Douglas and Bec’s Beautifully Understated New Zealand Home

There are elements of Bec Dowie’s northern New Zealand home that are impossible to capture in photographs alone. One may not realize, for instance, the scope of its rural surroundings. It may be hard to detect the relative quiet in comparison to the city where the designer, her husband, and daughter previously made their home. And it most certainly may be difficult to grasp that, despite a noticeable lack of embellishment, it’s a multifaceted — and completely modifiable — space that belies its minimal appearance. To put it plainly: Its walls move.

09.18.14

At Home With

The First 59 Minutes of Jill’s Day

We were recently asked to participate in IKEA’s brand-new “Show Us Your IKEA: The First 59” campaign, which focuses on how IKEA pieces can help make the most out of the first hour of your day. So we thought this was as good a time as any to invite our readers into one of my favorite spaces and to share a bit of my own morning routine.

04.08.13

Q+A

Melissa Bartley, Field Visual Manager of Terrain at Styers

When we first began hearing rumblings a few years back about Terrain, the garden center/home store/plant nirvana/farm-to-table café/dreamy wedding venue located 40 minutes outside of Philadelphia, we had no idea that the place was founded and operated by Urban Outfitters. Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, to do a profile one day on the sweet couple who must own the place? But don’t laugh at our cluelessness just yet. Though its flagship campus is huge — nearly a dozen buildings spread out over five acres — Terrain has the intimate vibe and the quirkily curated stock of a much smaller operation. Credit for projecting that cozy vibe, despite being part of one of the biggest retail conglomerates in the country, goes in large part to Terrain’s visual team — the buyers, merchandisers, and creatives who stock the place with mason jars, ticking stripe aprons, vintage planters, sea salt soaps, bocce ball sets, and terrariums.

11.03.10

Sighted

Book Case by Raw-Edges

It’s not very often that a designer’s work is accepted into the permanent collection at MoMA when he's just a year out of design school. But that’s what happened to the Israeli-born, London-based Royal College of Art grad Shay Alkalay, who debuted his Stack chest of drawers with Established & Sons at the Milan Furniture Fair in 2008 and saw it honored by the museum that same year. And no wonder: With Stack, Alkalay — who with his longtime partner Yael Mer forms the London studio Raw-Edges — stumbled upon a brilliant bit of reduction. The unit is made from a series of colored drawers, stacked atop one another, that can be opened from either side. There’s no frame and no back panel; in other words, it completely re-contextualizes what a storage unit can be. That same thinking went into the Book Case the pair constructed for their London flat, which is a bookshelf in the loosest sense of the word, seeing as there aren’t actually any shelves.