I’m sitting in the library at The Malin Savannah, fresh off a very long flight from Milan—where, like many of you, I was attending Milan Design Week for the last few days. If your feed looks like mine, it’s probably being pummeled with FOMO-inducing photos of negroni-splashed events, fancy installations, and very beautiful people. I will spare you another recap of those things. Instead, I am here to cover an underreported facet of the week that actually powers the whole damn thing. I am speaking, of course, about footwear.

At least in my world, a schedule in Milan during this time of year probably looks a little something like this: Appointments start at 9 and can go all day, in more or less 30- to 45-minute increments. Maybe you break for lunch. If you’re smart and the stars align, you might be able to group these visits to a single geographic location—but more often than not, you’re hoofing it across town, through showrooms, palazzos, and parks until the cocktail hour, when you’ll hit up maybe three or so aperitivi before dinner. Then you’re out for drinks until 1 (or later, if you’re more hardcore than me).

Which is to say: The right footwear is essential. It needs to carry you across 20,000+ cobblestoned steps and ideally be relatively safe on a bike, too. And this is a design crowd, okay, so you don’t want to look like a schlub.

This week, I polled the crowds across a sweep of chic events and venues—the For Scale x James Black party at Palinurobar, Wrong House’s own aperitivo with TCPR at Giacomo Tabaccheria, Alcova, brand events, and sloshed late nights at Bar Basso—for their rundown of the pairs that made the cut. Here’s how things shook out.

“They go with my turmeric outfit. I like to think I’m a guru. My wife actually told me not to bring them. She said they don’t look elegant enough.” —Ahsen Nadeem

Looks like your shoes are in great shape.

Malloy James: I keep my shoes in good shape. Anybody that knows me will tell you.

What do you do?

I don’t wear them in situations where they’ll get fucked up. You know what I mean? Wipe them down if I need to. Put them in the closet. Let them sit there. Rotate.

How do your feet feel?

Amazing.

How many pairs of shoes did you pack?

Five.

Did you check a bag?

I checked a bag, yeah. I feel like I understand when women pack a lot of shoes. I’m the same. Five to six might be the average. But I’m only here for five days, four nights.

Do you wear insoles, moleskin, anything like that?

No, I don’t. I used to play sports professionally, and when I did, I was big on insoles. Two socks though, I do. I have a habit where I always wear two pairs.

“These are like, 3 1/2-inch heels. I would say more, but I don’t want to count. I go by the rule; I’m an architect. I’m precise. The bigger the better.” —Crina Arghirescu Rogard

Thanks to all who shared their feet with me this week. Keep those step counts high, and those Band-Aids flowing. See you again next year.

xx

Lila

Hi there, housemates,

Happy week-before-Salone to all who celebrate. I’ve got my RSVP spreadsheet stuffed, my digital camera packed (!), and my sensible-but-still-acceptable-for-Italy boots ready to go. But, before I hit the tarmac: A new issue of Wrong House! Just for you!

Welcome to Issue 08: “Out to Pasture.” In these digital pages, we have a lineup of features that chew the cud of a few big ideas. Chief among them is the belief that retreat—whether into the countryside, a practice, or a tight-knit community—is less about escape and more about sustaining what actually matters. For our eighth issue, we have profiles, product roundups, interviews, and even a little ASMR content for when your nervous system needs a reset. (I’ll have this one on loop in Milan!)

Wrong House has never pretended to be a shopping newsletter, but occasionally we make a wacky exception (like our “Gift-Obligation Index,” Issue 03). In the spirit of this month’s theme, Alicia Kort plunges the depths of Reddit, eBay, Etsy, and online forums to mine cult-favorite home goods that have been put out to pasture—but still have devoted followings on online auctions and resale sites. As Alicia points out, some communities treat hunting down out-of-commission finds like an Olympic sport.

East Fork fans—self-described “potheads”—are among them. The Asheville, North Carolina–based brand, now in its 15th year, has amassed loyal collectors who seek out (and are quite vocal about!) different glazes and shapes that have cycled in and out of production. This community is what has kept East Fork ticking over the last decade and a half, and it’s one of many discussed in “East Fork’s Big Bet,” my profile of the company. My conversation with CEO and cofounder Alex Matisse took place as East Fork is on track to double its production capacity in the coming months, following a major investment at the end of 2025. But in many ways, East Fork is doing the same thing it’s always done, if not more of it: One cofounder, following a hiatus, is back in the mix and manually throwing clay. A hand-painted line is in the works. Can an American pottery brand balance big growth with big values? East Fork is sure as hell trying to find out.

This month, I also step inside the studio of natural-dye visionary Audrey Louise Reynolds, who forages plants, rainwater, and obscure fungi to produce otherworldly wood stains, paints, and pigments for brands big and small. Audrey, who relocated to a small upstate hamlet a few years ago after two decades in Red Hook, Brooklyn, discusses how following her curiosity—and giving herself time and space to explore and experiment—isn’t just frivolity or a hobby, but is at the center of her creative practice. Audrey created this month’s cover using turmeric, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s Lace, asiatic dayflower, lemon, and indigo. Here’s a diagram of all those pigments, for the curious:

Audrey isn’t the only one finding refuge outside of the city. Alex T. Williams returns to Wrong House in conversation with Kristin Coleman and Chad Phillips, the proprietors of Available Items in Tivoli, New York. As Kristin and Chad prepare to open their newest exhibition, “Sense of Place”—a survey of ceramics, fiber arts, furniture, lighting, and floral design from different pockets of the Hudson Valley—the trio discuss carving out a niche for up-and-comers in an industry that doesn’t offer many of those opportunities anymore.

And: Eric Trine is back for “Chair Time,” his advice column for creatives. This time, he ponders the tension between one’s personal and professional brand, and the role of POV in client-directed work. Have a question for Eric? He (and we!) are all ears.

Finally, one for the road. If you need to channel a little zen during the frenzy of pre-summer design season—that is, the Salone-High Point-NYCxDESIGN-3DD whirlwind—may I recommend a little ambient viewing? We asked Jesse Smiley, the hands and brains behind floral design studio Patches, to create a little content to help cultivate your inner calm. (I set this to a royalty-free song called “Calming Harp for Cats,” so you know it will be good.) Enjoy:

A huge thanks to East Fork for sponsoring this issue, and watering the lil’ mustard seed that is Wrong House.

If you’ll be in Milan for Salone del Mobile, let us know—we’d love to raise a negroni (or fauxgroni, whatever!) with you.

’Til next month,

Lila

Issue 08: “Out to Pasture” was made possible by

By Lila Allen

At East Fork’s production facility in Asheville, North Carolina, a hulking machine kicks out 2,000 pots per day. But close by—in the same building, actually—a tall Texan-turned-Carolinian named John Vigeland is hand throwing pots on a company wheel.

After a yearslong hiatus from the company—which he spent building a kiln—John is back in the saddle at the pottery. Formerly the brand’s CFO, he returns in a different role: re-envisioning the East Fork Workshop, where the company produces small batches of products made entirely by hand. A few weeks ago, the Workshop released a collection of espresso cups, mugs, and spoon rests. The coexistence of these two worlds—fast-paced, industrial-scale production on one side, and slower handwork on the other—embodies the tension that has long been at the center of East Fork.

This isn’t something the company is shy about sharing: Alex Matisse, East Fork’s cofounder (alongside his wife, Connie, and John), openly acknowledges this friction, which he feels acutely as the company’s CEO and a formally trained potter himself. “East Fork’s been growing, but it’s been a push,” he says. “It’s been a struggle to make the business model work at the heart of it while staying very stubbornly true to our mission and values and reason for being.”

And yet, here they are. Fifteen years after they first fired up the kiln on an erstwhile tobacco farm outside of Asheville, they’re producing 750,000 pieces per year—mugs, dinner plates, vases, and other vessels. They are on track to double that number in 2026, following a $2.5 million infusion that will go toward expanded fulfillment operations, new forming lines and kilns, and, for the first time, slip-casting equipment. Having outgrown their material suppliers multiple times, the brand is finalizing a decade-long effort to develop a more efficient clay body. They’re also expanding their bakeware, bringing in new partner lines of outdoor pottery from Whichford in the UK, and introducing new glazes—now collected by a community whose members call themselves “potheads,” and seek out “retired” colorways.

This push, as Alex calls it, comes after several years of reset that included expanding the team, shifting the leadership structure, and drilling down on the shapes and glazes that drive the brand. But the biggest reset might have been in 2024, when Hurricane Helene ravaged Western North Carolina—an area so far inland that a hurricane is nearly unheard of—and incited devastating floods, landslides, and power outages. East Fork, too, had to weather the storm: The building that housed the Small Batch Studio (now East Fork Workshop) was destroyed, along with production and studio facilities. During the worst of it, Alex and his team ran a “command center” from the Matisse house, using Starlink and a home generator to, quite literally, keep the lights on.

“We split up into groups. There was one team that was focused on getting the factory open as fast as possible, because if we’re not making pots, we’re not doing anything,” Alex recalls. “Another group was focused on the community, so we could double down with our [local] partners.” Sending out feelers to regional nonprofits, East Fork leveraged its network of followers and customers to drive awareness and reap support. While it will take years for the area to fully recover, Alex notes that this kind of collective effort has made a noticeable difference locally. “The tighter the community, the faster the recovery has been,” he says.

What happens next isn’t just about keeping production running; it’s about what’s worth making in the first place. And lately, even alongside the brand’s productivity push this year, that sometimes means doing things that don’t make business sense. “I feel strongly there are some things you just have to do—not because of their contribution to the bottom line, but because of their contribution to the brand and to the story,” says the CEO. To that end, Alex himself is currently hand-painting a limited run of pottery, which will debut next month.

For Alex and John, who learned the trade through traditional apprenticeships, this also means increasing access to similar opportunities. Alex and his team are asking, “How can we bring some accessibility into it, and connect folks that are working here? How can we break down this barrier, and talk about the hand and the machine?” With East Fork Workshop, which reopened last summer, Alex and John are scheming how it might serve as a site for R&D, as well as education.

Back at the East Fork factory, the machines are still running. John’s at it, too, spinning up pieces on the wheel—and even thinking about what a really big pot could look like in the world of this company. Much of this work scales, as East Fork’s 15-year trajectory has shown. But some of it doesn’t, and isn’t meant to. East Fork’s biggest bet yet is that they don’t have to choose. ⌂

Lila Allen is the editor of Wrong House.

By Lila Allen

The walls at Audrey Louise Reynolds’s home in Warwick, New York—a small town in Orange County, not far from the New Jersey border—are hand-painted in chunky, irregular stripes, like a cartoon. Oversized, tulip-shaped pendants and floor lamps pepper the room. It’s a bit like the candy landscape at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but in her world, the medium is nature, not sugar: For the past two decades, she’s been brewing bespoke artisanal dyes from natural ingredients like flowers, fungus, and bark, and helping others do the same through consulting work.

