UniFor’s Ethereal Furniture Range Transforms Living Spaces

Interior Design Hall of Famer Debra Lehman Smith and her Washington and New York–based firm, LSM, are renowned for exacting, elemental, and art gallery–esque corporate environs for the Fortune 500 set. The firm’s lifeblood, she explains, is deep, decades-long relationships with likeminded clients, from Bloomberg to Gulfstream, as well as artists and manufacturing partners. Among her frequent teammates is Molteni Group’s UniFor, with whom she’s worked for 20-odd years on furniture designs that, courtesy of “the company’s engineering expertise and craftsmanship,” rise to the status of “all-inclusive environments,” Lehman Smith notes. Building on that relationship, LSM will debut at Salone del Mobile Milano in April an ongoing series, Andromeda, its name a nod to a land art monument in Sicily by shepherd-turned-sculptor Lorenzo Reina (also the location in which the pieces were photographed). Designed with firm director Mark Alan Andre, the range encompasses a looks-good-from-all-angles curved or linear seating unit, a conference table, side table with round or oval top, and a “bare-minimal” credenza. The palette is succinct but ultra-refined—leather upholstery; bevel-edged tabletops in Italian travertine, terra-cotta, and concrete-like ceramic—with the commonality being polished-aluminum bases that reflect their surroundings, providing an ethereal, floating feel and a chameleon-like quality: both transformed by and transforming their environment. unifor.it/en

Learn How Design Can Manifest a Brighter Future in This Gensler Tome

Gensler Global Cochairs Discuss Design + The Future

Interior Design: Congrats on the book! Why this topic now?

Andy Cohen: We wanted to write about design’s ability to tackle the major challenges of a radically changing world head-on.

Diane Hoskins: Change is happening at such a rapid and accelerating pace, an effect we coined the “crisis multiplier” in the book. Each crisis happens so soon after the last one: climate change, COVID, geopolitical instability. It means we need to think about design very differently—and get more people to recognize that design needs to be part of the answer.

ID: What message do you want your colleagues to take away from this book?

AC: That climate change is the business imperative of our time. Nearly 40 percent of all carbon emissions is attributable to the building and construction industry. The flip side of that is: As designers and architects, we have a real opportunity to make a positive impact on climate change. Gensler’s taking a stand by committing to reducing carbon emissions in our projects by 2030.

ID: Your discussion of A.I.’s power to reinvent the design process is intriguing. 

DH: We’ve been through new technology adoption—and the training that goes along with it—multiple times in our careers: first CAD, then Revit and parametric modeling. There is not a team in our firm that hasn’t harnessed A.I. in some way. There’s a lot of enthusiasm around how A.I. allows faster iteration; it’s like being able to apply your Pinterest board or “what-ifs” in real time. It stimulates design ideation in a way we’ve never seen before. You can bring a hand sketch into a model, and then sketch again on top of that, and A.I. will convert it to the next visualization. A.I. also has the power to remove barriers to the profession, to engage young people and unlock opportunity.

AC: And it’s not just younger generations who are interested; old guys like me have never had a tool like this that translates hand-sketches into 3D reality! We just finished a really interesting project, the Santa Clara, California, headquarters of artificial intelligence–computing company Nvidia, during which the client gave us tips for how to incorporate A.I. into our process.

ID: How are you designing today’s workplaces to be “a destination, not an obligation,” as you put it?

AC: Our workplace survey showed the top reason people want to return to the office is for focus. But research also found a 37 percent drop-off in collaboration during COVID. So, these days we’re creating a phenomenal amount of living room space where people can come together. Our redesigned San Francisco office, for instance, has become a laboratory of the future workplace, with a layering of zones. The front is like a coffee shop, with music playing; the middle is collaboration space, designed with noise-attenuation technology so you don’t hear the group sitting at the next table; and the back is a pin-drop-quiet library for focusing. 

DH: Design isn’t task work; it’s about the whole person. So, we focus on the power of presence and the innovation it sparks, and even more so on the culture, which comes from relationships and the ability to learn, mentor, and grow alongside each other. More and more companies are recognizing they’re at their best—from the standpoint of innovation, speed, accuracy, efficiency—when everyone’s present together. 

