Category: Art Home Design

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Best Art Books of 2021

In a lockdown year, with travel reduced, there was no movable feast quite like an art book. Art is made by all sorts of people, everywhere, all the time, along many different paths, some of which are illuminated by these intriguing publications chosen by our critics, Pay Per Touch.

The maverick American artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995), who managed to be nowhere and everywhere in the art world through his invention of Mail Art, was lucky in his longtime friend William S. Wilson, to whom, over 60 years, he gave thousands of letters, collages, drawings and clippings. Wilson saved every last scrap, and a jampacked sampling of them makes up this gold mine of a book, edited and curated by Caitlin Haskell with Jordan Carter. Funny, biting, morbid, it’s a page-turner for sure, and accompanies a show at the Art Institute of Chicago through March 22). (Art Institute of Chicago, distributed by Yale University Press)

Edited by the curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, this catalog for one of the outstanding exhibitions of the season — originating at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, it’s now in Houston — proposes that the culture of the African American South, as defined by music and vernacular art, is the bedrock of American culture itself, with a strong influence on new art today. The book vividly illustrates and deepens the show’s powerful argument. (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, distributed by Duke University Press)

This book lovingly excavates the career of a Greek modernist painter who designed sets for Maria Callas and kept a Greek Classical figurative tradition alive in paintings of homoerotic nudes. Tsarouchis (1910-1989) was both too radical and too conservative for the art world of his time and fell into oblivion outside of Greece. Edited by Niki Gripari and Adam Szymczyk (and including a selection of the artist’s writings, this tender tribute brings him back. (Sternberg Press)

The London exhibition by this name reunited six major mythological paintings that Titian produced for the Spanish court. One of them, “The Rape of Europa,” belongs to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where the show, now called“Titian: Women, Myth & Power” is making its final stop (through Jan. 2.) A slender Gardner-issued publication devoted to that picture is an indispensable companion volume to the handsome London catalog. (National Gallery, London; published by Yale University Press)

Edited by Christine Macel and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska and produced for a major show at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this book documents the contributions of more than 100 female painters, sculptors, photographers and performers to the history of modernist abstraction and, by including artists from Asia and South America, demonstrates that abstraction itself has always been a global phenomenon. That many worthy figures aren’t included only makes the case for a continuing corrective art history stronger. (Thames and Hudson)

Edited by Howie Chen, this compendium brings together archival documents related to the formation, in New York City in 1990, of Godzilla, a collective of artists and curators intent on pointing out the exclusion of Asian American artists from the contemporary art world and pushing for their presence in that world. The book includes protest letters, news releases, and the minutes of group meetings. The result is a how-to in advocacy politics, a study in the complexities of identity politics, and a chorale of treasurable voices. (Primary Information)

Following the Guggenheim’s 2018 reveal of the mystical abstractions of Hilma af Klint, the Museum of Modern Art, Kunstmuseum Basel and Tate Modern further expand the mostly male ranks of European modernism to include Sophie Taeuber-Arp, one of its greatest polymaths (and colorists), whose egalitarian view of art and craft proved that abstractions in woven wool can trounce the oil on canvas kind. Edited by Anne Umland and Walburga Krupp. (Museum of Modern Art/Kunstmuseum Basel)

The painting on the cover of this exceedingly large volume recently set an auction record for the artist, but don’t let that spoil it for you. This lavish book, edited by Luis-Martín Lozano, contains many rarely seen paintings bolstered by numerous drawings, extensive photographs from her life and reproductions of related works by other artists. (Taschen)

This catalog, with a leading essay by the curator Katherine Jentleson, accompanies the largest show of the great visionary Nellie Mae Rowe (1900-1982), painter, sculptor, doll-maker, environment-builder and Christian, at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (through Jan. 9). Some of her drawings announce “God is Not Dead,” in bold colorful cursive writing. Rowe is the fourth great American outsider artist to receive a major catalog since 2007, after Martin Ramírez, Bill Traylor and Joseph Yoakum. May the trend continue. (DelMonico Books — D.A.P., New York)

This small cornucopia of a book, edited by Alison M. Gingeras, accompanies the first American exhibition of the formidable Polish artist and activist Erna Rosenstein (1913-2004) at Hauser & Wirth (through Dec. 23). It shows the stunning variety of her work, not just its many shades of Surrealism and biomorphic abstraction, but also its affinities with Fluxus, Nouveau Realism and Art Povera. Her life and work are detailed against the vivid tapestry of postwar Eastern European history — itself an education. (Hauser & Wirth Publications)

