Enliven the Patio With Outdoor Seating in Candy Colors

Talk about a delectable treat. Roche Bobois‘ collaboration with Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos produced fun, softly shaped sofas, rugs, and cushions in a color palette inspired by the pastel houses in Lisbon’s Old Town. BomBom Outdoor has adjustable bolster cushions that can be arranged in any way desired atop the seat. The upholstery is a cozy quilted Méridien outdoor fabric in hues that are sugar sweet and reminiscent of licorice Allsorts. Vasconcelos says she is inspired by everyday life. “As a Portuguese woman, the savoir faire and materials specific to my culture are essential: the azulejos that adorn our indoor and outdoor spaces, along with the crochet doilies that decorate sofas, tables, and televisions in all Portuguese homes.” It’s that sense of play and whimsy that defines BomBom.

A Colorful Brooklyn Townhouse Inspired by “La Joie de Vivre”

In Brooklyn’s brownstone-lined Fort Greene neighborhood, Jessica Wilpon Kamel and Christina Akiskalou—the duo behind New York-based studio Ronen Lev—updated a four-level 1890s-era home for a couple with elementary school-aged children.

The townhouse came with good bones and plenty of charm that Ronen Lev made sure to preserve while introducing “practical luxury,” as well as a curated selection of vintage European design pieces. “The parlour floor, which corresponds to the second level in historic New York brownstones and townhouses, accessed through the building’s front steps, is always the most luxurious,” says Wilpon Kamel. “These grand rooms are often filled with period detailing such as high ceilings, stone fireplaces, large street-facing windows and ornate ceiling work. We deliberately restricted the amount of furniture in this space, allowing each piece to shine in its own right. We wanted every element to have space to breathe.”

In the living room, a narrow mirror, stretching from floor-to-ceiling, contrasts with a low-set, sinuous sofa, creating tension with a play on scale. For the eclectic dining area, Ronen Lev sourced a vintage table and chairs, and custom designed the shelving unit. Unexpected graphic patterns add character throughout, referring to the work of architect and designer Alexander Girard (1907-1993). Various shapes and themes repeat in the house, like the black-and-white checkered pattern in the powder room, seen in the floors and wallpaper details.

A bold palette enlivens the children’s rooms, where historical details meet modern furnishings. “We approached the children’s rooms through a playful design lens, selecting soft, rounded furniture and vibrant green and yellow hues,” says Wilpon Kamel. “The owners wanted a home that would be full of color and look and feel like nothing they have seen before.” The designers delivered on all fronts.

Inside the Renovated Brooklyn Townhouse 

These Residential Interiors Offer a Palette to Suit Every Mood

A trio of new residential interiors runs the emotional gamut from bright and sunny to serene and sophisticated.

Manuelle Gautrand Architecture, Paris

Natural light floods the award-winning architect’s first residential interior, a 1,300-square-foot duplex in a 17th-century Marais building, where ceilings were raised, a ribbon skylight installed, and the play of volumes and voids carefully calibrated to take full advantage of the expansive windows—not least in the living area, which is dominated by a stack of colorful blocks forming a sunny sculptural staircase and fireplace.

Lorla Studio, New York

Quiet sophistication reigns in this renovated 1,900-square-foot garden apartment, housed in a former 19th-century church, where the confidently cosmopolitan taste of its young professional woman owner is reflected in a neutral background palette—white walls, light wood floors—that sets off a characterful array of vintage and custom furniture, warm-brass and matte-black light fixtures with sculptural silhouettes, and a gallery’s worth of commissioned and collected artworks.

No Architects, Prague

Two striking paintings—a numerical abstraction by Vladimír Houdek and a melancholy dreamscape by Josef Bolf—set the program in this renovated 1,400-square-foot maisonette, the former’s numbers and raw edges reflected in the perforated pattern on the radiator covers and the ragged bottoms of the kitchen cabinet doors, the latter’s gently sorrowful mood echoed in a teardrop-shape pendant fixture and the meditative greige of a feature wall.

IA Interior Architects Delivers an On-Brand, Budget-Friendly Office for a Fitness App Developer

2021 Best of Year winner for Budget Office

Zwift specializes in bringing people around the world together to train in virtual land and cityscapes. But in the brick-and-mortar world, the fitness-app developer found itself fragmented, with employees scattered across multiple buildings. To bring them under one roof, the tech company turned to IA Interior Architects to not only expand its headquarters but also have it live up to Zwift’s motto: “Fun powers performance.”

Supergraphics, slogans, and posters referencing the gaming-inspired app line the three-floor, 59,500-square-foot office, while color—be it a fuchsia perforated-metal staircase surround or a citrus-hued conference area—nod to Zwift’s vivid branding. Sculptural LED fixtures enliven hallways, pantries, and break-out areas. Perforated felt panels hanging between rows of workstations help balance acoustics in the open-office neighborhoods. Materials throughout are humble yet authentic: CNC-milled plywood arches, polished concrete flooring.

