June 7, 2022

Words: Fred A. Bernstein

Photography: James Ewing

Architecture Research Office Creates a Soothing Manhattan Headquarters for Mattress Maker Casper

Casper, the mattress maker that calls itself the Sleep Company, wouldn’t want to do anything jarring. “It was important to present a relaxing environment,” says Kim Yao, a principal of Architecture Research Office, which designed the company’s lower Manhattan headquarters. “Our use of curves and arches helps set the tone.” There is no showroom in the space, but as Yao’s co-principal Adam Yarinsky points out, “We’re presenting the brand through its workplace.”

Luckily ARO had already designed a product for FilzFelt called Plank, a pillowlike acoustical panel covered in felt. An oversize version of it now surrounds Casper’s reception desk. Beyond reception, ARO had to provide space for 300 or so workers—who are there on a hybrid basis—while maintaining the quality of softness associated with the brand.
There are few private offices, in part because the views from the headquarters, which occupies 37,500 square feet on the 39th and 40th floors of 3 World Trade Center by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, are as spectacular as the sunlight pouring in. With the floor-to-ceiling glass entirely exposed, everyone at Casper gets to enjoy those amenities. Away from the windows, personal workstations alternate with pods, or collaboration booths, that are about 5 feet high. “When you’re in one, you feel very sheltered,” Yao notes.

Conference rooms and telephone booths hug the building’s core. Upper and lower common areas include a café big enough for all-company meetings. The new stairway connecting them, sheathed in solid white oak planks, contains a circular felt-lined cutout for somebody to lounge in.

Casper wants its workers to be aware of how it presents products to consumers, so retail vignettes pepper the space, including one near reception. Other furniture, which ARO chose in conjunction with Casper’s in-house design team, is a mix of pieces from Muuto and Herman Miller.

“Our goal was a very direct connection to the architecture,” Yarinsky says, explaining the decision to expose the concrete floor slabs throughout and leave mechanical equipment visible overhead. Also hanging from the ceiling are boat-shape acoustical panels, covered in felt and targeted by LED uplights. The panels bring noise down to a soothing level, which is exactly what a sleep company deserves.

PRODUCT SOURCES

FROM FRONT

geiger: armchairs (lounge)

carvart: workstations (of­fice area)

vode: custom linear fixtures

softline: armchairs

Interface: carpet tile

c.r. laurence: doors (entry)

rockwood: door pulls

THROUGHOUT

muuto: dining chairs, dining tables, sofas, ot­to­mans, rugs

kvadrat: sofa fabric, ottoman fabric

filzfelt: felt, acoustical panels

herman miller: high tables, task chairs, desks

Shinnoki: paneling

amerlux; flos: recessed ceiling fixtures

hdlc: lighting consultant

longman lindsey: acoustical consultant

tmt: audiovisual consul­tant

benhar office interiors: furniture sup­plier

wsp: structural engineer

ama: mep

metropolitan architec­tural woodwork: wood­work

clune construction: general contractor

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May 12, 2022

Words: Fred A. Bernstein

Photography: Michael Moran/Otto

Bates Masi + Architects and David Kleinberg Design Associates Create a Contemporary East Hampton Estate

2022 Best of Year Winner for Beach House

Well before the East End of Long Island, New York, became known for shingle-style mega mansions, its residential vernacular was the saltbox, a simple two-story volume with a gable roof that comes closer to the ground in the back than in the front. Bates Masi + Architects decided it was the right form to give a new 11,450-square-foot weekend house for a couple and their family on a large plot of land in East Hampton. The clients asked for three semi-attached buildings, one for themselves and one each for their grown children (and their future progeny). Firm principal and Interior Design Hall of Fame member Paul Masi gravitated to the saltbox shape, so that the structures would feel protected from the elements in the back but wide open in the front, where the higher rooflines accommodate two stories of windows, all offering spectacular Atlantic Ocean views.