Doris Lee (1905-1983) worked simultaneously as a fine and a commercial artist, illustrating “The Rodgers and Hart Songbook,” while exhibiting paintings with the still-extant AAA Galleries in Manhattan. The paintings, which combined Grandma Moses with the textured color fields of Milton Avery cheerfully reflect this duality. This catalog, by Melissa Wolfe, and a traveling show at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pa., (through Jan. 9) should begin to end her obscurity. (Westmoreland Museum of Art and Giles Ltd., London)

This year’s unhappy Tokyo Olympics at least leave an architectural legacy: the lean, low-impact New National Stadium, made of the unfinished cedar that Kengo Kuma has made his authorial and ecological signature. This immense architectural tome — spanning three decades, weighing in at 11 pounds — establishes once and for all that sustainability and style need not be set at odds. New photography highlights his serene Nezu Museum and brawny V & A Dundee; temporary experiments in New York and Milan; and a Fukuoka storefront whose 2,000 intersecting cedar struts frame the world’s most elegant Starbucks. (Taschen)

He first declared a bicycle wheel to be a work of art in 1913, but it took nearly half a century — with the 1959 publication of Robert Lebel’s catalogue raisonné of his early painting, his ready-mades and his cryptic notes — for the New York art world to crown the discreet and debonair Duchamp as King Marcel. Long out of print, it’s now been re-editioned and bundled with a supplement that maps the influence of Lebel’s book over the decades, all housed in a handsome slipcase. (Hauser & Wirth Publishers)

Few photobooks have the mythic status of “Chizu” (“The Map”), first published in Tokyo in 1965, for which the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada shot worn flags, dented Lucky Strike boxes and the walls of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima as haunted abstractions in blown-out, high-contrast black-and-white. The 1965 edition is a single volume with gatefolds — but a maquette in the New York Public Library shows that Kawada initially conceived “Chizu” as a two-volume project. The N.Y.P.L. curator Joshua Chuang and the historian Miyuki Hinton have overseen this painstaking reproduction, while a new bilingual supplement offers further perspectives on this rarest and most mysterious artistic response to the nightmare of World War II. (Mack)

Statues also die; some get a second life. The year’s most beautiful exhibition, at the Capitoline Museums in Rome, brought to public view the world’s finest privately owned Greek and Roman sculptures — and its catalog, edited by the archaeologists Salvatore Settis and Carlo Gasparri, is as handsome as it is learned. But if it’s Roman grandeur you’re after, get the lush coffee table book “Villa Albani Torlonia,” for which Massimo Listri photographed the aristocratic family’s Neoclassical mansion, its chipped goddesses and rusting heroes standing against acres of trompe l’oeil marble and gold leaf. (Both, Rizzoli)

The Impressionists were gripped by social life at the opera, the cafe, the seaside; the Nabis, two decades later, saw just as much modernity at home. This catalog of an exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Portland Art Museum (through Jan. 23) presents the sometimes tender, sometimes stifling domestic imagery of Maurice Denis, Félix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard and — above all — Édouard Vuillard, whose dense, crosshatched scenes in the boudoir or at the kitchen table captured what one critic called “the daily tragedy and mystery of ordinary existence, and the latent poetry of things.” The curators Mary Weaver Chapin, Heather Lemonedes Brown and other contributors offer insight into domestic music performances, home garden design, and even pet ownership in fin-de-siècle Paris. (Yale University Press)

The seventh continent is not frozen but in constant flux — and changing faster than ever thanks to us. Probe the 1,000 engrossing pages of this landmark publication, edited by Giulia Foscari and UNLESS and inaugurated at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, and you will learn everything you never knew you needed to know about human society on an uninhabited landmass: Antarctic law enforcement, Antarctic communication technology, Antarctic water management. Terra Australis stands here as a nearly utopian built environment, and the book concludes with an indispensable “Archive of Antarctic Architecture,” with site plans and photography of more than a century’s efforts to inhabit the most extreme of environments. (Lars Müller Publishers)

Kara Walker offers an extraordinary tome: some 650 drawings, sketches and texts from her archive since the 1990s. It’s all here — Trump, Obama, the plantation, sexual demand and degradation, all the American phantasmagoria of her famous silhouette works and monumental installations; but also clippings, notecards, dream diaries, the artist wrangling with the fetters of prominence and racial expectations. In an essay, Walker wonders why she kept all this stuff; there must have been “some urge to talk about it later, an urge toward radical openness that any proper and studied artist would prefer to keep in check.” It’s a treasure. (JRP Editions)