ID: You highlight the importance of designing structures with built-in flexibility for different future uses.

AC: Look at all the B and C office buildings currently sitting empty, every one of which will need to be transformed through adaptive reuse. Gensler created an algorithm for cities and developers to analyze a building portfolio and determine applicability of renovation into much-needed housing. Only 25 percent of structures prove suitable, but that’s still millions of square feet. When prices drop low enough it becomes economically viable to retrofit those buildings into apartments. We just completed Pearl House, the largest such conversion to open in New York.

ID: The future of cities is a sort of sub-theme of the book. Tell us about other urban challenges you’re solving for.

DH: At the Meridian Diplomacy Forum, I met with mayors of Ukraine cities that were destroyed, to help them think through rebuilding. They know that by having a forward vision, they’re giving their people hope. Design makes hope tangible.

ID: Was it hard to find a writing voice that was optimistic yet urgent?

DH: Look, we’d still be in COVID if someone hadn’t created the vaccine. It took innovation, focus, and intensity to get to that solution. It’s within our grasp to make a difference in the world. We have this power—how the design brain connects the dots and thinks big and the collaborative nature of the profession. Our discipline is really well positioned to be the problem solvers of our time. We can do it.

Dynamic Staircases Encourage Movement in This Tech Office

2023 Best of Year Winner for Commercial Staircase

“Movement” was the design concept for this 16-floor tech workspace in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a notion exemplified via a series of dynamic feature staircases that encourage physicality and interaction while expressing and celebrating the flow of foot traffic between levels. Designed by Utile and Merge Architects, connecting three of the floors is an asymmetrically stacked ribbon of steel, its ash balustrade morphing into banquette seating at the base. The swooping form exerts a gravitational pull, inviting staffers to look over and enjoy views of the activity. Another stair with a geometric switchback profile makes a statement in bold blue, its translucent Panelite sidewall filtering the motion of ascent and descent through to the opposite side.

UTILE: MIMI LOVE; CHANTEL KOCHER; CLAUDIA PORRAS; JACK CORRIVEAU; PETRA JAROLIMOVA.

MERGE ARCHITECTS: ELIZABETH WHITAKER; DIANA TOMOVA; CHRIS JOHNSON.

This Athletic Center is a Win for the Environment

2023 Best of Year Winner for Early Education

The country’s oldest Quaker school boasts a brand-new building to house its robust K-12 athletic program—one that also switch-hits as the heart of its academic campus in Philadelphia via a vibrant lobby/common space complete with a nutrition bar, store, student lounge, and study areas. Designed by EwingCole, a second-floor classroom with glass wall permitting views of the buzzy space below, plus a soaring geometric feature wall pairing oak veneer and acoustic panels combine to make the most of the airy double-height volume. Nestling half of the Graham Athletics & Wellness Center’s 87,000 square feet below-grade, meanwhile, minimized its impact on the landscape and the environment, reducing energy use and solar heat gain to boot.

Suzanne Tick: 2023 Interior Design Hall of Fame Inductee

Material innovator Suzanne Tick has the future on speed dial. She embraced sustainability before most of us knew what the word meant, developed a CEU on the post-gender society before it even happened, experimented with 3D knitting before it was a thing, and imbued the woven surfaces that surround commercial interiors with characteristics of transparency, digitalism, and illumination before we realized we needed them. Then there’s the fact that her New York–based textile brand, Luum, launched its Fabric of Space collection, with patterns based on star trails and the expanding universe, the very day the James Webb Space Telescope images of same were publicly released. “Everyone thought we were in cahoots with NASA!” she jokes.

No, Tick is not conspiring with the government’s space-research arm, but she has collaborated with a galaxy of big-name brands during her four-decade career: Tarkett, Tandus Centiva, and 3form are just a few for which she’s conceived upholstery and drapery fabrics, high-performance carpeting and broadloom, and cement-tile and LVT flooring. She has enjoyed a longstanding partnership with Skyline Design, for which she conceives etched panels that bring textile softness to hard glass, and maintains an active fine-art practice realizing tapestries, custom textiles, and experimental handweavings for such clients as the Gates Foundation and BlackRock.