If you want to view paradise, just look around and you’ll see it. From her land of pure imagination in Warwick, Reynolds grows, forages, builds, and brews batches of color, testing them on her walls and anything else she can get her hands on. Reynolds sells many of these items—T-shirts and sweatsuits, balaclavas—directly, as well as through retail partners. (Freakout Spot, the record store I run with my husband, stocks her hand-painted T-shirts and rolling papers—what she calls “smokeable paintings.”) She also advises brands—Nike, J. Crew, Eyeswoon, Repetto, The Elder Statesmen, and House of RoRo (who used her natural woodstain on its Iggy Chair)—on color, organically dyed products, and design. And, in a move that will allow her to extend her ethos to maybe its greatest scale yet, she’s also developing her own natural paint line, Weightless.

She landed here on the heels of a breakup a few years ago after two decades in New York City. But even in her early days in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Reynolds had an affinity for nature: She used to pilot her own boat across the East River into the city. I caught up with her recently, right as the winter was giving way to spring. What became clear through our conversation is that in the land of Reynolds, going out to pasture isn’t merely a retreat from city life: It’s integral to her practice and productivity.

You’re probably the closest to being a mad scientist of anyone I know. You are really doing experiments out there.

I really am, and as long as I can remember, I’ve been doing this. It’s just endless curiosity.

Is it dangerous?

No, pretty much everything I do is not dangerous. That’s the goal with everything. Back when I started all of this as my career, I was turning food reductions from a kitchen job into color. So I was seeing that, like, ‘Oh, if I make this red wine reduction, it becomes really concentrated. Or, if I take this green and boil it, it becomes a brighter green. And then if I add citric acid, it becomes even brighter green. And then if I apply cold water, it stops that moment in time.’ It was a journey of understanding the fullest potential of these colors that I could achieve.

It never made sense to be on a path of creating and harming myself and the planet—if there’s a constant issuance of stuff coming out of you, and you can’t help but do it, why not figure out a way to do it harmlessly? That’s why my journey is now like, ‘OK, I can’t really make enough T-shirts, or art, or stuff to support myself, but I would love to use my knowledge to support other artists, and create harmless products that fill a gap in the market.’ They can let people create in that same way, completely safely.

What does an average week look like for you, in terms of doing your own creative work, consulting, and sourcing—what’s the balance?

It’s a wild mixture. Right now, I’m doing a lot of development for a company, and that stuff won’t come out until 2028. It’s funny to always be designing for the future and filling this niche of where people’s brains will be later.

So my week involves me diving into color palettes and having lengthy conversations with big brands that want to have a pop of color, or have a bit of chaos within the confines of their product. That might be something like a pattern behind a Nike Swoosh, something I made in a crazy way. They can scan that in and put it in the background of something, or create a digital print.

If I find myself with extra time from working for the bigger, more commercial brands that feed me and pay my bills, I’m working on Weightless, my paint company. So then my day will transfer from commercial products and paying the bills into my passion product. If it’s really nice out, I’ll probably go make some shirts, or if I have leftover dyes or fresh-caught rainwater, I’ll turn those into pigments and make supplies to stock the shelves so that I have things to create with later. I make a lot of the things on my shelves myself.

I’m also in the garden—should the seasons provide—working on growing those things, hiking around, foraging.

When you’re consulting for the bigger brands, is it always in the universe of natural pigment and dye, or are you doing more general design and color consulting?

It’s a mix of both. A lot of companies gravitate towards the natural-dye aspect and the things I’m more well-known for, but they’ll see the price point, or realize that they’re not as UV safe and going to evolve over time, and they realize the product might need a disclaimer, or need to be hand washed.

One of the problems we have is the color changing over time. Let’s say you have this beautiful wash made out of cherry blossoms that are fermented and the most beautiful color you’ve ever seen. If you have light coming in from your window at a certain angle at one time of the day, it’s super hot, and it’s basically bleaching it out. You’re creating these moments that are beautiful, but also don’t necessarily last forever. So that’s always the first conversation with these companies: Do you need permanence, or are you okay with impermanence?

Are they comfortable with that impermanence?

The higher-end brands are. When I work with fast-fashion brands, they don’t understand the luxury price point that hand-dye requires. The easiest metaphor I’ve found is: Imagine going to the juice stand and ordering your $12 juice, but you need 20 of those to dye a pair of pants. The process becomes expensive quickly.

When companies are designing more high-end, high-quality products out of natural materials, people are typically going to take care of those better as well. So, if you have a cashmere sweater that I’ve dyed with something high-end, that material hides in the price point of luxury anyway, so it becomes more palatable. Plus, you’re not washing and abusing that product the same way.

In a lot of the homes I write about, unlacquered brass is such a desired thing. It’s meant to show the wear over time. You want the smudges and everything else, because it gives it this wonderful patina.

It’s my favorite thing in the world. You can’t calculate it. There are ways that you can accelerate it or change it—like with copper and salt water or something like that. But you can’t really know. It’s beautiful.

You mentioned having to predict where people will be in a few years. But I think what’s interesting is that a lot of what you’re talking about is actually ancient. It’s almost out-of-time thinking. How do you get yourself into that headspace? And are you paying attention to future forecasting?

I have to be constantly surrounded by things I find inspiring, whether that’s taking a journey to a cool museum or taking long walks in the woods. I contribute to a lot of those future forecasts, and I love doing consulting like that. But then at the same time, I’m not the sole source.

It’s really fun when you make what you consider a “new” color—the little color meter that shows you the closest related paint color or pigment that’s been named, and nothing comes up. But obviously it’s not actually yours—it all belongs to nature.

The theme of this issue of Wrong House is “Out to Pasture,” and there’s a lot of circling around going back into nature, and back to one’s roots. So I’m curious about your move to Warwick, because you were a fixture of Red Hook, Brooklyn, for a long time. What is your relationship with the city now?

Red Hook, Brooklyn, from 2000 to 2003 was the most fabulous, magical place, peppered with artists and descendants of longshoremen. There was this soulfulness, but also isolation—cabs wouldn’t take you there. There was a level of danger that was also delightful—like, a pack of wild dogs lived at the sugar refinery, and they roamed the neighborhood. It was the closest thing to the Wild West, but somehow, I had my boat there and I could drive it to the city. I had a little mooring ball, and I felt like some fucked-up pirate—I’d make art all day, walk out on the dock, take my boat and go. It was romantic and poetic, and it doesn’t exist anymore. Fairway moved in; IKEA moved in.

There were a lot of friends who stayed, but for me, it was gone, and I wanted to return to nature. I’d been in the city 20 years; I grew up in the city, but I’ve always felt a strong connection to nature and worked with it. I got up here and felt like a kid in a candy shop. All this stuff around me has a purpose—it could save my life or kill me, or take me on some wild adventure.

I was also going through a breakup, and there was an immense amount of healing going on. I was going on long walks and learning to identify things. It became a game where I set out to find stuff, but also turn my brain on to color—discovering something that was new to me, like Chlorociboria, which is a parasitic mushroom fungus. It takes over wood and turns it a blue-green color. I was using alcohol to wick the color off of it, and that was the beginning of my wood-stain test, and understanding that I can use these mushrooms to make a bright teal on wood. That was the beginning of me collecting a barn full of it, fermenting it, extracting it, and trying these different techniques to get it out and turn it into something viable. It’s quite a challenge, but it’s an authentic offering from me.

You’ve been experimenting with new kinds of homeware, too—lights and bat houses. I encountered one of your lights in the wild at the Methods of Assembly studio not long ago.

That makes me so happy, because that series came out of feeling trapped indoors—cold, frozen, experiencing seasonal depression, trying to go snowboarding, but like, it not being nice powder, or feeling like I’m old and going to break something. It’s just so much less fun. I started making them waiting for spring—waiting for these things to pop out and bloom. And I was like, I’m just gonna make these rudimentary things as an extension of drawings I made as a child, that my mother fostered. It was also a way of reliving my connection to my mom. She’s getting older, so I’m looking back with gratitude and appreciation for the times that she could have scolded me and changed my whole path, but she lifted me up.

Well on that note, it’s finally spring. What are you foraging at the moment?

The magnolia blossoms that are everywhere—I don’t know if you’ve experienced those, but they break apart like an endive, and they taste like cardamom. They’re safe to eat, and delicious. Every salad or water I’m having has forsythia or cherry blossom or something cute that is coming up right now. But it still feels a little early. My lilacs are coming in, my hyacinth is too. The hellebores are rampant. I don’t know if there will be another frost after this, but knock on wood, next Tuesday looks like the day I’m gonna start planting everything I’ve got inside, and moving everything out into the garden. ⌂

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Lila Allen is the editor of Wrong House.

By Alicia Kort

For a certain set of connoisseurs, online shopping has become a competitive sport, filled with alerts, calendar reminders, and a final sprint to add-to-cart and checkout before a prized piece gets scooped up. And among the most coveted wins are those items that have been off shelves for years. “Retired” products—to invoke the language of Beanie Babies—are desired for several reasons. The brand might be known for making high-quality goods that last in a colorway that is no longer available. Or maybe it’s a book, long out of print, that shares images lost to the gloss and speed of the algorithm. Or maybe it’s just nostalgic for the shopper. From cookware to bedding, the hunt is on—across sites like 1stDibs, eBay, Etsy, and more recently, live marketplace app Whatnot. We did some deep dives on reseller sites, Reddit, and publishers to pull out some household items that people are going back in time to buy, rather than opt for something new.

IKEA “Vilbert” Chair

When you think of IKEA, you might flash back to decorating your first apartment—a fatiguing all-day, in-person hunt for furniture ending with Swedish meatballs, or an early, humbling experience assembling an IKEA dresser. Likely due to those formative experiences, IKEA has some diehard fans who not only love versatile workhorses like the KALLAX line, but have an appreciation for rare retired pieces. Among them is the Vilbert chair, made in the 1990s and designed by Danish architect Verner Panton. Only a few thousand of these chairs were made—so they fetch pretty decent coin on the secondhand market today. The chair is a visual feast with colorful planks of wood thrown together to create an eye-catching piece of furniture.

Green Lucite Pearl Wick Laundry Hamper

Modern laundry hampers are not exactly the most aesthetically pleasing household essential—or so we thought. That is, until we were introduced to Pearl Wick hampers from the 1950s and ’60s, which have quite the cult following for both collectors and those who just want to put their dirty clothes in something other than a Sterilite white plastic bin. These have been out to pasture since the early ’80s, but the few examples we found on resale sites convinced us that they need a resurgence. Usually made of metal, vinyl, or Lucite, these spacious bins are anything but an eyesore—plus, they hide dirty laundry. We’re partial to this green Lucite option.

East Fork Mug in Soapstone

The North Carolina–based pottery producer has established a loyal fanbase—self-described “potheads”—with its durable and stylish tableware. Thanks to its limited-run seasonal shades and retired colorways, East Fork has created a thriving secondary market. There are pages and pages of mugs, plates, and bowls that are going for double their original retail price. One of the most coveted retired shades is Soapstone, which was one of East Fork’s first glazes made for their gas-fired kilns. It went out of production in 2020, returning briefly in 2021 for a seasonal run. Cofounder Connie Matisse put out a now-archived love letter saying goodbye to the shade, so you know customers were verklempt. With Soapstone’s delicate, blue-gray speckled coloring, we can see why.

Ralph Lauren Charlotte Sage Green Floral Flat Sheet

Although Ralph Lauren Home is still alive and well, vintage bedding shoppers have a penchant for the brand’s linens of the 1980s and ’90s, praising both their quality and homey style. The patterned sheets and comforters—especially the florals and paisleys—seem to be popular, at least among the bedheads on Reddit. Just a word to the wise: Sheets from this era are not designed to fit today’s monstrously tall mattresses, so do some measuring before purchasing.

