from their primary residence in London or the children’s boarding schools. And it had to be in a setting that wouldn’t feel too rural or desolate. “Neither of us rides horses or actually even owns a pair of Hunter boots,” quips Brooke. “So as much as we like to think we’re going to the country,…

birds of a feather,” as the saying goes, “flock together.” But when opposites attract, the relationship can be downright electrifying. AD100 interior designer Muriel Brandolini—an ardent enthusiast of arresting colors and madcap patterns— couldn’t be more different in temperament from one of her longtime New York clients, a cerebral, business-minded woman who initially discovered Brandolini’s work in a magazine and picked up the telephone. “I’m a very analytical, linear thinker,” says the client, who asked the Manhattan-based decorator to revitalize an Upper West Side apartment she and her husband had bought a few years ago. “Muriel leads with passion and feeling. I wanted to ask questions, and she would just say, ‘It’s beautiful. I can’t tell you why it will work, but it will.’” The couple’s duplex apartment, on high…

Like a character in a fairy tale, during a 2000 trip artist Rachel Feinstein fell under the spell of Bavaria’s picturesque towns, sublime landscapes, fantastical castles, and rococo churches. Further enchantment ensued in Munich at Nymphenburg, the legendary porcelain factory on the grounds of the royal family’s onceupon- a-time summer palace. There she succumbed to her own maladie de porcelaine, the fabled “porcelain sickness” that possessed so many aesthetes in the 18th century. Feinstein, whose work has included architectural stage flats, period room–inspired installations, and immersive environments, found herself drawn to the exuberant figurines modeled by Franz Anton Bustelli in the 1750s. But rather than the graceful, colorful characters themselves, the swelling, curvaceous pedestals upon which they stood were what moved her. “What’s so fabulous is how one curve gives…

Every August, some 70,000 creative souls descend upon Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for Burning Man, a weeklong festival of self-expression, total inclusion, and communal living. Radical dwellings and infrastructure appear out of nowhere only to then be completely disassembled, vanishing without a trace. Those of us who have never had the pleasure—or perhaps courage—to go will soon have the opportunity to live vicariously at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. Opening on March 30, its new exhibition “No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man” captures the experimental ethos through three stories of archival photographs, ephemera, jewelry, and costumes, as well as installations by the likes of Leo Villareal, Christopher Schardt, and Michael Garlington and Natalia Bertotti. (Pictured is Totem of Confessions, Garlington and Bertotti’s 2015 chapel…

“I want to create furniture without guilt,” says Dutch designer Dirk Vander Kooij, whose custom robots can squeeze thick strings of plastic into a chair, bench, or chandelier. The ingredients? Discarded refrigerators, garden chairs, CDs, and more. “Anyone can make a beautiful object out of bronze,” he notes. “The real challenge is to turn garbage into a museum piece.” dirkvanderkooij.com…

THE DETAILS THAT MAKE THE LOOK “We both like an eclectic look,” says Brooke. “I love the fact that it feels very comfortable but holds an aesthetic structure.”…

Nearly two decades ago, Kathryn Herman—a high-flying American landscape designer with round-the-world clients—spent a transformative week in England’s Somerset County, taking in the genius of husband-and-wife horticulturalists Sandra and Nori Pope, creators of the acclaimed gardens at Hadspen House. “They are colorists, and I was hugely impressed by the subtle gradations they had established,” Herman recalls. “And I said, that’s what I’m going to do for myself when I get the opportunity.” The Popes had transformed 18th-century Hadspen House’s huge, dilapidated potager into dynamic color-themed gardens that bedazzled novelist and gardener Jamaica Kincaid, who once wrote, “Nothing matched in a way that I understood.” But after the Popes decamped to their native Canada in 2005, their landlord bulldozed the couple’s Arcadia to make way for a new garden—which, ironically, was…

Nestled in a canyon on the outskirts of Los Angeles, artist Mary Corse’s house and studio are a short drive—but a world away—from the city’s hustle and bustle. Cell service cuts out en route to her home, which is reached via a single-lane bridge and winding dirt road. Neighbors are few and far between, affording Corse ample room to paint in private. Which is what she’s been doing— quietly, steadily—for more than five decades, building an important body of work while innovating on pace with established pioneers of the Light and Space movement. This May, however, she will take an overdue step center stage, with a long-term installation at Dia:Beacon and a debut show at London’s Lisson Gallery, followed by her first solo museum survey at the Whitney in June.…

“Even though the house had been greatly expanded over the years, we still wanted to respect its original vision,” Martin says. to say that the 40-something Ricky Martin maintains a boyish appeal may be the understatement of the year. The Puerto Rican superstar seized the spotlight as an angelic 12-year-old phenom in the boy band Menudo, beloved by teenyboppers and grandmothers alike. He has rarely been out of the public eye since. Fresh off a blockbuster 2017 residency at the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Martin’s latest star turn has him portraying Gianni Versace’s boyfriend Antonio D’Amico in producer Ryan Murphy’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, on FX this January. Yet for all his success, Martin’s greatest joy lies in the happy home life…

THE DETAILS THAT MAKE THE LOOK “I found the French sofa in the bedroom on Instagram. I’d much rather look at furniture than see what people ate that morning,” notes Alexandre. “I’m a travel freak. Every trip I take expands my view of the world and feeds my soul,” says Sofía.…