Table of contents for Jul-14 /Aug-14 in Dwell

We are an American magazine, and hometown design is one of our favorite themes to explore. All year long we work hard to find exciting and innovative modern projects, but we are especially thrilled to feature places we don’t often visit, like Auburn, Alabama (page 100), and Parthenon, Arkansas (page 60). Highlighting cities that are outside our usual milieu reminds us that great strides in modern design and architecture are happening all over the country, and we are proud to showcase those creative practitioners in our pages. Regional interests aside, we know that the best design helps people live better lives. This salient truth is underscored in this issue in a very special addition created by architect Ko Wibowo in Tacoma, Washington, for a couple battling the challenges presented by…

A Travel Wallet by the Good Flock, $149 Stow your travel trappings—like passports, boarding passes, and cash—in this vegetabletanned leather pouch designed and made in Portland, Oregon. thegoodflock.com B Peninsula Chair by Ben Klebba with Matt Pierce for Phloem Studio, $2,700–2,900 Handcrafted in Portland, the Peninsula Chair—an homage to Klebba’s home state, Michigan, in name and in its honest construction—features a wood frame, leather seat, and brass details. phloemstudio.com C Cone stop by Studio Gorm, from $40 Debuted at Salone Satellite in April 2014, the conical wood doorstop from Eugene, Oregon–based Studio Gorm has a looped handle for hanging when not in use. studiogorm.com D Drawer Accessory System by Henrybuilt, price upon request Henrybuilt’s kitchen systems are fabricated in Seattle, including this organizer designed to work to keep utensils and…

PROJECT Gordon Cabin ARCHITECT DEN Architecture, den-arc.com LOCATION Parthenon, Arkansas For years, architect Germán Brun and practicing Buddhist Jason Gordon—members of the same Miami soccer team—casually batted ideas around for a cabin. “Then one day, it finally happened,” Brun says. Gordon’s plot of land sits within the Katog Choling Rit’hröd Buddhist center in the Ozark Mountains, and he wanted to create a haven that echoed its philosophy. (Gordon’s longtime teacher and mentor, Khentrul Rinpoche, established the retreat in 2006.) “My idea was to live off the grid and to live simply,” Gordon says. Completed in fall 2013 for just over $118,000, Gordon’s 1,157-square-foot house was designed to have as little of an impact on its environment as possible. Green elements include a photovoltaic array, a rainwater catchment system, and a…

Rough-sawn plywood and standing-seam metal siding clad the house. “In cabins, we like to use undressed materials, which lend themselves to the simplicity of the structure,” says architect Tom Lenchek. It all started with a ride in a cherry picker. Joseph Lada of Chicago bought a plot of land near Michigan’s Glen Lake and soon realized the view was best surveyed from a height of 30 feet. He approached architect Tom Lenchek, and the two conferred about how to build above the treetops. “The challenge was not only celebrating the view but also the progression of getting there,” Lenchek says. First, he established the structure’s height—four stories—then worked his way down. To enter the 1,400-square-foot house, the Lada family first ascends an outdoor staircase. Next, they circulate through a windowed…

PROJECT The Aqua Lair ARCHITECTS Schemata Workshop and Blip Design LOCATION Issaquah, Washington Sally Julien and Peter Loforte sit on the porch of the Aqua Lair, their restored 1960s house on Lake Sammamish, near Seattle. The Bertoia chairs and clay lion are from Pacific Galleries. In 1963, the story goes, a mechanical engineer for McDonnell Douglas visited friends in Newport Beach, California, and fell in love with their house—believed to have been designed by Gordon Drake, or at least in his style. Ambitiously, if not ignorantly, the engineer tried recreating the house from memory in his home city of Issaquah, Washington, drafting blueprints and undertaking construction with his brother. What he didn’t account for, though, were the obvious differences in weather conditions between dry and sunny Southern California and the…

PROJECT Lola House ARCHITECT mossArchitects LOCATION Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Early in the process of building a new house for themselves in Lawrenceville, an up-and-coming neighborhood in Pittsburgh, architect Andrew Moss and his wife, Michelle Yanefski, an electrical engineer, nearly gave up. Moss, the founder of mossArchitects, knew the site had potential, and he and Yanefski were determined to design a home that would comfortably accommodate their family, including their children, Griffin, 15, and Luka, 13. But keeping costs down was a major sticking point, and they had to ditch their original plan when it proved too expensive. Ingenuity often is born of necessity, and the pair simplified and strategized to complete the threebedroom, 2,300-square-foot house for a little over $310,000. Andrew Moss: Lawrenceville is a historically blue-collar Pittsburgh neighborhood that was…

PROJECT Lava Flow 7 ARCHITECT Craig Steely LOCATION Pahoa, Hawaii On the Big Island of Hawaii, there’s the relatively dry and forgiving Kona side to the west, and then there’s the Hilo side. With an average annual rainfall of well over 100 inches, the windward portion of the island can be daunting for builders. But it is here, just below Hilo in the district of Puna, that architect Craig Steely has built a mini-enclave of what he has dubbed Lava Flow houses (see Dwell, July/August 2005 and November 2008), situated atop the sharp, black a’a rock formed from a previous eruption of the active volcano Kilauea. Some 14 years after the first Lava Flow house was built, the seventh incarnation in the architect’s series—for Craig Mayer, a Realtor turned amateur…