Masi’s other big move was to arrange the three pavilions in an L-shape, which provides a sense of enclosure around the yard and swimming pool. The saltboxes are joined by glass connectors, but only at ground level; each has its own staircase to second-floor bedrooms and baths. The architect relied almost entirely on five materials: cedar, which clads most of the exterior; oak, for much of the interior; limestone, for floors, countertops, terraces, and some external walls; darkened bronze, for various kinds of trim; and, of course, glass. “We had to limit the palette because the house is so big,” Masi explains. “You lose the essence of it if there’s too much going on.” This ethos harks back to the early 1980s, when firm founder and fellow Hall of Famer Harry Bates—now 94 and retired—built modest beach houses out of whatever he could find in local lumber yards, a necessary discipline that became part of the firm’s DNA. When Masi joined Bates in 1998, he began devising ways to keep things simple even as clients demanded more and more luxury.

This couple, intending that the property becomes a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation, wanted to make sure it would last. That was fine with Masi, who thought in centuries rather than decades while designing it. “We put a lot of redundancy into the building envelope,” he explains, noting that the house is sheathed in two layers of shingle-like boards with gutters and leaders sandwiched between them to keep water away from the weathertight shell. The cedar is fastened to the structure with custom stainless-steel clips that don’t penetrate the wood, avoiding the damage nails or screws could cause the boards when they expand and contract.

The architect didn’t make things easy for himself. Exterior walls and roofs, identically clad, meet without even a whiff of an overhang. Exposing the transition from one surface to another means there’s nowhere to hide even the smallest flaw. “It’s harder than it looks to pull that off,” Masi admits. “Everything has to be perfect.” That includes four “light chimneys,” his term for a series of massive bronze-clad skylights that project through the roof. They ensure light “cascades down through the stairwells,” he continues, an effect that’s enhanced by open-tread staircases hanging on thin vertical steel-and-oak struts that descend from the second-floor ceiling. The stairwells double as ideally illuminated display areas for larger pieces of art (the couple are passionate collectors). And where the house turns a 90-degree angle, the nearly cubic 18-by-18-foot glass-enclosed connector space serves as a sculpture gallery. Delicate cedar-slat screens provide necessary shade, while large, operable windows make it easy getting lage artworks in and out of the space.

The clients brought in Interior Design Hall of Fame member David Kleinberg to furnish the house. The founding partner of David Kleinberg Design Associates, who has worked on multiple residences for the same couple before, softened the vast main living area with a custom beige wool rug. Much of the furniture is upholstered in shades of gray, including custom club chairs and sofas and a pair of French 1950’s oak lounge chairs. The seating is gathered around two Fredrikson Stallard cast-acrylic coffee tables that sit on the rug like massive chunks of ice. A patinated-bronze and polished-copper suspended light sculpture by Niamh Barry adds a note of drama overhead.

But Kleinberg has no desire to hog credit for this house. “It’s clear that architecture was the highest priority,” he notes. “The artworks were second in importance. And then came the furnishings, which were to be laid back, relaxed, and supportive of the architecture and art.” What Kleinberg doesn’t mention is that many of the pieces he has so carefully curated could well become heirlooms in their own right.

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See Interior Design’s Best of Year Winners and Honorees

Explore must-see projects and products that took home high honors.

2022 WINNERS

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PROJECT TEAM

katherine dalene weil, nick darin, nick braaksma, hung fai tang: bates masi + architects

lance duckett scott: david kleinberg design associates

orsman design: lighting consultant

steven maresca: structural engineer

men at work construction: general contractor

awg art advisory: art consultant

perry guillot: landscape consultant

PRODUCT SOURCES

FROM FRONT

maison gerard: oak lounge chairs, light sculpture (living area)

david gill gallery: coffee tables

Patterson Flynn: custom rug

joseph walsh studio: custom table (dining area)

victoria + albert: tub (bathroom)

apparatus: pendant fixtures (kitchen)

wolf: range (kitchen)

vent-a-hood: ventilation hood

sub-zero: refrigerator

bernd goeckler: glass table (sculpture gallery)

THROUGHOUT

bybee stone company: limestone flooring and cladding

Keller Minimal Windows: windows and doors

The post Bates Masi + Architects and David Kleinberg Design Associates Create a Contemporary East Hampton Estate appeared first on Interior Design.

November 4, 2021

Words: Fred A. Bernstein

Photography: Iwan Baan

SelgasCano Pair Preservation With Innovation for Their Weekend Home in Spain

The married architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano have become known for their luminous buildings, mostly made from translucent materials in bright colors and bulbous shapes. These include Second Home coworking spaces in Los Angeles, London, and Lisbon, Portugal; a school in Nairobi; and rec centers and meeting halls throughout their native Spain. But the couple’s weekend house—decidedly rustic, with barely a smooth surface in sight—couldn’t be more different from those widely published projects. Does that portend a change in architectural direction for SelgasCano?