This volume showcases 17 photographers from nine countries, graduates of a 2008-18 mentorship program founded by Simon Njami, a respected curator (and co-editor of this book, with Sean O’Toole). A few have become recognized — Sammy Baloji, Lebohang Kganye — while others, like Gosette Lubondo, are emerging just now into the continent’s photo vanguard, with a full spectrum of documentary and conceptual approaches. Here, 13 essays by critics approach the subject by theme — “Knowledge,” “Fiction,” “Desire”— and broaden their discussion to other emerging photographers as well as the archive. It’s a generous approach that proposes African photography as a fertile and expansive field of collective inquiry. (Kerber)

In an exhibition this year at MoMA, Black architects and designers imagined interventions in 10 American cities that would not only make visible but repair the effects of anti-Black planning, policy and spatial violence. It was an important show, if dense and all-too-brief. Fortunately, the catalog (edited by Sean Anderson and Mabel O. Wilson) supplements these propositions with texts by prominent scholars and critics that give the project an open feel and cross-disciplinary weave. In preparing for the exhibition, the architects and designers formed the Black Reconstruction Collective, modeling the self-determination and liberation values they insist are necessary. (MoMA)

Shahzia Sikander is known for disruptions of the Indo-Persian miniature painting tradition, which she expanded compositionally and infused with feminist and political themes. Rich with essays and conversations (edited by Sadia Abbas and Jan Howard), this catalog accompanies an exquisite exhibition on her early career (1987-2003). It follows her training in Pakistan, move to the United States in 1993, and navigation of U.S. social and racial realities; it leaves off in the frenzy of the War on Terror. It proves instructive to re-examine those years through Sikander’s keen grasp and artistic choices. (Distributed for Hirmer Publishers by University of Chicago Press)

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10 Fashion Chairs From Fendi, LV & Dior at Art Basel

Meant to look like they are “traveling in time, caught in motion.” I was told by an assistant at the Dior Medallion Chair project that Ma Yansong’s 3-D-printed chairs were the “It” chairs of Art Basel and Design Miami this year.
Photo: MA YANSONG ©KEN NGAN/Dior

This year’s Art Basel saw a number of luxury fashion houses eager to show off their new … chairs? Chairs. Of course, high fashion’s fascination with furniture design isn’t exactly new. Rei Kawakubo started making (mostly nonfunctional) chairs in the ’80s, while Fendi launched Fendi Casa, an actually usable home collection, in 1988. Louis Vuitton and Hermès ventured into furniture some 30 years later, with the former inaugurating Objets Nomades — its furniture and design store — a year after Hermès debuted its first furniture collection at Milan’s design week in 2011. More recent years have seen the inception of Gucci Décor (2017) and Maison Dior (2019), the brands’ respective home-goods ventures, while Balenciaga and Miu Miu showed their own questionable furniture collaborations at Art Basel in 2019.

But back to these chairs. Yes, the pandemic led to substantial growth in sales of home furnishings, but even without that, the fashion world’s infatuation with our Sitzfleisch makes sense; fancy furniture has the same aspirational bent as fancy shoes, and if a brand can’t be on your body, surely it would like to be in your home, even if it’s not something you can actually sit on.

That was the case for quite a few of the chairs that fashion houses debuted at this year’s Art Basel and Design Miami, where Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Fendi revealed their latest experiments in furniture (or, one could argue, sculpture). Below, some of our favorite fashion chairs from this year’s events.

For its Medallion Chair project, Dior invited 17 artists to reinterpret its iconic Medallion Chair, an item that the house has typically used to seat guests at fashion shows. For his interpretation, Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka used layered acrylic for a chair that filters light like a chandelier.
Photo: TOKUJIN YOSHIOKA ©YUTO KUDO/Dior

At Design Miami, Fendi’s artistic director, Kim Jones, called upon the Botswana-based furniture brand Mabeo to curate the ten-piece installation “Kompa.” The pieces (including the Foro chair, pictured above) were all handmade by artisans across Botswana using old woodworking techniques to reinterpret the Italian brand’s history of distinct style.
Photo: Courtesy of Peter Mabeo/Fendi

Since 2012, Louis Vuitton has brought together renowned international designers to create furniture and objects for its design venture, Objets Nomades. Above is Marcel Wanders studio’s Petal Chair, which, according to a press release, features calf-leather cushions “in three special Miami colourways (light pistache, neon yellow, coral and cream).”
Photo: Marcel Wanders studio/Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades

Korean artist Seungjin Yang describes his interpretation of Dior’s chair as “simple, unique, and fun.” Made of blown epoxy resin, an assistant at Dior’s gallery admitted that she nearly had to call security to prevent a guest from sitting on this piece, which definitely should not be sat on.
Photo: SEUNGJIN YANG ©Sungmin Kim/Dior