The addition of a retro-inspired Schwinn cruiser stationary bike outfitted with a tablet holder demonstrates that big bucks needn’t be shelled out for an over-engineered machine to ride Zwift’s virtual trails. IA proves the same can be true for office design: By prioritizing low-cost solutions, the firm delivered an energetic, on-brand space for approximately $70 per square foot.

Mat Barnes References Gen X Pop Culture in His London Home

The unassuming semidetached in Sydenham, a verdant district in southeast London, had sat empty for six long years before Mat Barnes, founder of Shoreditch architecture studio CAN, got his hands on it. The two-story Edwardian brick house leaked and lacked heating—and that was before part of the ceiling caved in. Still, the Welsh-born talent knew the home could be something special.

Barnes founded CAN in 2016 but the firm’s origins date to the art and design foundation year he took in 2005 to gain admission to the University of Nottingham, a period that exposed him to animation, fashion, and illustration. “That became the basis of CAN”—an acronym for critical architecture network—“which is all about bringing different aspects of the creative world into the discipline.”

Prior to opening his own studio, Barnes worked for a time at Paul Archer Design, a high-end residential practice known for its glass-box modernism. “CAN is something of a reaction against that,” he continues. “At some point in the nineties, the gallery aesthetic leached into people’s homes, and everything became a bland white box: You wouldn’t know who lived there or what they liked.” In contrast, Barnes encourages his clients to tell all, from what music they love to what food they prefer, and feeds the sum into their project.

For this house, the client was Barnes himself, plus wife Laura Dubeck and their two toddlers. To suit family living, he rearranged the upstairs bedrooms, accessed via a newly skylit stair, and added bathrooms so the home is now a four-bed, two-bath. He also opened up the ground floor, leaving only the front parlor, now a lounge, intact. He punched through the brick rear wall to the backyard—pow!—leaving the edges ragged, to add a glass-enclosed extension that became the new living room. The busted portal is framed by twin poles and a horizontal steel I beam, a reference to a scene in Danny Boyle’s seminal 1996 film Trainspotting in which a collapsing masonry wall is upheld by steel props in the squatters’ digs. “I was hunting for the archetypal derelict wall,” Barnes says of his source material. “I wanted to preserve the memory of the old building and the construction.”

The rear extension’s cobalt steel trusses nod to the same in London’s 1976 Hopkins House, an emblem of High-Tech style. “I love the structural expression,” Barnes notes. “Why not use the structure as the character instead of layering on plaster and then artwork?” Chromatic paint accents other architectural features, too, including the stair’s pale-green balustrade and tangerine underside. “We’re surrounded by so many colors and textures in the outside world that to me it feels natural to bring many different patterns and fabrics inside, too.”

The extension’s tubular-steel frame is deliberately thin and fragile-looking, and Barnes wanted a heavy roof in juxtaposition. That quickly morphed into something more original—a parapet in the shape of a mountain—when he came across a snapshot of Disneyland’s Matterhorn roller coaster under construction in 1959. “I loved its realistic concrete mountain teetering atop a skeletal frame,” Barnes explains. His precipice is made of water-jet-cut aluminum foam, created by pumping gas through molten metal, which has a texture resembling an Aero chocolate bar. (He first admired the material on OMA’s Fondazione Prada in Milan.) “It’s a bit of set design and a bit of architecture—a surreal landscape,” Barnes notes.

Likeminded elements followed suit, their conception aided by quizzing his wife, who studied geography, on the subject. A wall in the dining area has a cavelike texture courtesy of roughcast, a type of plaster that is thrown, instead of troweled, on. The aforementioned Trainspotting poles are painted in bands of red and white to mimic ranging rods, land-surveying instruments whose bright coloration is visible even from a long distance or in bad weather.

While Barnes’ approach to the house was “about getting in as much light as possible,” he says, the one off-note is the front parlor. “It’s designed as a dark, cozy opposite to the rest of the interior—a winter room.” The lounge is suffused in a blue tone color-matched to the walls’ Dulux Marine Waters paint, from the velvet sofa to the rug (it took three tries to nail the color of the latter). Also in the same hue are the architectural fragments arrayed on the walls à la British neoclassical architect Sir John Soane’s collection. “His were valuable, though,” laughs Barnes, whereas these entablature bits, plaster cornice, and ceiling rose are broken and secondhand. (Such ingenuity helped keep the overall renovation budget below about $300,000.)

Time and again, Barnes used his own home as a test lab for interesting materials he wanted to try before specifying for clients. Take the kitchen cabinetry, which he and a mate fabricated from recycled plastic surfacing made of compressed cutting boards and milk-bottle tops. “It gives a rocky sense,” he explains. “Plus, I liked the idea of making a kitchen out of chopping boards.”

