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This Affordable Boutique Hotel is Within Walking Distance of the Modernist Architecture of Paris

Hotel Noucha in Paris, above and top, designed by Jordane Arrivetz, mixes new fabrics and forms with the century-old details of a former townhouse.

A cliché, perhaps, to talk at this point about how great Paris is, but there’s a reason people love to visit: There’s simply an ease to the city. You can eat well even if you don’t book restaurants months in advance, you can bike the streets, you can do a million little day trips, you can even swim in the Seine. But perhaps my favorite aspect of traveling to the French capital is the array of beautiful but actually affordable hotels, to which Hotel Noucha is the latest entry. Located in the 16th arrondissement — slightly off the beaten path but a great place to be if you’re doing the Le Corbusier / Robert Mallet-Stevens circuit (or going to Roland-Garros) — Noucha is located in a grand former family home and retains touches of the original, century-old interior, including herringbone floors, marble fireplaces, a skylit library, and restored moldings. The rest of the interior is courtesy of Jordane Arrivetz, and it mixes custom-designed headboards, Pierre Chapo-esque wooden furniture, gorgeous textiles, and graphic carpets (which I honestly tried to source for you and only came up with these exquisite Jil Sander socks, which someone should absolutely buy). Everything is done in a palette of olives, creams, ochres, and blacks, and the whole effect is very Chanel — in other words, very Parisian.

A New Show On What It Means To Look and Be Seen

Clockwise from top: Dana Arbib’s Porta d’Acqua mirror, Rafael de Prieto’s fish-shaped mirror, Paul Cocksedge’s ode to Louis XIV. Photo: Joe Kramm

There’s a reason the new show at Emma Scully Gallery is called “Framed,” rather than something like “Reflections.” Though the show, co-curated by Scully and Friedman Benda’s Erica Boginsky, features five artists reconceptualizing the mirror, the focus here is on what surrounds those contemplative surfaces. The designers were encouraged to explore the “ornament that surrounds emptiness,” and what results are five objects that highlight their maker’s distinct material preoccupations. For her contribution, Dana Arbib created a Venetian-inspired arch that resembles a cameo or other piece of fine jewelry. It’s encircled by a ropelike watery green glass frame, accentuated with golden hardware, and topped by a small head, a reminder of the stone carvings that embellish Venice’s doorways. For her twisted frames, Simone Bodmer Turner recreated the look of bronzework in ceramic, painting them with a glaze that passes for metallic depth. Rafael Prieto created a wooden frame shaped like a fish, while Paul Cocksedge took a traditional gilded Louis XIV frame and distorted it, allowing the base to extend beyond the edge of the frame; it’s cleverly called Louiiiis. Marcel Wanders also contributed a mirror resembling a shattered gemstone held precipitously in place — a comment, perhaps, on our tenuous relationship with ourselves and our ability to see and be seen.

Wretched Flowers is Basically Doing Couture Work Now

Left, a top, beaded with sesame jasper beads in a tapestry style by Wretched Flowers for Christopher Esber. Right, a table lamp by Wretched Flowers.

Chainmail has its origins in fashion — or, at least, in the wearing of garments — but in recent years, it’s also been embraced by the design community, draped over chair frames or hanging in loose columns from the shade of a lamp. So it was fun to see the two worlds collide at Christopher Esber’s Spring/Summer 26 show at Paris Fashion Week, held at the Australian embassy, a modernist landmark, where Esber tapped Loney Abrams and Johnny Stanish of Wretched Flowers to create two garments. In their design practice, Wretched Flowers have invented a new aesthetic for chainmail, one informed by things like needlepoint and crochet, and they brought that signature look to one of the pieces: a chainmail-inspired top that funnels the beaded aesthetic of a beach cover-up through the Arms and Armor wing of the Met. (It’s Castaway meets From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.) The collection in fact doesn’t explore fashion as a kind of armature but rather plumbs the idea of escaping to paradise only to find that the perfection you sought doesn’t exist; the garments are meant to be familiar yet unsettling. Wretched Flowers’ second piece represents a more quantum leap from their typical look, featuring 7,550 beads, including quartz, shell, agate, magnesite, heliotrope, epidote, and Czech glass. It took more than 80 hours to perfect — the true couture equivalent of a striped towel — and we are here for it.

This Nate Berkus–Designed Residence Deploys Objects By Some Very Familiar Faces

At The Katharine in the West Village, the Nate Berkus–designed residence deploys works by Devin Wilde, BDDW, Meg Biram, and more.