Mabeo’s Maduo chair is made in Botswana’s Mmankgodi village and takes inspiration from a piece of Fendi jewelry designed by Delfina Delettrez Fendi with its series of interlocking F shapes.
Photo: Courtesy of Peter Mabeo/Fendi

Objets Nomades debuted five pieces from Chinese designer Frank Chou. Above is his signature armchair, “inspired by terraced fields in China and desert rock formations in the USA.” Covered in Brio fabric, it’s the first Objets Nomades piece designed for exterior use.
Photo: Courtesy of Frank Chou/Louis Vuitton Objets Nomades

My personal favorite, from French artist Pierre Charpin. To me, it recalls a compact mirror, but Charpin drew inspiration from the kinds of haute couture silhouette sketches that Dior uses in its clothing design.
Photo: PIERRE CHARPIN ©Marion_Berrin/Dior/Salone Del Mobile

Drawing from his Tswana heritage, Atang Tshikare’s work looks to beliefs and myths about the cosmos and Divinity. His interpretation for Dior is made in vegan tanned leather enhanced with constellations and beadwork in Bantu pictograms.
Photo: ATANG TSHIKARE ©Ayesha Kazim/Dior

The Shiya seat, made of panga panga wood and plywood, from Mabeo’s collaboration with Fendi. On the whole, the collection is a departure from a history of the sleek, sexy furniture typical of the Italian brand.
Photo: Courtesy of Peter Mabeo/Fendi

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Troye Sivan’s Fans Helped Design His Miami Art Basel Stage

“If everything turns to shit, I’m gonna go run errands for Pamela Shamshiri,” joked Troye Sivan during his Miami Art Basel performance, referring to the interior design all-star whom he collaborated with on staging. It’s fitting, considering Sivan spent his lockdown living in Australia and renovating his Victorian-era Melbourne home alongside David Flack. (Reading nooks! apple tree centerpieces! the “most comfortable couch in the world!”)

For Architectural Digest‘s AD100 launch, the Aussie pop star was asked to work with Shamshiri and Lenovo Yoga to call upon fan submissions to bring his Art Basel installation to life. They sent in ideas for four categories — “Paradise on Earth,” “Technology and Progress,” “Living in the Moment,” “Beauty and Art” — and helped Sivan land on an original background for his acoustic South Beach set at The Goodtime Hotel.

This was Sivan’s second live show post-pandemic, following his opening slot for the 2021 VMAs, and his parents stood front-row, iPhones raised to document the entire thing with giant smiles. Sivan was openly nervous, which is fair considering the guest list included everyone from Pharrell to Venus Williams, but he confidently powered through an emotional set with songs like “could cry just thinking about you” and his summer smash, “You.”

Ahead of Art Basel, PAPER called up Sivan from his current home in LA to talk about pre-show anxiety, how COVID changed the way he approaches performance and why collaboration helps him get out of his own head.

How has your approach to live performances changed, especially after being forced to make the shift to all things virtual for so long?

I have a new level of gratitude for it. I really appreciate being able to sing for people in real life. At the same time, I got very comfortable, as well, with doing these virtual performances. They allow for creativity in a different way. Essentially, you’re producing music videos, so it takes away a lot of boundaries. But nothing can ever compete with the feeling of being in front of a real crowd. That interaction… it sounds so cheesy, but I got choked up [at the VMAs] the moment I remembered this is my job and my life. I think it had been so long, that it almost could’ve been one big fantasy or dream that I had. Now, I look back on photos of a show from my tour or maybe a festival that I played and I’m like, “Holy shit, I can’t believe that actually happened and that used to happen all the time.” Hopefully we’ll get there again where I’m doing it often, but for now it still feels like such an intense experience again.

When you’re sitting at home alone and just creating things for the internet, it’s really easy to develop an imposter syndrome or you forget that there are even people at the other end.

Completely. I came back [to the US] and I was like, “All these people still want to get in the studio with me? Sick. I just booked this TV show? What the fuck?” I was really surprised, I’ve been so detached from it for so long being in Australia. I moved back home, so even coming back here and seeing that my friends are still here and they all still want to be my friend… I don’t know how to describe it, it just felt like the whole thing could’ve been something I imagined: my whole life in America, my whole life as an artist, could’ve been something that I just dreamt up. And I was like, “Oh wait this is real and it’s still happening and everyone’s so cool.” I was coming from 0 to 100. My first weeks back [in the US], it was the Met Gala and stuff, so it really felt like the craziest transition.

It seems like you did a lot of development in isolation as an artist. You appear to be more comfortable, and especially with your sexuality, than ever before. Do you think that’s true?

