Dwell July/August 2017

Here is the best idea for life: Choose to be extraordinary. No matter who you are, you can overcome obstacles with imagination and focus. This is the practice of good design—finding the right tools to identify hidden opportunities. Learning how to see, as George Nelson advised, is essential, because it is the invisible details that shape our lives. This is not a solo enterprise. We are at our best when we collaborate; communities thrive when citizens share a commitment to the future. This is perfectly illustrated in Columbus, Indiana, the site of many an architecture student’s pilgrimage. Here, a family’s dedication to modern design led to a rich, and arguably unmatched, urban tapestry. Today the city represents something important, and through the efforts of a new generation of locals, the hoped-for…

@kathy_sandler on Twitter Dwell has been a tremendous source of inspiration for me as I transform a circa-1900 building in downtown Spartanburg, South Carolina, into my town house. I am writing just to say that your introduction to the March/April issue is spot on and excellent! “Unexpected creativity in difficult circumstances” is an awesome expectation for all of us to consider. I am challenging my team to do just that and to look for opportunities of excellence in design and not to do things the way this small Southern town has always done them. —Jennifer Evins Just reread the March/April issue and was charmed for the second time by the article on Benny Hammer Larsen, weaver of the cord seats on the Hans Wegner chairs for Carl Hansen. I wonder if a predecessor…

The day that Alexa, Lutron Caséta, Sonos, Rain Bird, Nest, Logitech, and Haiku all stopped speaking to each other. I had to divine a shutdown/restart/resync sequence that got all the kids playing together again—while my wife insisted no more f-ing automation. Robert Grenader We had an LG Smart LED TV that would turn itself on and off. We searched the net for a few days and found a similar issue that someone in Asia had experienced and resolved by putting a small computer fan on the television’s board processor. The processor has a tendency to heat up too much and, in a self-preservation effort, turns the set off. No shop in our area would touch the modification. So, following the saying “Any port in a storm,” we opened up the TV…

Writer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy House of Tomorrow page 46 Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is a Charleston-based freelance journalist. Born in Manhattan and raised in London, she formerly worked at The Daily Telegraph, covering topics ranging from beauty to business. For this issue, Tuohy, a self-described “techie and Trekkie,” contributed to a package on the future of smart homes. Of all the connected devices in her house, she says her Nest thermostat may be the smartest of all. “It might make a conspiracy theorist very antsy,” she notes. “But if it keeps me cool in a hot Charleston summer, it’s worth it.” Technical Editor Bruce Greenlaw Dwell Listens page 26 Bruce Greenlaw got his first taste of woodworking when he built his own offthe- grid cabin in the High Sierra in 1976. He’s been hooked ever since. After working…

1. Are the flush doors so well disguised that we just can’t see any of them in any of the pictures? The only one shown in the article is the master bedroom media door (above). 2. Please help me visualize how a door can be flush in a 2x4 wall regardless of how it swings? Each door closes flush with the wall when viewed from outside of the room or space behind it, regardless of whether the door opens inward or outward. 3. Are the hinges hidden? Yes, we used Tectus concealed hinges. 4. Could we see what the knobs or levers look like? The minimal, custom black metal pulls are not concealed and can be seen in the master bedroom photo (top left). 5. Normally the door jamb would have a rabbet or an applied…

After 1945, the optimism of the second generation of modernist architects and designers was a great tonic to the austerity imposed by the exigencies of World War II. No place adopted midcentury modernism as quickly, or as definitively, as the United States did. And no part of the U.S. was more ready for newness, for reinvention, than California. Located at both a literal and figurative frontier, California had superb weather and an influx of non-neophobic migrants from other parts of the country (as well as refugee intellectuals from Europe, many of whom were sympathetic to modernism). California also had a healthy, diverse economy that was only strengthened by the war. These factors resulted in California becoming a kind of laboratory of lifestyles, perhaps the most enduring of which was “indoor/outdoor living.”…