Why Skirted Furniture Endures
There are certain decorating tropes—wall-to-wall carpet, mirror walls, conversation pits, chintz fabric—that remain consistent in their ability to elicit strong feelings but tend to wax and wane in genuine popularity. They follow larger trends, and their fortunes rise and fall at the mercy of the marketplace. What seems charming and idiosyncratic one moment (cottagecore, anyone?) seems dated and overly fussy the next. One trend that illustrates this perfectly is the curiously retro practice of skirting furniture, which has been having a moment for a few years now and accumulating on mood boards and showroom floors.
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4 Ceiling Trends That Give New Weight to the “Fifth Wall”
Ceilings can, and should, dazzle. A stellar example can signal thoughtfulness about the design of a whole space, and function as a kind of decorating Easter egg: Look up, and you might be rewarded with gestures of wit, virtuosic craft, optical tricks, or sumptuous color. So what ceiling trends are raising the roof right now? We spoke with inventive designers with distinctly different aesthetic points of view to find out what inspires them when it comes to designing a room’s fifth wall.
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Elizabeth Baird Brings This Rosewood Home Down to Earth
When architect Elizabeth Baird first visited her client’s site in Central East Austin’s Rosewood neighborhood, she was underwhelmed by the existing structure, but immediately knew the scale of the property made it a gem hiding in plain sight. “The original building was brick, from the 1960s, and the lot was overgrown, nothing special, really,” she says. “But when I stepped onto it with the real estate agent, we were both amazed by the sheer size of the lot, which in this neighborhood is kind of unheard of.”
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The Case for the All-Red Room
In the mid 1930s, legendary Vogue editor in chief Diana Vreeland began writing a column for Harper’s Bazaar called Why Don’t You? in which she would encourage readers to try something new, almost as an absurdly glamorous dare. Among her suggestions was the idea that readers might decorate their homes entirely in green, with a verdant mix of houseplants and glazed porcelain. But Vreeland’s personal favorite color was red, specifically “the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.”
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5 Kitchen Trends Taking Over Homes Now
Kitchen technology is evolving apace, with AI and other innovations pushing products ever closer to Jetsons territory. But some of the hottest kitchen trends right now have a distinctly vintage feel, from archival tile colors to retro flooring and the return of the breakfast bar. We asked some busy architects and designers what trends they’ve spotted so far in 2024.
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Doomsday Design: The Reality of Disaster Preparedness in America
What’s the first thing you would do if you learned that a cataclysmic disaster was about to unfold? If there was no cell service and you couldn’t reach your loved ones, you might reach for a go-bag, a portable generator, or a liferaft. If you frequently think about disaster preparedness and doomsday design (it’s difficult not to these days), you might conceive of your home either as a potential emergency shelter, or as a place from which you might have to evacuate one day. Since the advent of the nuclear age, we’ve become accustomed to thinking of “the end of the world” in a terrifyingly literal way, less as one of several surmountable calamities, and more like a hard stop on civilization itself: doomsday.
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2024 General Excellence in Interior Design: Emily Lauren Interiors
Imagine a natural setting, blending an array of whites and soft grays, some deep greens that range from bluish to reddish, browns and blacks, and a slightly muted brass that glimmers in the light. Now imagine that this was the entire color palette you had to work with. This is the chromatic world of Emily Brown, the Austin-based designer who launched her practice Emily Lauren Interiors in 2018, and won our Rising Star Award last year.
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Palm Royale Is the Most Stylish Show on TV Right Now
Given the verbal prompt “Palm Beach in the late 1960s,” your mind’s eye would undoubtedly conjure something fabulous. But this imaginary Florida aerie wouldn’t conform to one specific style, like Art Deco or Hollywood Regency; it would probably be a layered mix of Spanish-style architecture with chinoiserie furniture in a Lilly Pulitzer color palette. Palm Beach style evolved from a unique mix of 20th-century architectural movements, which combined in a way that tells the story of its clientele and shifting tastes. So for production designer Jon Carlos and set decorator Ellen Reede, bringing the tropical technicolor world of the new Apple TV+ series Palm Royale to life was a challenge full of historical rabbit holes and creative complexity.
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When Sneakers Became a Serious Asset Class
When did athletic shoes turn into collectibles? True sneakerheads have been scouting rare treasures for decades, but in July 2019, when Sotheby’s sold a pair of 1972 Nikes for $437,500 at its first dedicated sneaker auction, the shoes became an asset class to reckon with.
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Opinion: Everyone has an opinion about Martha Stewart
It’s rare to meet someone who’s totally indifferent to Martha Stewart. She has her superfans, detractors, defenders, apologists and critics. For some of us, she’s a figure best known for a moment of downfall: five months spent at a minimum-security prison in 2004 and 2005 after being convicted of conspiracy, obstruction and lying to federal investigators about a stock sale. For people in their 20s, she probably seems like an eccentric, highly entertaining serial entrepreneur.
