Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2025 från Architectural Digest

Living with antiques shouldn’t feel like living in a museum—just ask Patrick McGrath. “The challenge and fun is displaying them in a way that feels contemporary,” the designer reflects. That was the impetus for his new by-appointment gallery: an airy space (also his office) on the seventh floor of Manhattan’s Cable Building. Here, a freshly stained George III table might mingle with Roman statuary and a set of Biedermeier chairs recovered in black linen. Elsewhere, an Art Deco daybed cozies up to a Chinese altar table and a Venetian capriccio. McGrath likens such juxtapositions to alchemy. “I’m experimenting with how objects can assume new character,” he says, noting that the mix also spans vintage works and exhibitions by living talents—including Paul Morehouse, Silvia Prada, and Myles Oxenford. “It’s about creating…

Olive oil is part of our DNA,” says the Madrid-based designer Jorge Penadés, who grew up in the Andalusian city of Málaga, one of the world’s leading suppliers. “You see it in the food, the culture, the landscape.” When he learned that many native trees, which grow in clusters, were being uprooted to accommodate contemporary harvesting equipment, he wondered how to make use of the sacrificed plants—and particularly their root systems which, often bigger than trunks and branches, were being sold as firewood. “Technically and aesthetically, they have really nice properties,” Penadés says of the dense hunks, many of them more than 100 years old, that he now buys, dries, and slices into slabs. Since roots often grow around small stones, he initially struggled to find carpenters willing to risk…

If you think about the woodshop, the plank is where everything begins,” says designer Simone Farresin of Formafantasma, the interdisciplinary firm, now based between Milan and Rotterdam, he founded with Andrea Trimarchi in 2009. For their latest body of work, the duo started there as well, using timber to reconsider what Farresin calls “domestic archetypes.” The results now appear in “Formation,” the studio’s first solo gallery show in the United States, on view through August 1 at Friedman Benda in New York City. Building off that simple unit, the pair has created 10 limited-edition pieces of furniture and lighting that pay homage to classic American craftsmanship, including the live-edge slabs of George Nakashima. Whereas one angular seat nods to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin 1 chair, other pared-back forms—and the choice…

I wanted it to feel like an old cigar-slash-’70s shag pad,” says actor Olivia Cooke with a laugh, recalling the unconventional brief she gave her interior designers, Lisa Jones and Ruby Kean of the London- and New York–based firm Atelier LK. “But then I also wanted it to have this sort of Japanese-slash-château vibe.” That last bit feels particularly fitting for Cooke, who most know as Queen Alicent Hightower, the cunning second wife of King Viserys I Targaryen in HBO’s hit series House of the Dragon. If her freewheeling mood board comes off as indecision, it isn’t. Cooke knows what she wants. In fact, her house hunt was hardly a hunt. This 1860s Victorian in east London is the only place she saw. Call it an actor’s intuition, but she…

In 1946, the young French artist Roger Capron moved to Vallauris, a small village along the Côte d’Azur, where he took up the local specialty: ceramics. (Pablo Picasso would arrive two years later to do the same.) At his workshop, l’Atelier Callis, Capron fired earthenware lamps, accessories, and sculptures. By the late 1960s, he had expanded into larger furnishings, including a series of low, stoneware-topped tables. The early iterations featured small tiles that were sometimes embedded with botanicals, but as the series progressed the motifs became more abstract and bold. “These pieces show a move toward more graphic, geometric compositions,” explains Hugues Magen, of New York City’s Magen H Gallery. The tables—solid oak or elm structures with rounded edges and hand-glazed ceramic tops—were often, rather mysteriously, called the Shogun or…

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Nina Freudenberger was high up in the Italian Alps, photographing a project for her 2023 book, when her husband, Mike Larocca, phoned to say he had found their dream summer house on the far East End of Long Island. “Just go for it,” the Los Angeles–based interior designer remembers telling him. The property that Larocca, a film and television producer and self-described “King of Zillow,” had discovered was indeed a rare find: a contemporary residence on the shore of Lake Montauk. Given Freudenberger’s expertise transforming everything from ski chalets to surf shacks, the project felt destined to be. Five bedrooms and eight baths in total, the residence features a massive lawn rolling toward the water’s edge—an anachronism that would not be permitted today. With two young sons, that green space…

When Christie Ward and Staver Gray, founders of the New York City–based interior design firm Ward + Gray, began developing their own line of handblown-glass lighting, they knew exactly where to produce it. “Our first thought was to work with the family-run company from Venice who we’ve collaborated with for years,” Ward says of the Italian atelier that has long produced custom pieces for their residential and hospitality projects. But the duo also found inspiration in the Lido, the seven-mile Venetian barrier island, famed for its laid-back resort feel. Explains Ward: “It has such an interesting juxtaposition of coastal style and historic charm.” Atmospheric and nostalgic scenes from the isle now inform the collection’s palette and silhouettes. The Capanna table lamp, with its domed top and fluted base, nods to…

Any designer or architect worth their salt will tell you that having an inspired client, wholly engaged in the conceptual and aesthetic underpinnings of a commission, is an enormous boon to the prospect of original creative expression. Just ask Matthew Leverone of Leverone Design and architect Greg Warner of Walker Warner, San Francisco–based collaborators who recently returned to a project on the Hawaiian island of Maui to build a new guesthouse for just such a client. “She gave us a fully articulated narrative about how she wanted the new structure to connect with the main house but also offer a variety of different sensations. She gave us plenty of evocative touchstones—Brazilian music, Aperol spritzes, Georg Baselitz bronze hands, perfect jeans—but her primary concern was the experience, how the house and…

Memory Palace Our homes leave their mark on each of us, though perhaps none quite so profoundly—and meticulously—as in the case of Do Ho Suh. For more than two decades, the Korean-born artist has mined his past and present living spaces to create spellbinding works that interrogate themes of domesticity and memory, challenging viewers to unpack their own relationships to both. The sweep of that enduring inquiry is now on view in “Walk the House,” a blockbuster retrospective at London’s Tate Modern museum. For one installation, the artist revisited his childhood abode in Seoul, wrapping the actual edifice in mulberry paper, completing a rubbing, and then reconstructing the domicile using aluminum rods. Another feat (Nest/s, 2024, pictured) re-creates corridors and entries from his apartments in diaphanous fabric at 1:1 scale,…