Le Creuset Enameled Cast Iron Braiser Pan in Cassis

The colorful enameled cookware brand has attracted plenty of collectors over the years, because Le Creuset routinely discards a shade or two each year in favor of new colorways. A moment of silence for this year’s victim, Shallot—which might be called the dying gasp of millennial pink. But one of the most-talked-about colorways on Reddit is Cassis, a deep plum-violet shade that retired in 2018, eight years after its debut. Yes, it’ll look immaculate on your floral tablecloth, but the hearty construction of Le Creuset’s cookware suggests that you’ll have something like this braiser pan for decades.

Culver 22K Gold Striped Old-Fashioned Glass Set

If you’re on the hunt for some gorgeous discontinued glassware, keep an eye out for Culver. Founded in 1939, Culver’s most sought-after designs date from the 1950s through the 1970s, when their 22-karat gold gilded designs were produced. (The brand is still kicking today in a slightly different form—they are the official glassware decorator for Fiesta, which itself has a die-hard community of eBay warriors.) Because most of these were made before regulation ramped up in the ’70s, you may want to check any finds for lead, and be sure to hand-wash those signature gold accents to preserve their luster for years to come. ⌂

This post contains affiliate links; Wrong House may earn a commission if you click.

Alicia Kort is a Brooklyn-based journalist.

Jesse Smiley is the founder of Patches, a New York City–based floral design studio.

Each month, we’re inviting our community to submit their conundrums—big, small, petty, logistical, professional—for a second opinion. Need to know when to call it quits on a project? Or how to scale your crafty hobby into a career? Or what to do when your product gets knocked off? Over the course of two decades in creative business, Los Angeles–based industrial designer, curator, and Opinionated Man on the Internet Eric Trine has seen it all—and isn’t afraid to tell you what you need to know. Have a question for Eric? Drop us a line. (Submissions will remain anonymous.)

I run a small studio. I find that I’m having to dilute my point of view quite a bit in order to please my clients or win new work. An ideal scenario, of course, is that I find clients that are better aligned with my taste and perspective—but I’m just not there yet, business-wise. What’s your advice for building a business without losing POV?

I hear that! I run a small studio, too. I think this stuff is tough and it doesn’t stop being tough.

The best way to start is to speak plainly about the realities of doing creative work in a market economy that must grow at or above the pace of inflation. That’s the challenge. And it may sound bleak, but stay with me.

Let’s say I’m a salsa maker, and I’ve got a booth at the local market. I’ve got my favorite recipes, my unique contribution to the world of salsa. In fact, I have a degree in it! I have customers. People love my salsa. But how much of my salsa do I actually sell? Can I build a business around just my recipes? And what does it take to do that? Businesses need to generate profit, and the way I do that is by utilizing my particular skill set, training, and experience, to make salsa for other people. I can make salsa in so many ways! I can tweak any recipe. Same ingredients, just a different combination. More spice, less spice, sometimes it’s bland AF. But those customers love “my salsa” too. It doesn’t feel like “my salsa” to me, but it is to them. Because it is for them. That’s the business model—to make things that other people like, and deliver it to them. Sometimes we can do that with all our own recipes, sometimes we need to make recipes for others.

I find that’s the hardest thing to remember with the creative work we do. We’re in the kitchen—that is, the studio, or wherever we do our work—so that, on the other side, when we deliver, they feel like we’ve done magic. We taste it all, so we can create things that others enjoy. Any salsa recipe can be the best salsa someone’s ever had—we just need to bring it to the right marketplace, to the right customer.

Dear Eric, I’m torn on how centrally to locate myself in my brand’s image, particularly on social media and in marketing. Should you anchor your brand to yourself and be the personality, or keep the brand more impersonal, with the work or service as the anchor?

I think it’s really important to separate your business from your identity. No one needs to run a business. A business is something you do if you really want to participate in a specific economy where you can make money. Other than that, it is so important to remember that there are no rules.

None. You can really, truly, actually do whatever you want.

Think of your business as a lit candle flame. That little fire needs fuel and air. So what lights you up? The goal is to keep the fire going at a rate that you don’t feel burnt out, snuffed out, or lacking the fuel you need to continue.

I’m 43 now. I’ve been dancing around the artist/brand/corporation/identity on the internet my whole adult life. In 2009, I was called a “California artist blogger.” In 2014, I was called an “industrial designer,” though I don’t have a degree in the field. (I’ve never even taken an industrial design class.) For years, my Instagram handle was @etrine, and folks would say to me, “Are you the guy who runs ‘Ehtreen’?” As if it was sophisticated and ambiguously European.

In 2018, I changed my business name to Amigo Modern with the direct intent of separating my work from my name. It totally worked. I was at a recent consulting meeting where the client asked me if I knew the “Amigo Modern guy.” My experiment of separating myself from my business name was so effective that many folks love my work without knowing it is my work. (One catch here, though: I generally do not advise changing your business name. Pick it and stick with it for at least 10 years.)

Your work is going to change. Your jobs are going to change. You will likely take on many different titles in your career. And you can count on other folks talking about your work in a way that makes sense to them, too. ⌂

Eric Trine is an object-based studio artist, living and working in Long Beach, CA.

By Alex T. Williams

When I was first coming up around the New York design world in the early 2000s, the energy centered on limited-edition objects, conceptual provocation, and a downtown scene where design bled into art, fashion, and performance. It was the era of Tobias Wong hacking early iPhones into sly cultural commentary, and Murray Moss’s SoHo store functioning as a kind of secular shrine for design obsessives. I met Chad Phillips in the midst of all that, when he was working across Moss, the Cooper Hewitt, and other museum design stores, helping shape the ecosystem through which certain objects, and certain ideas about taste, entered the conversation.

When Chad came back into my orbit two years ago with Kristin Coleman, they were opening Available Items, their small but deeply considered shop in Tivoli, New York. It felt, immediately, like an oasis: a place where objects still mattered and where selection itself was the point.

We sat down on the deck of architect Amin Tadj’s Ohayo Mountain House, just as guests began arriving for the opening of “Sense of Place,” an exhibition Chad and Kristin had organized there. Caterers moved up and down the stairs, speakers cut in and out, and Kristin kept one eye on our conversation and the other on the logistics of the evening. We were seated in folded aluminum chairs of Amin’s own design, surrounded by the low chaos of something not quite finished but very much coming to life.

The setting felt right. “Sense of Place” gathers Hudson Valley–linked designers inside a house that itself reflects one version of the region’s evolving architectural language. For Chad and Kristin, whose work has long involved framing objects and the worlds around them, the show suggests a larger question: what happens when the cultural energies once concentrated in New York begin to disperse, settle, and recombine in places like this? At Ohayo, the question wasn’t just what was on view, but what kind of design culture is taking shape here now.

Milkweed Sun Touch Dimmer by Jake Coan and Stump Side Table (Bollard) by Kieran Kinsella. // Photo: Kristin Coleman

You’ve both operated at the center of design culture in New York. What changed about that world; if not something breaking, then something becoming insufficient?

Chad: A few things. The pandemic obviously accelerated everything, but even before that, design was moving more and more high-end. There was less room for smaller designers, especially those working at scale. They just couldn’t afford to be in the city anymore.

Kristin: Yeah, people were getting pushed out. Studios, workshops—those things became harder and harder to sustain.

Chad: So people were already moving upstate; the pandemic just sped that up. And for us, personally, we were at a point where we weren’t really taking advantage of the city anymore. We’d gotten comfortable. Moving up here fit the next chapter better.

Kristin: And we actually see more people now—more designers—than we did in the city.

Were you seeking that kind of community when you moved?

Chad: Not consciously. We bought our place in Germantown as a weekend house without really knowing what was here. But I’d always wanted to open a store, and New York felt too expensive to do it the way I wanted.

Kristin: We didn’t move up with a plan. We were both working remotely, throwing around different business ideas—some pretty random.

Chad: Snack subscriptions. Curated beer.

Kristin: Things that felt missing from the area.

Chad: But we ended up coming back to what we knew: design.

Available Items doesn’t feel like a store, exactly. It feels more like an edit. What are you actually curating?

Chad: Everything. It’s just things we love, loosely under the umbrella of “for the home.” My background has always been in design smalls, so that world is important to me.

What’s interesting now is that there are fewer places for that kind of work. Future Perfect doesn’t really do it anymore, Matter doesn’t, and MoMA operates at a different level. So in a strange way, we’ve become part of a small circuit—there are only so many places a young designer can even show that kind of work anymore.

And it’s really just about fit. A lot of things come our way, but if it doesn’t feel right, we don’t include it.

What does “good taste” mean in a rural context versus the city?

Chad: We’re very aware of local vernacular. I could easily make a store that feels like outer-space design retail, but it wouldn’t make sense here.

I grew up in the country, so I’ve always liked primitives. We have this stool my grandfather made—tractor seat, iron legs, a plow disc base—and it reads almost like a modern object. That overlap—where something is deeply rural but formally contemporary—is really interesting to us.

So the mix becomes important: vintage and contemporary, local and international, emerging and established. It’s all in conversation.

There’s a romantic idea of retreating to the countryside. What’s actually true about that and what’s not?

Chad: The bugs. But also, there’s definitely a kind of costume people put on when they come up from the city; flannels, boots, the whole thing. And then there are people who just come up and actually settle into the place. What’s real is that there’s a lot going on. The level of culture, the food, the people—it’s incredibly high. And life is just… simpler logistically. You go somewhere, you come back. That alone gives people more bandwidth.

Does being here sharpen creative work, or dilute it?

Chad: I think it sharpens it. In New York, you’re constantly aware of what everyone else is doing. You start editing yourself before you even begin. Here, people can retract a bit. They’re still inspired, but they’re less distracted. There’s more space to focus on what they actually want to do.

Is there a Hudson Valley “scene,” or is that something we project onto it?

Chad: Not in terms of style, there’s too much variation for that. But there is a community. People know each other. There are overlapping groups. You see it at openings, gatherings; there’s a shared orbit, even if the work itself is very different.

What feels missing?

Chad: A real meeting point. Historically, there were these meccas: Moss, early Future Perfect, Matter—places where you could go and understand what was happening. Now, it’s more fragmented. There are a lot of voices, but not a single, consistent platform.

What kinds of gatherings or structures would help?

Chad: More low-lift ways for people to come together. What you’re doing [StüdiGroup] is great, things like that. Talks, small gatherings, recurring events. The challenge is distance. Everything’s spread out. But if you can keep it simple: lunches, rotating locations, that’s the right direction. There just needs to be more of it.

To bring it back to “Sense of Place,” how did you think about the show as a whole, as something shaped by this house and by the Hudson Valley more broadly?

Kristin: The Hudson Valley was always the starting point. We knew from the beginning it would be a showcase of designers and makers connected to the region, and then it became about how to define that connection, whether that meant being physically based here or tied to it in a broader way.

The title came out of that. It’s about what emerges from being in this house and on this site, but also the larger history and perception of the Hudson Valley—its artistic legacy—but very much rooted in the present.

