Canvas To Carat: The Hidden Jewelry Talents Of Iconic Artists

French collector Diane Venet counts his visagelike Le Grand Faune pendant among her 220-piece trove of artist-made bijouterie. It turns out, several painters and sculptors shared this hobby. Pairings of their accessories and artworks in their respective mediums compose “Artists’ Jewelry: From Cubism to Pop, the Diane Venet Collection,” at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Florida, through October 5. Among the ap­prox­imately 250 pieces is Alexander Calder’s primary-colored Spirales tapestry, which is joined by a belt buckle he designed, Lynda Benglis’s Cocoon wall sculpture, shown alongside a silver pin she crafted, and Niki de Saint Phalle’s voluptuous Nana figure, displayed with her Nana Ange brooch. Picasso’s pendant also appears, as does Venet’s coiled silver wedding ring, made by her sculptor husband Bernar, in lieu of a diamond.

Modern Flair Meets Art Deco In This New York Office

2024 Best of Year Winner for Small Financial Office

For new digs at 45 Rockefeller Plaza, Confidential investment firm sought a workplace that would balance gravitas with employee comfort. In response, Gensler strategically excised portions of a floor slab to create grand double-height spaces. The intervention also accommodates a glass-box mezzanine library carpeted in plush rust-colored silk-wool broadloom. On the floor below is the reception lounge, where a Nakashima Edition rug pairs with nesting Guilherme Torres tables and Minotti sofas, a setting that’s residential in feel. Throughout, metal accents such as Stickbulb’s nickel chandeliers in the 20-foot boardroom honor the landmarked 1933 New York building’s art deco heritage. Elsewhere, pockets of greenery provide the benefits of biophilia.

PROJECT TEAM: LAURENT LISIMACHIO; JULIETTE POUSSOT; JOE HYNN YANG; ALESSANDRA SHORTEN; NAOMI NOTTINGHAM; FANCH TSENG; ASKLY CHIRAYIL; KATHRYN MORSE; AUDREY STROM; TYLER DENNISON.

Descend Into This Earthy Spa In The Heart Of The Mediterranean 

Sunshine and subterranean settings may seem incongruent. But unifying contrasts is rote for Makhno Studio. The Ukrainian studio’s latest endeavor, Vroda Clinic & Spa, in Limassol, Cyprus, continues the firm’s boundary-pushing MO. “The challenge was to create a space that doesn’t resemble a medical facility,” explains founder and architect Serhii Makhno, who conceived a soft yet brutalist scheme for the 14,700-square-foot project, with clinical cosmetology rooms on the first floor and the spa zone below. The latter offers a dozen water-based experiences—freestanding bathing capsules, voice-activated rain showers, plunge pools, snow chimneys (for cold treatments post sauna or steam room)—housed in annular coves. In the VIP area, Makhno’s cloudlike ceramic pendant fixtures, 3-D printed walls in an earthy clay, and plumes of pampas grass, arranged in the Japanese ikebana style, soothe and calm. Throughout, recessed LEDs and radiant salt blocks gently brighten, while staggered plaster columns and communal marble seating recall ancient Roman bathhouses.

Explore Stylish And Sustainable Indoor/Outdoor Rugs

2024 Best of Year Winner for Environmental Impact: Flooring

Inuit and Tuareg communities are nomadic, moving in search of resources and pastures for their animals. “Since they cannot carry more than light-weight elements, essentially, they build their homes with fabrics, rugs, and cushions,” designer Alejandra Gandía-Blasco Lloret notes. Her Nomad collection of indoor/outdoor rugs and stackable cushions is inspired by such lifestyles, and made with 100 percent recycled PET—netting the collection a Best of Year Award for Environmental Impact: Flooring. The patterns themselves are based on Indigenous Indian designs that Gan explored during research into how recycled PET fibers behave on a loom. Those samples are now the fabrics of Nomad, in two chromatic ranges: Inuit in neutral, pink, and gray, and Tuareg, in blue, taupe, and white.

