Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2023 från Architectural Digest

“I am inspired by the past, so embracing the history of the house was important to me…. I wanted to preserve as much of the house as possible.”—Aerin Lauder Palm Beach is certainly one of creative force Aerin Lauder’s happy places; I’m fortunate to have visited her there and witnessed the ultimate Manhattanite barefoot and relaxed in her oceanfront element. Aerin’s legendary grandmother Estée Lauder maintained a beautiful estate (AD, May 2017) where Aerin grew up spending time with her family and eventually her own husband and children. It’s a bit of a surprise, then, when despite her deep roots and passion for the locale, Lauder emphasizes, “I’ve never had a home of my own in Palm Beach.” So when the romantic limestone 1930s house across the street from her…

Jae Joo NEW YORK CITY When Joo opened her firm in 2017, she did so with an unusual line on her résumé: opera conservatory. And yet she sees harmonies between the disciplines of music and design. Both, she explains, involve “mixing old and new, lots of teamwork, and collaborating with experts in their fields.” Her eclectic interiors, often historic renovations, eschew anything “too precious, pretty, or predictable” in favor of understatement and comfort. “I think about what mood I want,” she muses. With forthcoming projects in the Hudson Valley, Connecticut, and Manhattan, including her own Tribeca home (pictured), Joo continues to creatively sing. jaejoodesigns.com —MADELEINE LUCKEL Light and Dwell PORTLAND, OREGON Light and Dwell may be based in Oregon, but the studio’s reach extends across the country. Cofounded in 2016…

It was Florence Knoll’s request for “a chair like a basket full of pillows” that spawned Eero Saarinen’s 1948 Womb, the now famous sculptural seat that cradles its sitter in a gentle cocoon. But you might call MoMA’s 1941 Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition the moment of conception. It was here that Saarinen and Charles Eames, colleagues at Cranbrook Academy of Art, submitted a suite of furniture that included curving chairs, molded from plywood. Expensive and hard to make, the designs, which won the competition, never made it into production. But a few years later, when Knoll, cofounder of the eponymous American furniture manufacturer, desired a spacious seat that did not dictate a single position, she and Saarinen revisited the concept. Molded plywood wasn’t strong enough to support the…

“I am inspired by the past,” Lauder avows, “so embracing the history of the house was important to me.” Two separate interviews, two different days, a single word repeated: magical. That’s the term that Aerin Lauder, the designer, uses to describe her new getaway in Palm Beach, which she just moved into a couple of months ago. It’s also the word that the AD100 interior designer Stephen Sills, a longtime friend who handled the decors in collaboration with Lauder, uses to describe the project in general. “It’s an intelligent house,” he explains. “A pretty house with a beautiful layout, a romantic history, and lovely gardens, like an enchanting French pavilion.” Lauder, whose parents live across the street—“close, but not too close,” she jokes—had been captivated by the place since she…

How many of us swore to ourselves that when we grew up, we wouldn’t furnish our houses the same way our parents did? Call it a declaration of decorating independence—the inalienable right of each new generation to reject chintz, midcentury modern, or whatever furniture Mom and Dad picked out back in the day. Married couple Kevin and Nahal Danesh admit that for them, this is absolutely the case. Both born in Iran, as young children they immigrated with their respective families to Los Angeles, where they grew up in the area’s Persian American Jewish community. They were introduced by mutual friends during their senior year of college (he was at UCLA, she was at USC), and, says Nahal, “we’ve basically been together ever since.” Later, as a married couple feathering…

In Michael Arad’s glorious memorial fountains, Davis Brody the 22 years since the World Trade Center was destroyed, the site has gained some spectacular architecture, including Bond’s subterranean museum, and Santiago Calatrava’s show stopper, the spiky transportation hub known as the Oculus. One more piece of the puzzle will be in place this September, when the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) opens to the public. The building, designed by Joshua Ramus of REX, is at once restrained and exuberant: a simple translucent box, clad in heavily veined Portuguese marble, that glows like an elegant lantern. “We wanted the building to be respectful,” Ramus says. “It couldn’t distract from the memorial. Yet we wanted to give a hint of the creative activity inside.” Ramus has been working toward this moment for…

Still only in his 40s, designer Rafael de Cárdenas has already amassed an impressive and slick portfolio that includes a Madison Avenue flagship for Baccarat, an English estate’s soaring pool pavilion with a pair of corkscrew waterslides (AD, November 2017), and an ultrahip showroom for boho-chic fashion designer Ulla Johnson. But could de Cárdenas devise a stylish yet livable apartment for a growing family? “Many of the projects we’re associated with aren’t super family-friendly,” de Cárdenas admits. But his work on the SoHo apartment of Jonathan Perrelli, who works in NYC real estate, and Yasmina Jacobs, an entrepreneur and marketing professional, plus their three young daughters—not to mention two dogs—shows his firm was up to the task. “Here, first and foremost,” he says, “the family-friendliness dictated everything to a strong…

Flour. Water. Paper. Those three simple ingredients—whipped into papier-mâché and molded into ornamental forms—have done wonders throughout the history of the decorative arts, stepping in as a lightweight and low-cost fix when other materials wouldn’t do. (Just ask Marie Antoinette, who employed the material at the Versailles mini theater where she performed for friends.) Today, the fantastical but underutilized technique is getting a 21st-century refresh at Casa Gusto, the beloved West Palm Beach antiques store. There, proprietors Cris Briger and her sons, Charles Peed and Augie Briger, have transformed a tiny room into a spellbinding feat of artisanal genius, its tiled ceiling, paneled walls, and pomegranate relief all realized in nothing more than papier-mâché. The installation serves as an immersive calling card for the brand’s new collection of wall and…

Every homeowner has a fantasy. For interior designer Bryan Graybill and his husband, Daniel Dokos, an attorney, that fantasy was a 19th-century warehouse that had been transformed into a domestic retreat. But no such structure existed on the waterfront property they purchased in Sag Harbor, New York. There stood only a 1950s house with seven-foot-high ceilings, uncomfortably low windows, and a number of awkward additions. “We thought we could just modify it,” recalls Graybill. Instead—or rather, of course—those straightforward ambitions evolved into a holistic yet backward-glancing reimagining of the home on its cinder-block foundations. As the couple discovered, a warehouse had in fact once occupied the property, which was traversed by an elevated railroad from the 1880s to the 1950s. Photographs of the demolished edifice were unearthed in a local…

It is no accident that Melanie Charlton Fowler’s country retreat, nestled at the base of a forested mountain in northwest Connecticut, retains an unmissable storybook quality. Its narrative potential is what initially drew Fowler, founder of the organizational design firm Clos-ette, and her husband, a health care executive, to the 200-acre estate that encompassed a main house, horse barn, and pondside fishing cabin. It’s also why they chose to take the more arduous and costly route of painstaking renovations instead of simply tearing things down and rebuilding. “I knew that this was going to turn into more than we bargained for,” she confides, “but I really wanted each part of the property to be special.” The pastoral setting, as well as a hint of the unexpected, inspired AD100 designer Virginia…