New York, jettprojects.com An interior designer who worked for ASH NYC and Rafael de Cárdenas before striking out on his own in 2020, Jett grew up in rural Tennessee and was an Architectural Digest subscriber by the tender age of 8. Little did he know he’d end up two decades later as host of a breakout YouTube series for that same magazine, in which he dispenses home makeover advice with a mix of practicality and theater, advising one client to douse her bedroom nook in Gucci pink, or encouraging a studio apartment dweller to combine her sofa and bed into one. The thread running through Jett’s work is a sense of high drama — he’s partial to bedroom walls fully covered in velvet drapery, wall-to-wall silk carpeting, beds perched on leather platforms, mirrored backsplashes, murals, and more. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? American design is a feeling of being free and untethered. What that looks like from an aesthetic point of view is entirely up to the creator. To envision your own world, blank slate, is the most exciting thing imaginable. What’s better than being untethered to a history and being able to pick and choose references so freely? Key point is doing your research. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year? Loads more videos with Architectural Digest. More than anything, I love sharing creative and researched design with a wider audience that perhaps isn’t used to being challenged. The audience loves these videos and glimpses into process, and I believe it’s a result of the void in the market for something provocative and fun. It brings me so much joy. For projects, we are crossing from one design world into another. Although all of my projects are tied together by seduction and storytelling, the look that is coming up is vastly different than what anyone has seen from me. We are releasing two projects in the first half of the year that are in keeping with what you’ve seen — both are of a sexy, minimal, bachelor pad aesthetic that is achingly pure. Think stainless steel, carpeting, mirrors, and unabashed sex appeal. It is sort of funny because then the following projects will be like whiplash, a sort of reinvention which excites me terribly. One is an ode to swinging 1960s London through an Art Nouveau lens for a … Continue reading Darren Jett

Brooklyn, husband-wife.us Partners in work and in life (the name isn’t ironic), Justin Capuco and Brittney Hart had worked for a who’s who of interior design firms (Rafael de Cardenas, Peter Marino) before joining forces in 2015. They’ve been simmering for a while, creating incredible work for Roll & Hill at the company’s New York showroom and show-stopping Salone booths. This year, though, they bolted out of the gate, debuting two residences that showcase the depth of their ambition and their impeccable, ‘50s Italian–inspired aesthetic. What is American design to you, and what excites you about it? It’s hard to wrap our heads around “America” at the moment. That being said, the spirit of operating from necessity — making the best of what you’ve got — is an optimistic ethos that we value and feel still permeates American Design. In lieu of tradition, American Design adopts from a patchwork of cultural influences.  From this seems to come a freedom to remix and reinterpret, to experiment. American Design is a wild ecosystem. Generally, if you look at French design, Italian Design, Japanese design, you can see certain codes that speak to the country of origin. There is a reasonably evident cultural throughline, often rooted in historical reference. In American Design, these traditional codes feel much less evident, sometimes replaced by more apparent generational shifts. We love this constant reinvention. There is something beautiful in the ignorance that exists when historical reference isn’t as present — there is so much excitement and freedom in discovery. We are excited to see how a current emphasis on natural, crafted materials is incorporated into broader ideas about the future. What are your plans and highlights for the upcoming year?  From a life perspective, we hope to travel for the first time in forever. So much of our inspiration is derived from exploration and the pandemic has really impacted that. Professionally, we feel super fortunate to be working with incredible clients on a number of projects with significant scale shifts. We’re just wrapping up a really great large-scale office space in the financial district of Manhattan. The client has been wonderful — very design interested, unafraid of challenging ideas surrounding office programming. And just across the street we are working on a boutique workplace concept in a historical building with a great local client. We are making progress on a large home in Ohio that is part historical home and part ground-up … Continue reading Husband Wife