Suzanne Tick on Her Futuristic Approach to Design

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Get Ready for 2024: See what’s next for Interior Design‘s Hall of Fame event with a peek at what we’re planning for the 40th annual gala. Discover Hall of Fame details.

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For Tick, Sustainability is Top of Mind

Her approach has always been holistic and sustainable, ranging from development of raw material and structures to revamping of manufacturing methods. At Luum, for instance, “The majority of what we do is to develop new fibers and invent constructions. That’s why our fabrics feel different.” Her handweavings also utilize novel materials—salvaged objects like dry-cleaning hangers. For a financial company commission, she’s currently warp-and-wefting two centuries’ worth of shredded ledgers; for a paint brand, she’s weaving cut-up sample discards.

Tick, a self-described “fourth-generation recycler,” comes about her salvage mindset honestly. Business at her dad’s scrap-metal yard was the main dinner table topic growing up. At the same time, her family was “very cultured and creative”—her mother was a graphic and set designer—and tapped into Eastern philosophy. “My dad had all the books: the Bhagavad Gita, a library of Ram Dass.” Also stacked on those shelves were her mom’s interiors magazines. Tick owes a lot to those glossies, which helped her home in on a vocational track when, late in her college tenure as a printmaker experimenting with etching fiber textures onto copper, she set about figuring out what the heck to do after graduation. “Flipping through them, I saw ads by Jack Lenor Larsen, Brunschwig et Fils, Scalamandré. I thought I could work for a company that makes fabrics like those—and that I had to move to New York to do it.”

Meditation Meets Design Innovation

Manhattan proved an energizing yet scary place at the time. “I arrived at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Designers we were creating custom orders for would just stop calling us back.” To handle the stress, she tried Zen meditation, but it never stuck. She gave the pursuit of higher consciousness another try seven years ago, after a period of discontent despite her many achievements, which at this point included a TEDxNavesink talk and work exhibited at international museums. A last-minute opportunity to attend an introductory Vedic workshop coincided with a weeklong staycation, her first in 30-odd years. She found the mantra-based practice transformative, and since 2020 has been teaching it to others. It’s become a cornerstone of her studio culture that she credits with unlocking higher levels of collective creativity. “If I could get more firms to realize how incredible this practice is for design teams! Your awareness becomes open, everything becomes much clearer, you just see what needs to be done.”

Part of de-stressing her nervous system, she continues, has involved “figuring out what I can do to be of help.” She’s doubled down on her commitment to giving back via free weaving workshops and serving on the board of The Light Inside, which teaches meditation to prison inmates and corrections officers. Tick pays it forward to Mother Earth, too. Back in the ’90’s, she was the brains behind Resolution, the first-ever solution-dyed panel fabric (and the first Knoll Textile product to sell 1 million yards); today, her studio recycles all textile waste it produces (almost a ton annually) and has been instrumental in shifting our perception of circularity via envelope-pushing product designs attuned to nature yet equally informed by technology, craft, and human ingenuity.

Watch the Hall of Fame Documentary Featuring Suzanne Tick

Explore Textiles Design by Suzanne Tick

Installations by Suzanne Tick on Display

5 Global Getaways That Nod to Their Surrounding Scapes

Global getaways channel the earthy, organic essence of their unique terrains.

Super Paradise Beach Club by Omniview Design

Site: Mykonos, Greece

Tasked with reinventing a 1971-built beach club—the island’s first—the firm combined the best of old and new, preserving the chill retro vibe while leveraging cutting-edge technology for au courant takes on traditional elements, such as the computer-generated curves that distinguish everything from the wood-ceilinged bar to wall niches showcasing locally made pottery and bottled libations.

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Faraway Martha’s Vineyard by Workshop/APD

Site: Edgartown, Massachusetts
Keys: 75

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This near-the-waterfront hotel’s mid-century-meets-modern redesign—including an expanded lobby, new courtyard pool with lush plantings, and revamped décor—is based on a neat conceit: The team conjured as muse an island native who grew up in the 1960’s, now an avid gardener and mystic fluent in the healing powers of plants who hosts artsy bashes in her bohemian-botanical manse.