I’m in my 90th year and am an avid reader of Dwell. I look forward to each issue. My design philosophy has always been that the language of midcentury-modern (MCM) architecture is not a style, and your April 2014 issue solidly reinforces that concept. With its legacy now more than 80 years old, MCM is still spoken and enjoyed by a new generation of architects and landscape architects thanks to Dwell. The MCM language is never out of date. It always unfolds and adapts to new technologies and challenges, but the language stays the same. Mary Barensfeld said it all: “Architecture doesn’t stop with the building…architecture and landscape should meld into one design process.” That was my design philosophy in 1950 when I became a licensed architect in California and…

The bedding industry has never had a shortage of made-in-America options, a rarity in today’s importheavy marketplace. Serta and Sealy, two name-brand mattress manufacturers, still produce domestically along with regional companies like Jamison Bedding (Nashville, Tennessee) and King Koil (St. Paul, Minnesota). We take a look at a trio of alternate choices, from an all-organic line made in Ohio to two upstarts that use design thinking to lower costs. Organic bedding purveyor Naturepedic, which was founded by an environmental engineer in Ohio and is produced by Amish craftsmen, is touting its new EOS Customizable Organic Mattress Sleep System ($1,599–$4,399). The system allows buyers to customize their mattress with a choice of coils that range from plush to firm or latex, plus wool, cotton, or PLA plantbased fiber batting with cotton…

PROJECT My Beautiful Launderette ARCHITECT 30E Design, 30edesign.com LOCATION Boston, Massachusetts According to architect Anne Barrett of the Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, firm 30E Design, the vision for revamping a laundry room in an 1849 Boston brownstone began with her favorite question: “What would James Turrell do?” The back-of-house space was originally a cold, dank hallway with a dingy aluminum vent linking the basement and first floor. Now anchored by a glowing borosilicate chute—illuminated by a bundle of fiber-optic cables—this laundry room is more of an art installation than a hub for domestic chores. The residents wanted the space to be as beautiful as it is functional. Barrett’s challenge was to create a minimalist design to conceal the water heater, cables, Miele washer and dryer, and storage space, all of which…

Focusing on products made Stateside wasn’t Danny Seo’s first priority for his kitchen renovation—instead, he had one specific requirement: stainless-steel cabinets to replace the original, musty wood ones. “Stainless steel is timeless,” he says. “I wanted something that was clean on the outside and on the inside. It’s hygienic, 100 percent recyclable, and, for the home’s modern feel and look, it made the most sense.” A new smudge-free finish by Lasertron, a Florida-based company, caught Seo’s eye, sparking an internal conversation about domestic production. “I asked where they make the cabinets; they said, ‘Right here in Florida,’” Seo says. He then started looking around for other American-made trappings, deciding on tile by Shaw Floors (Georgia); Wilsonart’s HD laminate (Texas); Bosch appliances (South Carolina); and a Kohler cast-iron sink (Wisconsin). The…

PROJECT Sunshine Canyon House ARCHITECT Renée del Gaudio Architecture LOCATION Boulder, Colorado Colorado architect Renée del Gaudio and her family were camping when they heard the news: One of the most destructive wildfires in the state’s history was ripping through their property in Boulder. Del Gaudio and her husband, Ross Wehner, had purchased the land just two years earlier, in 2008, with the hope of someday relocating there from Denver with their two small children. In the meantime, they’d leased a tiny cabin on the property to a college student—who was able to escape the blaze—but the structure was destroyed. In all, 162 homes were wrecked in what came to be known as the Fourmile Canyon Fire. “It looked like the scene of war,” Wehner recalls. Equally devastating was the…

PROJECT Ramirez Residence ARCHITECTS Norman Millar and Judith Sheine LOCATION Sea Ranch, California Ramirez Residence Floor Plan A Terrace B Living-Dining-Kitchen Area C Wine Cellar D Half Bathroom E Guest Bedroom-Office F Garage G Guest Bathroom H Guest Loft I Master Bathroom J Master Bedroom Fifty years ago, a group of young architects began planning a cluster of contemporary houses on a rugged strip of coastline north of San Francisco. The goal was to turn a ten-mile expanse of bluffs and beaches into a community where modest, rustic second homes would blend in with the landscape. Among the founding architects was Charles Moore, a future dean of the Yale School of Architecture whose own condo featured a bedroom raised on corner posts over the living and dining rooms, partaking of…

PROJECT Brogan Residence ARCHITECT Salmela Architect LOCATION Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin “This is the place where I want to create new memories with my family,” Julie Brogan says, pointing to the view of Lake Michigan from her bedroom window in Sturgeon Bay, a small town in Wisconsin’s Door County. For years, Brogan, her husband, James, and their two children spent weekends and holidays on the one-acre property, first in a rustic log cabin dating from the 1930s and later in a house that they built in its place in 1986. Then, in 2006—less than a year after James Brogan died—the house burned to the ground. “There was nothing left,” Julie Brogan says. After stumbling upon a book by David Salmela, an architect based in Duluth, Minnesota, Brogan began to contemplate rebuilding…

