Every day we inch closer to July 4, 2026, America is heating up. The sun is streaming through the temporary decals on the windows of Bank of America that read, “Celebrating 250 Years of the American Dream.” Printed summer picnic plates at Walmart go viral for their wording, “United States of America, 1776–2026.”

As people prepare for our nation’s “birthday,” and skim over the unpronounceability of the word “semiquincentennial” in articles about Donald J. Trump building a 250-foot neoclassical white marble arch in Washington, D.C., or the English architect Norman Foster designing a time capsule to commemorate the lasting allyship of Britain and America, the idea of “history” floats around like parade confetti. It is 2026—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. At a moment when fewer and fewer people agree on what the great experiment we call “America” even is, a uniting factor is: things. New things, old things, red, white, and blue things.

America’s historical narrative rests largely on object narratives: the beads the Dutch used to purchase Manhattan, the Liberty Bell, the bus that Rosa Parks sat on. Objects are convenient symbols for whole swaths of experience, standing in for histories that are rarely as tidy as their material remains. Objects do what language no longer can. They are sturdy metaphors, unmoving, unflinching, and primed for assimilation. We give objects value with narrative, and vice versa: stories absorb value through objects.

The semiquincentennial is, officially, a federal initiative. A cry for programming. An invitation to the rodeo. Cultural institutions have answered the brief with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The Metropolitan Museum has a range of objects displayed in a small exhibit titled Revolution!, including an engraving designed by Benjamin Franklin, which depicts Britannia as a woman with her limbs removed, a teapot that says “No Stamp Act,” and the Antislavery medallion designed by Josiah Wedgwood. Carnegie Hall’s season festival, “United in Sound,” spans more than 35 concerts. The Smithsonian has organized Our Shared Future: 250 across its 21 museums and over 200 affiliates. The American Folk Art Museum has mounted Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States. PBS is airing Ken Burns’s12-hour, six-part documentary series, “The American Revolution.” Opening this month at the Huntington Library is a show titled This Land Is …, which borrows its title from an object on display: a guitar owned by Woody Guthrie. Also on exhibit, digging further into the land theme, is a hand-drawn design for a garden at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson, and a collection of photographs by Japanese American flower farmers in Los Angeles before and after the Japanese internment during World War II. Elsewhere, there are tall ships, drone light shows, commemorative coins, and a small fleet of “Freedom Trucks,” designed in part by conservative endeavor PragerU and led by the current administration, are going on tour as mobile museums where each visitor is greeted by an AI-animated painting of George Washington.

The efforts to historicize this moment in history have taken to the sky, the sea, the heart, and the land. What the semiquincentennial has not managed to produce, despite considerable effort, is a feeling. And that feeling, perhaps, is patriotism? Pride? Purpose? What we have instead is a vast collection of objects tasked with representing 250 years of narrative. What is on display is a dutiful, albeit lazy, response to a national mandate to historicize a moment for which there is no real collective spirit.

A few weeks ago, I stood in front of two painted maple side chairs on the lower floor of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in a small exhibition tied to the museum’s America 250 focus. The exhibit’s placement in the basement had no particular markings other than a version of the America 250 logo and wall text describing the Federal style and key late-18th-century American decorative arts movements. Employed widely during this period, these styles drew on the visual motifs of the European past and flattened them just enough to feel modern. The two chairs, from “Boston or Salem, Massachusetts, 1790–1800,” sit angled toward each other as if in polite conversation. Identical in design, both have silk upholstery fastened to spare cushioned seats by brass tacks. Their oval backs are painted with faux ormolu, floral embellishments, and ribbons. The only difference is color: One has a dark brown frame and pale yellow-striped jacquard seat; the other is painted white with gold ormolu and powder-blue moiré silk.

What did these chairs intend to communicate about America in the years just after independence? Their trompe-l’œil finishes—the look of gilding without its cost—are reminiscent of the linen floorcloths painted to look like marble in Southern antebellum mansions, or the colorful architectural elements flattened and rendered symbolic in the work of postmodern architects like Charles Moore. They are likely part of the “American Fancy” period, which relished in the presentation of ornament for ornament’s sake. More than any cohesive narrative, the side chairs brought to mind a line from Susan Sontag’s posthumously published journals, a prose-y thought sitting on the page unattached to anything else: “An essay with no ideas: description + modulations of description.”

Two hundred and fifty years ago, America began to design itself. Shaking off its colonial past, everything got a bit bigger, cleaner, and more established-looking. Having achieved independence some 30 years into the Neoclassical movement, the use of Palladian porticos with tall Corinthian columns, domed roofs, and Roman cubic proportions served as a potent reference for the country’s developing aesthetic identity. America wanted to appear as virtuous and stable as a Herculaneum ruin. The pride of the young republic was also evident in the development of symbolic representations of patriotism; the bald eagle, in particular, was chosen to represent strength and freedom. In early American antiques, eagles are everywhere. They are cast in brass, depicted in furniture motifs, carved in stone on buildings, woven into textiles, etched in metalwork and silver serving sets, and illustrated on porcelain. Like the painted ormolu of the chairs, the motif was symbolic. The look of a nation that wanted to rush its stability, to appear as if it had already arrived.

In 1876, during the nation’s centennial, the United States hosted its first official World’s Fair in Philadelphia. The sole purpose of the exposition was to showcase the country’s prowess through a citywide display of material goods and architecture. The 1876 fair was, in this sense, the Federal style writ large: aspiration dressed as fact, a trompe-l’œil finish applied to an entire city. Ten million visitors moved through Fairmount Park that summer, past the Corliss steam engine, the halls of textile machinery and silver plate and decorative furniture, and paid 25 cents to look at the torch-bearing arm of an unfinished Statue of Liberty. The official story was one of arrival. America, in its 100 years of freedom, was thriving. What the fair’s gleaming display cases could not accommodate was the counter-history running alongside it. Frederick Douglass, a guest of note but almost denied admission, later spoke of the conspicuous absence of Black Americans from a celebration of a freedom that had not been universally conferred. The fair’s “folk,” its artisans, its laborers, the hands behind the made things, were present only in posterity and only now “in plain sight,” as the historian Mabel O. Wilson says.