Albor San Miguel de Allende, Tapestry Collection by Hilton by Esrawe Studio; Productora

Site: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Keys: 93

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The clean-lined architecture of this new-build property thoughtfully integrates with its surroundings. Coloration of the ground level, housing the public spaces, is inspired by the purple tones of the mountainous terrain, while the upper levels devoted to guest accommodations feature lighter, more serene shades. The abstract motifs adorning artist Omar Barquet’s ceramics—some cladding ceiling-hung sculptural elements—were likewise sparked by local flora.

Faern Arosa Altein by Run for the Hills

Site: Arosa, Switzerland
Keys: 126

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The London studio’s refined-rustic refurbishment of an alpine wellness resort, set in a national park, offers guests a cozy retreat for après-ski socializing, with cosseting upholstery (think sheepskins, Swiss-cross wool blankets), characterful timber furniture, and a rust-to-ochre palette. A dose of the unexpected comes from the camera-ready Wes Anderson–inspired reception desk and Slim Aarons photographs.

AutoCamp Zion by HKS; Narrative Design Studio

Site: Virgin, Utah
Keys: 72

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Nestling up to Zion National Park, the outdoor-lodging brand’s latest property honors its red-rock desert locale. Guests sleep in custom Airstreams, cabins, or tents and hobnob in the communal clubhouse, featuring expansive glazing, an easy in/out flow, and an earthy palette of hues and materials, including sustainable cork walls and furniture.

A Trio of Retro Homes Gets a Modern Reboot

In Belgium and Brazil, a trio of retro period pieces that encapsulate their time and place get a modern-day reboot.

Ten Architects

After having lived on a boat for many years, a couple with two children opted to become landlubbers, purchasing a quirky 1978-built house on a tranquil lot in Brasschaat, Belgium. Designed by its original owner, a technical draftsman, the property had many selling points, including a leafy, forestlike site and a retro-cool conversation pit with built-in ’70’s-era light switches. It also had some less savory period flourishes: too-small windows that made the interior feel cramped, an overabundance of brown finishes, and dated wall-to-wall carpeting. . .in the bathroom. “We kept the original identity of the house by preserving the conversation pit, the cedar ceiling and concrete floor, the interior doors, and even the toilet-control panel,” Ten Architects founder Elke van Goel recalls. To lighten things up a bit, though, she whitewashed the walls, replaced the tiny windows with more expansive glazing, swapped out rotting awnings for new versions, and otherwise improved the indoor/outdoor flow and connection to surrounding greenery.

A highlight of the redesign is a new outdoor water feature, an L-shape pond that wraps the glassed-in living area, so when the homeowners relax in their sunken conversation pit, they feel like they’re on a boat.

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João Batista Vilanova Artigas

A São Paolo residence epitomizes the famed architect’s innovations in concrete construction and his efforts to create a sui generis Brazilian modernism that departed from European norms. Designed in 1974 for a former student, the iconic building boasts complex interior volumes, unorthodox floor ramps, a Brutalist sense of materiality, and a symbiotic relationship with its surroundings that were pioneering indeed.

Though the house remains privately owned by the original family, this fall it moonlighted as a public-facing gallery during Aberto/02, a cultural happening that forges connections between art and architecture. The exhibition, conceived by Brazilian-born, London-based art advisor Filipe Assis in collaboration with furniture designer Claudia Moreira Salles and curator Kiki Mazzuchelli, showcased some 130 artworks throughout Vilanova Artigas’s daring structure, which was restored for the occasion. The exposed-concrete walls, double-height spaces, and stained-glass window formed a dynamic foil for paintings, sculptures, and furniture by the likes of Alighiero Boetti, Humberto Campana, Leda Catunda, and Ernesto Neto. In one room, for instance, a 2002 oil on canvas by Adriana Varejão dialogued with Ivens Machado’s freestanding concrete-based sculptures from 1983 that have an almost furniturelike presence.

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Fronton Architecture

Louis-Herman De Koninck, one of Belgium’s most influential modernist architects, had to lobby hard in 1936 to get the building permit approved for this two-story villa. At the time, most houses in the seaside resort of Knokke were thatched or red tile–capped cottages, and he was proposing a rather anachronistic flat-roofed concept in the so-called “style pacquebot,” with rounded corners, porthole windows, and streamlined roof railings evocative of ocean liners. Luckily, he prevailed, and the resulting structure has since achieved landmark status.

