Innehållsförteckning för December 2023 från Architectural Digest

Earlier this year, when Lauren Santo Domingo arrived at Tiffany & Co. as the brand’s new artistic director for its home category, the first thing she did was research. Delving into the archives, she immersed herself in company lore, from its 1837 origin story through 20th-century reinventions by the likes of jewelry maestro Jean Schlumberger and Bean progenitor Elsa Peretti. But she also had her own creative sword to wield. “I asked if Tiffany had a crest,” recalls Santo Domingo, who has long collected antique European armorial ware, a form of traditional china emblazoned with a family’s coat of arms. When she discovered Tiffany did not, she says, “we began the process of creating one from scratch.” Her interpretation—now the basis of the Tiffany Crest tableware collection—celebrates brand iconography, with…

It’s a chaotic environment, but I like that,” Ryan Preciado says of Jose Auto Body, the East Los Angeles shop where he paints his sometimes functional sculptures. “We’re always moving things around. Cars come in and out. It keeps me from being too precious about what I’m making.” Whether he is working on an artwork or an automobile, the process is equally labor intensive, requiring coats upon coats followed by buffing and polishing. Recently, he applied the same color to a Toyota Hilux as he did to New Feeling (Baby Blue), an egg-shaped cabinet that is now on view at the Hammer Museum as part of the 2023 “Made in L.A.” biennial. It’s one of 12 pieces in the show by Preciado, who is of Chumash and Mexican heritage and…

as the in-demand architect for art institutions such as Hauser & Wirth and an ever-constant slew of private commissions stretching from Majorca to Mexico, it took Luis Laplace and his partner in life and business, Christophe Comoy, 15 years to find the time to fully renovate their own home, in Paris’s 9th arrondissement. The couple moved into the 2,000-square-foot apartment on the elegant Place Saint-Georges in 2007 and worked from here until they expanded their offices to the twin building next door, where their AD100 firm is now spread over three floors. Constructed in the Haussmannian style, much of their two-bedroom home retains its original flamboyance with a series of bombastic reception rooms decked out with herringbone floors, wainscoting, and soaring 11-foot ceilings with elaborate moldings. It’s in step with…

After the Moroccan-born French artist Nicola L. began sketching eyes in the late 1960s, it was her Belgian friend Marcel Broodthaers who helped her turn them into lamps. Broodthaers, who had been making artworks from thin, vacuum-formed plastic, brought Nicola to his Antwerp factory, where she produced an edition of 50visionary lights: A bulb encased by a blue, green, or brown iris, with a movable lid-shade, was mounted on a steel rod. Years later, in 2008, she would create pendants, table lamps, and sconces for Galerie Pierre Alain-Challier in Paris. The Eye Lamp joined Nicola’s ongoing series of body-furnishings—vinyl foot-sofas; a woman-shaped cabinet. “I refused to create sculptures that were not going to be used for something,” she explained of the pieces, likely made with help from her husband, Fred…

Step inside the London industrial-design workshop of Samuel Ross, and one thing immediately becomes clear: He really likes orange. Here, within the Brutalist walls of 180 Studios, it’s everywhere—the shade of a traffic cone—from his metal shelving to his model for the electric motorbike company Cake. Now that hue reappears in his new limited-edition faucet for Kohler, a prototype of which can be found amid the flotsam and jetsam of his workspace, in advance of its Design Miami debut. “People are used to seeing this color,” Ross explains. “It’s democratic in the way that it cuts through any type of environment. It carries an alertness, a vigilance.” It’s true: One’s eyes cannot help but park themselves on all things orange, be it the powder-coated steel base of his perforated-marble chair…

When contemporary, multidisciplinary artist Daniel Arsham was looking for a new home in Manhattan, he had one “big desire”: There had to be a garage. Arsham drives back and forth to his Long Island City studio every day so, he stresses, “the car is really important to me. I’m very particular, and the garage needs to be clean and protected.” Quite a tall order for NYC housing no matter the borough, but during the summer of 2022 it all clicked. A friend called Arsham to tell him about a place in SoHo—a former firehouse—that he had to go see right away. There was already an offer on it, but he just might be able to snag it. Intrigued, the artist ran over and jumped at the opportunity. Nothing else had…

Ralph Pucci is betting on Miami, specifically the burgeoning Wynwood neighborhood. “It’s not as commercial as South Beach and not quite as polished as the Design District. It has the right vibe for Pucci,” says the zeitgeist-surfing furniture impresario. Two years ago, after nearly a decade of doing business in the area, Pucci made a long-term commitment to Wynwood with the purchase of a 10,000-square-foot former warehouse, set to open as his Florida showroom during this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. The new location, situated alongside the home of the Margulies Collection, won’t be hard to find—a mural by designer Elizabeth Garouste, spanning the building’s entire 100-foot-wide façade, announces Pucci’s bold creative spirit in no uncertain terms. Next year, the ongoing mural program will feature the work of…

a polychrome stained-glass folding screen designed by the late visionary Italian architect and theorist Paolo Portoghesi inhabits a corner of the living room in Jonah Disend’s magical Hollywood Hills aerie. “I’ve been trying to place that screen for 15 years. Jonah is the first person I thought would really get it,” recalls Richard Petit of the AD100 design firm The Archers. “Jonah’s home became a repository for objects and ideas we’ve had for decades but never had the right client,” the designer adds. “Let’s just say he’s open to unusual things.” Great houses—the ones that fire the imagination of true aesthetes and aficionados—invariably arise from the union of an ambitious, artful designer and an equally inspired, invested client. For every John Fowler, there’s a Pauline de Rothschild; for every Eckart…

When this 18th-century reception room from Damascus first arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it came in 24 crates of architectural remnants, albeit with no photograph to guide reassembly. “It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle only we didn’t know how it should look,” recalls Linda Komaroff, LACMA’s curator of Islamic Art. “But it told us a lot about itself. We just had to hear what it had to say.” Richly decorated—with painted woodwork, gesso relief, tin and brass leaf, Arabic inscriptions, and stone inlay—the interior would have been the centerpiece of its Ottoman-era home, constructed at a time of economic prosperity. The house survived until 1978 when the room was disassembled, traveling to Beirut then London before ultimately being acquired by LACMA in 2014. By…