Folk Nation: Crafting Patriotism in the United States, on view now at the American Folk Art Museum, is quietly circling some of these same ideas. The show traces how vernacular objects, weathervanes, quilts, trade signs, and carved portraits became shorthand for an idea of authentic American identity. It places objects as descriptions and representations. “Folk,” however, was never a neutral category. It developed alongside the art and antiques markets. Many collectors and dealers cite the enthusiasm surrounding the 1974 exhibition “The Flowering of American Folk Art” at the Whitney Museum of American Art as the birth of the folk art movement in antiques. It was also the brink of the Bicentennial (which, arguably, had way better branding than our current moment). Terms like “folk,” “nation,” and “patriotism,” as the museum’s curatorial team notes, carry layered and contested meanings. Objects were granted cultural significance not only by the people who made them, but also by collectors and institutions who deemed them legible as national symbols.

“America has a patchwork culture made of the dreams and songs of all its people,” Alan Lomax said of his work as an ethnomusicologist. In a project called An American Patchwork, Lomax traveled throughout the American South and Southwest from 1978 to 1985 to document regional folklore, music, traditions, and dance. Much of this is housed at the Library of Congress, not in any assemblage around the number 250. The music exists in the walls of the building, where he recorded many musicians, including a nine-hour session with Jelly Roll Morton in 1938. I sat in those archives the rest of the day I was in Washington, D.C. The documentation is a body of work that exists as a quilt does, an assemblage of other things of feeling, of something maybe like patriotism, of something more, something maybe, American.

There is a current curatorial theme in line with Sontag’s “essay with no ideas.” One that relies on objects as modes of description. Narrative is lacking, unraveling. Objects are honest. They hold their shape. They don’t equivocate. They sit in contrast with each other. The space between is what creates meaning, not the written description. The great experiment, at 250 years, is still legible in objects, in trompe-l’œil chairs and Liberty quilts and even Freedom Trucks. ⌂

Monica Nelson is the author of Edible Flowers: How, Why, and When We Eat Flowers (Monacelli, 2021), These Long Shadows: Women’s History in House Museums in the American South (Atelier Éditions, 2026), and Antiques Today (Princeton Architectural Press, 2027), and is the founding photo and design director of Wilder Quarterly. She writes about history through the lenses of material culture, design, and nature.

There’s a chair in the den at my father’s house that, to me, is perfect. It is large, red, and assertive, and bears a passing resemblance to Jindřich Halabala’s slutty little Art Deco armchairs for Thonet. The generous arms can accommodate a stack of books, my large water bottle, and a flotilla of TV remotes that you’ll find in a Boomer household. To sit in it is to feel enveloped. Nothing hurts or feels bad. When I tire of being upright, the chair meets me where I am: With a bit of casual effort, I can lean back, and the chair will splay me out—almost like I’m sitting in my second favorite seat, a zero-gravity lounger I found in the garden shed in my father’s backyard.

I love the TV chair so much that I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking for one of my own. I was shocked, but only briefly, to discover that it isn’t some sort of lesser-known midcentury-ish, dupe-y relic—it’s a La-Z-Boy, specifically this one, a pushback recliner designed for an upscale interior that prioritizes both comfort and style.

You can imagine my surprise: In my mind, a La-Z-Boy is a chair designed for watching football and eating Chili Cheese Fritos, probably in the rec room of an overstuffed McMansion. Its slightly worldlier cousin, a midcentury-adjacent lounge chair that you’d see in an upscale med spa, is designed for waiting, not settling in. A 30-minute chair. The other end of the spectrum is where aesthetics take precedence over comfort—if your La-Z-Boy is lowbrow and your vaguely Scandi DTC special hovers in a crowd-pleasing middle, then the world of design-fair chairs sits solidly (and smugly) at the top. It feels incorrect to tie moral value to aesthetics, but it seems like the more “difficult” (or uncomfortable) the chair, the higher cultural and aesthetic value it has—or maybe needs in order to justify its existence. When I presented my loose thesis to Witold Rybczynski, the architect, professor, and author of a very useful book about chairs, he offered a defense: “The La-Z-Boy is a fine chair, to call it lowbrow is just snobbism.”

And actually, I could not agree more! But much like sex or how you take your coffee, comfort is different for everyone, and the idea of what fits that criteria is deeply personal and extremely specific. Chairs should always be comfortable, right? I think so. Am I wrong? Maybe!

A chair can be many things. For instance: an artistic expression of its maker’s personal philosophy about how design functions, or a product in a category that abounds with options for the modern aesthete to telegraph their taste. They’re also functional objects, made (for the most part) to be sat in.

Appealing form and comfort aren’t always mutually exclusive; vintage Status Chairs and their re-editions are often comfortable and nice to look at. Though those factors are not a requirement for a chair, I’d argue that the best chairs should at least try to tick both boxes. “A Saarinen Womb chair and an Eames lounge chair are pretty comfortable,” Rybczynski says. “There are many 18th-century French chairs that are much more valuable, and are eminently comfortable.” It’s true that the midcentury chairs of note were radically comfortable for their era—but as time and innovation marched on, the idea of comfort in chairs and furniture has evolved.

Sami Reiss of the “furniture-demystifying” Substack SNAKE points out that the way we’re even looking at comfort now is relatively new: “The only chairs that had backs on them up until maybe 200 years ago were for like, kings and royalty. Everyone else just sat on stools,” he says. “We’re living in a gilded age of comfort.”

The chairs that are not comfortable very often fall in the murky world of “collectible design,” where you can go to a design fair and sometimes find a gallerist hawking what appears to be a pile of sticks held together with packing tape, accented with hints of chrome—a chair, sure, but according to whom? These makers exist, but when I talked to noted Chair Guy Eric Trine, I was pleased to hear that this is not necessarily the norm: “I went to Parsons last year and talked to design students and they really do care about comfort,” he says. “They are beside themselves when they go to these collectible design shows. And they’re like, why the fuck aren’t they making comfortable chairs?” A comfortable chair is a sellable chair—one that could be ordered en masse by a restaurant, a hotel, or an interior designer, for a large sum of money.

There is nothing wrong with highbrow chairs that lean more toward sculpture than comfort. They are art, not industrial design, and therefore the rules of engagement are different. Art doesn’t have to be comfortable to sit in, to look at, or to interact with, and often, that’s the point. What you might see at Design Miami or on your favorite designer’s favorite designer’s Instagram story is compelling because they are inherently provocative, like all good art can be. As Trine points out, “Collectible design is, as a genre, probably closer to craft or decor. The design aspect of it is a bit of a misnomer, because it’s only design in so much as these objects are known silhouettes.” The aforementioned pile of sticks, then, could sit in a regular person’s home as not an actual chair to use, but one to admire. “It’s kind of like a grand tradition in design,” Reiss says. “There’s always a piece of furniture that’s off limits.” Think of it this way: If you can’t afford an Eichler or even a suburban split-level fixer-upper, a freaky little chair in the corner by an end table you don’t love is, at the minimum, a bit of fun for guests, and maybe also for you, even if sitting in it for longer than four minutes aggravates your sciatica.