The show brings together architecture, floral design, furniture, and smaller objects in one environment; what interested you about that kind of interdisciplinary mix?

Kristin: We wanted it to sit somewhere between an exhibition and a lived-in space. To give the work room to breathe, but also to suggest how you might actually live with these pieces.

And personally, we’re interested in all of those media. There’s something exciting about letting those disciplines exist in conversation with one another.

If you were to leave readers with one final thought, what do you feel this show is really trying to hold or express?

Kristin: That well-crafted objects can elevate everyday life; that they can shape how a space feels and how you move through it. And that supporting a local creative ecosystem is essential if you want it to continue to grow. ⌂

Alex T. Williams is a designer and advisor working at the intersection of creative practice, business, and community building. A cofounder of the lighting brand RBW, he now works with creative entrepreneurs through dialogue, advisory engagements, and curated experiences focused on building sustainable, meaningful practices.

Boy, it’s been a month, huh? If you’re on your phone, laptop, or other screened device as much as I am (it’s a hazard of the job, unfortunately), it’s hard not to see technology as a runaway train—one that’s coming for our creativity, our livelihoods, and our relationships. Even some of the drudgery of our everyday chores, which suddenly seem… not so bad?

But one good thing does come from all of this acceleration: We are forced to confront, however painfully, what we value, what we will and won’t tolerate, and what we’ll create room for in spite of everything. (See also: Why Wrong House exists!)

Our seventh issue, “Hack Job,” takes on technology—virtual worlds, ingenuity, and gaming the system—both as an assessment of where we are currently, and where we can be in the future.

Diana Budds makes her second Wrong House appearance in “Extending the Playing Field,” a reported story that examines how video games are trickling into architectural education and practice. Speaking with professors, practitioners, students, and the team at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London (who recently launched their own program, Portals to the Past, in Minecraft), Budds gives us a state-of-the-industry look at the ways these digital interfaces change how a new generation thinks about collaboration, technology, and worldbuilding.

In “Have You Seen This Couple?”, Daphne Lundi—an urban planner, climate policymaker, writer, and artist—tracks two ubiquitous “scalies” (those little figures you see in architectural renderings) she’s dubbed Jacques and Claudette. “They persist across renderings, offering a sense of permanence, even as the material conditions of most cities make that permanence increasingly difficult to achieve,” she writes. Following their appearances in visualizations of large-scale developments throughout New York City, Daphne uses the figures to explore bigger questions of representation, development, and who the city is for.

And Alex T. Williams of Hudson Valley event platform StüdiGroup is back this month with his creative-conversation series in “The Art of Coding Compositions.” This time, he goes into the studio of Aaron Alden, an interdisciplinary artist who uses diverse real-world inputs, like environmental data and biometrics, to create visual and sonic compositions—projects that Alex calls “part engineering experiment, part sensory spectacle.” Alden’s path is a reminder of the ways that curiosity gets rewarded, and how using technology to a generative end is often less about a particular fixed outcome, and more about systems and process.

But, as Anthony Paletta points out in “Learning From Indigenous Technology,” not all tech is the stuff of gadgets, renderings, and robotic arms. In his interview with researcher and architect Julia Watson—whose book Lo—TEK Water: A Field Guide for TEKnology came out last year—Paletta and the designer discuss the place-based, adaptive systems that Indigenous cultures around the world have devised to manage and harness one of Earth’s most powerful and precious resources: water.

And finally, something totally new. This month, we’re debuting an advice column: “Chair Time With Eric Trine.” I have long admired the designer’s candor on Substack and Instagram, where he’s openly shared about the ups and downs of practice, branding, licensing, finances, and more. Now, for Wrong House, he’s taking questions from all of you. Whether you’re a designer or—like me—just a *creative at large*, it’s always helpful to get a second opinion. This month, Eric answers queries about personal work and hiring. Want to submit a question? You can do so anonymously through our portal here.

Finally, the House of Wrong House just got an addition! I’d like to welcome and introduce July Winters—a whip-smart writer and architectural thinker, and now, Wrong House’s first editorial assistant. July is already demonstrating excellent editorial instincts (and saving me from making embarrassing typos). Happy to have you here, July!

As always, thanks for reading—we’ll see you next month.

’Til next time,

Lila

It isn’t surprising that some of the most successful architects trace their interest to toys and games: Charles Renfro, a partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, told the New York Times a Kenner Girder & Panel building set he received at eight years old crystallized his career path; Bjarke Ingels, founder of the Danish firm BIG, tinkered with LEGO bricks as a child, and today uses them to make models for his block-like buildings; and the Dutch architect Francine Houben named her firm Mecanoo after the endlessly reconfigurable British toy Meccano. The connections extend to the way we talk about architecture, too: The critic Paul Goldberger said Sir Norman Foster’s early work sports the look of an Erector Set, albeit more elegant. (Can you guess what the architect played with?) There’s even a whole book about how children’s construction kits influenced modern architecture.

Each generation’s games shape how it learns to see and build its environment, but a major shift is now underway, as today’s youngest architects came of age in an entirely different landscape: virtual worlds. Sandbox games like Roblox (launched in 2006) and Minecraft (initially released in 2009, with a full release in 2011) invite creative construction like their analog predecessors, but with more immersiveness, open-endedness, and flexibility.

History has shown how play seeps into practice, and these digital arenas are no different. It’s starting in architecture schools, where the shift is already visible in how educators teach and how students think about creativity and future jobs. “It used to be that every admissions letter would be about LEGOs, and [over the years] it shifted toward games like Minecraft or Roblox,” says Stewart Hicks, an associate professor and associate dean at the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at The University of Illinois Chicago.

With 151 million daily active users, Roblox is arguably one of the most popular video games of all time. Minecraft also has an immense audience, with 204 million monthly active users. Institutions nurturing the next generation of architects are looking to borrow some of that momentum: This past January, Sir John Soane’s Museum, a historic house-turned-archive in London, launched an educational program called Portals to the Past in Minecraft. In the game, players hunt through a re-creation of the museum for time-travel portals where they complete quests—like assembling ancient Greek columns—before creating their own buildings. Within the first month, it attracted 41,000 players, a far higher figure than the 1,500 school children the education program typically reaches in a year.

“As a popular national museum with limited capacity, it is a challenge for us to physically get large groups into the museum to learn about the collection and the architecture, so going digital made perfect sense,” says Tallulah Smart, a learning officer at the museum (and Minecraft player since 2011). “In an increasingly digital world, it’s important to acknowledge how technology can enhance learning and creativity. When the opportunity came up to render the museum in the Minecraft Education world, it felt perfectly aligned with the ethos of the museum: to increase knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of architecture and the collection.”

While architects of the past may have derived formal references from Erector Sets and LEGO bricks, Minecraft players are less inclined to take away stylistic influence. It’s more about opening the door to creative expression.

Dominick Concepcion, 21, a fourth-year undergraduate in Penn State’s architecture program, is one future architect who grew up playing Minecraft after school. Ten years ago, he and his friends began creating a world within the game. “We’ve built cities,” he says. “It’s very expansive,” he says. There’s a casino—complete with a playable poker table—a Pokémon battle arena, and lots of skyscrapers. He and his friends have all entered creative fields, from music to film and architecture. (One now has a multi-million-dollar career designing maps in Roblox.) “It leads you towards thinking in an experimental way rather than being very rigid,” says Concepcion. “There are genuinely infinite possibilities.” He intentionally tries not to let the orthogonal qualities of Minecraft seep into his work.

Tiam Schaper, a 26-year-old architectural designer at Gensler, started playing Minecraft with his friends around the time of the game’s full release. He says, “There’s a creative aspect to the game where you can do anything.” This is quite different from the actual work of architecture and all the constraints and specific conditions that come along with designing in the real world, he notes, but the experience of space planning helped him understand some basic architectural principles. “You can conceptualize space in a very real way,” he says. “I need to build a house. Where do I want the living room? Where do I want the bedroom?”

Schaper still plays Minecraft today, drawn to the creative freedom it offers (even if it has nothing to do with the game’s actual survivalist objectives). He recently built a Corbusian house with a Japanese garden. “You can be successful in terms of ‘beating the game’ by just building a box and putting all your shit in it and putting a door on it,” says Schaper. “You don’t get any benefit from being creative. It’s just for your own pleasure.”

Palmer Purcell, an industrial designer based in Philadelphia, continues to play Minecraft for similar reasons. He started when he was around 10 years old and loved the open-endedness of the game. “There was a lot of back and forth online about people finding out how to make new things,” says Purcell. “You want to go back in and start experimenting more. There’s this feeling of discovery that always draws me to it.” This influences how he makes things today, from seeking out new materials and techniques to creating objects that spark a sense of wonder.

But the culture around the game might just be its greatest contribution to young architects. Concepcion says the game’s collaborative spirit prepared him for the field. “It trains you because in the workforce, you’re never doing anything by yourself,” he says. “Everything is a joint venture, especially in architecture where you’re working with consultants, other architects, landscape designers, and construction teams. Having fun with your friends translates to this field very well in that regard. I think it’s important to trust your friends and allow them the freedom to do their thing.”

Gaming is only growing in popularity: Globally, the industry is expected to reach $350 billion by 2030, and architects see an opportunity to contribute to it. “There’s not enough work out there for everybody, but a lot of architecture schools are still stuck in producing people who make buildings,” says Ryan Scavnicky, an architect and assistant professor of practice in Marywood University School of Architecture. “We need people who design buildings, but we also need architects who are comfortable taking that skill and moving into different arenas.”

As Scavnicky, who is 36, writes in his recent book Architecture and Video Games: Intersecting Worlds, “the space of a video game is the space of architectural thinking.” Buildings start out in 3D digital models, which are akin to the immersive virtual worlds in gaming, he continues, so “it makes sense that examining video games as architectural works requires only minor shifts in the application of core architectural ideas.”

This perspective informed the Bachelor of Virtual Architecture program he established last year at Marywood. The first program of its kind in the United States, it trains students to design for film, gaming, and extended reality—an umbrella term that includes augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. Some of the lessons, especially in introductory classes, are similar to those found in traditional architecture school. But instead of asking students to draw a plan from photos of the Villa Savoye, as Scavnicky’s professors instructed him to do when he was in school in 2007, Scavnicky tells them to draw a video game.

Gaming is creeping into architecture curricula around the world, too: The New Jersey Institute of Technology offers a track for Game Design through its College of Architecture & Design. Last fall, The Bartlett School of Architecture at the University College of London began offering an MArch degree in Cinematic and Video Game Architecture.

But that trend doesn’t automatically translate to the technical skills required in architecture, according to Scavnicky, especially since the popularization of tablets. “I’ve seen a lot of students struggle with the transition between software-like iPad games, or even Minecraft, and computers,” he says. “Where are you saving your files? Are you using a cloud? Do you back up? Do you have copies? There is a real computer literacy issue.” Scavnicky feels like his peers had more aptitude with architectural software because they grew up with computers as their primary devices. (Back then, he was a gamer too—he played Final Fantasy and Armored Core, but also noodled around on his parents’ Photoshop software.)