When you live in New York long enough, you begin to hear stories of how many of the city’s residential buildings originally functioned. There’s the low-rise in the East Village that used to be a movie theater. There’s the Italian Renaissance building on 63rd Street that was a boardinghouse for Sylvia Plath when she worked at Mademoiselle in the 1950s. And perhaps most iconically, there’s the Flatiron Building, a former construction company headquarters that’s currently undergoing a conversion. The Katharine in the West Village falls under the category of “early 20th-century haven for independent working women” (and later, a New School dorm); after years of disrepair, the 1910 Benjamin Wistar Morris building was recently refreshed by BKSK architects to form eight residences, all designed by Nate Berkus. Out of those eight, only one remains unsold, having just hit the market this week: the 4-bedroom, 4,000 square-foot, $22.5-million penthouse, an all-cream aerie where Berkus loaded up on design details befitting its downtown address: BDDW puzzles, Devin Wilde vases, Meg Biram paintings, mid-century chandeliers, and vintage trompe l’oeil draped tables among them.

Teklan’s Second Collection for Layered Plays With Perception and Illusion

Prague’s Vila Volman proved a perfect backdrop for Teklan’s highly colorful and geometric collection for Layered. Photos: Andy Liffner

If you’ve already scoured your copy of the Modernist Travel Guide, you might recognize the location for the Swedish rug company Layered’s most recent collection shoot in Prague. Called Vila Volman, the house was built in 1939 for a wealthy industrialist by the young architects Jiří Štursa and Karel Janů. The house’s highly colorful and graphic interiors — all tiled surfaces, pastel tubs, and perforated walls — prove a perfect foil for Layered’s second collaborative collection with Teklan, which moves beyond color-blocking and into concepts like perception and optical illusion. “Working with rugs is like sketching a new geography for a room,” says the designer Tekla Severin. “You influence how people move, how they perceive scale and surfaces. I like the idea that a rug can either enhance a space or create a deliberate break within it.”

The collection includes three new styles. Fregio, with its decorative dashed border, recalls ancient dentil moldings; cutely, its pink and yellow colorway was inspired by outfits from the Pippi Longstocking book. Labyrinth, with its mesmerizing meander, subtly references modernist architecture, in particular Scarpa’s Brion cemetery. And the Diagonal pattern simply funnels a classic motif through Teklan’s unerring sense of color. An excellent collection that I *perceive* will be on a floor near me soon!

Editor’s List

CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT

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The 100% natural fragrance company Abel just relaunched its scents, and there’s so much I like about this company: a female founder (who was formerly a winemaker!), a reliance on biotechnology — which removes the need for fossil fuels in fragrances — and a new, unusually shaped bottle that’s made from post-consumer recycled glass and a biodegradable cap.

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Years ago, when our friends at Wary Meyers posted this incredible image from the cover of a 1973 New York Times Magazine story, we tracked down its photographer, Norman McGrath. But now McGrath has an Instagram of his own, where he’s posting his original architectural photography, including this insane interior from a 1969 Myron Goldfinger house in Bridgehampton. Worth a follow!

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I’ve had this insane wooden bed designed by Jerome Byron of Office of BC knocking around my head since I saw it on Instagram this spring. I did point out in my beds opus that all the best beds are custom for interiors projects, but so it goes.

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Sometimes the more absurd the object, the more I like it. I’m not sure who is buying this chic as hell silver-plated lapis lazuli stand for an iPhone by Natalia Criado, but frankly I wish it was me and that my office had these modernist Bond villain vibes!

News

Billy Cotton’s collab with the British company Soane, including a slim, ball-and-socket floor lamp and a leather banded dining table, makes some of the more trad signifiers seem current.

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If you liked Billy Cotton’s collab with West Elm, you’ll love the partnership the interior designer is launching this month with the craft-forward British company Soane, comprising rattan chairs, romantic patterned wallpapers, walnut furniture and lighting. We especially love this ball and socket floor lamp and the leather-banded dining table finished with metal studs.

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Jess Hannah runs her studio the way I’d want to if I were a maker. She’s a jeweler first, but she also makes lamps and has a thriving nail polish line; her collaboration partners, including the Met Museum, LACMA, and the JB Blunk estate, are always pitch perfect. Her latest is for the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial, for which she released two shimmery limited edition polishes inspired by the paintings of Made in L.A. artist Kristy Luck.

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There were two excellent home tours published this weekend that seem to herald a return to individuality in our interiors. The first was our friend Ellen Van Dusen’s upstate house in Architectural Digest; we’re obsessed with the house itself, which was built by a textile artist several decades ago, but also with all the care and DIY Van Dusen and her family put into it, including the incredible randomized Fireclay Tile mosaic in the bathroom. The second tour was Christene Barberich’s 650-square-foot upstate cabin in House Beautiful, built by her architect husband, which uses the ingenious solution of compressed straw panels to provide insulation, soundproofing, and dehumification.

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On view until October 28 at 180 Maiden Lane in New York is Return to Office, an exhibition of pieces from Gaetano Pesce’s radical 1994 office interior for Chiat / Day. It’s presented by Sweeterfat, a New York vintage dealer that’s been quietly acquiring or borrowing pieces from the original interior for years. A must see!

Jobs

SIN is seeking a trade and wholesale account director in Brooklyn
Daytrip is seeking full-time interior designers at all levels in London
Michael K. Chen Architecture is seeking a junior architect/designer in New York City