Innehållsförteckning för June 2020 från Architectural Digest

It’s just paint, but it has weight, emotion, and density,” AD100 interior designer Rodman Primack, a part-time Mexico City resident, says of architect Luis Barragán’s legendarily colorful Cuadra San Cristóbal—a residence in Los Clubes, a gated community in suburban Mexico City that Barragán also devised. “You feel like if you opened the purple wall, there would be purple inside.” Commissioned in 1966 by Swedish industrialist Folke Egerström and his first wife, Ami, the property, set in the midst of an equestrian-theme neighborhood threaded with bridle paths, was a March 1979 AD feature. The snow-white house is lovely, but the polychrome stables and courtyard are the stars as well as a pilgrimage site. A waterfall pours into a huge, shallow, L-shaped pool that is used for exercising and watering horses amid…

British writer and video-game developer Dan Houser had been on many camping trips along the Saranac Lakes in the Adirondacks when he finally invited his wife and children to join him in the wild three summers ago. It could have gone comically wrong: Krystyna, an entrepreneur, is a native New Yorker accustomed to life in the fast lane, and their youngest was all of three at the time. But in a perfect twist of fate, “I fell in love instantly,” Krystyna muses. “The water, the mountains, the pine trees—I’ve never been more relaxed. Seeing the kids, Dan, and myself calm down that weekend was the deciding factor. I was like, ‘If we’re going to lead chaotic lives in the city’”—the family of five is based in Brooklyn Heights—“‘we should commit…

Madame and Monsieur had it all worked out—or at least they thought they did. The fashionable Parisian couple bought a big apartment with many tiny rooms in the 2nd arrondissement, and promptly knocked down all the walls. They had no children, and much as they tried, it didn’t look like they were meant to have any. You can guess what happened next. Boom! A week after they moved in, Madame got pregnant. Then she got pregnant again. Suddenly they needed rooms and walls—in short, they needed the whole habitat for bourgeois Paris family life. So they started looking for a new home. The place they found, a 4,800-square-foot maze of rooms and hallways, all on one floor, is as classical as the previous was bohemian. The building dates from 1900…

There’s no place like home—just ask Louis Vuitton. The French luxury brand’s new dollhouse, Malle Maison Vivienne, is a pièce de résistance for any design-obsessed kid at heart. Enclosed within a monogrammed canvas trunk, the three-story dwelling features color-coded rooms (a rooftop lounge, too) with 22 pieces of miniature furniture, among them petite homages to Louis Vuitton’s signature quatrefoil motif. Escapism at its finest! Price upon request; louisvuitton.com…

As the minds behind some of New York’s most beloved restaurants, Rita Sodi and Jody Williams regularly refine recipes to their essence. The cacio e pepe at I Sodi, tarte Tatin at Buvette, and insalata verde at Via Carota are all paradigms of texture and flavor. And the duo is no less discerning when it comes to design, setting the mood with an understated mix of vintage finds and bespoke wonders. So naturally, when it came to renovating their own kitchen, they sought out top quality, enlisting British cabinetmaker Plain English. “Our home is part of whatever project we are in,” says Williams, noting that their new kitchen reveals the same spare inclinations as their eagerly awaited, Shaker-inspired restaurant on Commerce Street. “Nothing is just aesthetic,” Sodi adds of the…

“Miles managed to create a beautiful space that’s also comfortable. The great room is so much fun to sit around in and do nothing.”—Krystyna Houser “We went for a sort of Bloomsbury aesthetic, with a nod to Bavarian Schloss style.”—Miles Redd…

given the choice, most decorators with a personal design itch would scratch it by moving from one house to another, exchanging one expertly completed realm for a new challenge, ad infinitum. That would not be Kit Kemp, the effervescent British interior designer who is also the creative director and cofounder, with her husband, Tim, of the eccentrically chic Firmdale Hotels, an international hospitality empire composed of 10 smart hostelries and eight fizzy bars and restaurants, stretching from London to New York City. “I’ve lived in other places before, but I’m going to stick with this one,” she explains. “I’m no quitter.” The address to which Kemp has pledged her devotion for 20 years and raised three daughters is a three-story, gray brick, vaguely medieval house on a cul-de-sac near Hyde…

Roman Alonso, a principal of Commune Design, was supposed to spend all of this past March in Japan, putting the finishing touches on the Ace Hotel Kyoto—one of the 24 winners of AD’s inaugural Great Design Hotel Awards (see page 32). In a sign of the times, the AD100 designer instead supervised the project’s installation from Los Angeles via lengthy FaceTime meetings. As Ace Hotel’s first outpost in Asia, soon to make its official debut, the hotel is a tour de force of East/West fusion, ingeniously conceived and executed by the progressive minds at Ace in collaboration with not only Commune but the acclaimed Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. “We tried to honor Kyoto’s history by evoking the scale and materials of the city’s vibrant street culture,” Kuma says of his…

Ace Hotel Kyoto KYOTO, JAPAN For its Japanese debut, Ace assembled a veritable dream team, tapping starchitect Kengo Kuma and the AD100 firm Commune Design to help transform what was once a telephone-company office into a temple to local craft (see page 92). acehotel.com Aman Kyoto KYOTO, JAPAN Nature and nurture collide at this exquisite property, set on 80 sylvan acres with moss-covered paths and ancient stones. A series of pavilions by the late architect Kerry Hill updates the Japanese vernacular for relaxing at its most refined. aman.com August ANTWERP, BELGIUM Part restoration, part reinvention—AD100 designer Vincent Van Duysen’s first hotel project masterfully transformed a former Augustinian convent into a spare yet cerebral sanctuary of guest rooms, gardens, spa facilities, and more. august-antwerp.com Austin Proper AUSTIN The latest hotel from…

At the age of eight, I was allowed to decorate my own bedroom. My family’s tract home in Indianapolis backed up to a cornfield, and the overall color scheme leaned heavily on blah/beige. I decided to buck the bland and go bold: olive-green walls, chocolate-brown shag carpeting—and a gold disco ball. In the years that followed, well into adulthood, that sensibility remained. I preferred bold rooms, collections of items, color and more color. My first house in Los Angeles had a prized teal (!) love seat (it was the ’80s; cut me some slack). And my second home, which the lovely and talented Dakota Johnson now inhabits (AD, April 2020), was a midcentury masterpiece designed by Carl Maston that I fixed up and filled with period-true swatches of saffron and…

“Big headboards are a fabulous opportunity to really enjoy a beautiful textile.” “Color makes me happy. Black-and-white is harder.”…