A student’s success from the screen to the real thing might just depend on their ability to engage with a game beyond just playing it. Concepcion and his friends downloaded third-party modifications for Minecraft, for example. “You have to get into the backend workings of your computer to figure out how to do that, and that tech literacy kind of, I think, extends to design software,” he says. Like Scavnicky, Concepcion downloaded Photoshop when he was in elementary school. He also experimented with 3D design tools including Blender, Maxon, and Unreal Engine. “All of these things were a natural creative progression from Minecraft,” he says. “I was able to come into architecture school already having fluency in this software.”

Phillip Bernstein, deputy dean and professor in practice at the Yale School of Architecture and a former vice president at the software company Autodesk, is skeptical about the impact of gaming for multiple reasons. “I’d say the coefficient of friction to learning technology’s gotten lower, but no one’s a better architect because they played Minecraft when they were nine years old,” he says. “You may have a high degree of comfort as a digital native, but you still can’t drive the Ferrari or the Mercedes-Benz that we’re giving you until we give you a few driving lessons. And it’s not just because the tools themselves are sophisticated. It takes a long time to learn the language of architectural exploration and of architectural expression.”

The school—which primarily trains architects who pursue licensure and professional practice—limits technology for undergraduates and instead emphasizes hand-skill instruction. “You need to develop the kind of haptic sense of what it means to represent an idea and think about three dimensions like a designer,” says Bernstein, who himself practiced for two decades before spending nearly as long at Autodesk. “That’s not exclusively a digital phenomenon.”

It might be too soon to tell what the impact on the field will be, but the way these sandbox games nurture creative exploration, collaboration, and the expectation for hard work to be rewarded all seem like positives for architecture—if the field can attract and retain people who share those values. “I have some hope in my generation for maybe making some things better and correcting some of the mistakes that maybe the baby boomers and the millennials have done to the field, but I’m not sure,” Concepcion says. “My dream is to be a multidisciplinary designer, able to do any type of design I want whether that’s architecture or something much smaller or more sculptural. I’m not sure yet. I’m still finding my way.” ⌂

Diana Budds is a design journalist based in New York.

They go on long meandering walks through New York City. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them: Jacques and Claudette. They’re probably in their 50s. He’s bald, wearing a light blue dress shirt, khaki pants, and brown loafers. She’s wearing hoop earrings, a pink T-shirt, and bootcut jeans. They would not seem out of place in Canarsie, or Flatbush, or Crown Heights, or East New York, or any neighborhood that has a strong uncle and auntie contingent.

The couple in question are scalies, stock characters inserted into architectural renderings to populate imagined urban futures.

I started noticing them 10 years ago while working as an urban planner in New York City. My media diet included the regular perusal of real estate websites like New York YIMBY, Crain’s New York Business, and neighborhood blogs to get a pulse on development murmurings. Unless a development comes to the city government for a regulatory approval, the average person is mostly kept in the dark about what a development might look and feel like until the scaffolding comes down. But on sites like New York YIMBY, you’re offered a peek—usually by way of permit filing notices and glossy renderings that feature people walking, sitting, riding a bike, pushing a stroller, and taking advantage of what this new apartment building, office building, or park has to offer.

As far as the scaly influencer market goes, Jacques and Claudette are busy. They’re often tucked into megaprojects, popping up in courtyards, strolling through Coney Island, visiting community centers, on the High Line, and in New York YIMBY post after post. They’ve quietly populated the imagined futures of New York City, always walking, always together (unless it’s a controversial development, in which case they suddenly part ways).

I should mention that Jacques and Claudette are not their real names. I pride myself on my skills of internet sleuthing, archival research, and obsessing over a particular topic to exhaustion, but I was never able to find the real names of these architectural rendering celebrities. The earliest usage of their image I could find dates back to 2015, when Columbia GSAPP students started NONSCANDINAVIA—a collection of racially diverse scalies meant to counteract the mostly white, able-bodied ways in which people were represented in renderings.

If you were in architecture school a decade or more ago, using sites like NONSCANDINAVIA—and the sleep-deprived ingenuity of scouring Creative Commons and celebrity tabloid sites for people to cut out—was what it took to make renderings less generically Nordic and more representative of the neighborhoods where development was actually happening. Diverse scalies traveled from studio to studio, passed along like genetic building blocks and rearranged in an infinite number of configurations, slowly shaping how a generation of architects imagined life in cities.

The 2010s also marked a period when more architects and designers began interrogating the homogeneity of the built environment professions—and how spaces and places were represented. The first Black in Design conference was held in 2015 at Harvard GSD. In 2018, the National Museum of African American History and Culture organized a symposium focused on the activism and organizing impact of Black architects and planners from the civil rights era to the present day. Around the same time, grassroots networks of architects and designers began organizing counterprogramming—like BlackSpace, Spaces and Places, and Hindsight—to challenge the more traditional and expensive offerings of the AIA and APA. It was a moment when many designers, planners, and architects were actively questioning norms of representation, even in renderings.

Jacques and Claudette became my personal Where’s Waldo? of development in historically Black neighborhoods. I would spot them walking through parts of Central Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx—the byproducts of major developments and neighborhood rezonings in places like East New York and The Rockaways, and of the warped market forces that turned any neighborhood with decent transit and access to a major park into an investment opportunity. They became main characters in photorealistic renderings of the coming-soon future: future schools, future apartment buildings, future bike lanes, future renovated train stations, future parks. As these developments neared completion, and as I was on the hunt for a new apartment, I began noticing them on NYC Housing Connect listings, standing in for the few who beat tens of thousands of other New Yorkers to win the housing lottery.

This anonymous couple started to feel less anonymous, in part because they never seemed out of place in the imagined future. For a pair that hasn’t updated their style in over a decade, they somehow don’t read as outdated; they’re timeless rather than time-bound. Other scalies can sometimes feel like relics of the 2000s and 2010s—jeans too skinny for today’s denim conventions, hairstyles that harken back to the era of makerspace idealism and Richard Florida-esque creative-class urban revitalization, rather than the private-equity–laced streets of the 2020s. Jacques and Claudette have a versatility that makes it easy to imagine them almost anywhere—or anywhen. I ended up calling them Jacques and Claudette because they remind me of the aunties and uncles I grew up with in Flatbush and Crown Heights, the headquarters for Jacques and Claudettes in New York City.

So what’s their story? Maybe they’re both former civil servants, enjoying retired life on a Tier 4 pension. Maybe they sold their home in Jamaica, Queens, deciding to downsize once their kids went to college and wanted an apartment with in-unit laundry and no risk of pulling your back while mowing the lawn or falling off a ladder while cleaning the gutters. Maybe they were looking for a walkable NORC to spend their last decades in.

Maybe they’ve left the city altogether, becoming stand-ins for the reverse Great Migration driven by rising housing costs, predatory landlords, deed theft, and the sense (and reality) that home ownership, or just plain housing stability, feels out of reach in most northern cities. In the last 20 years, New York City’s Black population has decreased by over 125,000 people. I wonder what they make of the city in 2026 versus 2005, which neighbors they’ve watched move away, which developments they loved being featured in, which they hated, and, of course, their thoughts on Eric Adams’s tenure as mayor. Perhaps they’ve relocated to Atlanta, Houston, or Dallas, where instead of being the spokescouple for affordable units in new high-rises, they advocate for accessory dwelling units and fourplexes.

Perhaps we would discuss their new scaly colleagues: the matte, AI-generated, sometimes faceless NPCs performing human activities in renderings. Their uncanniness makes it easier for me to focus on the actual design of the project—which may or may not be a good thing, depending on the quality of said project—but it makes it harder to project any kind of backstory onto them. It can feel like I’m looking at stills from a video game rather than a real construction project scheduled to be completed in a matter of months or years.

Maybe that’s a more honest reading of renderings. When the human or humanoid figures in the images look uncanny, less photorealistic, it’s harder to get swept up in the futures the images are trying to sell. Sites like AntiRender offer an antidote to the pollyannish rendering. It can’t be sunny all the time.

The little figures sprinkled throughout these visions are not the main characters. We’re meant to appreciate, or at least focus on, the building, the plaza, the new train station. When a rendering feels too real, too complete, it makes the project, or the future, feel like a done deal. And then we run the risk of obscuring the realities: the area median income of a development, the budgetary gap between rendering and reality in green space design and maintenance, and balconies value-engineered into Juliet balconies.

Perhaps Jacques and Claudette’s recurrence over the past decade is the result of that discernment. They aren’t flashy, aspirational placeholders or faceless human blobs; they’re real people standing in for real people. They persist across renderings, offering a sense of permanence, even as the material conditions of most cities make that permanence increasingly difficult to achieve. ⌂

Daphne Lundi is an urban planner, climate policymaker, writer, and artist.

Dear Eric, how can I find balance between creating personal work and not taking it personally when the work is not a “success”?

Let’s start with a level set: What are your goals as a creative person? There are many ways to define both “balance” and “success,” depending on your answer. So first, you need to identify how you are framing those ideas internally. Then you can determine if they are serving you and your work in the long run. How do you understand balance and success?

On balance: Try picturing it in your mind, visually. Is it like balancing weights on opposite sides of a scale? Or does it look more like forces pulling you in multiple directions? Now, think about balance as a feeling. When do you feel most in alignment? What are the qualities of that sense of balance? In visual arts, we can create balance in a composition without symmetry. We can make the composition feel whole, even when it is a constellation of disparate parts and energies. The goal is to identify what balance feels like to you, and to align your systems of measurement to achieve that goal.

Now, success: Everyone defines it differently, and everyone measures it differently.

To choose to spend minutes, days, hours on our own work—to make the things we do, in the ways we do—is a gift. That gift is first and foremost to ourselves. When we share our gifts with others, we will have widely varying results. Just think of a music genre that you can’t stand to listen to. Someone loves that music. Loves.

In my experience, the older I get, the less sure I am about what people will connect with. It’s often a surprise. And when that surprise occurs, it is a gift back to me. Sometimes the things I care the least about—the piece with the wrong shade of orange that I didn’t even want to bring to the show—is given this glorious reception. Sometimes our work is a gift to others without being a gift to us. That is a certain type of success, too.

How do you hold those two goals of balance and success, and what does it feel like to hold them both at the same time? Are they compatible, or are they in opposition to each other? When are they in conflict, and when do they work together?

Find out what balance and success feel like to you, and expand from there.

My furniture business is still young and developing. At what stage should I hire help with sales and marketing?

So much depends on your specific product category and distribution model, but the “stage,” so to speak, is there any time you are ready.

Rather than “what” the stage is, as in time, I think it can be helpful to think of the stage as one you’d step onto in a performance. You need to select which stage you want to perform on. You can rent out a venue—any venue. A whole stadium if you want. But who is going to show up? Are you ready to perform on that stage?

What type of work is required to perform on that specific stage? How much does it cost to play at that venue? $50,000? $100,000? How many tickets do you need to pull it off? One hundred, 1,000, 10,000? That’s a lot of tickets—can you actually sell that many tickets, and what’s your plan for doing it?

What I’m getting at here is that you can buy your way onto any stage, but the audience has to know about it, get there, and be willing to pay. The same goes for hiring. You can build your team whenever you want, but I recommend making sure your “concert”—whatever it is you’re selling—is well-rehearsed.

Have you ever thought, “How can we afford this?” after you made a decision? It’s dreadful, and a painful place to operate from. Now, how much better does this sound?: “We can afford this.” That’s a statement.