Tinkering, researching, and eschewing Pinterest trends for personal references has resulted in a 1,600-square-foot home as idiosyncratic as the individuals who live there. It’s a hit with everyone, especially the couple’s young daughter, nearly three, who because of life under extended lockdown, simply assumes everyone has a mountain on their house.

Ghislaine Viñas Creates a Calm Yet Vibrant Getaway in Palm Beach, Florida

With the constant drama of crashing waves right outside, creating a beachfront home that feels restful can prove surprisingly challenging. But New York–based interior designer Ghislaine Viñas ran with that sense of theater at this 3,900-square-foot ground-floor condo in Palm Beach, Florida, artfully drawing in the colors and movement of the water visible at every turn through floor-to-ceiling windows.

This is Viñas’s second project for the clients, the first being their Manhattan apartment. (A third project is also underway.) The owners, a married couple with two teenagers, wanted a getaway where they could relax and spend time with relatives, many of whom live in the area. Because of their past collaboration, Viñas was able to nail the brief right out of the gate. “They wanted a feeling of joyfulness and relaxation—but in an energetic sort of way,” the designer says. Comfort, she adds, was paramount. She also knows the clients to be modernists with an abiding love of midcentury furniture; the wife grew up with Arne Jacobsen Egg chairs, Eero Saarinen Womb chairs, and many other iconic pieces in her childhood home. And because this is a beach house, everything had to be easy to upkeep. “It’s supposed to be a stress-free living environment—it’s not supposed to be fussy!” Viñas says.

Although the living area’s coffered ceiling was deemed worthy of preservation, one element original to the 1980s condominium that absolutely needed to go was the “hideous” dark-cherry woodwork in the kitchen and bathrooms, which felt very heavy and contrary to the open and airy atmosphere Viñas was aiming for: “We cleaned out everything and created a fresh, white, invigorating space.” She left stonelike ceramic-tile floors in some rooms, including the living area, but specified white-ash planks for the three bedrooms and installed new baseboards and architectural lighting throughout. She also opened up the kitchen to the public areas and added an eating bar with high stools—perfect for breakfasting, lunching, and general hanging out. Shaker detailing on the cabinetry doors echoes the gridlike coffers overhead. “It’s not a look-at-me kind of project, so the little details are important,” Viñas explains.

As for the palette, the clean white base is spiked with serene oceanic blues, soft corals, and moments of terra-cotta, plus Viñas judiciously placed more intense accents throughout. The wife loves bold hues, especially when they jump from warm to cold tones. Viñas accomplished this chromatic sleight of hand by letting artwork and a few carefully chosen pieces do the heavy lifting. For example, the custom-colored yellow poufs in the living room and a series of hanging lamps in the octagonal entryway, the rainbow shades of which were woven using recycled soda bottles as a sort of armature.

Just below that fixture, the classic Saarinen laminate-top pedestal table was a natural choice given the wife’s love of the classics. It softens the room’s hard edges, as do the round ombré rug and custom crescent-shape wall-mounted consoles. “The repetition of circular forms is very pleasing and relaxing,” the designer observes. Ditto the pair of paintings by Ludwig Favre that Viñas describes as “other-worldly underwater-y”: fantastical compositions of tropical leaves mixed with flashes of bright color.

Comfort was taken to what some might call an extreme: The clients asked to test-drive every chair and sofa before they agreed to live with it. (The Egg chairs, of course, didn’t need to interview for the position.) Wherever possible, Viñas used performance fabrics for seating upholstery, many from her own line for HBF Textiles. The L-shape sectional in the living room—substantial and deep enough to provide plenty of room for family gatherings—is clad in her Sister Solid polyester-acrylic, while dining room chairs sport her Sir Stripe-a-lot Sunbrella.

In the middle of the apartment, Viñas created a cozy media room, which can be shut off with glass doors to provide privacy without skewing cavelike. Two walls are dressed in another of her designs, Wild Thing for Flavor Paper, a tropical-leaf motif that can, in certain colorways, be quite wild indeed. Here, though, Viñas specified a custom shade—a subdued sand—which allowed her to introduce riotous pattern without overwhelming the smallish space.

The primary bedroom started with the view; namely, “how the color of the ocean changes all the time as the sun hits it,” Viñas reports. “And how, when the sun goes down, it transforms from green to blue in a really beautiful way.” She pulled those hues into the carpet (Vestry Street, one of her designs for Aronson’s) and lounge chairs (upholstered in a blue-and-coral stripe) and even the ombré walls, which transition from soft blue to white. “The room has a beautiful tranquil feeling,” she says, stating the obvious.

Although everything is done with great subtlety, the overall effect is quite striking, a sophisticated yet unpretentious take on the prototypical beach house. “It is definitely the kind of place,” she notes, “where, when you walk in, you say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so glad I’m here; it makes me feel good.’”