Layered Waves Of Brick Wow At This Theater Café In China

2024 Best of Year Winner for Commercial Café

Inspired by the island location, One Plus Partnership devised an oceanic scheme for movie theater café, Haikou Gaoxingli Cinema Coffee Bar, albeit without the typical blue focus. Instead, the 11,400-square-foot space in Hainan, China, is defined by red-clay masonry, with undulating, precisely layered waves of brickwork evoking sand dunes on the shoreline—a conceit that’s dramatic in its monochromaticity. Brick courses laid in stack bond rise from the floor, cresting into concave benches and bowed counter-tops. Other forms hang like stalactites from the ceiling. Despite the rugged materiality, the scene is still cozy, with twinkling LEDs tucked into the pre-existing core holes of the bricks and plump custom chairs with rustic-colored upholstery scattered throughout.

PROJECT TEAM: AJAX LAW; VIRGINIA LUNG.

Explore A Helix Of Corridors In This Sculptural Sales Center In Shanghai

2024 Best of Year Winner for Sales Center

Wrapped in interwoven, ribbonlike GRC staircases that make the building appear as if in constant rotational motion, West Bund Orbit in Shanghai, an exhibition hall with exterior by Heatherwick Studio and interiors by Wutopia Lab, is unabashedly sculptural. The sense of movement continues inside, where behind a swooping CNC-carved marble wall that forms a sort of secondary facade—a visual whirlwind set behind the curtain wall—is the main events space, with a ceiling that soars to 32 feet. From here, a helix of corridors and multifunctional zones unscroll, inspired by the idea of a vortex. They terminate on the top level, where, under a domed skylight, model structures are displayed to would-be clients.

YU TING; LIRAN SUN; PAN DALI; KUANG ZHOU; XIONG JIAXING; WANG SIZHE; ZHANG NAIYUE; VI CHEN; GU XIANG; ZENG RUI; GAO BOLONG (WUTOPIA LAB); NEIL HUBBARD; FRANCIS NG; CONSUELO MANNA; MARY SUEN; STUART MACALISTER; NICOLAS OMBRES; KACPER CHMIELEWSKI; MARCO MAZZOTTA; LEO CHEUNG; BRANDO POSOCCO (HEATHERWICK STUDIO).

Cook Like A Michelin-Star Chef With These Kitchen Designs

Having conceived modules for two Michelin-starred chefs, it’s safe to say cabinetmaker Søren Hvalsøe Garde knows his way around a kitchen. The foodie and founder of his namesake firm has spent years in the workshop alongside studio partner Søren Lundh Aagaard perfecting heritage techniques from the Danish masters: Finn Juhl, Mogens Koch, Hans Wegner. At Denmark’s 3daysofdesign last spring, the duo hosted “Crafted to Last,” an exhibition at their showroom curated by interiors stylist Pernille Vest. (Portuguese furniture brand De La Espada was a co-exhibitor.) Visitors encountered a range of hit products including copper/ash and new zinc/beech iterations of Framed, a kitchen design from 2020; Solid, a 2013 island defined by oiled heart-oak planks; and Minimal, a 1999 model made of elmwood with a quartzite worktop, its shadow-gap around the drawers forming an elegant graphic expression.

Behold This Century-Old Edwardian Townhouse Reno In Toronto

Toronto’s Roncesvalles neighborhood is home to art galleries, Polish eateries, a farmer’s market, and verdant parks. It’s also where photographer Andrew Rowat, whose award-winning work has appeared in Bon Appetit and Vanity Fair, now resides. After stints working in Shanghai and New York, the global denizen returned to the city with his wife and newborn son looking to purchase a home in 2019. “It was a year of firsts,” recalls Rowat, who settled on a quaint, century-old Edwardian townhouse in the hip enclave.

Rowat had no intention of making major changes to the two-story home, other than a simple appliance upgrade in the kitchen. The layout proved challenging, however, so Rowat sought help from his former officemate and longtime friend, architect Delnaz Yekrangian. “Like most Toronto semi-detached homes on relatively deep lots, daylight had to be ‘dragged’ inside,” recalls the architect, who suggested opening the main floor for maximum sight lines and adding skylights, among other features. “In the software business, it’s called ‘scope creep’,” laughs Rowat, who tapped another colleague, Hong Kong-based designer Daniel Fintzi, to collaborate for the grueling facelift. “Fortunately, all three of us are very detailed-oriented,” notes Rowat. “As a photographer adept in leveraging natural light, he was the perfect client,” concurs Yekrangian.

