As I write these words to you, spring is fast approaching. The blooms of my neighbor’s magnolia tree fill a back window of my apartment, and across the city budding trees stand at the ready. The thaw is welcome after an intense winter.
In anticipation of summer, our features whisk readers away to five remote homes, from Mexico to Santa Fe to Saint Kitts, where architects have delivered thoughtful buildings with limited footprints that prioritize connection to their natural surroundings. Within, find a house in Greece crafted by Not A Number Architects for themselves, a continuation of the region’s generations-long tradition of how to spend the summer. And a zen-like retreat with contemporary craft sensibilities in Accord, New York. The theme extends to an essay about the Norwegian architect Wenche Selmer, who often camped on the land while she was designing a summer house for it.
We also include a tribute to Frank Gehry, who died last December: In Los Angeles, his Schnabel House has been lovingly renovated by Thomas Safran. We get a look inside with photographs by Zara Pfeifer and a story from Michael Franklin Ross. The project is special enough that we decided to put it on the cover of our issue.
Spring brings waves of product releases, as seen at design shows in North America and Europe. Kelly Pau, our design editor, collects the most interesting kitchen and bath items for your consideration, and in a special section, we showcase a wider catalog of new design arrivals to admire. Along the way, we showcase emerging architects, tour great projects, and invite you to write your own zingy text with a back-page Mad Libs prepared by FOR SCALE’s David Michon.
Beyond the solitude that travel can bring, we still need moments of calm in our daily lives. We can see this in a Manhattan apartment carefully renovated by Lang Architecture and in Casa Gardenias, a sculptural residence by Vrtical near Mexico City.
Restorative calm can also happen outside the home. On a visit to the Brooklyn Museum, I spent some time with the Rubin Museum Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, relocated to the former’s Arts of Asia galleries. On loan for six years, the installation imagines a space within a Tibetan Buddhist household where family members would practice their religion. Within a simulation of a traditional Himalayan interior, created for the original version at the Rubin Museum in Manhattan, the staging contains over one hundred artworks and ritual objects. Set atop furniture pieces, the paintings, sculptures, scepters, bells, bowls, pitchers, mandalas, musical instruments, and ornamental textiles establish a reflective environment. The lights are dimmed, a whiff of unlit incense fills the air, and recordings of chants burble quietly. Glass-walled off from the rest of the museum, it is a private moment, a specific world within an encyclopedic museum. I sat on a bench and scanned across the ornate items, the Buddhas glinting back at me. The moment deepened my appreciation of this devotional tradition.
Later, my mind wandered to a line about mental discipline from the first chapter of the Dhammapada, a collection of the Buddha’s sayings: “Just as rain does not break through a well-thatched house, so passion never penetrates a well-developed mind.” Across this issue of AN Interior, there are many well-thatched houses. I hope they give you some respite—and inspiration for your next design adventure.