An Insider’s Tour of the French Ski Resort Charlotte Perriand Designed in the 1960s and 70s

From the late 1960s through the 1980s, Charlotte Perriand designed several residential and recreational buildings in France’s Savoy Alps, inspired by the area’s traditional mountain architecture. The monumental project — Les Arcs — became one of the largest ski resorts in the world, and I had the opportunity to spend a few days there last July, documenting its interiors and exteriors.
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Tour the Unbelievable 1930s Color-Blocked Fantasy Interior Hiding Inside a Simple Brick Building in Belgium

The modernist pioneer Jozef Schellekens was the public architect of Turnhout, a Belgian town halfway between Antwerp and Eindhoven, where he worked on schools and city halls. But his best-known and greatest work was his own house, a 1935 rectangular brick-and-glass structure whose simplicity belies the expressiveness of its interior, where Schellekens created a colorful world full of bespoke built-in furniture and other functional and decorative details.
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At Villa Cavrois, Muller Van Severen is an Eerily Perfect Match for the Modernist Estate

This month, the Belgian design duo Muller Van Severen begin a four-month intervention at Villa Cavrois, the modernist French estate designed in the late 1920s by Robert Mallet-Stevens. The show is a retrospective of sorts for the husband-and-wife duo, featuring everything from their leather-and-steel Duo Seats to brand-new work like the Alltubes series they launched this spring with Valerie Traan at Collectible and a sofa they've designed specifically in response to the installation site.
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Inside a Forgotten Gem of 20th-Century Belgian Art Deco

In case you missed it, writer, curator, and Prague-based architectural historian Adam Štěch hosted one of our most popular IG Live talks a few weeks ago on the topic of Belgian 20th-century architecture. Here, he gives us the backstory behind one of our favorite examples from that era — the Queen Elisabeth Foundation by Henry Lacoste.
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Why is This Early 1900s Swedish Minimalist Suddenly All Over Instagram?

We’re not sure when it was that we first started noticing the late Swedish designer Axel Einar Hjorth popping up everywhere we looked. But whenever it was, you can now consider us full converts to the church of Hjorth, whose work remains disarmingly fresh 60 years after his death, mixing as it does both Art Deco and Modernist influences, and a sense of sophistication with something more primitive.
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Inside Villa Stenersen, Oslo’s Under-the-Radar Gem of Modernist Architecture

We first came across Villa Stenersen on a trip to Norway in 2016 and immediately fell in love with the corrugated wall, the glass bricks, the bright blue facade, the free-standing columnal fireplace, and, of course, the colors. Our visit there was so magical that when we heard one of our favorite photographers, Tekla Severin, was visiting Oslo, we implored her to photograph the house for us in all its waiting-to-be-refurbished glory.
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Exhibit Columbus Washington Street Installations

See How 5 Design Galleries Are Transforming This Tiny Midwestern City

The seed for Exhibit Columbus began back in 2014, when designer Jonathan Nesci created an installation of reflecting tables, called 100 Variations, in the sunken courtyard of Columbus's First Christian Church, built by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen in 1942. "It was essentially to show proof of concept that a designer could make an installation in dialogue with the city," says Nesci. Three years later, the resulting design festival, which runs through November, boasts 18 separate installations.
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The Hollyhock House Shot by Gaea Woods

If you'd happened to wander into L.A.'s Barnsdall Art Park in the middle of the night last Friday, you might have assumed there were concert tickets, or some newfangled iPhone model, about to go on sale the next morning: even into the wee hours, a line of people three hours long snaked all around the property. Amazingly enough, though, the massive crowd had turned out not to buy something but to experience the re-opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark 1921 Hollyhock House, which we overheard certain over-caffeinated line-goers describe as "super hyped." Built in 1921 in the so-called California Romanza style, the theater and home turned museum had been closed to the public for more than three years for restoration, and the city was celebrating the unveiling of its face-lift by giving the public continuous free access for 24 hours. We figured the best way to mark the occasion was to send a photographer to shoot the house after dark, a task we entrusted to the up-and-coming L.A. photographer Gaea Woods.
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Autoban, Furniture and Interior Designers

The Beyoğlu district is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Istanbul, but for centuries, it’s been the Turkish cultural capital's most modern quarter as well. So it's fitting that the creative firm helping to spearhead the growth of modern design in Turkey has all but grown up on Beyoğlu’s cobbled streets. Autoban is housed in a half-baroque, mid-19th-century Italianate building, but inside, the studio is almost seamlessly modern.
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Alex Lin, graphic designer

If you were to chart the degrees of separation among young American designers, you might do well to start with Alex Lin. Since 2007, Lin — a Yale School of Art grad and former designer at 2x4 — has created all of the branding and collateral for Brooklyn-based furniture designer Stephen Burks, who often does work for the sustainably minded home accessories company Artecnica, who recently launched a line of pendant lights by Rich Brilliant Willing, who produce their Excel light series with Roll & Hill, who shared an exhibition space at this spring's Noho Design District event with Areaware, who commissioned a special 5-year anniversary piñata from Confetti System, who did the set design for United Bamboo’s Spring/Summer ’09 campaign. Confetti System also happen to share an 11th-floor Manhattan studio with Lin, who is the mild-mannered, super-talented graphic designer at the vortex of this Venn diagram–gone-haywire. Lin has headed up his own shop for only two years, but in that time, he’s worked with every creative on this list and then some.
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Stephan Jaklitsch, architect

In the world of retail, there is a tendency towards sameness, a familiarity designed to lull shoppers into a complacent state in which they might begin to feel it’s okay to spend a lot of money. A Zara, anywhere in the world, is immediately identifiable by its gold-toned lighting and rows of shoes lined up haphazardly underneath the clothes; a Marni boutique leaves its mark with swooping stainless-steel rails and elliptical cutouts in the ceilings. As a brand, Marc Jacobs has never been about uniformity, though — this is a fashion designer, after all, who’s gone from the most infamous collection of grunge in history to the luxurious heights of Louis Vuitton — so why should his stores? “There are certain iconic elements that are repeated,” admits Stephan Jaklitsch, the New York–based architect who’s been responsible for Jacobs's bricks-and-mortar for more than 10 years, “but in general, each store relates to its own specific building type, to the city’s specific urban condition, and to the architecture of the individual space. Although they’re identifiably connected, every one of them has a particular feel.”
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