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Art for Life's Sake
Take a walk through center city Philadelphia, you’ll find evidence of Jane Korman’s vision all around you: on Arch Street, the innovative textile studios and galleries at the Fabric Workshop and Museum will be abuzz with creativity, with thought-provoking exhibitions on view. On Walnut Street, you’ll pass the Jane & Leonard Korman Respiratory Institute at T homas Jefferson University Hospital—an initiative inspired by her own experience as a lung cancer patient who never took the ability to breathe for granted.
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The Clay Studio Puts Down New Roots in Philadelphia
Walk up North American Street in Olde Kensington, Philadelphia, and a sharp figure will catch your eye: It’s Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, the leader and founding member of The Roots, depicted majestically on the side of a decorated Sèvres vase. Artist Roberto Lugo’s mural—four stories high, saturated with joyous color, and full of references to Black creative excellence and historical ceramics—is the perfect introduction to the beehive of creative activity unfolding inside the building. Walk up to the front entrance and you might pass an artist throwing pots just behind a street-level window; then you’ll encounter a retail space full of handmade functional pottery for sale.
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Millennials Embrace Bicentennial Style
Scroll through Erick J. Espinoza’s Instagram feed, and you might think you’ve traveled back in time to the 1930s — not the Art Deco version, but the version filled with hooked rugs, weathervanes and candlesticks betokening the era’s American Colonial Revival, perhaps with the color saturation cranked way up. “There’s something so lighthearted about Americana. Even really serious and intense works of American folk art are still whimsical, graphic and humorous,” said Mr. Espinoza, who is the 32-year-old creative director at the Hamptons design studio founded by Anthony Baratta. Mr. Espinoza especially loves the geometric patterns of game boards and quilts.
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An Exhibition Celebrating Dorothy Liebes’s Distinct Weavings
In the middle decades of the 20th century, trained eyes were alert to something called the Liebes Look. Colorful, textured and shot through with shimmering, synthetic fibers like Lurex, the woven textiles of Dorothy Liebes were a signature feature of some of the most glamorous postwar interiors in America: Doris Duke’s Shangri La, the Delegates Dining Room at the United Nations, the cabin of the American Airlines flagship 747, the set of the 1949 Barbara Stanwyck film noir “Eastside, Westside” and the inside of the 1957 Chrysler Plymouth Fury, to name just a few.
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A Cat's Eye View
During the summer of 1950, artist Saul Steinberg was in Los Angeles so that he could appear as Gene Kelly’s hand double in the movie “An American in Paris.” He was quickly disenchanted with the project (he decried the output of the movie studio as “Technicolor musicals, stupid stuff”) but he and his wife, artist Hedda Sterne, decided to stay in California anyway. They kept company with Igor Stravinsky, Gene Kelly (no hard feelings, apparently), Christopher Isherwood, Billy Wilder, Oscar Levant, and Charles and Ray Eames.
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Is It Time to Do Away With “Good Taste”?
In 1913, the designer Elsie de Wolfe published a book that would become a classic of interior design, a profession she helped create during her long career. Entitled The House in Good Taste, its mission could not have been more clear: De Wolfe wished to see American interiors brightened up, styled with a confident point of view, and cleared of the Victorian clutter that crowded so many 19th-century homes with fringe, cut velvet, seashells, and elaborate wood carving.
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Luxury underfoot
It’s difficult to imagine a group of Gilded Age women reading a magazine, or listening to music on a phonograph, while reclining on a rug. Their foundation garments wouldn’t have permitted it. The wool wouldn’t have been comfortable to laze on, even if it had been acceptably ladylike to do so. But this is exactly the posture in which we find women in the 1950s, at least in innumerable editorials and print ads. They lie sideways, wearing pants or leotards, doing their thing, almost as though there were a new, secret room in the house hovering just below the horizon line of the coffee table.
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An Irish Abbey Where the Grass Is Always Warmer
Between Holy Week and the demands of farm life, it wasn’t easy to get Sister Lily Scullion on the phone in April. (“Sorry for the delay, have been very busy with lambing,” she wrote in an email.) But a packed schedule goes with the territory at St. Mary’s Abbey in Glencairn, where 29 sisters are busy each day with work and prayer; making handmade cards, candles and Eucharistic bread; and tending the abbey’s grounds, which occupy nearly 250 acres of County Waterford, near Ireland’s southeastern coast.
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The Enduring Appeal of “Ugly” Design
There is something irresistible about the ugly duckling, even before its grand metamorphosis into (spoiler alert) an adult swan. He’s gangly, his feathers look weird, his proportions are off, and every other animal he encounters on his journey notices this and comments on it. The moral of this beloved fairy tale is that beauty and its antithesis, ugliness, are meaningful only in context. The “ugly” duckling was just the victim of a temporary category error, he wasn’t actually ugly.
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Has Brutalist Architecture Hit the Saturation Point?
Its name doesn’t inspire a sense of coziness, comfort, or even glamour, yet Brutalist architecture—the postwar style that pinned its hopes on the possibilities of poured concrete—seems to be back in the zeitgeist. Of course, it never really left: For decades, its detractors have been waging a war of attrition against its somewhat severe and aggressively modernist aesthetic with a policy tactic known as “active neglect.” Boston’s City Hall has been controversial since it was unveiled in 1968.
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