If you’re of the mind that furniture is meant to be a statement—something you love, even if it doesn’t make sense to others—then comfort might not be a concern. (David Michon of For Scale recently riffed on this idea in his print issue.) And people really do love these chairs, even if, and especially because, they are conceptual interpretations of the idea of a chair that challenge the viewer’s understanding of what a chair is. When I posed this question to Rybczynski, a man who certainly knows a thing or two about chairs, his answer was refreshing. “I don’t agree that the function of a chair is to ‘challenge the viewer’s understanding,’” he says. “Come on, it’s just a chair.”⌂

Megan C. Reynolds is a writer, editor, and author. She runs Your Home Is Not Ugly, a semi-frequent newsletter about design for normies.

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.

I run a small product design studio in the Midwest. I’ve been considering participating in a fair like ICFF, but I’m undecided on whether the investment is going to yield a real return. When is it worthwhile to participate in these kinds of events?

I used to think that a single show was going to make or break my furniture business—that the right person was going to walk down the row, see my stuff, and I’d get a huge opportunity and the whole thing would blow up. A decade of doing these shows later, I now see it as more routine: Talking about your work is a part of the job. Being exhausted (which you will be) is a part of the job. There are a lot of different avenues you can take to find customers. Trade shows are just one of those lanes.

The issue right now with the trade show landscape is that it’s not exactly clear where customers are coming from. At Afternoon Light this year, for instance, there weren’t any badges—I had to be really diligent about asking every single person who approached my booth and gathering that intel myself.

Sometimes I hear designers complain that people just walk by their booth without stopping. You can’t let that happen—I don’t let that happen. Think about it almost like a website in real life: you are the user interface. If someone walks by and sees you with your head down, sitting on your phone, that’s bad user interface design. I joke that it’s a little like selling makeup at the mall: I stop people walking by and I tell them who I am, I ask them who they are and what they do. Are they students? Architects? Looky-loos? Writers? You need to know who you’re selling to and tailor your pitch to them.

In my booth, I always let people sit in the chairs on display. Even that is a distinction in itself—people go, oh, these are chairs to sit in; these are chairs for specifying. I talk about the projects my chairs go into, because creating an imagined space and context is an important part of the pitch. I point out my kitchen counter stool and tell them that it’s my best-selling item, that it works well in small spaces, that New Yorkers love it and I always have to bring it to the shows in New York. That immediately paints a picture. At these shows, keep in mind that you’re also selling yourself: That beyond the product, there is a person attached. A customer can reach out to them, and that can make the experience different.

I recommend looking at a trade show not just as a place to sell, but as a kind of feedback loop. It’s a place to receive a lot of data from real people in real time. It’s an invitation to a conversation. This year at Afternoon Light, I brought a super-low meditation chair. No one had ever seen it before, and it was like a Mad Lib in that everyone brought their own narrative and ideas to it. I kept hearing from parents that they thought it’d be great in a kid’s room. Ultimately a dad bought it, and sent me a photo the next day of his kids sitting on it. That’s the use case. So if you take a swing at a trade show, use it as a place to learn from your audience.

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

I first met the architect and designer Lucia Bartholomew when I was 19 years old, spending the end of a gap year in Santa Barbara before heading off to RISD. We discovered an unlikely shared connection: Her family spent summers on Squirrel Island, a small community off the coast of Maine not far from where I grew up. Our lives and careers have continued to intersect in serendipitous ways ever since.

Now, after nearly two decades building a career in Los Angeles—including an early stint at Gehry Partners—Bartholomew has become one of the most thoughtful voices in contemporary hospitality and residential design. As cofounder (along with Cayley Lambur) of Electric Bowery, a Los Angeles–based architecture and interiors studio, she has helped shape projects ranging from Wildflower Farms, a Hudson Valley retreat set among meadows, mountains, and orchards, to Casa Cody, a historic desert hideaway in Palm Springs.

I reconnected with her just as she was preparing to leave Los Angeles and move to New York’s Hudson Valley with her family. As I listened to Bartholomew describe her return to the Empire State (she grew up in Saratoga Springs), I was struck by how closely the qualities drawing her back—seasonality, connection to landscape, gathering, and a sense of belonging—mirror the qualities she has spent two decades creating for others through her work.

You’re preparing to move back to the Hudson Valley after two decades on the West Coast. How does it feel to be returning? Has your idea of home changed along the way?

It feels great to be going back. At this phase of my life, it still feels like home.

Building our business in Los Angeles was so much about creating homes for other people. We started with development projects where we were almost designing for a fantasy client; we didn’t know who would eventually live there. Over time, we moved toward much more personal, residential work, collaborating closely with homeowners to define what home meant to them.

Southern California also shaped the way I think about living. The boundary between indoors and outdoors is much blurrier there. Living rooms extend outside, people work outside, practice yoga outside. A lot of East Coast clients actually come to us looking for that West Coast sensibility and the way it redefines the relationship between architecture and landscape.

But now, having a young child, I find myself drawn back to the seasonality of New York. The house we’re moving into has beautiful framed views, and I’m excited to experience a home that evolves throughout the year. There’s something special about watching a place change with the seasons.

When you think back to places that made an impression on you growing up, what qualities made them memorable?

Seasonality is a big part of it. The house I grew up in had a huge den that always felt a little chilly in winter, but it had this massive fireplace. In the colder months, that’s where everyone gathered. In the summer, we’d spend most of our time on the patio. When I think about childhood memories, I think about spaces being used differently throughout the year. Certain rooms became important at certain times. That progression creates a sense of time passing.

That’s actually one of the things that’s felt strange about California. The weather is wonderful, but the spaces are used much more consistently throughout the year. You lose some of those seasonal rituals.

I remember that den would almost be shut down for parts of the year, but then in winter it became special. That’s where the Christmas tree went. That’s where everyone gathered around the fire. Part of what made it meaningful was that it wasn’t used all the time.

You’ve designed private residences, hotels, and retreats—what have hospitality projects taught you about making people feel welcome?

Hospitality has changed a lot over the last 15 years. People no longer go to hotels purely for leisure. They’re working remotely, taking meetings, integrating parts of everyday life into travel. Hotels have had to become much more fluid.

It’s no longer just a lobby, a restaurant, and a guest room. People want spaces where they can have coffee, work for a few hours, meet someone, or spend time alone without sitting in their room all day.

