Sustainability Is Baked Into The Blueprint Of This Caribbean Home

2024 Best of Year Winner for Large City House

Residences located in tropical areas like the Caribbean must strike the right balance between maximizing and mitigating the ample resources of sun, breeze, and rain. Such was the case for this house, designed around natural ventilation. The 16,400-square-foot structure by Moneo Brock takes the form of a trio of travertine-clad concrete platforms—each set at a slightly different level to follow the topography—anchoring a grid of steel columns that in turn support vaulted brick roofs. Walls are alternately sliding glass, fully open, or composed of wooden louvers; on the property’s street-facing side, a screen wall built of local stone hushes traffic noise. Sustainability is baked in: Solar panels harness sunlight, large cisterns collect rainwater used to feed the numerous ponds and pools that cool the interior, and tanks beneath the main slab purify blackwater for household use.

PROJECT TEAM: BELÉN MONEO; JEFFREY BROCK; FEDERICO PÉREZ; JAVIER DEL POZO; FRANCISCO BLAZQUEZ; PEDRO ARNANZ; ISMAEL SANZ; YAIZA CAMACHO.

SheltonMindel and Architecture + Information Earn an Iconic Old Classic Best of Year Award for a Private New York Office

2021 Best of Year winner for Iconic Old Classic

Experiencing perhaps the greatest James Turrell piece in New York doesn’t require a museum membership. You only need to have business to conduct with this family-run office. Rising through its double-height reception area is Turrell’s enormous hollow egg shape, a chamber that required a laborious six-month process to construct from white solid-surfacing and concealed LEDs. Typically for this master of light and space, his mysterious conceptual sculpture alters our perceptions. Once you enter the egg and encounter the shifting colors inside, everything outside it looks different for a few seconds.

Like the Turrell, its surroundings make us see the world differently. A Manhattan office, it turns out, can be as graciously proportioned and serene as a Palladian villa. That’s thanks to the impressive real estate: 40,000 square feet of a tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and even more so to the joint efforts of the interiors firms, led by Interior Design Hall of Fame members Lee Mindel, Brad Zizmor, and Dag Folger, the latter two the co-founding principals of A+I. Mindel relates the egg installation to the philanthropic work done by the client: “This is a metaphoric think tank. They desired contemplative spaces, as opposed to some others that we all know of. That’s something beyond interior design.”

sheltonmindel: Grace V. Sierra; Michael Neal; Marc C. Newman; Emily M. Meroney; Margaret O’Connor

Architecture + Information: Brad Zizmor; Dag Folger; Cheryl Baxter; Nisha Mary Prasad; Chris Shelley; Abby Kuskin; Aaron Whitney; Katina Max Kremelberg