Though the building had been modified over the decades, the original glass-block ceiling, terrazzo floors, and pastel bath tiles were still intact when real-estate investor Hubert Bonnet purchased the protected monument for use as a vacation and rental property. He hired Brussels-based Fronton Architecture to restore it, starting with pouring a new floor slab. “We found termite damage, and it turned out the house was built on top of a dune—there was barely any foundation,” firm project manager Alain Delogne recalls. Other interventions included scraping off layers of paint to uncover the original orange window frames, rebuilding the roof terrace with original tiles, and installing De Koninck’s iconic Cubex kitchen cabinets, a ’30’s design that’s still in production.

Bonnet, an art collector, commissioned Bauhaus-inspired rugs and furnished the house with classic pieces by Alvar Aalto, Poul Kjaerholm Serge Mouille, and Charlotte Perriand. Also featured are highlights from his portfolio of minimalist and conceptual art, including a Sol LeWitt tattooed on the dining room walls.

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5 Refreshed Historic Properties That Honor Tradition

Historic properties in vacation spots from Portugal to Italy get a new lease on life with redesigns that honor tradition—and subvert it, too.

Casa Hoyos by AG Studio

Site: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Keys: 16

A meticulously restored colonial-era villa was reinvented as a property that celebrates the best of Mexican design and regional artisanal crafts. Interior highlights include sunshine-bright glazed ceramics, mirror-tiled planters, woven tapestries, crisp black steelwork, and contours galore. Best seat in the house to take in the colorful modernist surrounds: the lounge’s cocooning Calaca armchairs by Comite de Proyectos.

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Sophia Hotel by Balbek Bureau

Site: Kyiv, Ukraine
Keys: 39

A century’s worth of paint layers stripped from the 1881 edifice revealed elegant yellow brickwork and period architectural details—characteristics the minimalist-modern interior scheme quietly harmonizes with via restrained neutral tones (offset with occasional pops of red), warm timber and brass accents, and contemporary Ukrainian artworks.

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Habita79 by Giuliano Dell’uva; Gianluca Marangi

Site: Pompeii, Italy
Keys: 79

Built in the 1940’s for travelers trekking to the archeological site, this newly revamped MGallery hotel captures Pompeii’s energy of discovery while reinterpreting its ahead-of-its-time interior architecture; note the iron-base concrete columns, stucco wall panels (channeling grooves found on Pompeiian houses), and slabs of the same marble used to sculpt Roman fountains. More avant-garde are the Gio Ponti chairs, Luciano Romano photographs, and reproductions of 18th-century Giustiniani vases that likewise quote antiquity.

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The Georgian by BLVD Hospitality; Fettle

Site: Santa Monica, California
Keys: 84

And, scene: After a sensitive renovation, a storied coastal property from 1933 marries Old Hollywood charm, global élan, and SoCal cool via such cinematic mise-en-scène as custom art deco chandeliers, original decorative reliefs, exaggerated furniture profiles, and exuberant stone flooring. Did we mention the transporting Pacific Ocean views?

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The Largo by Space Copenhagen

Site: Porto, Portugal
Keys: 18

Following a three-year restoration by architect Frederico Valsassina, five interconnected structures dating from the 15th through 19th centuries received a sensitive but thorough interior overhaul—one that maintained existing features—during its conversion into a hotel for Danish hospitality group Annassurra. Against the subdued tones of this stripped-back setting, replete with conserved elements like a five story–deep courtyard flanked by stone walls, Space Copenhagen juxtaposed stylized modern interpretations of Renaissance-era gestures including ceiling ornamentation and voluptuous headboards.

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6 High-Concept Design Projects With Urban Edge

From a Shanghai beauty salon to a kids’ play space in New York, high-concept destinations are infused with urban edge and vitality.

These Colorful Interior Designs Command Attention 

Funzy Play Family Club, Queens, New York, Designed by Pal Design

A place for kids to climb, bounce, and slide, this 5,700-square-foot space by chief designer Joey Ho fairly telegraphs fun and futurism via a bubblegum palette, spherical and arcing forms, and balloon-esque embel­lish­ments, yet is a blank-enough canvas for projecting imaginations onto. Color-blocking smartly subdivides the different functions.