I do think that’s true and it comes from, ultimately, I don’t really care as much as I used to. Not in a bad way, like I care so much about the music I’m making and the music videos. I care about my job a lot, but the stuff that surrounds it, like what people say or comments on the internet, I don’t care about them as much. During the pandemic, I found such a solid base, something I was longing for for a really long time was I was lying to myself about how homesick I was. Then when I got home to Australia and set myself up there with my family and friends that have been my friends since I was two, I truly feel in my heart of hearts that I know I could go back to Australia and go to Uni for graphic design, or something like that, and I know I’d be happy. So it took off all the extra pressure and reminded me I’m here doing this because I love what I do and I’m so stoked to have all these opportunities. But it also gave me the sense of confidence and security where I’m like, nothing really matters. Just do it because you’re enjoying it, because you love it.


Photo via BFA/ Michele Sandberg

Pre-pandemic, the industry was like, Go go go. Is this song going number one? Will I become the biggest pop star in the world? Did you ever have that ambition and now do you feel more comfortable existing in whatever environment you find yourself in?

The people I’ve always looked up to, for example, someone like Mark Ronson or Robyn… I see the way they live their lives and I feel like they’re confident to just do good work and then live a good life at the same time. That’s my dream. At a certain point, I would imagine, your work would eclipse your ability to have a good life. I’m really intimidated by the thought of, and not saying I ever could do this, but having that level of commercial success. I think it would really impact your ability to hang out with friends or go to a club or go to a grocery store, and those are all things I really enjoy doing. So I don’t ever aspire to that, but I do think, and I’m even feeling it now, when you’re here in America and there are these cool opportunities and you’re loving your job, it’s very easy to prioritize that over something like family or friends. And I’m so lucky, this is coming from a place of privilege to do this, but I’m like, “You know what? No,I’m actually going to take off some time in December even if we have to say ‘no’ to that really cool thing cause I want to go on a family holiday for the first time in two years.” So it’s kind of a conscious effort to try and maintain some sort of balance in my life.

Those breaks are important to create work with intention, because otherwise it’s so easy to keep making more, but what exactly are we putting out? You’ve done such an incredible job, especially in the past few years, of releasing projects that look beautifully styled and art directed. You mentioned wanting to go to school for graphic design. Do you feel yourself growing more interested in the visual side of music?

I’ve always really loved that side of it. I’ve always loved photoshop. For me, I’m writing a good song when I’m imagining a music video, so the visuals have always been a huge part of my expression. But then I branched out over the pandemic and designed my house in Australia. I had such a good time falling into that world of interior design and architecture. I really fell in love with these YouTube videos about city planning and my mind definitely was in an exploratory phase. I was really enjoying being bored enough to find new interests because I hadn’t done that in a really long time. And that’s part of again this feeling of security for me. I have so much I want to do, and so much that interests and excites me. My main priority in life is to be happy and mentally stimulated, and I’m lucky that’s happening in music and in acting and in film, right now. I’m also curious to see what shape that takes in other industries or areas of my life. I don’t think I’m going to quit and go to Uni anytime soon, but I feel a sense of peace knowing that it’s there.

Your Art Basel performance is very visual and involved fan submissions for the stage design. Talk me through that process from the beginning and what it was like to work alongside Pamela Shamshiri.

This performance is a combination of pretty much everything we’ve been talking about, which is all my favorite things. It’s design, it’s live performance, it’s music, it’s collaboration. It’s a collaboration between me and Pamela, who’s my favorite interior designer, and then this collaboration with people from all over the US that submitted their ideas, treatments, mood boards, drawings and photos. That’s something that came out of the pandemic: outreach to the people who follow me on Instagram or Twitter became so important and inspiring to me. One of the first things I did in march 2020 was outreach to people for graphic design. It felt so nice to have something that made me feel connected to other people and something that made me feel inspired from my bedroom. I’m never not floored by how great the ideas are, so it was really nice to hop on a Zoom with the winners and talk through where their ideas came from and the “why” behind what they do. Each of them had such specific, different mediums that they were passionate about. Pam and I worked through the ideas, and came up with a really cool stage design and performance.


Photo via BFA/ Angela Pham

It’s always interesting to get an outside perspective on your work.

That’s the thing about collaboration: I would have never come up with half these ideas. It’s so cool to be able to stretch your mind and get out of your own head.

How’d you and Pamela determine what criteria to look at all the submissions through?

I think the criteria was people who felt genuinely inspired from a genuine place. Finding people who found their medium and really expressed themselves through that. One of the winners we spoke to worked exclusively in flowers and their whole treatment was floristry. We spoke to him for like five minutes and he had me thinking about flowers in the most beautiful way: talking about how sometimes beautiful things are not made to last and the flowers are going to die and the fact that they existed in that form in that one moment is beautiful enough. It was so inspiring to talk to all these people, that’s just one example.