As a result, hospitality spaces have become much more residential. We [at the firm] think a lot about creating living-room-like environments that encourage both conversation and comfort. That relationship goes both ways. Our hospitality work influences our residential projects, and our residential work influences our hospitality projects.

Places like Wildflower Farms and Casa Cody create a feeling that’s difficult to describe but easy to recognize. What makes a place genuinely comfortable rather than simply beautiful?

Context is a huge part of it. With Wildflower Farms, one of the most important moments is arriving on that covered porch and immediately understanding where you are. You’re looking out toward the mountains, connected to the landscape, grounded in the setting. We wanted the experience of arrival to feel like a gradual reveal. You come in, the view opens up, and suddenly you’re situated within the larger landscape.

The other piece is creating spaces that encourage connection. Every time I’ve been there, I’ve found myself talking not only with the people I arrived with, but also with complete strangers. The seating arrangements, the scale, the relationship to the landscape—it all encourages people to linger and interact.

How do climate and geography shape the way you think about comfort?

They’re fundamental. With Wildflower Farms, there was concern early on that guests would have to walk through snow to reach their rooms, but that ended up becoming part of the magic. You’re forced to engage with the elements. The weather becomes part of the experience.

The same thing happens in Palm Springs, just differently. You’re embracing the heat rather than the snow. The pools, the sun, the mountain views—they all become part of the identity of the place. The best projects don’t separate people from their environment. They help people engage with it.

How has your hospitality work influenced the way you approach residential projects?

Many residential clients come to us because they’ve experienced one of our hospitality projects. They’re often looking for some version of that feeling at home.

We’ve become much more interested in creating spaces that don’t fit neatly into traditional categories. Instead of thinking strictly in terms of living room, dining room, and family room, we think about how people actually want to spend their time. Maybe it’s a place for coffee and reading in the morning. Maybe it’s a covered porch that becomes an everyday gathering space. The programming becomes more personal and less conventional.

Are there things homeowners tend to get wrong when thinking about comfort?

Sometimes people focus too much on resale value.

They worry about bedroom counts or conventional layouts because they think that’s what future buyers will want. But often the most memorable and successful homes are the ones that are uniquely programmed around the people who actually live there.

Los Angeles has experienced an extraordinary period of disruption in recent years, including the wildfires. Has that changed the conversations you’re having with clients?

Definitely. We’re doing fire-rebuild work now, and there’s a much greater awareness of resilience and fire safety throughout California. But more broadly, I think people are thinking differently about permanence.

Fifteen years ago, clients would often talk about creating their “forever home.” We hear that much less now—instead, people tend to think in terms of a particular chapter of life. Like, this is the house that works for us right now.

Maybe that’s because of climate change. Maybe it’s because of the pandemic. Maybe people are simply more mobile than they used to be. But there does seem to be less focus on forever and more focus on the present moment.

What else do you think people are craving right now?

People want warmth. They come to us looking for spaces that feel timeless, grounded, and connected to nature. We’re using a lot of wood. We’re paying close attention to materiality. We’re trying to create spaces that don’t feel newly built, even when they are. People are looking for authenticity. They’re looking for connection to landscape, and something that feels human.

Going back to warmth—what does it mean to you?

Warmth is a sense of coziness, a space you don’t want to leave. It’s natural materials. Soft lighting. Spaces that transition gracefully from day into night. It feels like something made by hand rather than by a machine.

Maybe that’s partly a reaction to the world we’re living in now. As AI becomes more present, I think people increasingly want environments that feel undeniably human.

For me, warmth is that feeling of being in a place where people have gathered together. A place made of wood, lit by candlelight, where you can feel the human touch behind everything around you. That’s what people are craving, and what we’re always trying to create.

Before we wrap up, is there a hospitality experience you find yourself returning to again and again?

The other three women I run Electric Bowery with and I do these little retreats together, and one place we’ve returned to several times is the sushi restaurant at Treebones in Big Sur. It’s this tiny restaurant housed in a canvas structure overlooking the Pacific. The fog rolls in; there’s barely audible classic rock playing in the background; and the staff are incredibly warm and familial. The food is exquisite, and the dishware is beautiful. It’s this blend of perfect quality: Everything feels thoughtful and considered, but also completely relaxed and effortless. You leave dying to go back. That’s very difficult to do well. ⌂

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.

This spring, her volume Quietest Places in New York City hit the shelves, offering readers an illustrated account of the metropolis’s most serene spots. While Kelner prioritizes green spaces, she also highlights some of the city’s more calming interiors: bookstores, libraries, and other locations that offer ports in the storm of New York City noise.

Along with the quest for quiet, Kelner has been cultivating methods for being present and mindful in a device-centric city: For example, she recently brought together more than 100 Q train riders for a hushed and phone-free commute. The next edition of Quiet Car is in just a few days, on June 27—you can sign up here.

I recently caught up with Nicole about her new book, the impact of art on sustainability, and ways people can be quiet together.

I love this project because it examines a much bigger, more complicated topic than it lets on at first: climate change. It’s a connection that a lot of people wouldn’t make right away—for the uninitiated, can you unpack the relationship between noise and climate change?

My goal was to welcome readers to the book as a guide to finding calm in the city, then share the ways New York is becoming more climate-resilient.

The loudest sounds in the city are often made from fossil-fueled machines like gas-powered leaf blowers, planes, or combustion engine cars. The electric alternatives are much quieter. I like to think that a more sustainable future doesn’t have to look that different; it could just sound a lot quieter. Picture more bike lanes, electric vehicles gliding down the street, and high-speed trains as an alternative to flying.

I’m also curious about art as a tool for fighting climate change, and particularly how you think about it at a personal level. What impact did you see when, say, your kelp illustration took off on Twitter years ago? How has your practice evolved since then?

My goal is to use art as a tool to imagine a more sustainable future. I love creating educational infographics that explore existing climate change solutions and inspiring people to take individual and collective action.

I started with creating infographics, but my practice has evolved over the past few years. My book is an example of that. By painting these spaces in New York, it allowed me to explore more creative ways of communicating climate solutions.

I like to create art that draws people in because it is beautiful, then help them learn something new about climate solutions in the process. A reader might see a pretty watercolor painting of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and then read about how they have the largest geothermal project in Manhattan. I hope that this new curiosity about climate can spark climate action.

In your research did you measure quiet with a particular metric—literal decibels? Or does the idea of “quiet” go just beyond a measure of sound to include things like plant and animal life, having places to sit, and so on?

I have lived in New York for nine years and have 2,000 stars on my Google Maps. I combed through this list and curated my favorite places for quiet. I chose not to measure by decibels because there wasn’t a way to standardize sound over time of day and day of the week.