“We always try to work with what we find,” responds Selgas, reeling off a list of projects in which the couple used existing elements. In the case of the weekend house, in Cáceres province, a few hours west of Madrid, those elements included three farm buildings—a pair of chicken coops and a small stable for goats and donkeys—closely clustered around a rudimentary two-story cottage. The cottage didn’t have a source of heat—not a fireplace or even a chimney. When the previous owners would build a fire to keep warm, they did it on a stone in the middle of the kitchen floor, eventually blackening the woodwork overhead.

Over the four-year renovation, Selgas and Cano did install a fireplace and stoves, but other­wise they changed as little as they could. One of their main interventions involved lowering floors, by excavating, and raising ceilings to get a bit more headroom. “We can’t enter like chickens,” the 6-foot 4-inch Selgas says. But when the local contractors thought the ceilings should be 8 feet or higher, he demurred. A bit under 7 feet was enough, lest the character of the buildings be destroyed. “The existing scale was really nice.”

Still, where roofs were raised above the tops of existing walls, in the cottage and stable, there were gaps the couple filled with sheets of acrylic, giving the structures newfound lightness. They also chiseled holes into some of the masonry walls, “to bring in additional sunshine,” Cano says. Acrylic was cut into panes that fit those irregularly shaped openings. Inside, while much of the woodwork and masonry were left in their natural state, some sections were painted white in order to bounce light around.

They added rooms within the existing footprint, mostly using salvaged materials, including some of the blackened wood from the cottage’s original first-floor ceiling. “It’s part of the history of the house,” Cano notes. Much of the design work was extemporaneous. The contractors, skilled as they were, weren’t comfortable working from plans. “So we typically would go there with them and say, ‘Let’s put a wall up to this height,’ and ‘Let’s install a wardrobe there,’ and then we’d choose the wood,” Selgas explains. He and Cano supervised construction together. And they did so forgivingly. The house, Cano says, “wasn’t meant to have perfect anything.”

The couple’s own bedroom, largely below-grade, had been one of the chicken coops. Its new roof is a concrete slab covered with soil and native plants. Puncturing a thick sidewall are two unusual windows. The first was made from a stump that one of the builders was saving for just the right project. The other was a kind of barrel, built to be installed a few degrees off horizontal. Selgas and Cano planned to use it to see mountain peaks, but the builders installed it upside down. “So now you see the lawn,” Selgas reports. “It’s almost like a piece of sculpture.” The other chicken coop and the former stable became the compound’s two guest bedrooms.

In the cottage, the original kitchen was pretty much open to the elements. “We kept much of that feeling,” Selgas continues. But he and Cano created a structure out of rebar to support the living and dining areas in the renovated upstairs. They also used rebar to frame the new stairway. And they broke a hole through the wall, “So the kitchen would have a relationship with the outside table, where we typically have dinner,” Cano says. Asked how they made the hole, she adds, “carefully and by hand.”

To complement the couple’s modern and vintage pieces by the likes of Monica Förster, Dirk Van Sliedrecht, and Hans Wegner, the builders made custom furniture on-site. “They have the time, the patience, to do things you can’t do in places where labor is expensive,” Selgas says. He said the price of the renovation was about $50 a square foot, or about $65,000 altogether—a fraction of what it would have cost in any major city.

After finishing converting the original buildings, Selgas and Cano decided they needed space to keep garden tools and patio furniture. An existing stone wall became one side of their planned storage building. They added the other walls, one of which is punctuated by yellow doors, and a wooden ceiling (made of the formwork from the project’s concrete pour)—perfectly adequate for a storeroom. Except that while working on it, Selgas says, “We noticed the incredible views and decided to transform it into a guest house,” albeit one that’s far simpler, spatially and structurally, than the main house. (A portion of this new structure was reserved for storage.)

Asked what she likes best about her family’s weekend compound, Cano answers, “It’s the setting. It’s nature.” That includes a rushing stream they use for swimming and an Eden of fig, olive, orange, and lemon trees. In fact, as the plantings around, and on, the house grow in, “The buildings are disappearing,” she says happily.