One submission category was “Living in the Moment.” What does that mean to you, right now?

Living in the moment is something we’ve all had to really practice doing over the last two years. I’ve had my own struggles with anxiety, which is literally my definition of not living in the moment, and I often find myself not living in the moment. So developing those skills of trying to bring yourself back to the present and if you can create some piece of art that helps people do that… maybe it’s the flowers, maybe it’s a really intimate music performance, I think that’s sweet and very needed.


Photo via BFA/ Angela Pham

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32 Best Winter Nail Design Trends You’ll Love

Minerva agrees about the jewel tone trend. Additionally, Chanel’s Le Vernis in Rhythm is a stunning jewel-toned blue, while Sundays L.03 is a pleasant milky blue.

Chanel Le Vernis in Rhythm

Essie Nail Lacquer in Off Tropic

Gucci Vernis À Ongles Nail Polish in Goldie Red

Minimalist Accents

Although Stone is seeing lots of excitement towards adventurous nail designs, she still thinks people love a minimalist manicure sometimes, as a way to compliment their look but having a standout nail—leaning towards “metallic accents, dainty gemstones or pearls, swirls, or a colorful French tip.”

Festive Press-Ons

If you’re low on time, try press-ons. Stone says that “Signet Beauty has created some of the most beautiful nail art press-ons I have ever seen—perfect for any holiday party!”

Signet Beauty Instant Manicure Kit in Cold Foam

Vibrant Hues

“Trending colors for the winter are brown, deep green, red (with blue undertones), and burgundy,” says Queenie Nguyen. She recommends the Chanel Le Vernis polish in Rouge Noir for burgundy or the shade Emblématique for a deep, blue-toned red. Essie’s Nail Lacquer in Take The Espresso is her pick for a chocolatey brown shade Pine-ing For You by Orly is her favorite rich, jewel-toned green.

Chanel Le Vernis in Rouge Noir

Chanel Le Vernis in Emblématique

Essie Expressie Quick-Dry Nail Polish in Take The Espresso

Orly Breathable Treatment + Color in Pine-ing For You

Traditional Neutrals

Nguyen builds that neutral colors like black or nudes are always good go-tos. For a pink-ish nude mani, the artist recommends OPI’s Nail Lacquer in Do You Take Lei Away.

OPI Nail Lacquer in Do You Take Lei Away?

Winter Maximalist

Nguyen lists that “reflective glitter, tortoiseshell, gold foil, subtle candy cane patterns, and a 3D sweater effect” are nail designs we should see all winter long.

Modern Nail Stickers

If you want an at-home design, Nguyen thinks ManiMe has a great selection of stick-on gel decals. “They come in many different colors and modern nail designs that are designed by talented nail artists.”

ManiMe Stick-On Gels in Peach Nectar

Rich Blues

“Blue, silver, and cream are everywhere this winter,” says Chanel nail artist Betina Goldstein, who is a fan of Mischo Beauty’s pale blue polish in Undaunted. For a rich navy blue, look towards Nails Inc.’s Plant Power nail polish in Spiritual Gangster.

Mischo Beauty Nail Lacquer in Undaunted

Nails Inc. Plant Power Nail Polish in Spiritual Gangster

Crystal Accents

“It’s no surprise that people love some sparkle for winter; with all the holiday parties and get-togethers, nail art is a great way to add a little something to your outfit,” says Goldstein. “An easy way to do that is by adding some Swarovski crystals to your manicure. If you want to go a little more subtle, try using silver nail polish instead.” Essie’s Nail Polish in No Place Like Chrome for a silver swash, or Chanel’s Le Vernis in Canotier for gold will do the trick.

Essie Metallics Nail Polish in No Place Like Chrome

Chanel Le Vernis in Canotier

Playing With Finishes

“Mixing textures with matte and high gloss is also a great way to change up your nails for winter,” Goldstein continues. Try Sundays’ matte top coat to add a little texture to your next at-home mani.

Deep Nature Tones

This winter, Jolene Brodeur is anticipating lots of deep browns and berries like Olive & June’s sable brown nail polish in shade CN or Zoya’s rich purple nail polish in Leighton. Also, the manicurist is seeing shades of orange too—notably OPI polishes in Suzi Needs a Locksmith or My Italian is a Little Rusty.