With my own furniture business, I did not hire anyone until I broke $500,000 in cumulative sales, which took me two and a half years. Then I knew it was truly viable. I hired one person, part time, and it was a full year before I bumped him up to full time and a salary.

If you are running a business, and you have a plan for that business to continue to grow, and you can forecast that plan, and you have the budget within that plan to hire someone at a competitive rate that gets them excited about your business and product, and and and you have the time to manage them, create your work, and all of that math works, then try explaining it to someone else. Does it make sense to them? If the answer is yes, then it’s a good time to hire. ⌂

Eric Trine is an object-based studio artist, living and working in Long Beach, CA.

About 10 years ago, I purchased a wooded parcel in Esopus, New York. It wasn’t large, but compared to my cramped Brooklyn apartment it felt like a national park. It became my place to think, experiment, and mess around with tools.

Unbeknownst to me, just a mile down the road another New York City–based creative mind was doing something similar, camped out in an Airstream, hatching his next big idea over cold beers. It would take a pandemic and a mutual friend to bring us together. That friend had turned his Hudson Valley home into a kind of informal salon for curious, creative people, and Aaron Alden had taken over the garage as a laboratory for his own professional reinvention.

Alden began his career composing music for advertising, but the pandemic—and broader shifts in the media industry—forced a reset. What followed was less a career pivot, and more a recombination of skills he had been collecting for decades: programming, virtual-reality experimentation, generative software, sound design, and a fascination with translating real-world inputs—wind, motion, heart rate—into visual and sonic experiences.

Today Alden works as an immersive installation artist, designing complex interactive systems that transform data and human interaction into art. His projects—created for clients like Porsche owners’ clubs, Cascada Thermal Springs + Hotel, and Palo Alto Networks—blend software, hardware, light, and sound into environments that are part engineering experiment, part sensory spectacle.

In our conversation, Alden discusses creative evolution, composing with generative systems, and working in a territory where unruly data, strange machines, and human intuition intersect to produce unexpected outcomes.

You spent a lot of years composing music for film and advertising, correct?

Mostly advertising. I did a lot of car commercials—kind of specialized in car commercials. I did a lot of tech, a lot of other industries, but car commercials were the main focus.

Toward the end of the company’s trajectory we tried shifting to focus only on film trailers. In the film trailer world you write the music ahead of time and then try to get it placed. Unfortunately we did this right during COVID as the film industry was shutting down, so that was kind of the end of that.

How did you get on the path to building generative installations?

When you’re making music for film, there’s a lot of odd technology that you have to learn. It wasn’t necessarily intentional, but along those two decades of writing music I picked up a lot of side skills and learned a lot of odd technology.

I helped ad agencies expand their VR capabilities, and that led to me making strange art installations where nature was the driving force making the output of the sound in various ways.

So it was kind of just a long process of picking up odd tech skills and then refocusing them all with a clearer direction in the interactive world.

So it was maybe less of a hard pivot career-wise and more following the same curiosity and tools you had already learned, just applying them differently?

Everything that seemed unrelated suddenly became related in this new, odd industry of interactive generative art, where you have to take engineering skills, design skills, knowledge of music—just all these things rolled together in a sensible package.

Where did you feel most native in that world, and where were the biggest learning curves?

I feel like I had a strong intuition that we could be doing more with generative art to make work that was fascinating to people in a way where they saw themselves or data they created come out in the work.

I’ve always been doing projects that translate one form of input into another, whether it’s windmills in an Icelandic field generating tones as they pass a magnetic sensor, or people’s workout data changing how a piece of artwork looks on the wall.

Earlier on, the tools weren’t quite there to do these projects as powerfully as they can now. The program I use—TouchDesigner—is like a melting pot for code, data, and media: Anything you throw into it, you can translate into some other form of output.

Of course, code has been able to do powerful things for a long time, and now everyone’s throwing their hat in the ring and doing crazy things with it. So I balance my time between node-based programming in TouchDesigner and code-based projects.

Across music, code, installations, and hardware, it seems like you’re designing systems rather than finished objects.

I never thought of it that way, but I guess that’s right. I’m not creating a JPEG necessarily, though sometimes I am. I think it’s almost accidental that I’m doing that, because I’m attracted to what the outcome is, but to get there requires these complicated systems. Sometimes the end result I have in mind requires learning new tools, and then learning and experimenting with those tools leads to surprising outcomes.

Do you feel like you’re still composing, just with different raw materials?

Absolutely. I’ve always played with analog synthesizers. It was only when I started experimenting with modular synths that I really understood what every part of the instrument was doing. That translated directly to design philosophies of modular thinking—building systems that rely on unique and odd parts that come together.

When I was doing sound design with cars, the sound of an engine would go up and down in pitch. They’re identifiable—I always thought of pitch as musical content. My tagline on Instagram is “resonant pixels and waves” because the physics of waves in sound and light have related properties. I see them as having points of overlap.

How often do you hit the limits of software tools and start bending or hacking them?

I feel like my answer isn’t the answer for this article subject because I feel like I’m the weak link. Tools are very powerful these days. In TouchDesigner, it’s like a blank page. There are nodes that help you do certain functions along the way, but it’s really your own recipe.

One of the problems I have with my data visualization projects is that I’m trying to make a product that doesn’t yet have a place to be shown. It would be great if I could get the data from my watch to sync to my smart TV, but even the smartest TVs are still pretty dumb. So I’m working on how to make those connections stronger and more seamless for the user. Sometimes you have to create your own solution.

You recently got a robot arm. What was that for?

The robot is an industrial robot. I originally wanted to get it to create a 3D printer. People have been doing interesting artistic and architectural design things with them for a long time. I have a very expensive, very small robot. To do what I really want, I need a much bigger one, but learning this helps me get started.

Right now we’re working with Porsche Studio Portland where we’re decorating macarons for an interactive exhibit. The user picks a Porsche color and the robot paints a macaron in that color. I’m having to hack this thing because the robot isn’t designed for a user to walk up and tell it what to do, so we’re building a small “dumb computer” with an ESP32 that simply tells the robot which program to run. [Editor’s note: An ESP32 is an inexpensive and powerful microcontroller.] We keep the dumb computer doing one task and the smart computer doing its own tasks, and they’re kind of unaware of each other.

What else is happening here in the garage lab right now?

Seventeen different projects all at once on top of each other. That makes it difficult.

At the moment, I’m working on the Porsche exhibition I mentioned. There will be four interactive exhibits: A giant kaleidoscope where a user can turn a steering wheel and transform live video into kaleidoscopic imagery; the robot decorating cookies; an interactive art car where users pick from palettes and patterns and decorate the car digitally, then get a print of their art car; and I’m taking the sound of Porsche engines and vibrating carbon-fiber plates to create cymatic sand patterns. We’ll film those sand patterns and project them through transparent fabric throughout the room, creating cascading immersive elements.

I’m also working on an interactive light installation for a hotel spa in Portland. We’ll be creating a saturated color experience that creates a journey through space for guests.

A lot of your work translates real-world data into visual or sonic outcomes. Why use those inputs instead of composing everything from scratch?

There’s a lot of art in the world that says, “I was inspired by space,” and then someone composes something based on their feelings about that inspiration.

But I think we can go farther. We can set up generative systems where we compose the rules that define how input responds and creates output.

The music I compose has a very small audience. (If you want to listen to my ambient sci-fi music, please do.) But I find there’s more interest in art when there’s more context behind it. When we have the power to create generative systems based on rules we establish, it’s fascinating to see how natural data or inputs alter the outcome.

How are you using AI? Do you see it as a collaborator, an instrument, or raw material?

I’m definitely using AI in all the ways everyone else is right now.

I love using it for visualization. Sometimes when I sit down to render a 3D model I know exactly what I want. Sometimes I don’t, so it’s an exploration. Throwing an idea into Midjourney and seeing the accidental outcomes can inspire new directions.

I also use AI to program—to create functional Arduino or ESP32 code, Python commands for TouchDesigner, and to troubleshoot tech problems that would have required much more expertise before.

It’s definitely a superpower, but I’m not using it in ways where AI is the dominant creator of the work. It’s a collaborator.

In this new chapter of your creative life, what excites you and what still feels uncertain?

I think it’s a great time to reinvent what the idea of being an artist means. The balance between art and commerce is interesting. I’ve been lucky to get projects funded by companies without putting too much branding on them.

I always say there’s the front door to MoMA and the back door to MoMA—I’m trying to get in through the back door by doing things a different way.

The tools right now are incredible. You can render anything, laser cut anything. If you can imagine it, you can do it. It’s a very exciting time to create.

What’s uncertain is how long it lasts. I’m optimistic, but it’s always a little scary. What I do now is going to make the phone ring the next time, and I won’t be in control of who’s calling. A creative career takes a lot of work to keep on the path you want to follow.

Right now I’m overloaded with client projects, and I’d love to get more time to focus on the work I’m doing for myself: translating data from people’s daily activities into art.

Is there anything you’re trying to figure out right now that you don’t understand yet?

Scaling up. Working larger. Getting funding for larger-scale projects.

I can build a light installation in my studio that fits on someone’s wall, but I want to build it at Dubai scale—like an airport wall. Everything right now is about scale. ⌂

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Alex T. Williams is a designer and advisor working at the intersection of creative practice, business, and community building. A cofounder of the lighting brand RBW, he now works with creative entrepreneurs through dialogue, advisory engagements, and curated experiences focused on building sustainable, meaningful practices.

Western architecture is adept at building “hard” solutions to managing nature. Concrete and other impermeable materials rigorously wall off the natural ebb and flow of nature–both destroying ecosystems and often ensuring that these variations will become all the more intense somewhere else. But there are more nimble solutions around the world, used for centuries if not millennia; and often, at least in the West, they have been largely overlooked. Julia Watson, a researcher and architect, first glimpsed these possibilities early in her career when she was exposed to Indigenous design mechanisms at the University of Queensland, then on visits to Borneo and Bali. Since then, she has embarked on a mission to document and amplify these undersung traditional practices—ones that work with nature, rather than against it.

Her body of work exists under the umbrella of what she calls “Lo—TEK”—“Lo” standing for “local,” and “TEK” for “Traditional Ecological Knowledge.” The term itself is subversive, undercutting the fiction that Indigenous solutions exist on a primitive pole opposite Western “high-tech” ones. In 2019, she published Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, an engrossing survey of Indigenous technologies for land management—from rice terraces in the Philippines to underground aqueducts in Iran. Each case study is presented with local collaborators. As she writes, “While ‘modern’ societies were trying to conquer Nature in the name of progress, these Indigenous cultures were working with it.”

Her work has continued with the co-founding of the Lo—TEK Institute (with Melissa Hunter Gurney) in 2024, which has since undertaken research, curricular, and design work in collaboration with Indigenous experts. Last year, she published a second book, Lo—TEK Water: A Field Guide for TEKnology, taking a focus on water-management systems around the world—from fish weirs in Cameroon to salt pans in Goa, India. These systems, refined over thousands of years, offer testament to the merits of treating water not as a foe but as a collaborator. “When it rises onto the land,” writes Watson, “it does not come to ruin but to remind us that we’re distracted from our role as its custodians.” On the heels of her latest announcement—the launch of the Lo—TEK Office for Intercultural Urbanism, which adds applied practice to her three-legged stool with education and research—we caught up about how Indigenous knowledge is translated, protected, and put into practice today.