July/August 2014 Fred A. Bernstein Since learning about Sea Ranch as an architecture student, Fred A. Bernstein has wanted to visit the legendary enclave of modernist houses. He finally got his chance when reporting “Back at the Ranch” (p. 122). The only problem was the drive—hours on a road so twisty that it explains how Sea Ranch remains pristine during an era of rampant real estate development. Mitchell Alan Parker While interviewing homeowner Sally Julien for “The Big Payback” (Renovation, p. 80), Mitchell Alan Parker thinks he might have discovered the source of her smart design chops. “Her parents had a striped, crushed-velvet living room set,” says Parker, a writer and editor. “She told me that that’s probably where she learned exactly what not to do.” Helen Thompson Texas native…

Designed by architect Eero Saarinen and landscape architect Thomas Church, the 320-acre General Motors Technical Center campus initially featured 25 buildings. The most visually arresting and technically challenging of these is the aluminum-clad Styling dome, an auditorium and exhibition space. Harley Earl, GM’s chief of style at the time, believed that the center’s architecture should reflect the automaker’s emphasis on advanced engineering and design, and persuaded the company’s leadership to be ambitious and bold when commissioning the concept, says Susan Skarsgard, manager of GM Design Archive and Special Collections. More than a half-century later, the center is still GM’s thriving creative hub where designers, engineers, and craftspeople develop prototypes and technologies—and the architecture continues to inspire. “Seeing the giant ‘wall of water’ on the lake for the first time in…

It was the grain of sand that became a pearl. CxMxD, a team of three New York City–based designers, hit upon the idea of a faceted circle while conceptualizing their entry for Add-on’13, an affordable-housing competition in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. That circle evolved into an adaptable fivesided structure called Oyster House, which design lead Christopher Lee, visualization designer Mengyi Fan, and graphic designer Dungjai Pungauthaikan envision as a way to build for high density and low impact. The rooms are arranged from most public to most private and face outward to maximize borrowed space from the outdoors. “A circular arrangement [means] you’re able to modify and orient the house to take advantage of the landscape,” says Lee. “And it’s superefficient in terms of surface area.” At 700 square feet, the…

PROJECT Vanguard Way ARCHITECT Max Levy INTERIOR ARCHITECT Sharon Odum LOCATION Dallas, Texas Deborah Orrill and Blair Sanders weren’t thinking about moving out of the house they’d lived in for 30 years, let alone building a new one. But they did both with the help of Dallas architect Max Levy, surprising themselves with an impetuosity that flew in the face of the security of a nearly paid-off mortgage. “It was an accident,” admits Orrill, a former director of Dallas’s Central Market Cooking School. How did two usually methodical people upend their well-laid plans and end up in a brand-new, stucco-galvanized, metal-and-glass house? Luck, or perhaps fate: Orrill noticed a sign on a road near their house in the Dallas suburbs announcing Urban Reserve, a neighborhood of modern, single-family, architect-designed homes.…

PROJECT Bragg House ARCHITECT David Hill LOCATION Auburn, Alabama “I wish people would not stick their heads into my living room and ask, ‘What kind of business is this?’” architect and landscape designer David Hill says with a laugh. This happens often, which is understandable given that his home, an industrial red-brick building, contrasts sharply with the student apartments surrounding Auburn University, where David is an assistant professor, and the typical cozy houses that populate Auburn, Alabama. When David and his wife, Elizabeth, moved here from Virginia with their three children, it was the anomaly of a historic brick building off the main street that grabbed their attention. Built in 1920 as a mercantile space in a thriving African-American neighborhood during segregation, the building has since hosted several pool halls,…

PROJECT Stevens Addition ARCHITECT Ko Wibowo LOCATION Tacoma, Washington When Claire and Ken Stevens first contemplated building an addition to their home, it was plain that their needs had undergone a sea change since 1973, when L. Jane Hastings, a pioneering Pacific Northwest architect, had designed their house in the trees. Set on a tranquil, wooded site in Tacoma, Washington, the bi-level structure is filled with artwork, books, and one-of-a-kind treasures collected around the world—testaments to the couple’s rich and varied life together. When Ken was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2009, architectural features that they had once negotiated without a thought—the steps leading to the front door, the two-step changes of level inside, the flight of stairs to the bedroom and master bathroom—all became potential hazards. A chemistry professor who…

Anne Lindberg had been working in monochromatic, two-dimensional graphite drawings for several years when she made a jump into color. In 2009, Lindberg—who holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and resides in Kansas City, Missouri—spent the summer at Art Omi International Artists Residency in upstate New York. “I was in this beautiful old barn that had corrugated, milky plastic inserts in the ceiling that created this cool blue light in the space,” she says. It inspired her to “hightail it” to a hardware store to buy scores of yellow thread, which she mounted in a rough version of the color-field installations she’s since created in museums and galleries around the world. Each ephemeral installation—which she creates onsite with Egyptian cotton thread and a staple gun—starts as a scale…