Olive & June Nail Polish in CN

Zoya Nail Lacquer in Leighton

OPI Nail Lacquer in Suzi Needs A Loch-Smith

OPI Nail Lacquer in My Italian Is A Little Rusty

Remixed French Manicure

Brodeur explains that variations of the traditional French manicure will be big this winter, whether it’s “the French Revolution, a new twist on the French Manicure” or “deep French, using trending colors that have an accent color to accentuate the V and tonal combinations.”

Mix and Match

Not sure which color or design to choose? Brodeur also notes that mix and match nails are fun, too—”it is okay if all the nails do not match.”

Pearl Sheens

Natalie Minerva has been seeing a lot of pearl sheens—just think of festive creamy whites with a hint of glimmer perfect for the holidays. OPI’s Nail Lacquer in Kyoto Pearl is the ultimate shimmery white satin.

OPI Nail Lacquer in Kyoto Pearl

3D Design

In terms of design, Minerva says, “It’s all about texture and 3D! The more obscure and abstract, the better! It’s been really fun to see nail art take such an unexpected and creative turn lately.”

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Inside a Historic Marfa Home Transformed by AD100 Designers

Reflecting on Marfa in 1985, Donald Judd wrote: “The area of West Texas was fine, mostly high rangeland dropping to desert along the river, with mountains over the edge in every direction. There were few people and the land was undamaged.” Decades later, that spellbinding beauty and sense of exquisite isolation remain, albeit juxtaposed with the artist’s own legacy—the Judd Foundation (anchored by The Block, his former home) and the Chinati Foundation, the army base he transformed into a museum for contemporary art. Today’s Marfa is a contradiction: a tumbleweed town and an international pilgrimage site, where Judd’s visions of unified art and architecture reached their apotheosis.

Timber bookshelves in the style of Donald Judd line the library; custom-made sofa in a Pindler fabric.

Boston Functional Single Arm Library Light

By Chapman & Myers 

Bow Basket by Annemarie O’Sullivan

It was that heady mix that set two creative New Yorkers, both natives of the Lone Star State, on the long drive to this one-stoplight oasis. “If you’re from Texas and involved in the arts, then all roads lead to Marfa,” says one, whom we’ll refer to as Cowboy for the sake of this western adventure. As his other half—let’s call her Cowgirl—recounts, “The moment I saw the town, I felt connected. It’s intangible…the big sky, the light, the breeze. Marfa is not one thing; it’s many things.”

Their plans to buy land and build a contemporary glass box were scrapped when they visited a 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival house for sale. Designed by Henry Charles Trost, a celebrated El Paso architect who cut his teeth in the Chicago School, the home occupied a hilltop plot not far from the center of town, with spectacular views and an adjoining empty parcel. Judd had even owned it once upon a time. Says Cowgirl, “It just felt true and beautiful and right.”

Terraced plantings of Russian Sage descend from the entertainment pavilion to the pool.

Custom-made ebonized benches and Bonacina 1889 wicker chairs mingle on 
the loggia.

Quilted Kapok Mattress

By Tensira

To reimagine the property, they turned to architect Annabelle Selldorf, whom they knew from New York and through Chinati. She updated the Trost house (whose original details had already been stripped away by the prior owner) through a series of deft interventions to the floor plan. On the main level, clusters of small rooms were combined to create a vast living space, with multiple seating areas, and a spacious chef’s kitchen, where an enormous island can seat six comfortably. A tight, sculptural staircase now descends to the primary suite on the lower level, creating a sequence of compression and expansion. “You had to make the trip downstairs into something exciting,” notes Selldorf, whose hand can be felt most clearly on what had been vacant land, where she devised a side-by-side guest casita and a garage/gym, as well as an entertaining pavilion up on another hill. “The architectural vocabulary is a simple series of volumes that speak to one another but feel distinct from the old architecture,” she notes of the structures, clad in clay-colored stucco and aligned to create beautiful transitions.

A view of the historic home, designed in the 1920s by architect Henry Charles Trost.

The kitchen’s large island can accommodate six on counter stools; antique pendant.

Helado Ceramic Bowl

By Tina Vaia

Along the way, Selldorf connected the clients with landscape mastermind Madison Cox, whom they visited in Marrakech well before Cox made it to Marfa. That first trip to Morocco was an aha moment: Their eyes widened as Cox welcomed them to Villa Oasis, introducing them to the work of designer Bill Willis, and guided them to sites throughout the region, whose landscape, building materials, and sensibilities reminded them of West Texas. In no time, an enormous shipping container filled with pots, zellige, and furnishings of all kinds was on its way to Marfa, where Cox conceived a series of outdoor spaces that blend the local vernacular with Moroccan traditions. Terra-cotta tiles line porches, walkways, and exterior stairs. Terraced terrain, fragrant with sage, descends from the pavilion to the pool—part of a larger strategy to limit lawns for water conservation. And iron pergolas devised with Selldorf offer shade thanks to rush awnings that will one day be replaced by creeping vines.