Tell me about your journey to Lo—TEK, as practice, research, and a publishing project. What made this work feel necessary?

Through the cultural heritage and conservation work I was doing in my practice with Indigenous communities in Bali and Iraq. I was repeatedly seeing complex, culturally grounded, place-based systems that hadn’t been documented in the design field and sometimes even in the sciences—the tectonics that created sacred landscapes protecting soil, food, water security, synchronous seasonal cycles, and Indigenous cultural systems. I realized that there could be a landscape urbanism where we don’t look objectively at everything as a resource, and we start to understand the environment relationally, with a broader understanding of human connectivity to nature.

Lo—TEK took my work on the ground with communities and carved out a framework that reflected how communities have been creating very sophisticated infrastructural systems—for 6,500 years, in the case of the Ma’dan of Iraq. And those infrastructures have remained unrecognized in academia and within the architectural profession.

I’m assuming that whenever they do receive academic attention—and if I’m mischaracterizing, please let me know—that they’re being examined anthropologically and not technically?

Yeah, I would say that asking, “Is it anthropological?” or, “Is it technical?” is a very Western framework. In Western scientific rationalism, you’re taught that spirituality and science are separate from scientific inquiry. I’m asking, “Can we move out of these tropes?” I’m looking at localized infrastructural systems, Indigenous sciences, and material cultural studies. If you survey Indigenous technologies around the globe, you’ll see that there are ways that communities are arriving at similar, sophisticated solutions to extremes within their climate, without having contacted each other.

I’m fascinated by the examples you give of communities drawing upon traditional methods—by incorporating contemporary technology such as 3D printing or electronic sensors, or working to use invasive species, such as hyacinth in Bangladesh or mangrove on Moloka’i?

I think this is the future of design, and it flies in the face of the misconception that these are technologies of the past. If something has had a continued life cycle for thousands of years, adaptation is a continuous ongoing process. An Indigenous community is living in response to real-time changes in their environments. It’s not like downloading a software update on your computer. Indigenous communities believe in cyclical time. The fact that they’re now incorporating non-Indigenous practices and materials and construction methods is just a renewed cycle that gets us into that next cycle of regeneration.

You bring up many examples of immensely sophisticated systems whose complexity, until now, has not been framed in ways familiar to a Western audience. You’ve featured all sorts of charts and drawings explaining these systems. Is there a block to overcome when these things are codified in this way?

I was talking to a tribal leader recently, who explained to me that I have the ability to translate our deep traditional ecological knowledge into a framework of language that Western people get.

I think it was foundational training—plus deep engagement over a very long time. I have no right to speak about spirituality in an Indigenous sense, but when you speak about it in terms of socioecological systems, it suddenly unfolds. And so maybe I was able to transmit that understanding through language and illustration that felt more accessible. I think Western education is not driven by place-based, observational, culturally grounded research, though I think landscape architecture and the design profession are in a unique space of agency to bridge them.

Among those examples in your books, were there any that felt like big finds?

I would say the living root bridges of the Khasi people in Meghalaya, India. There, humans have long understood how to create infrastructure by growing a ficus tree and training its tiny, hanging roots over a river. [It eventually] plants on the opposite bank, creating a bridge condition that grows stronger with age. That one blew people away.

I’d say about 15 percent of the case studies that I explored, I found through some sort of a built-environment publication. Eighty-five percent of them I found going through other sources: touristic writings, or speaking with the communities themselves. A lot of our work was just connecting with these communities. I mean months and months spent trying to find a co-author to find the right resource and the right people, and then trying to overcome language barriers.

I’m fascinated by the sense that many of these examples seem to be systems of best practices that are unknown more broadly. It also makes sense why communities might be suspicious of outsiders and exploitation. In the book, you build toward an idea of Indigenous intellectual property as a sort of missing element in these engagements.

I was working on an exhibition piece for a show at the Barbican in London in 2021. The brief was to imagine a world in which Lo—TEK had become the urban model of the future. Our project envisioned the co-design of three urban climate technologies for the year 2040, by pairing three Indigenous communities from Bali, Iraq, and India, with three groups of engineering experts from Buro Happold. In this co-design process, we were paying the Indigenous experts involved professional rates, as you should. But then halfway through the collaboration, upon listening to the engineers speak about infusing the knowledge into all the other projects they were working on, I panicked, thinking, “Well, clearly something is missing in the process I have created, if these professional experts don’t understand how to use knowledge offered by communities in a respectful and reciprocal way.”

So I began speaking with a group known as the Enrich Hub, who are Indigenous intellectual property scholars, as well as a lawyer, to create a new legal framework for the protection of the IP on this project. I wanted to move away from asymmetrical Western legal systems, [and toward] communities retaining control of their knowledge—to deem its value on their terms, and make sure that it was used for the good of those communities and for the benefit of humanity, rather than commercial profit. We haven’t resolved these questions, but are working on them.

Water runs through almost all of the examples in your first book, but you take a true focus on it in the second. What led you to that sort of zoom-in as a follow-up?

Climate rhetoric usually speaks about the rising or warming of waters as the biggest threat to coastal shorelines and communities. I wanted to really shift that. What’s the biggest difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous understanding of water? They’ll say that we are all related—that the water is my ancestor, or the ocean is Mother Earth’s amniotic fluid. That’s foundational. And that is so foreign to non-Indigenous people.

Is water threatening our infrastructure? Or is it giving us dire warnings about where it needs to move? Those are two very different ways you can understand water, and in response, design infrastructure and urbanism: You can treat it as a threat or co-design with it as a partner.

Your examples usually involve human activity being vital to sustaining ecosystems and muting the effects of climate change. So often, people are making a living off of a place while also actively maintaining ecosystems. That is not usually the way we think about it in the West, because that’s not normally how we do it.

In all ways of modernization there’s the prioritization of economics and extraction, and the deprioritization of humanity and environment. With Indigenous communities, that’s very much reversed: They have a deep, holistic understanding of direct and indirect impacts.

Within Indigenous infrastructural systems, abundance is optimized. Take, for example, the raised agricultural beds or chinampas, which were the foundational landscape of the pre-colonial city of Tenochtitlan. While most of this system was drained by the Spanish, some chinampa fields still exist in the South and East, where they have eight harvests a year, cool the city, protect from flood and drought, and cleanse some of the city’s waste water. As with all Indigenous systems, it was not created with the intention to just benefit humans; they are designed to benefit all living species, as well as non-living elements, like soil and the water.

I really like the example of the native Hawaiians. I talk about the Loko i‘a, the fish pond which is part of the TEK of the Ahupuaʻa, the mountain-to-shoreline ecosystem adaptation system of the native Hawaiians. In this system, the reason communities care for taro is because they have reverence for the plant. Taro is an ancestor of the Native Hawaiian people, as it came before them in the cycle of creation.

The Swinomish build clam garden walls that protect against tidal surge. They believe that clams are a nation they should respect. The clam nation feeds them. They are there as custodians to provide a habitat on which the clam nation can live in response. It’s a very reciprocal engagement.

The Sangjiyutang, the polder dyke canal system in China, is really interesting principally because it’s completely circular. It’s feeding the population; it’s producing textiles; it’s cleaning waste water; it’s sequestering carbon; and it’s also part of the flood protection system in the Pearl River delta.

The Bheri constructed wetlands system on the outskirts of the city of Kolkata is incredible—it cleans up to 70 percent of the water coming out of a city of 15 million people. That city’s population has exploded in a short timeframe. You have a system that’s not a formal sewage treatment system, but it’s able to expand and adapt—not just to take in sewage, but also produce food.

I know that many of these are broader systems or structures. Do you have a sense of any lessons that can be drawn at the scale of an individual home?

There are a couple of examples. For one, there is the Seaweed Reimagined project by Kathryn Larsen. This also related to the case study houses we were working on—really thinking about seaweed thatching, which is fire resistant, thermally insulative, and endemic to Scandinavia. It is commonly used for roofing; however, communities on the island of Læsø use it as a cladding structure. Compression is the critical factor in expanding from thermal insulation to an actual cladding system.

There is also Mud Frontiers by Emerging Objects, who are 3D-printing habitable desert structures out of earthen materials. They’re using a very new technology and an ancestral building material and form.

One example in the book is called Blanket of Warmth. The Starblanket Cree Nation working with McPherson Engineering has co-designed a radiant heating system for reservation housing. This heating was usually provided by space heaters, which have a terrible risk of fire and mold and are very high cost. It’s a radiant heating system that employs TEK from the tipi, to create a safe, efficient, paneling system that’s also economical for these communities.

Or the Totora Reed Emergency Housing system designed with communities on Lake Titicaca, for families whose houses were devastated by an earthquake. They could be constructed in four days from pre-fabricated panels of custom-woven totora (a local sedge). The raised design addressed site‑specific constraints, such as freezing temperatures, by lifting the housing off the ground and adding a skylight for additional solar heating.

You noted that paper and electronics are two things vulnerable to water in any setting. A hermetic seal against water is the watchword of every American architect, it seems like—occasionally there will be a concession in a flood zone of raising a building, but your examples seem to point to greater flexibility.

I think about the idea of “smart housing,” and I also think about housing through a Lo—TEK lens. Those seem like very different approaches, but if you look at their mission, they’re actually driven by the same intent.

I talk about technological specifications in my book. Co-evolutionary technology that has emerged with communities for 1,000 years should be lifted up above non-biodegradable technology from the last 200. If water was going to write specifications for the building industry, what would those look like? ⌂

Anthony Paletta is a writer living in Brooklyn. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Architects Newspaper, Metropolis, Architectural Record, and elsewhere.

A few years ago, an anonymous admin (maybe one of you?) regularly documented and critiqued the wash basins of greater Brooklyn—and occasionally other locations—on the Instagram account @sinkreviews. The page has been dormant for a while, but I always really appreciated the narrator’s over-the-top poetics, and, quite honestly, their aptitude for articulating the finer nuances of handles, spouts, and water flow.

I’d like to think that this issue, Wrong House’s sixth—dubbed “Kitchen Sink”—pays homage to the spirit of @sinkreviews in its celebration of the quotidian. This journey begins with “Daily Toil,” Mimi Zeiger’s observant reflection on Ravenhill Studio’s annual “Everyday Objects” series. The brand taps makers, writers, directors, and other tastemakers each year for their most beloved ordinary objects (which so far have ranged from a fake fried egg selected by Bailey Hikawa to Jill Singer’s favorite long-handled iced-tea spoon). And, fun fact: I actually participated in 2025, contributing my go-to incense burner.

The force of the familiar further surfaces in Ekemini Ekpo’s essay on Nigerian event souvenirs. Ekpo, who currently lives in the U.S., considers the bowls, cheese graters, and notebooks that her friends and family have produced for weddings, funerals, and everything in between, casting them as embodied acts of care.

These pieces also complicate some of the environments we routinely encounter in popular media. In “The House That Reality TV Built,” a conversation with Dwell managing editor and recovering architect Jack Balderrama Morley (whose book Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV comes out next month), Jesse Dorris interrogates the interiors of shows like The Real World and The Kardashians and the ways they’ve reshaped our own.