For his part, Selgas, an environmentalist, is particularly pleased by the project’s modesty. “Wasting space is a problem for our society,” he says. “We should only create what we’re going to use.” Like his and Cano’s gently upgraded buildings, he adds, “The future will be more about renovations than new things.”

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project team

luismi quintana: builder

rubén criba: carpenter

product sources from front

cisal: sink fittings (kitchen).

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Mexico City has long been Joy’s favorite place to visit. “It has a lot to offer in terms of both culture and emotion,” he observes as a fan of the capital’s burgeoning art and architecture scenes. So when a Mexican developer asked him to design a five-story townhouse for a site in the upscale Polanco neighborhood, he jumped at the chance.

Comprising a pair of duplex apartments stacked on a ground-floor garage, the 40-foot-wide, 60-foot-deep building is roughly the same size and shape as its neighbors. But in most other ways, it couldn’t be more different. The other facades on the street are flat; for contrast, Joy wanted to give his house front “a deep 3-D quality.” In fact, he created a kind of giant sculpture by pouring concrete into primavera-wood forms, a construction method used for the entire building.

“Some people have a negative attitude toward concrete,” Joy says, acknowledging the common perception of the Brutalist material as harsh and cold. “The concrete  here is soft”—rich with the imprinted texture of the wood planks—“and a very warm color. Mexicans do the best concrete in the world.”

The townhouse’s sculptural form arose from Joy’s habitual desire to bring the outdoors in. “When I ask people why they hired me, they say, ‘We knew you’d bring nature into every room,’” reports the architect, who grew up in Maine but moved to Arizona 34 years ago. “But how do you do that on a super-urban site?”

Torso Volcanico, a pigmented-concrete sculpture by Mexico’s Tezontle Studio, presides over the penthouse terrace. Photography by Joe Fletcher.

Joy’s answer was to puncture the building both vertically and horizontally. He started with three lightwells, which bring sunshine (and starlight) all the way to the ground floor. (“I’m really conscious of celestial connections,” he notes.) Since the shafts serve both apartments, where there are privacy concerns, Joy coated the window glass with opaque film. A lush garden courtyard sits at the base of each lightwell; additional plants grow in boxes built into the shaft walls or in baskets hanging from ropes threaded with local stones.

Next, Joy created terraces for both the lower and upper units. The penthouse terrace, open to the sky, is expansive enough to accommodate a firepit and a small reflecting pool with a totemic sculpture at its center. But it’s not only the outdoor spaces—2,000 square feet in all—that connect to the surroundings. Since the front of the building is the only facade with exterior fenestration, Joy made the most of the windows, positioning them so that they frame views of specific neighboring trees wherever possible. And one window is pointed at the Parroquia de San Agustin—a strikingly austere, reinforced-concrete church designed by Leonardo Noriega Stavoli in the 1940s—less than a mile away.

The common stair has a powder-coated-steel center partition and a custom brushed-brass handrail. Photography by Joe Fletcher.

Entry from the street is through a blackened-steel gate, detailed with brass inserts, that leads into the  largest of the three courtyards. The adjacent stairs to the apartments wind around a center partition of blackened steel, which Joy has given a traditional powder coating. A brushed-brass handrail forms a softly glowing ribbon against the inky metal backdrop.

In the apartments, Joy uses oak planking for ceilings and floors, which not only links those surfaces to the board-formed walls but also further mellows what would otherwise be all-concrete spaces. Built-in cabinetry and doors are made of oak, too, while kitchen counters and bathroom vanities and walls are travertine.

Lush vegetation fills the courtyard at the base of the south lightwell. Photography by Joe Fletcher.

When it came time to furnish the townhouse, Joy’s team didn’t have to look far. There are a few European pieces in the mix but—given the high tariffs on imports and the resourcefulness of Mexican craftsmen—it made sense to have much of the furniture made locally. “We collaborated with local fabricators to make sure most of the pieces reflect the essence and culture of Mexico,” says Studio Rick Joy senior interior designer, Marybel Rodriguez Zepeda. The architect designed some of the hardware, including handles and hinges, which was also manufactured in the area. So were the large steel-casement windows, many of which feature nearly square panes.