My philosophy is that quiet isn’t just measured in sound levels, it’s about finding calm within and around you. I provide guided meditations and mindfulness prompts for each location to help you tune into the environment around you and find a moment of stillness.

Do you have a personal favorite quiet place, in New York or elsewhere?

Green-Wood Cemetery is my favorite quiet place in New York. It’s actually a certified arboretum, home to nearly 8,000 trees and 200 species of birds.

My favorite part is that a flock of wild parakeets has nested in the spires above the entrance. The story goes that the birds escaped a shipment at JFK in the 1960s and made the spires of the entrance their new home. I love going there and watching them fly in and out of their nest.

Quiet is often tied with solitude—but the quiet places in your book are often quite social (if, well, quietly!). Like climate change, loneliness is a scourge of our era. Did you intentionally seek out places where people can be quiet together? And how does “Quiet Car” and other events factor into all this?

I love the idea of collective quiet. I think there is a sense of intimacy that comes with being quiet together, and it’s so rare today. We are living through a very noisy time both in the physical and digital world, and creating spaces to slow down, disconnect from technology, and be quiet together feels like a rare and much-needed experience.

That’s why I designed the Quiet Car, where we do a phone-free ride on the Q train in Manhattan and turn it into an Amtrak quiet car-like experience. Riders bring an analog activity, put their phones away, and are present together. This simple act of not looking at our phones on the subway feels radical and magical all at once.

I think it’s important to find reasons to be excited about putting down our phones, because willpower alone isn’t enough. Creating these quiet spaces is a way to be in community, and being offline together is one form of that.

For the lucky New Yorkers (or other city dwellers) that have access to a balcony or other outdoor space, are there any steps they can take to contribute to a more quiet (and climate-resilient!) city?

Planting trees or plants is always helpful! They increase biodiversity and buffer sound. You can also talk to your landlord about switching to electric leaf blowers or installing heat pumps instead of AC units. These electric alternatives are more energy efficient and quieter. ⌂

Lila Allen is the editor in chief of Wrong House.

Richard Nickel, the canonical Chicago preservationist and photographer, shot the Madlener House, home of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, on at least three occasions. The first was during its earliest incarnation as the imposing Gold Coast manse of a German liquor magnate. When the family cleared out, they tore up floorboards and scuffed the wainscoting, planting a few seeds of Grey Gardens ferality in their wake. The two other occasions were after its conversion to The Graham Foundation as we know it today: a pre-eminent grant-funding organization and center for architecture programming.

At no point did Nickel photograph the bathroom, a fact I learned in mid-April and have been profoundly disappointed by ever since. It’s not that the space was renovated away or otherwise lost. It’s still there. (I’m somewhat of a regular, and see it all the time.) It’s because it is probably my favorite room in Chicago, or maybe anywhere—a small, residential-scaled bathroom with soap caddies and a bathtub that awkwardly mediates the building’s two lives.

It sits smack in the middle of this august cultural institution, with its dark walnut wood paneling, pure white gallery walls, and Indiana limestone detailing—unmistakably, perhaps, an international hub for architectural discourse. But open the door and suddenly you’re in Some Dude’s Bathroom. The room is a weird little ghost, dressed for the wrong occasion, but still there to help.

Here is an inventory of the items and experiences you can expect to find in the Graham Foundation bathroom:

• Seafoam green tile on walls, with black trim, and beige hexagonal tile on the floor. It all seems vaguely Art Deco—it’s giving “misanthropic aunt.”

• A bathtub with a shower head (the water is turned off). Typically, I am overwhelmed by a desire to lie down in this bathtub, but I never do. I saw another design writer do this and it has become an intrusive thought.

• Two acrylic towel racks.

• A window overlooking the courtyard.

• Two recessed soap caddies over the sink, and one by the bathtub, which I am not allowed to lie down in.

• A full-length mirror. If you take a photo of the front half of the room nearest the door, your reflection is caught in the mirror, and you’re forced to observe yourself at full height photographing a toilet—a cursed image that reminds me that people truly do all sorts of things. You can’t see the bathtub from there.

• A toilet plunger that looks dusty enough to have never been used, a comforting thought.

• A black lacquered bench by the mirror. It makes the bathroom a good place to hang out. It also offers a great view of the bathtub. When I sit there, I again struggle with the desire to do things I shouldn’t.

• A wicker basket with toilet paper.

• A half-length mirror that swings open to reveal a cache of cleaning supplies. If I were cleaning the bathtub and doing a really thorough job, really scrubbing it, that would sort of be like lying in the bathtub. I’m not allowed to lie down in the bathtub.

• Also, the bathtub is white.

Anyway, there’s an aura of old-world opulence and drama conjured from the idiosyncratic material finishes, and that juxtaposition makes this place seem a world apart; upstairs-downstairs rumor and scandal, stern fathers and brittle mothers, the thousand petty dramas and triumphs that define family life in any era. I don’t think any of these emanations could survive the installation of a single Dyson hand dryer. This sense of dislocation entices me to become a really weird one-note side character in a F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, caught in the building’s own historical narrative. It’s the only place in the world where I bounce from the writerly egoist paranoia of “I need to think of something witty to say to Madelon Vriesendorp RIGHT NOW” to pretending the biggest problem to face this week is replacing my damnably unreliable milliner before the cold weather sets in.

Built for Albert Madlener and his wife Elsa, a German family with roots in the city going back to the 1850s, the Madlener House is a transitional piece of architecture. Its stolid, prize-fighter massing has elements of Neoclassicism and Renaissance Revival, but was clearly influenced by the native Prairie Style. It was designed by Richard E. Schmidt, the brother of Elsa’s brother-in-law, and Hugh M. G. Garden. In its days as an actual house, it was busy and overstuffed with floral wallpaper, crystal bowls, a bear skin rug—garden-variety, swooning-couch Victorian.

Albert died in 1941, Elsa in 1962. The Graham Foundation acquired the residence soon after, and hired Daniel Brenner to convert it into offices and event space. Brenner was very much a Mies Guy, teaching at The Orthogonist School for Cultic Rectangle Worship (Mies’s Illinois Institute of Technology) for 30 years. But he approached this conversion with the sensitivity of a designer that was not nearly so close to the house style of clear-cut urban renewal.

He didn’t have to change much. The kitchen became a library; walls were removed to expand gallery floors. In Nickel’s photos, held at the Art Institute of Chicago, Victorian frippery was stripped back and the Circassian walnut wood paneling from Russia on walls was refinished.