And contributor Alex T. Williams is back again this month, too, delivering an interview with self-trained woodworker Abigail Castañeda. Abigail grounds the conversation in a detailed account of her daily rituals and guiding principles. I couldn’t say it better than Alex does himself: “In a world that can feel increasingly loud and jarring, her work demonstrates an insistence on attention, slowness, and beauty.”

To top it all off, this issue also features a look inside recipe developer and editor Anna Stockwell’s new volume, The Butter Book, which is, well, exactly what you’d guess. But in true Wrong House style, we zoom in on the surprising, weird, wonderful ways folks are serving up yellow gold these days. Let’s just say: it’s a big moment for big butter.

If there’s an argument here, it’s that meaning has a tendency to pile up, like dirty dishes, in the places you’d least expect. I hope it’ll have you giving the everyday items and practices in your own life a little extra love.

OK, down the drain you go!

Til next time,

Lila

About 10 years ago, my mother—an expert hostess—adopted a very specific, very peculiar habit: only serving her guests butter hand-delivered from France. My mom is also the type of lady who gets most of her cheese from Trader Joe’s and who relishes a good find at TJ Maxx (hey, me too), so it’s not as if she’s stockpiling other rare gourmand accoutrements. Acquiring the butter, which she swears is better than any you can find here in the States, requires the help of a flight-attendant co-conspirator, and, of course, a refrigerated bag. I can confirm it’s very impressive to visitors, of which she has many. These days, everyone is feeling the pinch—but a tub of French butter is a luxury that elevates a tear of crusty bread from mundane to sublime, not only because it tastes delicious, but because there’s a good story behind it.

If you’re going to all that effort, it’d be foolish to offer your guests their spread in a humdrum vessel. The Butter Book, culinary whiz Anna Stockwell’s forthcoming bible of all things butter, details the many stylish ways to serve the good stuff—along with butter’s history, Anna’s recipes, and instructions on how to make your own. She and I caught up recently about how to serve it (butter mountains are still going strong, people!), the popularization of the coquillor, and the persistence of butter yellow.

Looking through the butter tools you detail in your book, it strikes me that many of them seem so old-fashioned. Maybe because there’s a slowness or ritualistic character to them (like the butter warmer and the coquillor). As somebody who has been steeped in butter(!) for the last year or two, what’s your take on how we’re feeling about butter—and the way it’s served—right now?

Yes, I love all the old-fashioned butter tools! And I love that they seem to be regaining popularity these days, thanks in part to brands like Gohar World who re-popularized the coquillor a couple years ago. How we’re feeling about butter right now is we’re all about it! Home cooks and restaurants and party planners are going big and bold with butter!

I’m sure my algorithm is biased toward butter after my two-plus years of lots of butter related searching on my phone... but I’m seeing butter continually pop up in my feed. It seems we’ve mostly moved past butter boards and are onto molded butter, butter sculptures, mounds of butter, and generally just BIG butter. It seems like every hip party has a tower of whipped or molded butter on the buffet, while many restaurants now offer (and charge for!) special butter service. Butter is being considered as a centerpiece, not as an afterthought, and honestly, I’m all about that.

For most of my lifetime, at least, Americans have had an ick when it comes to having butter sitting at room temperature. That seems to have changed, with butter crocks now being common commodities at boutique kitchen stores. What’s changed?

Just like you can taste and appreciate the flavors of a soft cheese better at room temperature, you can taste and appreciate the flavors of butter at room temperature. I think as people have become more aware of and appreciative of high-quality butters, they’re paying more attention to how best to serve it.

Can you tell me about a few of your favorite butter-serving implements—cutlery, crocks, display stands, presses, and so on? Where did you acquire them?

My favorite butter dish (which I found on Etsy during my butter tool research) is a vintage silver-plated covered shell butter dish with a little glass dish inside. It’s the perfect size to use for serving butter at the dinner table, and it keeps it guarded from my butter-loving cats. The easiest type to find are from the mid-century revival of the original Victorian trend of silver butter shells. They also make great caviar serving vessels.

For my everyday countertop butter storage, I use this deep ceramic butter dish with airtight lid that I bought after my two cats destroyed a succession of six different more traditionally shaped ceramic butter dishes. No matter how heavy or clever I thought it was, they eventually figured out how to knock off and break the lid of every butter dish except this one! Like I said, they love butter. And I love to keep butter on my counter at all times, so we had to find a solution. The airtight lid helps keep the butter fresh, and I like that the dish is big enough to fit a European-size block of butter. It’s not the cutest dish in the world but it has lasted three whole years now which is a record in my kitchen, so we’re sticking with it. And it keeps the fancy butter for me instead of the cats!

What are some of the most impressive butter displays you’ve encountered in your research and travels? (Any that a fellow butter enthusiast could re-create at home?)

I feel like I’ve been seeing some really great ones on Instagram recently, but I just went digging to try to find some photos for you and can’t find the ones I’m remembering, shoot. But as I said before, it’s all about BIG impact butter. Tall mountains of whipped butter—I teach you how to do this in my book and it’s a very good party trick to re-create at home. I saw somewhere a centerpiece built of many sticks of butter like a wall with candles sunk into the butter. Dramatic, but maybe a bit wasteful because really that’s a lot of butter. Sculptures made of butter are easy to re-create at home on a smaller scale using silicone molds (my method is in the book!) and are honestly so fun and charming. Why serve a stick of butter on your table ever again when you can serve butter shaped like a shell or a lemon or a cow? I now keep ready-made butter shells in my freezer to pull out for special guests.

I’ve got to know: Do you have a preferred butter?

I have several! I always have at least three types of butter on hand in my kitchen:

1.) A table butter, or what I keep on my counter for spreading on bread, topping pancakes or oatmeal, or adding a dab to this or that. Ideally this is a European-Style salted cultured butter. Depending how spendy I’m feeling and which grocery store I pop into, this will either be Isigny Ste Mere butter with sea salt crystals (a package of this is also one of my favorite hostess gifts to give!), Ploughgate Creamery Salted Cultured Butter, Vermont Creamery Salted Cultured Butter, or Kerrygold salted butter. Kerrygold isn’t cultured, but the grass-fed cream gives it a nice flavor boost worthy of being table butter!

2.) A savory cooking butter, or what I use to make sauces, baste steak or scallops, roast chicken, etc. Salted Kerrygold butter is my favorite for this.

3.) A baking butter, or an unsalted sweet cream butter for all-purpose baking. I go with whatever the grocery store brand organic version is for this, which for me means Hannaford’s organic unsalted butter. I keep backup in the freezer because you never want to discover you’re out of butter when the urge to bake cookies strikes.

Finally: Butter yellow. Here to stay, or a sizzle in the pan?

For fashion, a sizzle. For interiors, here to stay. Or at least simmer for quite a while still. ⌂

Lila Allen is the editor in chief of Wrong House.

Every year, for the past five years, the good folks at Ravenhill Studio in Los Angeles publish Everyday Objects. Each volume presents a trove of quotidian things selected by a set of creatives within the studio’s orbit.

Launched online just in time for the holidays, it is, ostensibly, an elevated gift guide—burnished to shine by the keen judgement the dozens of designers, architects, makers, curators, writers, and artists use in their selections of household items or work tools. It also is a document of the mundane actions that make up our daily lives. “The archive feels like a love letter to the objects that make doing everyday things delightful,” says Marjory Garrison, Ravenhill’s director of sales and marketing.

All entries include a close-up photograph or ASMR-esque video; one or two sentences accompanies the object. As a former participant (a vintage silver fountain pen given to me for my bat mitzvah), I know that the brief asks for contributors to take their own images. Viewed together, the collection is soothing. A balm from all the horrors that populate the Internet.

The lighting is always so nice, the shots consistently pretty. Maybe that’s the outcome of asking a bunch of visually-oriented people to make an image or maybe it’s an algorithmic function of the iPhone camera, either way, there’s a pleasure in looking closely at something so very commonplace, like a binder clip, an iced tea spoon, or a pair of kitchen shears. With a touch of art direction, these objects neither transform nor offer transcendence, but they do make strange the act of living.

Emeco’s Jay Buchbinder says this toilet paper holder “demonstrates craft in an object typically overlooked.” // Video courtesy Jay Buchbinder and Ravenhill Studio

We crave a tiny glimpse into the nuance someone else’s life. As judgement, as reassurance, as escape.

Certainly, there’s no big revelation here. Socials and Substacks are chock-full of influencers sharing and oversharing. Staring into the ring light, they peddle lists of things-you-can-buy-to-hack-your-life or aspirational-tchotchkes-bound-to-make-you-feel-poor or 15-things-you-didn’t-know-were-on-Amazon-for-your-insomniac-hours. There’s a whole TikTok genre built around celebrities unpacking their handbags. It’s amazing how many kid snacks Jennifer Garner fits in her purse.

I love those seemingly authentic moments where a writer or artist lets you in on their particular idiosyncratic totems and rituals. Those with writerly or literary pretentions (myself among others), can recite Joan Didion’s The White Album packing list on cue: mohair throw, typewriter, 2 legal pads and pens, files, house key. (Did that mohair throw show up in her 2022 estate sale?)

Above: Mike Jacobs of JACOBSCHANG Architecture called these Niwaki Higurashi Secateurs “not an everyday object, but certainly an everyday-in-the-garden object.” // Video courtesy Mike Jacobs and Ravenhill Studio

Art critic Jerry Saltz famously loads the fridge he shares with Roberta Smith with grilled skinless chicken breasts packed in Tupperware and black bodega coffee. It’s an iconoclastic performance born of necessity, with a touch of anti-elitist posturing. What might be Saltz’s everyday object? “We bought a dozen 7-Eleven cups and tops in 2017; we wash and reuse them; ditto four metal straws,” he shared with Vulture back in 2020. Not everyone is Alison Roman or Alex Tieghi-Walker.

With Everyday Objects, task trumps taste. Tape measures, utility knives, pens, leather gloves are catalogued as “Work.” Practical, beautiful, worn with use. Filed under “Kitchen,” are multiple manners of bottle openers, wine glasses, mortar and pestles, and juice squeezers. The selections are not solely about consumerism (although there are links to third-party sites if one was so inclined) but rather ask us to slow down and concentrate on the process.

And then there are the outliers, that point to something else in someone’s life—that open up a window of speculation into what specifically matters within their little world. Tyler Polich and Jessica Jimenez Keenan of Years shared a pink light bulb, an atmosphere-inducing object for intimate nights. Grain Design delivered the perfect dive mask for exploring the underwater fauna of the Salish Sea with their children.

Designer Bailey Hikawa, maker of phone cases so economically expressive they become small sculptures, submitted a Fake Fried Egg. “You would be surprised how much joy a fake egg can bring,” she shares as way of explanation. Drawn to the ways surrealism shakes us from the labor of routine, I’m bound to agree.

When Belgian painter René Magritte asked his viewers to reconsider ordinary pipes or bowler hats, it was to shake them from the stupor of reality. Today, we are awash in AI slop that feeds us what it imagines we want. Magritte’s goal was “to disrupt the order in which one habitually sees objects…to make them shriek aloud.” Maybe everyday objects will foment a collective scream. ⌂

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles–based critic and curator.