#elmer-grey

#elmer-grey

I never thought of it as making sculpture. It's just the way I think.

When you design your home with intentionality, you are essentially 'hard-coding' healthy behaviors into your daily rhythm. Health outcomes are the result of thousands of micro-decisions—so in his own home, he prioritized spaces like the kitchen, whose open layout makes cooking a pleasure, and the gym, centrally located.

The walk, and the houses surrounding it reflect a period when Berkeley's hills were becoming a laboratory for new architectural ideas rooted in craftsmanship, landscape and a belief that the built environment could shape daily life for the better.

In the digital world that we're in, you know, negative videos are what goes viral. People are always knocking people down a peg and it's really easy to fall into that. If something bad happens-which, when you own your business, something bad happens every day- it's easy to circle in despair. But my challenge is to look for the positive and figure out how to pivot, and if something isn't working then figure out a different way to get it done.

A couple of years ago, really well-prepared Wright properties sold very quickly. There were historically low interest rates and a lot of liquidity, even in the luxury market. Now the tides are shifting, and a post-pandemic frenzy for Wright designs has softened.

I knew I needed help, so I put an ad in MySpace. A woman named Beth responded and I met her for an interview at a coffee shop. As we talked I realized she had all the skills I didn't have. She had a design degree. She had business savvy and technical skills. And she was wildly smart and more importantly, kind.

Wright created a sculptural masterpiece, but he was pushing the boundaries of residential construction. He didn't put enough reinforcing steel in the cantilevers of the house over the waterfall, so as soon as they removed the formwork, the house started to sag. Wright was always assuring the Kaufmanns it was natural, but it was the house failing.

Like the chambered nautilus, its shell was a logarithmic spiral. A wall of rough sandstone and aquamarine glass cullet twisted up fifty feet to an oil-drill-stem mast from which a floating roof was hung by the stainless-steel struts of World War II biplanes. You slid in with the humid air from the ravine outside to stroll a terraced garden of pools and plants, over which suspended and carpeted pods for living and sleeping drifted like clouds.

The style is characterized by raw, exposed concrete and bold geometric forms. You've certainly seen it before in many cultural and civic buildings built between the 1950s and '70s. With countless examples spanning countries and continents, the look has both historical significance and remains popular-particularly in residential design-today.

Gropius, who from 1919 to 1928 directed the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau, designed the house in 1921-22 for lawyer Fritz Otte. The property is considered a dramatic evolution of Gropius's earlier seminal Haus Sommerfeld, which was also located in Berlin, but destroyed in World War II. The Bauhaus founder embraced a forward-looking approach with an unadorned, sharp-edged structure that rejected the heaviness of 19th-century historicism.

Designed by noted residential architect Roland E. Coate, the home was built in 1926 for Annie Wilson, daughter of pioneering Southern California businessman and politician Benjamin Wilson, for whom Mt. Wilson is named. The gently sloping 1-acre-plus property was once part of the vast holdings of George S. Patton, father of the famed U.S. general.

Maloof hand-carved a three-story spiral oak staircase. Other artists created stained-glass windows, copper doors and designer lighting. But the person who has been most involved in the house is Herb Hafif, the attorney, sculptor and art collector who personally split rocks for the stone walls and who has owned the property, through his philanthropic family foundation, since 1953.

"I'd been looking for probably six months," he tells AD. "There are not many unique options in Western New York. A lot of it is very cookie-cutter, traditional prefab homes." Then, while touring potential properties with his friend, interior designer Caryn Dujanovich, Milano got a call: an off-market tip-and a directive to drop everything and get over here now. The duo complied and were among the first to see a 3,700-square-foot, midcentury-modern-inspired hideaway surrounded by dense forest.

The mansion is so iconic and instantly recognizable, but it was definitely ready for an upgrade. The bones were always there, but the house needed to evolve the way the show has evolved—more layered, and reflective of how people actually live and gather now.

The dream project for me isn't a skyline object or spectacle, it's a long-life system -a project whose structure is reused, materials are upgraded and recycled rather than replaced, and performance improves over time. Where sustainable strategies aren't hidden in basements, or rooftops, but become part of the architectural experience. A dream project would be an urban district reimagined, edited with a scalpel (rather than a sledgehammer) with its declining building stock given a new life through subtle upgrades, modest interventions, and attention to craft and building performance.

Every architectural project is the result of deliberate choices. Beyond form and function, buildings embody technical, political, and cultural decisions that shape their relationship with both their surroundings and the people who inhabit them. ArchDaily's AD Narratives series explores these processes by bringing together accounts that trace projects from initial conception to built realization. In parallel, the AD Classics series turns to works of historical significance, presenting not only the stories behind these buildings but also technical drawings

No matter the style or scale, however, his sixth sense for the provision of creature comforts is evident throughout his work. "He just knew how to design a house for cultured living," notes Escher. It's telling that Williams opted for modernism in his own residence, yet the functionalist disposition of the rooms is balanced with richly personal details. "On one hand, it's still sort of a traditional layout in how the kitchen and back-of-house facilities are organized," says GuneWardena.

Postmodernism began as a critique of modernism's exhausted promises. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many designers no longer treated modernism as radical or socially redemptive. Urban renewal projects accelerated the demolition of historic neighborhoods, and landmark preservation battles raised urgent questions about what the United States valued and, ultimately, protected. The loss of major civic icons, including New York's Penn Station, sharpened public awareness that progress often arrives through erasure.

The Garden House is a light-filled, mass-timber hub for The Packer Collegiate Institute's Lower School, designed for the joy of its students and the ease of those who teach and care for them.

tqtq studio + 46 More SpecsLess Specs tqtq studio Text description provided by the architects. UNI-CENTER project renovates Hanyang University's existing Student Union, located along the main pedestrian axis connecting the subway station, the main building, and the welfare center, into a welfare-centered, multi-functional community hub for students. The design goes beyond simple functional enhancementit restores the building's sense of place and redefines it as a central node within the campus circulation network.

After years of modern, ultra-polished aesthetics dominating the design industry, people are yearning for character. Young renters and homebuyers are indicating that new-builds and gut-renovated spaces, despite clean lines and amenities, simply pale in comparison to the aesthetic charm of an older home. And designers agree: There's something undeniably more interesting about a touch of patina or an imperfect silhouette. The romantic, old-world sensibility of vintage design is hard to beat.

Many interior designers are indeed looking towards neutral colors and "warm" minimalism in 2026, as reported in Apartment Therapy's annual design industry survey, the State of Home Design. But there are a few maximalist design trends that refuse to fade into the background this year - namely, room drenching, and, more specifically, stripe drenching. This pattern drench has design pros leaning into colorful, dizzying stripes from wall to wall.