The trio worked asynchronously, aiming to marry form and function wherever possible while maintaining the home’s 2,000-square-foot envelope and historic character. Old Canadian houses lack closet space, Rowat explained, hence a slew of built-ins: cubbies, drawers, benches and nooks for optimal storage, and uprights meant to mimic two-by-four beams delineating the entryway. A wall-hung toilet allows for additional counterspace in the powder room. Upstairs, Fintzi designed a spacious full bath with heated large-format porcelain tile flooring and marble countertops, specifically cut so the veins flow continuously from backsplash to counter to overhang.

In the formerly cramped kitchen, expansive Corian countertops host a bevy of custom features like an integrated knife strip, induction mobile charging, and discrete cutting boards. A tabletop extends from a lower drawer that can be folded away after use, and an 8-foot louvered ceiling diffuses atmospheric light while concealing the Bluestar range’s exhaust pipe. “The ceiling is often an overlooked canvas for creativity and function,” concurs Rowat.

Fond of Japanese and Scandinavian design principles, the homeowner embraced a wabi-sabi approach through a reductive palette of white-painted walls and pale millwork with Canadian maple flooring, complementing the dwelling’s original brickwork. Rowat debated repointing the latter but ended up keeping it as-is. “Cracks and missing mortar all tell a story of sorts,” he muses. “I enjoy looking at my photographs hanging from this brick that was made more than a century ago.” A large-format print of Kazakhstan’s former Hotel Aral adorns the coat closet, another, of Gaudí’s Basilica of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, adds drama to the dining area.

Rowat’s 20-year career is evident elsewhere, with furnishings and fixtures curated by fellow artists and industry connections. He discovered Vancouver-based lighting studio Bocci after an assignment shooting the co-founder Omer Arbel for T Magazine. Arbel’s pearlescent ovoid chandelier and globular table lamp adorn the dining room, opaque red and yellow orbs appear near the entryway. “Almost every piece or decision in the house comes from some sort of a personal connection,” reflects Rowat.

In total, the renovation took eight months, give or take a few straggling pieces. Rowat, for his part, is pleased. “I have often thought of the home as a palimpsest, where each subsequent owner adds a layer of their own to the underlying manuscript,” opines the photographer.

Peruse Andrew Rowat’s Toronto Transformation

Step Into A Chic Urban Sanctuary In The Heart Of Williamsburg

When designer Cece Stelljes and her husband, developer Yuval Berger, purchased an early 20th–century Williamsburg house in 2014, they’d been renting a smaller residence in nearby Greenpoint, just had their third son, and hoped to renovate the new home to live in with their young family. But, “It turned out to be a teardown,” recalls Stelljes, who at the time was co-owner of Revamp, which fittingly had just won an Interior Design Best of Year Award for a West Village town house project. By 2020, Stelljes had launched Stelljes Design, collaborated on residential-development properties with Berger, and, finally, broke ground on that Williamsburg site. “It was the first time I’d design a town house from scratch,” she says.

You’d never know it from the result. Encompassing a 1,000-square-foot garden apartment, plus a 2,800-square-foot triplex with three bedrooms, an open-plan parlor level with generous kitchen, a home office, and enviable outdoor space, the new home has major curb appeal: white brick, black cornices, a pitched roof, and an entry courtyard with a newly planted honey locust tree.

Inside is equally eye-catching. Although Stelljes, now design director at Jeffrey Beers International, has been a Brooklynite since 2001, the interiors have a decidedly global air, with influences ranging from France to Brazil. In fact, the centerpiece, a sculptural C-shape stair, evokes the work of Oscar Niemeyer, whom Stelljes had studied while earning her master’s at Pratt Institute (it was a Queens-based fabricator, however, who pulled off the connector). High ceilings, oak herringbone flooring, and a black-stone fireplace nod to Haussmann typology. “My dream aesthetic is to take a gorgeous old Parisian apartment, add modern furniture and color. . .marry tradition with today—I got to explore that idea with this building,” Stelljes notes.