Joy continues to expand his practice beyond the desert houses that made his reputation. His current projects include another Mexican foray—a resort north of Puerto Vallarta, for which he has designed more than 100 separate buildings—as well as two villas in Ibiza, Spain. Surprisingly, he has only one current commission in what was formerly his bread-and-butter state, Arizona. But he expects that to change momentarily. “Projects,” Joy says, “tend to come in waves.”

Keep scrolling to view more images from the project >

The penthouse dining area’s table and chairs are walnut and oak, respectively. Photography by Joe Fletcher.

Project Team: Marybel Rodriguez Zepeda, Philipp Neher, Natalia Zieman Hayes, Christopher Pela, Heiman Luk, Claudia Kappl Joy: Studio Rick Joy. Frb Arquitectos Asociados: Architect Of Record. Entorno Taller De Paisaje: Landscape Consultant. Concept Lighting Lab: Lighting Consultant. Rodolfo Padilla: Structural Engineer. Iesh Instalaciones: Mep. Montealban: Woodwork. P&G: General Contractor.

Product Sources: [Living Area] Atra Form: Sofa, Coffee Table, Brass Side Table, Lounge Chairs. Astro: Floor Lamp. Namuh: Wood Side Table, Area Rug. Lago Df: Accent Pillows, Black Blanket. [North Courtyard/Lightwell] Iguzzini: Wall Mounted Floodlights. Prudential: Wall Mounted Linear Fixture. [Dining Area] Atra Form: Table, Chairs, Area Rug. Buschfeld: Pendant Fixtures. [Penthouse Entry] Namuh: Wood Bench. Prudential: Wall Mounted Linear Fixture. [South Courtyard/Lightwell] Iguzzini: Wall Mounted Floodlights. [Kitchen] Buschfeld: Ceiling Fixture. Detaller: Custom Door Pulls. [Guest Room] Atra Form: Bedframe, Side Table. Searchlight Lighting: Table Lamp. Bi Yuu: Rug. [Terrace] Bogus Studio Through Atra Form: Painted Steele Chairs. Atra Form: Custom Teak Table, Custom Bali Beds. Sunbrella: Bed Roll Fabric. Lago Df: Accent Pillows. [Master Suite] Atra Form: Bedframe, Gold-Leaf Cabinet Doors. Flos: Table Lamp. Namuh: Stools, Rug. [Den] Prudential: Wall Mounted Linear Fixture. [Master Bath] Viabizzuno: Shower Head/Light Fixture. Warp & Weft: Indigo Rug. American Standard: Bathtub. Stanza: Bathtub Mixer. [Throughout] Basaltex: Stone Flooring. Vescom: Sheer and Dim-Out Curtain Fabric. ELR: Recessed Ceiling Fixtures.

> See more from the Interior Design Summer Homes 2019 issue

The post A Concrete Townhouse in Mexico City Marks Studio Rick Joy’s First Ground-Up Urban Building appeared first on Interior Design.

By narrowing a hallway and taking over a closet, Dufner and Wismer found space for a badly needed powder room. Then, by walling off a raised platform next to the living room, they created space for a larger kitchen, plus a breakfast nook. Adding walls actually “allows for those separate experiences that make the apartment as a whole seem more spacious,” Wismer says. “We made the layout better,” Dufner adds.

But efficiency is hardly their only strength. Dufner and Wismer have become known for a style they call “minimalish.” The goal, they explain, is to place eye-catching elements amid uncluttered settings. For the Holborns, whose love of efficiency was coupled with a desire for liveliness, that meant painting the living room soft white but giving the fireplace a new face of richly veined Italian marble. Choosing upholstery in mustard, coral, peacock blue, and a Hella Jongerius floral lent even more “quirkiness,” Erica Holborn says, to the palette.

The tone is a touch quieter in the master bedroom. Wall covering is a soothing swirl of pale blues and golds. “It’s hypnagogic,” Dufner says of the pattern, “like you’re dreaming before you even fall asleep.” Blush felted wool covers the headboard, while white leather upholsters the Arne Jacobsen Grand Prix chair at the vanity. “When I sit there, I feel glamorous,” Erica Holborn says, also noting that Marilyn Monroe once lived in the building. Similarly, Dufner and Wismer chose silver mylar to line her closet. “Every time I open it,” she says, “it provides an element of surprise and a bit of joy. There are many special things here I never would have thought of. That’s why you hire a designer.”