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BMW Mini Customer Experience Center, Shenzhen, China, Designed by Archihope

Firm founder Hihope Zhu and team’s 2,150-square-foot showroom for the personality-driven car brand embraces the concept of waves as both a formal gesture—curved micro-cement walls, stainless-steel ceiling elements, seafoamlike terrazzo flooring—and a demographic mindset, reflecting the notion that its youthful clientele is surfing the tide of cultural change.
Photography by Vincent Wu.

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King Kong Club in Salzburg, Austria, Designed by Masquespacio

Taking inspiration from cyberpunk and the underground techno clubs of the 1980’s, the 8,610-square-foot fitness center has a forward-feeling silver-and-aquamarine palette that both energizes members in the neon-lit training areas and relaxes them in the hangout area, where the custom seating is formed from air-conditioning pipes.

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Isabel Marant, Tokyo, Designed by Isabel Marant and Yutaka Sone

French insouciance meets Japanese avant-garde at the fashion designer’s 2,150-square-foot Aoyama flagship, where chic men’s and women’s ready-to-wear is backdropped by dressmaker pattern–inspired ceiling features, terrazzo flooring Marant herself customized with stone and glass, and artist Sone’s facade and rocklike furnishings in faux obsidian.

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G. Bar Brave, Kyiv, Ukraine, Designed by Taranova Olga Design

The beauty shop channeling an audacious Gen Z–worthy pop aesthetic occupies 1,180 square feet at Arsenal, one of the city’s oldest factories, part of a complex of 17th-century fortifications. Royal-blue and shocking-pink accents, including a faux fur–covered wall, play against such all-white architecture as the painted brick ceiling vaults.

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Meet Nail, Shanghai, Designed by 8877 Interiors

Along the Xuhui Riverside Promenade, the partially subterranean salon suffused in a warm amber hue boasts cleverly angled corner windows that coax daylight inside. An artificial linear skylight bisects the 750-square-foot interior for additional illumination, shining a flattering rosy glow on the terrazzo reception desk incorporating recycled plastic and salvaged stone.

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Retail Projects Raise the Bar for Social Responsibility

With such selling points as advanced robotic technologies and social responsibility, retail projects from Shanghai to Philadelphia meet—and surpass—the needs of today.

Compartés Designed by Nakkash Design Studio

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

The Los Angeles chocolatier’s first Middle East location—a department store shop-in-shop that took the local firm just 90 days from concept to completion—makes the most of 150 square feet and a soaring ceiling via painted-MDF mobile displays and a 20-foot-tall, ombré-acrylic zigzag that divvies space, supports brass shelving, and multitasks as signage. Sweet!

Blue Table Chocolates Designed by Arch&Type

Buffalo, New York

The untempered crystallized form of and silky filling inside the artisan treats made and sold at the 900-square-foot shop drove its parametric “river” ceiling, a passerby-luring feature fabricated by University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning students of CNC-milled EPS foam that’s been hand-coated in plaster then painted metallic gold, a machine-meets-craft process similar to that used to produce such truffle flavors as sacre torte and blackberry mojito.

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Le Sélect Designed by Atmosphere Architects

Chengdu, China

Pure and monumental, natural stone not only inspired but is also the star material in the ethereal 7,300-square-foot volume housing women’s luxury clothing and accessories, where a sculptural spiral staircase connects the two levels, and stainless steel and glass dress up the brawn of the travertine and granite appearing throughout.

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Angel Care Pharmacy Designed by Sergio Mannino Studio

Philadelphia

This community-minded, mission-driven storefront, in a neighborhood ravaged by the opioid epidemic, was conceived as a beacon of safety, serenity, and service—concepts sensitively conveyed via the fashion-forward architectural branding agency’s collateral and interior. Note, for instance, the soothing mauve palette applied to walls, chrome-back seats, and even the compostable packaging, arrayed on Studio deForm shelving.

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Relay Designed by Muku Design Studio

Shanghai

The bookseller’s latest outpost occupies 4,000 square feet in Shanghai Hongqiao Airport, its forestlike solid-pine beams and columns crisscrossed and stacked up to 16 feet high and incorporating integral seating that provides a welcome contrast to and place to read amid the hustle and bustle of terminal T2.

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