“We wanted no trickery,” John Entenza, the Graham’s director, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1964, with his nose firmly pointed skyward, probably. “The problem was to let alone the things of beauty and to enhance the strength of the house. This meant elimination of the nonessentials and the vulgarities with which Victorian life loaded the best of houses.” He felt it was a better piece of architecture after clearing away all the crap.

When it was done, Brenner was a bit baffled himself: “I don’t quite know what to call the job we did here,” he told Architectural Forum in its April 1965 issue. It wasn’t a direct restoration, nor quite so far afield to be pure adaptive reuse. The fireplaces were still there and even the galleries had vaguely residential proportions. But the Sullivan-style grates on the tomb-heavy front door make it pretty clear that no one has ever watched TV there while distractedly thumbing their phone for three hours.

I think what fascinates me about this bathroom is the sense of remove it offers. I love the Graham Foundation as a design object and institution, but as a place where I’m almost always at work as a critic in some capacity—attending a lecture or reception, covering a show—it’s not a place I’m typically comfortable, per se. I love to be on stage, or anywhere near a stage, but it’s a lot of work. I’m cramming my head and notebook with stuff, trying to synthesize what it’s all supposed to be about, and worrying about how much I don’t yet know. That’s a great time to slip away.

It’s a move I’ve practiced. It doesn’t happen as much now, but when my daughter was younger—when parenting felt more like shoveling coal into a steam engine rather than trying to manage a favorite terrible employee—slipping away into the bathroom of my family home was a signature move of mine, with no motivation beyond the desire to be alone. Often, it would happen after I’d publicly displayed my medium-talent creative and compositional abilities in the heroic service of something greater: meal prep.

In my family, I’m responsible for all food acquisition and preparation, and the period after work ends is the most logistically and cognitively demanding part of my day. One moment, I’m closing my eyes to think, paging through books, alone and listening to my own thoughts—something I crave more than I often care to admit. The next, I am tweaking burners, scalding my wrist, sprinting to disarm fire alarms in our unvented kitchen, directing homework, responsibly metering screen time, and trying to get everything squared away so that some portion of the evening can be left for me.

But back then, often, I didn’t make it. Midway through my bi-weekly presentation of Tacos in the American Style—after workshopping with my partner new systems of parenting that would surely fail; after troubleshooting a string of minor annoyances that could ruin everything if you looked close enough; after decrying the crush of deadlines or fretting the lack of them—I would retreat to the guest bathroom four feet from our kitchen table seeking reprieve. Sometimes I would smear my hands down my face. Often I would stare at the ceiling. Always I would lie on the floor.

This sort of scene, shot in too-close Dutch angles on a handheld camera soundtracked by screeching violins and howling woodwinds, is often presented as a shorthand for “the precarious state of the American middle class/jump-scare aftermath.” But at the Graham Foundation, the elevated design environs make this escapist interlude decidedly less dire. How bad could it be? Madelon Vriesendorp feigned interest in my signature character, the friendly Chicago architecture pedant.

As a professional building-tour-taker, there is something liberating about retreating to the bathroom. It’s where the docents leave you alone, and you can experience a space as if it were yours. It’s the only place you can credibly imagine, by dint of solitude and delusion: this is my house. The boundary between work and domestic life can be a disjunctive place, to be placated by compression in a small room filled with intimate details; trapped between two worlds where no one can find you, but maybe you can find yourself. ⌂

Once he leaves the bathroom, Zach Mortice will continue to be a Chicago-based design journalist and critic focused on the intersection of design and public policy.

So here’s what happened. I had a multi-tab spreadsheet, a color-coded calendar, email invitations, planned social posts, multiple rounds of bus tickets, and around 15 coffee dates to carry me through NYCxDESIGN, New York’s design week. And then, suddenly, I had to drop all of it to hop a plane to Florida. It was, culturally speaking, about as far away from the city as I could get.

So for me, the busiest part of this season was over before it started—at least outside of the sad, glowing screen I stared at from a thousand miles away. But design week coverage at Wrong House stops for nothing! If I couldn’t be there in person, I still wanted an on-the-ground report from the Design Writing With Guts (™) fam that I knew would be pinballing around town.

The fruits of that labor—what I am calling our NYCxDESIGN Chorus—can be found below, with thanks to contributors Jesse Dorris, Dan Howarth, Adrian Madlener, Liz Ryan (whose illustrations carried us through the week), and my trusty fellow editor July Winters.

Hope to see you at the next one.

xx

Lila

Tiny Shirts and Ramen Noodles

Jumping the official NYCxDESIGN starting gun, The Future Perfect packed its West Village townhouse on Tuesday, May 12, for a morning preview of two very different showcases straddling the high-low divide. While half the attendees arrived to swoon at Athena Calderone’s new furniture line, the others (myself included) were there to ogle at 140 night lights commissioned by Philadelphia-based collective Dudd Haus—whose punk-style Jonald Dudd exhibitions have been delighting New York’s design festival goers for many years. Ranging from a $10 ball of dried ramen noodles by Warren Young to a $6,202.50 patchwork of sea shells, sea glass, and sea coal by Caely Melford, the compact lights were displayed inside the basement’s emptied wine fridges and across a large wall on an upper-floor landing.

The most buzzy luminaires of the bunch—at least according to the guests packed onto the David Chipperfield–designed staircase or basking on the roof deck—were Andrew Laska and Mohammad Asgari’s toothpaste tube, which oozed glowing green paste; Kate Bailey’s altar to Luigi Mangione complete with pill-bottle “candles”; Stefanie Haining’s miniature light-up 7-Eleven; and my personal favorite: a tiny illuminated striped-blue shirt by Nino Chambers. (I would’ve walked away with it myself if I had $700 to spare.) The creativity and whimsy demonstrated across the exhibit proved just how much fun designers can have with an open brief, and offered a wonderfully unserious start to this year’s festivities. —Dan Howarth

Late Night Shining

Liz here. My design week kicked off with the group show After Hours at Sake Bar Asoko; colored pencils sharpened, trusty piece of plexiglass tucked under my arm. While stashing my book bag in an empty planter pot, I bumped into Scott Newlin, one of the hosts of the evening.

Scott set me up with a seat in the middle of the action and a glass of his favorite sake (I forget the name but it was warm and sea salty and delicious). Part of my evening was spent chatting with Sergio Mannino, who told me about a new lamp he was debuting this week at Shine.