The post Elements of Surprise Define a Dreamy Manhattan Aerie by Dufner Heighes appeared first on Interior Design.

Garry Winogrand, the renowned photographer of American life, once observed: “Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.” Winogrand was expressing a view that could be ascribed to many architectural photographers, who are, at least in some cases, less interested in recording how buildings look than in producing images of how they could, or should, look. In so doing, they sometimes join forces with architects, who wish to disseminate idealized images of their work, and with publications that waver between wanting to present reality and wanting to offer visual delight.

The gap between documentation and manipulation is a central theme of “Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture,” an exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum—itself, the occupant of a much-photographed Herzog & de Meuron structure—in Southampton, New York, through June 17. It includes images that make no claims at realism—some by current art world darlings such as Thomas Ruff, who has said that other photographers “believe to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture.” Therese Lichtenstein, the show’s curator, notes in her catalog essay that Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron once commissioned Ruff to photograph their buildings to see, she says, “what they would look like as art.”

Prominent among the photographs that make no attempt at “accurate” representation are works by Hiroshi Sugimoto, who renders famous buildings in blurry black and white. In a 2001 image, for example, he strives to see how far he can distort 30 Rockefeller Plaza without sacrificing its recognizability, a process he describes as “erosion-testing architecture for durability.”

For Sugimoto’s images to work, the subject buildings must already be iconic—a status they acquired largely through the efforts of his camera-wielding predecessors. The narrow-shouldered 30 Rock, for instance, was made instantly recognizable in the 1930’s by Samuel H. Gottscho. But even Gottscho, it turned out, was a manipulator who shot 30 Rock first with enough light to get the skyscraper’s outlines sharp, and again by night, to capture the glow from its windows, then combined the results in the darkroom.

“Documentary” photographers who didn’t resort to such extreme efforts still took pains to shoot modernist buildings in ways that made them look glamorous. As Interior Design Hall of Fame member Julius Shulman once stated: “Every architect I’ve ever worked for has become world-famous, because of the publicity they get.” Shulman himself is famous for shooting the Case Study Houses, the mid-century Southern California experiments in residential design, sponsored, tellingly, by a magazine.

Shulman’s postwar contemporary Balthazar Korab photographed tightly cropped sections of buildings, creating abstractions from the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and other masters. Today, Korab’s closest counterpart may be Hélène Binet, whose work zeroes in on forms and textures, sometimes making it a challenge to determine what exactly is being depicted. (Luisa Lambri and Judith Turner, neither of whom is in the Parrish show, explore similar effects.)

One divergent strain in American architectural photography has been the dystopian vision. A case in point: Lewis Baltz’s 1970’s images of the tract houses in the West, which make the buildings seem, in Lichtenstein’s words, “outmoded even before their completion.” While photographs like these populate art journals, they are less likely to turn up on the pages of architecture or design magazines, where they may be seen as downers.

Architectural photographers must decide whether to include people in their images. Contemporary German conceptualist Candida Höfer believes photographing buildings with no one in them reveals a lot about human nature, just as an absent guest is often the subject of conversation at a party. The young Dutch photographer Iwan Baan tends to include people in his shots, but not always the people the architect or the client would have chosen. He gained prominence last decade documenting the construction of the CCTV headquarters in Beijing by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture with his images that placed migrant workers and their makeshift living quarters in the foreground.

For a century, photographers of architecture and interiors have been a mainstay of print media, including general interest publications. Gottscho’s work appeared regularly in Town & Country as well as the more specialized House & Garden, while Ezra Stoller published in Look, Harper’s Bazaar, and Playboy, along with the expected architecture journals. Design magazines play a hybrid role, not only entertaining but also educating readers, and thus tend to stay on the “representational” end of the spectrum (with “misrepresentation,” for art or profit, at the other end).

But, as a show like “Image Building” makes clear, there is no such thing as pure representation of buildings in photographs. The qualities of great interiors, especially, must be experienced first-hand. As Baltz said in a 1993 interview, “Architecture, real architecture, always defies reduction into two-dimensional representation. If not, it’s hardly architecture at all.”

