Innehållsförteckning för February 2025 från Architectural Digest

I try to trick myself into thinking it’s the 18th century,” says the artist known simply as Lukas the Illustrator, speaking from his studio on Westport Island, Maine. To a soundtrack of orchestral chants or sea shanties, fanciful motifs flow from his old-school dip pen, conjuring scenes that hover between architectural ruins, theater sets, and sylvan dreamscapes. “Lately, I’ve been fixated on men riding scallop shells and fighting dragons,” he reports. Lukas grew up in Connecticut, traipsing through the forest behind his childhood home. He pursued art for a simple reason: It would allow him to spend time outside drawing from nature. He hadn’t yet graduated from Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied illustration, when his friend the fashion designer Harris Reed got him a job creating packaging…

Historically speaking, trunk shows have always been moments to introduce luxury treasures to fresh eyes, as traveling designers took their wares on the road. Today, Louis Vuitton has put its own ambitious spin on that tradition in midtown Manhattan, wrapping its Fifth Avenue flagship (now under renovation) in a temporary façade that mimics a stack of its iconic monogrammed luggage. But at the brand’s newest Manhattan location, just east on 57th Street, there are more feats to behold. Designed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, four towers of iconic Courrier Lozine trunks rise to over 52 feet, each totem bearing a different pattern and structural configuration. One twists, another zigzags. The remaining rotate and stagger. “Are they hanging? Are they balanced?” muses Shigematsu, a regular collaborator of the brand. “We wanted…

The Milanese pied-à-terre that Giampiero Tagliaferri designed for a young art collector offers a mini master class in Italian modern design. The idiosyncratic duplex penthouse is chockablock with treasures by a pantheon of 20th-century design titans on the order of Mario Bellini, Osvaldo Borsani, Angelo Mangiarotti, Gae Aulenti, Gio Ponti, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Joe Colombo, Tito Agnoli, and others. Works by laudable but lesser-known talents—Pia Guidetti Crippa, Giovanni Travasa, Gigi Sabadin—pepper the heady mix. All those melodious names sound like toothsome items on an Italian menu: “I’ll have a plate of Mangiarotti with a glass of your best Gio Ponti.” Delicious. But there’s much more to the apartment than a mere accumulation of objets de vertu. Tagliaferri has lovingly evoked the spirit of those avant-garde Italian interiors of the…

to woo their clients, decorators regularly come equipped with fabric swatches, tile samples, and other tactile hints at rooms to come. Darren Jett goes for an even more full-sensory experience. As part of his presentations, the designer prepares a soundtrack that embodies not only the interiors he’s envisioning but also the lifestyle he hopes unfolds there. In the case of the Manhattan loft that he recently renovated for finance executive Christopher Chiou, that playlist included disco hits, underground dance tracks, and George Michael classics—songs that capture urbane gay abandon. “Every project should feel like a movie,” Jett reflects. “This character felt close to my world. I knew his plot.” Chiou bought the apartment, a classic SoHo artist’s loft, in 2021, amid the city’s pandemic real estate slump. At the time,…

Nashville seems an unlikely place to discover anything even remotely akin to a Japanese kissa bar. A kissa—or, more traditionally, a jazz kissa—is a type of café that initially sprang up in Japan in the 1920s as a communal place for people to drink, socialize, and listen to vinyl records. “They’re typically very intimate, casual, DIY spaces, sort of cobbled together,” explains Roman Alonso of the AD100 firm Commune Design, which recently completed work on 888, a combination kissa and sushi restaurant improbably tucked in the base of the JW Marriott Nashville hotel tower. The brainchild of Harrison Soffer, a principal at the hospitality and real estate development firm Turnberry, 888 celebrates the spirit of the kissa along with the fertile design heritage of the country in which it originated.…

The Chicago-based interior designer Summer Thornton has built her name as a virtuosic mixer of color and pattern. But at times she must reserve her most daring concepts for herself. “I’m taking the ideas my clients won’t do,” she says, reflecting on the recent renovation of her own Chicago office, an 1877 Victorian house in Lincoln Park. After renting the top floor for several years, she decided to buy and restore the entire building—taking over the ground-floor bridal shop, digging a fortified foundation, and making updates in two phases amid client commissions. “It was my last priority,” she concedes, calling the two-year process “a cobbler-with-no-shoes situation.” Intended as both a showcase for client meetings and a home base for Thornton and her team of 15, the space couldn’t fall a…

A photo stylist makes what looks good in three dimensions look even better in two. Stylists don’t simply work with a photographer to document a room, they try to capture its essence, doing whatever it takes to transform a space into captivating and memorable images. And few do that better than Mieke ten Have, who over the past decade and a half has worked with virtually every top interior designer and photographer. Ten Have brought a fresh approach to the images she worked on, which are color-drenched and evocative, perhaps best exemplified in her unconventional use of flowers. So startling were her arrangements—loose, blowsy, full of grasses and greens—that early on one of her editors asked her if she had used dead flowers for a shoot. (Okay, that was me).…

a unifying spirit flows through Charbrook, the rural Massachusetts homestead, workspace, and design lab of Lauren and Stephen Stimson, married partners behind landscape architecture firm Stimson. Gently rolling acreage unfolds like a necessary conversation—a little messy at times but deeply satisfying. Where sharp lines impose order, nature blooms to blur them, and rangy garden beds encroach on clean modern structures. Even the name evokes balance, a flame’s “char” meeting the cold, clear rush of a “brook.” “This tension between wild and groomed is a sweet spot,” says Stephen, who traces his sensibilities to mentors like Dan Kiley and Michael Van Valkenburgh. “Modernists with a capital M,” Lauren interjects, noting she came up under “ecologists and environmentalists saying, ‘We don’t need a row of trees. We need a giant stormwater basin…

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“I wanted the interiors to have a bit of an American folk-art feel.”—Mieke ten Have “I knew Mieke had impeccable taste. I had become enamored with her style.”—Coco Quinlan…

Fernanda Pompermayer “My assistant says I’m like a tornado, picking up everything around me and putting it in my work,” says Pompermayer. There is certainly an element of chaos to her vessels and furnishings, which mix clay, glass, resin, and more in collage-like compositions. Her own path has been similarly intuitive. Born in southern Brazil, she moved to Latvia in 2018 for a residency at the Rothko Museum before heading to London, where she worked as a graphic designer. Pandemic travel restrictions, however, left her stuck in her hometown, a moment she seized for a career pivot. “I really wanted to create with my hands,” she recalls. So she ordered a bunch of clay and began testing out the Japanese nerikomi method, mixing pigments to create patterns. Seeking a larger,…

Peace Accord According to Jain mythology, the Samavasarana temple brought the faithful closer to enlightenment through its tiered architectural forms—each ascending space marking the accumulation of knowledge on the path toward enlightenment. Today, that spiritual vernacular endures in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where Serie Architects have completed its own contemporary homage: the new Raj Sabhagruh, centerpiece of the nearly 250-acre Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram. Set atop a crescent-shaped hill, the building rises from the 5,000-seat auditorium at its base, a column-free expanse distinguished by its monumental concrete arches. At its crown, meanwhile, a soaring 300-person meditation hall glows like a lantern thanks to over 1,000 integrated pin lights. And outside, the building’s angled façades bear some 800,000 bricks crafted from salvaged marble, their hand-chiseled surfaces yielding subtle texture. Whether…