Architectural Digest January 2023

FOR MORE SMART IDEAS VISIT ARCHDIGEST.COM/AD-IT-YOURSELF BUNDLES OF JOY TUPKER WENT “ALL OUT” IN ONE BATH, GIVING SERIOUS BELLIES AND TAILS TO LONDON SHADES IN A CHELSEA TEXTILES PRINT, AN EFFECT SHE CALLS “OLD-FASHIONED BUT UNEXPECTED.” UNIFORM THINKING IN THE WIFE’S DRESSING AREA, TUPKER MATCHED THE RELAXED LINEN ROMAN SHADES TO THE WALLS, LINING UP THE PATTERN OF THE WOOL CREWELWORK. PARTING WISDOM A BEDROOM FEATURES SWAGGED CURTAINS IN A SISTER PARISH PRINT, WITH CUSTOM CLAREMONT TIEBACKS AND CONTRASTING LINING TO ENLIVEN THE VIEW FROM OUTSIDE. NEUTRAL STANCE FOR THE LIVING ROOM, TUPKER CHOSE SIMPLE YET TAILORED ROMANS IN A SUBTLE PRINT SO AS NOT TO DETRACT FROM THE SCENIC VISTAS OF THE HARBOR BEYOND.…

“This project had all the green lights. The owners were supercool. The building had good vibes, good bones, and a good location. It was what you call a no-brainer.” —Pierre Yovanovitch At AD we perpetually celebrate architects and designers—they are our rock stars—but we do so with particular intentionality in our annual AD100 issue, which includes our much-anticipated list of the most exciting talents in the world. The exceptional projects featured this month have been in the works for many years, and AD has often been tracking them for a long time prior to publication: It’s a process! However, no one has more patience, faith, and vision than the homeowners themselves, without whom these inspirational, ambitious spaces would obviously not exist. An especially warm relationship between client and designer is one of…

Italian maestro Gio Ponti wore many hats. And one oft-forgotten entry on the architect’s lengthy CV was his work as art director of FontanaArte, a decorative branch of the Italian glassmaker Luigi Fontana. The brand is best known for lighting, but one design has proved a sleeper hit: a curved brass mirror that has infiltrated today’s interiors. “It’s a keystone,” says Ponti scholar Brian Kish of the reflector’s unusual shape, which resembles some of the architect’s designs for porcelain brand Richard Ginori and his 1950s Lotus chair. “This is the Ponti method—he’s looping architectural features into design objects and abstracting them. Often he’ll take one idea and move it into another material—glass, silver, porcelain, or even the contours of furniture.” In the 1950s, when versions of this mirror were hung in Ponti’s…

Want to know the secret to giving a tiny apartment a big personality? Crowd it with objects, splash it with color, and pile on the patterns, an equation that distracts the eye as much as it delights the soul. At least, that’s the philosophy of Carlos Mota, the fast-talking, globe-trotting stylist turned decorator and consultant with four inspiring books to his name (including his new hit, G: Forever Green, published by Vendome Press) and a new fabric collection called Verde, the first step in a home-furnishings line branded Casamota. “I never plan anything,” the AD100 designer says of the swashbuckling approach. “I just hope it works—and if it doesn’t, I’ll just sell it.” His latest domestic scenario is a new Manhattan home base, a 700-square-foot flat in a voluptuous Beaux Arts…

It’s a crisp day in Manhattan and Miranda Brooks is talking plants. “Euthamia, or goldenrod, is from Long Island,” notes the AD100 landscape designer. “This is a Rhus, which turns a lovely reddish color in the autumn. The Clematis paniculata will have tiny little white flowers in the late summer.” These mostly native species have found a happy home on the rooftop of the new Hermès flagship at 706 Madison Avenue. Accessible to all shoppers, the garden is a calm reprieve from the streets below—and particularly on the occasion of our tour, as sidewalks were being painted, stages installed, and food trucks lined up to fete the store’s opening. Later that night, an Hermès musical would unfold inside the boutique and around the block. “This wasn’t going to be just some roof,”…

Skipping a flat stone across a summer pond is a childhood rite of passage: a rock carefully flung, bouncing off the water’s surface, in a magical moment of levitation. For AD100 fixture Steven Harris, it also inspired an architectural fantasia on oceanside acreage in the Hamptons. Part sculpture, part retreat, part flight of fancy, the pool pavilion that Harris conceived for a New York City couple is tucked beneath a sinuous canopy that holds more than 20,000 gallons of water—not for swimming, mind you, just for effect. “It is one of the most heroically engineered things you can imagine,” Harris says of the airborne creation, which he describes as a “flying reflecting pool” and which contains a kitchenette and storage area in its base. The superstructure is not unlike a ship,…