> See more from the April issue of Interior Design

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Sited in the exact same spot, with the same orientation, the new version nevertheless needed to be built 5 feet above ground level to comply with new flood-zone requirements. Accordingly, the 3,500-square-foot structure sits on a concrete base, like a sculpture poised on a pedestal. Skeletal steel columns and beams support a roof made of cross-laminated timber that’s left exposed on its underside to double as the ceiling surface, milled into recesses for light fixtures and cutouts for skylights.

Bates and Masi are renowned for coaxing beauty and variety from a limited materials palette. “Too many ingredients spoil the stew,” Bates says. Throughout, paneling is cypress, cabinetry is bamboo plywood, and flooring and counters are fossil-flecked Montana limestone. Bronze door handles, rescued from the old house, inspired the choice of burnished bronze to surround the fireplace. You need only a few ingredients if you choose them wisely.

Project Team: Daniel Widlowski; Jack Booton.

> See more from the December issue of Interior Design

> See all 2017 Best of Year winners and honorees

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It’s nice living on the water. But when Superstorm Sandy hit Long Island in 2012, it destroyed a number of waterfront houses, including one midcentury dwelling on a lagoon in East Hampton, New York. When the owners decided to tear down the damaged structure and build a new residence, Bates Masi + Architects, based in the same town, proved a logical choice for the project. Firm founder and Interior Design Hall of Fame member Harry Bates has been designing modernist houses in the East End since the 1960s, when the original property was built.

> Project Resources

The design needed to satisfy both memories and aspirations. The clients wanted it to be, as principal and fellow Hall of Famer Paul Masi eloquently puts it, “the child of the old one.” That meant it should reveal its structure honestly. “Our conversations kept returning to the fact that the design of the old house expressed how it was made,” he says. “There was a truthfulness to it that they really appreciated.” The new house would be on the exact same spot as the old one, with the same orientation, since the site had already been cleared and landscaped to accentuate the owners’ favorite vistas. But to comply with new flood zone requirements and avoid the same fate as its predecessor, the structure had to be built five feet above the ground. 

The 3,500-square-foot four-bedroom residence is slightly larger than the old one and sits on a concrete base, like a sculpture poised on a pedestal. In this manner, the glass-wrapped dwelling recalls Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois—which is also raised five feet to avoid flooding. An open central volume containing the living/dining area and kitchen is flanked, nearly symmetrically, by bedroom wings. Exposed steel columns and beams support a roof made of cross-laminated timber, a product capable of spanning long distances—in this case, up to 30 feet. The CLT pine panels, like most of the house’s components, were readied for installation in a factory. That left much less to do on-site. “The contractor poured the slab, assembled the steel structure, craned the ceiling panels into place, and put up the doors and windows—and we were done,” Masi reports. “We didn’t so much as drill a hole.”

The firm is renowned for coaxing beauty and variety from a limited materials palette. “Too many ingredients spoil the stew,” Bates says. All paneling, indoors and out, is cypress. Cabinetry throughout is bamboo plywood, its exposed edges part of the “how it was made” motif. And anywhere stone was specified, the design team used the same fossil-flecked Montana limestone: outside, as sawn-finish rectangles that form steps and terraces leading from driveway to entry; inside, as irregular flamed slabs fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle to create the floor, their freeform edges a gentle counterpoint to all the right angles. Bathroom countertops are also made of the same stone, this time with a honed finish. 

But the CLT perhaps proved most amenable to Bates Masi’s just-a-few-ingredients approach. Exposed on their underside to form the ceiling, the prefab pine panels accommodate lighting in rows of milled recesses, while elliptical perforations create skylights above the kitchen and living areas. The openings have radi-used lips, the precise curvature mocked up via 3-D printer. “The curves really showcase the laminated timber layers,” says Masi. “They’re also better for light distribution—you don’t get the hard shadows typical of overheads.”

Layered wood carved into sinuous forms is another recurring motif. Even the powder room sink was sculpted from a thick block of laminated bamboo plywood. Above it, a shallow recess in the cypress slats frames a lozenge-shape mirror.

Bronze door handles, rescued from the old house, inspired the choice of metal that surrounds the double-sided fireplace, which separates the living/dining area from a more intimate seating zone. The same material was wedded to a slice of CLT to create the custom chandelier illuminating the dining table—high-tech and yet gentle, like the house itself.