One of my favorite pieces in Scott and Keith’s show was Rose Wong‘s collection of hand-sewn sake bottle tapestries. I’m biased but I love when illustrators translate their work to other mediums (see Bill Rebholz’s wooden figures). More of that please. —Liz Ryan

Next-Level Party Design at USM

I regret not arriving to this event earlier because I heard the drawers were full of food, à l’Automat. My producer brain briefly fixated on the odds of a lone tomato galette getting left behind in one of the shiny USM Haller cabinets, but folks at this event were hungry, in a no-crumbs-left-behind kind of way.

I too came to imbibe: Specifically, the champagne tower headliner (it was technically a cocktail tower, but you get what I mean), by Pinch Food Design. Downstairs, partygoers lounged in moody domestic sets and sipped wine decanted (distilled? aerated?) through pyramidal glass carafes.

I ran into a new pal, creative director Emily Chang, and we tried our luck poking around, but either the closet drawers were fresh out of eclairs or someone made a wise decision to keep food out of the upholstered zones. —L.R.

House Party in the Big Pink Building

No, there weren’t blasting speakers, beer pong, or any of the other usual tells of the genre—but there’s no denying that on May 13, a house party was exactly what was afoot at the pink building on the corner of Myrtle and Vanderbilt Avenues in Brooklyn. Nothing Comes From Nothing, curated by Office of Tangible Space and Verso, greeted guests from the ground level exhibition space of 144 Vanderbilt, a residential complex developed by Tankhouse and designed by SO–IL. For a moment, things felt frozen in time—perhaps thanks to the gold hands of a clock which sat confidently unmoving at 3:20 p.m. Additional trinkets from Carl Auböck’s Assorted Objects, c. 1950s–1960s—a mix of practical objects and more decorative miniature sculptures—rested on Natalie Shook’s large oak sculpture Boy (2024), with organic, asymmetrical forms carved from various types of wood branching out from a blocky black column at the center of the exhibition. But rather than feeling stuck in the past, the curators seemed to have endowed the historic objects with a kind of perpetuity. With the artist’s contemporary pieces as a reference point, the curators made pairings with historic works inside the lobby. The austere architecture added something vaguely industrial to the blend of old and new. One visitor, apparently a neighbor, looked around in awe: “I thought this was just the ugly pink building on the corner.” (Our apologies to SO–IL.)

Upstairs, the party got hotter thanks to a second, residential installation from the Office of Tangible Space. This time, their curatorial prowess turned to design in Brazil through the collection of Espasso. As records spun, attendees pressed shoulder to shoulder, squeezing up the stairs and through the halls, taking photos from the balcony and test-driving chairs from the Espasso collection. The group seemed to be in consensus that the soft, diffused lighting and mounted yarn work in the living room brought much-needed warmth to the space: shoutout to Kawabi and Kat Howard, I love what you’ve done with the place. Same time next year? —July Winters

Luke Malaney Mines Madness From the Mundane

Here are a few of the semi-functional and non-functional sculptures on view at Loose Grip, Luke Malaney’s curatorial debut at 144 Vanderbilt:

• Richard Snyder’s Code Violation installation from 1996—a wooden stove, ironically made from the logs it’s designed to combust

• New carapace–like stoneware bowls by Adam Cutts

• Louis Sarowsky’s Brownstone Beanie wall relief from 2023—A wayward cap carved into a fragment of displaced building material

• Panos Mavridis’s 2022 Study—A hyper-realistic charcoal drawing of a man sketching

• Daniel Weiss’s Goldfish Shoes—A 2013 photo of platform shoes with fish-tank heels

• A cabinet with no actual storage shelves and a handle fashioned as an oversized cigarette

The last of these is the making of Malaney himself, a woodworker and rising star in Brooklyn’s collectible space. True to form for New York’s still-scrappy and community-driven design scene, this group show brings together works by interdisciplinary talents that defy categorization as designers or artists, and all share a Red Hook workspace.

Placed within this two-bedroom apartment at Fort Greene’s candy-pink complex—also home to showings from Kalon Studios (via Assembly Line’s Residence) and Paraphernalia, in addition to the exhibitions in the blurb above—these unabashedly playful and irreverent objects riff on the everyday functions we might otherwise take for granted, hinting that there’s absurdity in the mundane.

But even more importantly, they demonstrate how so many independent creatives continue to work hands-on in their medium of choice. This process appears to allow these makers to more closely control the realization of their idea without the adulteration or watering-down that can sometimes happen through outside fabrication. In doing so, it creates space for a more direct form of experimentation—one that can challenge the conventions of everyday life. —Adrian Madlener

Hurdling, Jiggling Little Blobs

Depending upon your practice, Sunday night was either the end point of your art marathon, the mid-point of your multidisciplinary romp, or somewhere near your entry into a hyped and oversubscribed design week. Or maybe you’d just stumbled through the sudden summer Red Hook heat to Natalie Shook’s Piscina gallery, from which a crowd spilled and lingered, nursing beers pulled from metal ice buckets and sharing snacks and gossip.

Inside, the remodeled showroom was warm, all sage alcoves tucked within creamy arches. Garnier Pingree’s Volute chair welcomed visitors in curves of birds-eye maple and velvet. Deeper still, the new gallery space offered From the Studio: Drawings and Sketches by Artists and Designers, more than 50 illustrations and material explorations in which designers thought out loud, by hand, on paper. Some anticipated a future life as furniture, including Pingree’s own elegant preparatory for Volute. Others, like Kiki Goti’s eye-popping Study on Color and Form, struck up a conversation with a neighbor—in Goti’s case, Workaday Handmade’s buttery wedge of glazed stoneware Sleep Backwards Table. The show is chatty, and so was the crowd, and it was all a bustling reminder of what happens when you take what you make into public.

Halfway or so through the opening, a reprehensible email from the design week majordomos marched into my inbox. Its subject line, ill-formed and too long, was a threat: AI is here to stay! Now how will you…. How will I what, I thought. In front of me was Hannah Bigeleisen’s amorphous yet personable Small Blob Drawing, in which the titular forms rainbowed and shimmered on their little plane. They looked full of potential. They just needed a hand. So unlike those in power, hellbent on marching us towards laziness in the guise of efficiency, to environmental catastrophe in exchange for the chance to plagiarize for (maybe) a living, to the complete dismantling of the relationship, however fraught, between maker and object made. But out here, tonight, the little blob seemed to jiggle. In their in-between states, they seemed here to stay. The opening crowd swelled, and I felt a little sentimental at all the hubbub, the ambition and cynicism, all the life here and what might be soon to come—around the corner, even, at the next show. —Jesse Dorris

Afternoon Delight

It’s Sunday afternoon and 90 degrees outside. Ideal weather to hide away at the WSA building. Afternoon Light occupies two floors and feels less like a fair and more like a construction of little design islands. (I say this as a person who has been to exactly two art fairs.) The first thing that caught my eye was RS Barcelona’s foosball table, with its colorful little players. I loitered around their section for a while hoping to capture some folks playing with it, but the allure of the ping pong table was too strong.