In the end, though, the walls remained white. That’s because the family never moved in. Even though furnished with her own vintage gems, family-friendly pieces from Anthropolgie, CB2, and IKEA, and eclectic artwork—some by the designer herself—Stelljes and Berger decided to rent the property, as their boys, now a tween and teens, are firmly ensconced in their local schools. But they may eventually call it home. “It is spacious,” she concludes, “so it’s very enticing.”

Stroll Through A Spacious Townhouse Meant For City Living

PROJECT SOURCES FROM FRONT: GRAND STAIRS: CUSTOM STAIR, CUSTOM HANDRAIL (STAIRWAY). VELUX: SKYLIGHT. BENCH-MADE MODERN: SOFA (LIVING AREA). LAWSON-FENNING: SIDE TABLE. SAFAVIEH: RUG. SPOONFLOWER: THROW PILLOWS. BIG APPLE FIREPLACE: FIREPLACE. MARBLE-LITE: MANTLE, FIREPLACE SURROUND (LIVING AREA), COUNTERTOPS (KITCHEN). ANTHROPOLOGIE: CHAIR, COCKTAIL TABLE (LIVING AREA), DAYBED (OFFICE). IKEA: BENCH (LIVING AREA), BEDS (BEDROOMS). JUSTICE DESIGN GROUP: SCONCE (LIVING AREA). CB2: CREDENZA (LIVING AREA), CHAIR (OFFICE), TABLE LAMP (KIDS’ BEDROOM). THROUGH ETSY: WOOD ART (LIVING AREA), VINTAGE RUG (OFFICE). THROUGH SALON DESIGN: CHANDELIER (KITCHEN). SCHWINN HARDWARE; SUPERFRONT: HARDWARE. KALLISTA: SINK FITTINGS. BERTAZZONI: RANGE. VENT-A-HOOD: HOOD. LOSTINE: TABLE LAMPS (MAIN BEDROOM). ROMO: PILLOWS. ETHNICRAFT: SIDE TABLES (MAIN BEDROOM, OFFICE). THROUGH REPOP: DESK (OFFICE). WEST ELM: FLOOR LAMP. STRING FURNITURE: SHELVING UNIT (KIDS’ BEDROOM). 

PROJECT SOURCES THROUGHOUT: PELLA: WINDOWS. S&B CAST STONE: WINDOW TRIM. KINGS BUILDING MATERIAL: FACADE BRICK. EDON COMPOSITES: CORNICES. BENJAMIN MOORE & CO: PAINT. ARJUNE DESIGN STUDIO: ARCHITECT OF RECORD. STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING INTEGRATED: STRUCTURAL ENGINEER. ADAL ENGINEERING: MEP. NEW ANTIQUITY: MILLWORK. PROFESSIONAL CONSTRUCTION GROUP: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

4 Design Mavericks Transforming The Kitchen & Bath Space

Meet the visionary artisans blending creativity and cutting-edge design to craft innovative pieces for the kitchen and bath sphere.

Discover The Artisans Bringing Flair To Furniture Design

1. Lori Weitzner for Artistic Tile

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Product: Lola
Standout: Crafted entirely in-house in Secaucus, New Jersey, the marble tile, which reinterprets an arabesque refracted into a mesmerizing palimpsest, recalls the Weitzner Design founder’s luxurious handmade textiles and wallcoverings.

2. John Löfgren and Jonas Pettersson for Very Simple Kitchen

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Product: Very Simple: Accessories
Standout: Swedish studio Form Us With Love conceived a powder-coated or raw aluminum kitchen rail system that makes the perfect perch for accompanying accoutrements like utensil holders, hooks, a lamp, and more. 

3. Daniel Germani for Cosentino

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Product: Adia
Standout: The architect and kitchen expert’s new Pietra Edition range of Dekton surfacing takes inspiration from various Mediterranean stones, like Ceppo di Gré and Roman limestone, including this pleasing creamy-toned pattern.

4. Paolo Trevisan and Francisco Barboza for Florense

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Product: Arco
Standout: The Brazilian brand introduces a kitchen by Italian industrial-design studio Pininfarina, best known for high-end automotive creations, that hides a fun surprise: a secret cocktail bar that rises from a circular module at one end of the island.