For all its architectural efficiency, the house is comfortable to live in. The abundant wood finishes and limestone floors lend warmth and texture. The owners brought in furniture from previous residences, including vintage armchairs in the living room and a bluestone dining table patinated from years of use. “Familiar pieces like that make the house feel like a home,” says Masi. How much the architects accomplished with a simple palette is a testament to their creativity. To return to Bates’s metaphor, you only need a few ingredients if you choose those ingredients wisely. 

> Project Resources

Project Team: Laguardia Design Group: Landscape Design. Steven Maresca: Structural Engineer. Peragine Millwork: Woodwork. Lettieri Construction: General Contractor.

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Like Graves, Neri and Hu work at scales from urban plan to tabletop. Exhibition design joined the mix with the Luis Barragán tribute currently at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. Asked about the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner’s clear, colorful forms, Neri says, “We didn’t think, at first, that we had been influenced by Barragán—we had always focused more on Adolf Loos and Carlo Scarpa. But after seeing Barragán’s work, we realized we were influenced subconsciously by what he does. Take away the color, and the resemblances are amazing.”

Hall of Fame member Calvin Tsao, who has a number of projects in China, says Neri and Hu are “responding to where the culture is and at the same time moving the culture forward. They’re sympathetic souls—insightful,  philosophical, sharp, and worldly with feet planted in the realism of today.”

Neri & Hu has won international acclaim for renovations that reinterpret but don’t eradicate the past, presenting the contemporary as part of an architectural time line. For the Waterhouse at South Bund—a boutique hotel in a 1930’s industrial building used in the ’40’s as the Japanese army headquarters—that involved such moves as adding a penthouse in Cor-Ten steel and installing mirror-lined shutters in the courtyard to cast intriguing and occasionally voyeuristic reflections depending on how the shutters are angled. Making the past palpable, the lobby is a palimpsest of fading paint, old plaster, and recovered brick. “You should be able to touch the history of the building,” Hu says.

Originally located on the historic river-front Bund, the enterprising couple’s retail venture, Design Republic, brings furniture and housewares from around the world to Shanghai’s burgeoning middle class. Pieces by Neri & Hu are some of the best there. Neri wittily describes a sofa recalling Tang dynasty opium beds, but with contemporary proportions, as intended for people whose addictions are a cup of coffee and the Sunday paper. A chair in walnut and leather, evoking Charles and Ray Eames, “has modern classic written all over,” says David Alhadeff, whose Future Perfect stores sell it in New York and San Francisco. At an even smaller scale are teacups in a clay renowned for its rich textures and purple tones.

Design Republic has now moved to a redbrick former police station shared with a sister restaurant, event space, and one-room hotel, all known collectively as Design Republic Design Commune. Elsewhere in Shanghai, Neri & Hu has designed restaurants with theatrical grandeur. “They really know how to orchestrate a dining experience,” Tsao says. One of the latest, Capo, is in the attic of a 1911 building: a collection of dramatic spaces ranging from narrow passageways to a basilicalike dining room lined in ghostly gray brick.

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After acquiring 11 sculptures by the Japanese-American artist and designer Isamu Noguchi, Leonard and Louise Riggio hired Gluckman Mayner Architects to design a viewing pavilion on their property in Bridgehampton, New York. The pavilion was to be set alongside a man-made pond, part of a garden landscaped by Edwina von Gal + Co. Immediately, Richard Gluckman thought of Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine.

For more than two millennia, this Shinto site near Kyoto has been rebuilt every 20 years in the same cypress, making the building simultaneously ancient and new. Gluckman proposed constructing the Bridgehampton pavilion according to the traditional Japanese methods used at Ise, with the beams and joists held together by wooden dowels rather than metal nails or screws. When he showed the Riggios a sample of the kind of joinery he had in mind, he says, “They lit up.”

He constructed the open-sided 680-square-foot structure from Alaskan yellow cedar, with every board oriented the same way and two large crossbeams perpendicular. The cedar started out quite yellow, as the name implies, before weathering began. “I was very happy when the wood finally got to be the silver-gray you see today,” he says. True, the pavilion may need to be rebuilt every few decades. As at Ise, however, this will serve as a way of passing down construction methods to the next generation.

> See more from the March 2017 issue of Interior Design

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