From there, I had a string of friendly conversations with Kelsey Fairhurst (Forks Plus), Nate Scheibe (Scheibe Design), Amanda Dandaneau (Wallpaper Projects), and the one and only Eric Trine. Eric was in from LA and fielding design questions from fair attendees, in an IRL edition of his advice column, Chair Time.

Eric: Someone came up to me and said “I was told I could bring my existential problems to you, is that true?” and I was like, “Well, yes.”

He didn’t disclose the nature of their distress. (I assume chair-designer-confidentiality rules apply.) —L.R.

Stumping Grounds

As the Design Week marathon continued, a separate heat of ICFF brought crowds down from the Javits Center to Soho—to a cocktail bar at Host on Howard serving as Monday night’s hydration station. The Look Book Offsite exhibition Form and Feeling, curated by Julia Haney Montanez, brought 16 artists together for a refreshing moment beyond the fairgrounds, with works by up-and-comers like Vy Voi, Thomas Yang, Anna Dawson, and Aaron Getman Pickering.

I felt called to Ian Love’s white oak stools, hand carved with wood felled from his hometown on Long Island. In a quick conversation, the former musician, sculptor, and furniture designer shared some insight into his work. —J.W.

Re-School’s in Session

Dear diary, I am tired. Vitra is my last event of design week and a blessedly short bike ride away from my studio. I’ve been to enough events at this Bowery showroom (*cough* Wrong House launch) to know you’ve gotta get there on time to secure a good seat.

I climbed up their funky new Reset seating and set up camp for the panel discussion, which Wrong House is co-hosting. In Lila’s absence, Diana Budds is leading the conversation. Toy designer Cas Holman, Dutch architect Florian Idenburg, and Vitra’s own Thor Ochs chatted about play, friction, and the spaces in between. I won’t lie, I was a bit distracted trying to capture the speakers’ likenesses, but one of Cas’s anecdotes made me stop and tune in more properly. Speaking on the topic of her Rigamajig building kit (and heavily paraphrased by yours truly),

• “The nuts and bolts could be any color. I made them black so the kids think they’re real. Then when the kids see tools out in the world, they’ll go, ‘Oh—I can play with this.’ But what I’m trying to instill in them is ‘No—you can play with anything.” —L.R. ⌂

Writing by Jesse Dorris, Dan Howarth, Adrian Madlener, Liz Ryan, and July Winters
Illustrations by Liz Ryan

We are in the thick of what I refer to as “design season”—the triple-decker event sandwich of Milan Design Week (April), NYCxDESIGN (May), and 3daysofdesign (June). Here in New York, May is living up to its status as the “meat” part of the sammie, with exhibitions and events starting now, pretty much, and running ‘til Memorial Day (even though the “official” dates of the festival are May 14–20).

We’ve got a lot coming down the pipe—see all our goings-on below!—so to help us reset before schedules go crazy again, we decided to have a day of rest and relaxation in the countryside this past Saturday at Edition Farm in Hyde Park, New York, with many of our friends, readers, and members of the art and agriculture community upstate. We touched grass, for real! Many, many thanks to our cohosts AvroKO, HOST on Howard, and Matter; our culinary and bar partners Cornerstone and Catskills Cocktail Club; our DJ Rob from Freakout Spot; and the floral wizards at Flowerpsycho for the botanical alchemy. What a day!

But back to the grind: The Design Week Sandwich is a demanding one, so Wrong House will run our next issue a bit later than usual—but we’ll have some bonus content to tide you over in the meantime. Aside from the digital goods we have rolling out, you can also catch Wrong House live and in the flesh at a few different venues this month. Here’s where to find us, and details on how to get your name on that sweet, exclusive list:

May 17 — Fair Hours 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
”Chair Time With Eric Trine” IRL at Afternoon Light
WSA, 161 Water Street, New York, NY 10038 — Booth #503

Catch our columnist and Resident Chair Guy Eric Trine at Afternoon Light! Eric will showcase his own new designs and offer all of you a precious opportunity to pick his brain. In other words, this is Chair Time With Eric Trine—IRL. Bring your conundrums, your entanglements, and your existential angst, and Eric will set you straight. (Plus: Afternoon Light has a hefty lineup of programming and exhibitors, so you’ll have plenty to see outside of Eric’s booth, too.) Note: This one is a bit more of a drop-in sesh than a formally programmed talk.

—> BUY A TICKET

May 18 — Talk 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

“The State of Affairs in Design Media” Panel at ICFF
Javits Center, 429 11th Avenue, New York, NY 10001

Maybe you’ve sensed a…vibe shift in design media these last couple of years? Wrong House editor Lila Allen takes the stage with Dan Rubinstein of The Grand Tourist and Jill Singer of Counter Space and Sight Unseen at ICFF for a conversation about what the hell is going on, how we’re all making sense of it, the storytelling opportunities made possible through indie outlets, and what publications might evolve into in the years ahead. Put on the kettle, mama, ’cause we’re brewing some tea! Tiffany Jow of Untapped is moderating, so you know it’ll be good.

—> TICKETS: Get complimentary entry HERE with code MISKGENSPK.

Update 5/12/26: Lila Allen is no longer able to participate in this event. Jack Murphy, editor in chief of The Architect’s Newspaper, will take her place.

May 19 — Talk and Reception 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

“Re-School’s in Session” at Vitra
Vitra Showroom New York, 46 Bowery, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10013

The multi‑purpose room is where things happen when they don’t quite fit anywhere else: assemblies, after‑school clubs, PTA rallies, and awkward town‑hall meetings. This panel—hosted by Wrong House and moderated by Diana Budds—will uncover what a “multi‑purpose room” for the next decade should be at work, at school, and in civic life. Where are offices and campuses over‑correcting? Beyond the typical buzzwords, what does “flexible” space actually look like? The panel will take place on Vitra’s Reset system, and will offer time for audience Q&A at the end. Panelists include Cas Holman, author of Playful, Florian Idenburg, founder of SO–IL and professor of practice at Cornell AAP, and Thor Ochs, vice president of global accounts at Vitra.

—> RSVP HERE

Hope to see you at one or all of these events—and here’s to making it through the meat of the sandwich!

’Til next time,

Lila

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, California.

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