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A Savannah Home Melds Georgian Architecture With ’60s Flair

IN THE MID-1950S, Savannah, Ga., was crumbling. The effects of the Depression had left the city’s buildings in disrepair. And as residents fled to new postwar suburbs, developers began planning to bulldoze many of the deteriorating, expensive-to-maintain grand antebellum homes, as well as the once elegant public squares conceptualized, beginning in 1733, by the city’s founder, James Oglethorpe.

The impending loss radicalized many of the locals, among them an energetic real estate agent, developer and contractor named David Morrison and his wife, Zelda, who became part of a preservation movement that would lay the foundation for what the 2.2-square-mile landmark district would become: a mannerly grid of graciously restored homes, modish restaurants, art galleries and boutique hotels. David, a Savannah native, was at the forefront of the efforts, wrangling bank financing for the Historic Savannah Foundation to rescue dilapidated historic properties. Zelda, who was from South Carolina, and who was a design and interiors enthusiast, supported the fight as well, eventually joining the board of the foundation.

But despite their fervor for Savannah’s original structures, the couple had no interest in buying and restoring a residential property for themselves and their three children. Instead, in 1965, they began designing their own home on a one-acre lot shaded by huge Spanish moss-draped magnolias. “They just always knew they wanted to create this house together, with every aspect considered,” says Lisa Van Dusen, their youngest child, a 66-year-old architect who lives in Washington, D.C. “That collaboration was what they lived for.”

At first, Zelda petitioned for a modern house influenced by the Pop Art colors and shapes of the era. But her husband, an avid sailor who in his younger years had spent hours building elaborate models of celebrated vessels, convinced her that she’d grow tired of its trendiness. A “detail guy,” as Van Dusen calls him, David had been amassing salvaged building materials — 200-year-old windows with wavy surfaces that would catch the morning light, and waxed heart-pine floor boards — in anticipation of the day he would begin his dream home. He was certain they could build a Georgian-style residence with interiors that aligned with his wife’s love for the palette and patterns of the 1960s, one she could transform as the years passed and tastes changed.

Six years after they moved in, however, David died suddenly of a heart attack at age 54, upending plans for how the house would evolve. Instead, it remains almost exactly as it was when it was completed in 1966. The property stands as the couple’s second great preservation gesture — a buoyant celebration of two seemingly incongruous aesthetics and design eras.

AFTER HER HUSBAND’S death, Zelda, who had been a housewife, stepped in to run his businesses. That, along with raising three kids, Lisa and her siblings, Nancy Macaluso and Bill Morrison, rendered her too busy to update the décor. But even after all the children left, the place remained largely untouched, and stayed that way long after Zelda’s death in 1998 at the age of 75. “Most families would have sold the house a long, long time ago,” says Van Dusen, who, like her siblings, now has grown children of her own, including the Brooklyn-based textile, apparel and home goods designer Ellen Van Dusen, and Henry, the production manager for the multimedia artist Cory Arcangel. “We just couldn’t bring ourselves to do it.” Van Dusen, who owns some commercial properties in Savannah, comes down once a month, and Macaluso, a former textile designer, visits occasionally from New Orleans, but the decision to hold onto the house, Van Dusen concedes, largely reflects how strong its emotional pull remains. “My parents’ personalities,” she says, “are all over the place.”

From the outside, the two-story, 5,000-square-foot Savannah gray brick structure is stately and, with the exception of one wing, symmetrical. The front door is a replica of that of the 1770s Hammond-Harwood House in Annapolis, Md., itself among the best examples of extant Anglo-Palladian architecture, which David Morrison had seen while training to be a Navy officer during World War II. (Its chief architect, William Buckland, based the design on an etching by the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.) There are twin chimneys at either end, and the entrance is flanked by a pair of electric lanterns atop eight-foot beige poles. The roof was designed in a foreshortened pattern that David labored over — all the shingles seem the same size when viewed from the circular driveway, itself made of salvaged 18th-century Belgian blocks once used as ballast for clipper ships.

But behind the front door, the centuries collide. The interiors are pure Zelda, a riot of pattern on pattern, with antiques and midcentury furnishings exuberantly combined. The breakfast room, with its lapis wrought-iron chairs sunk into the Greek sheepskin rug and a bay window rimmed with hand-painted Mexican tiles in shades of azure and midnight, is bracketed by tall cabinets stacked with antique crystal and modern tableware. In the living room, above the marigold silk jacquard-upholstered Sheridan sofa near a Chippendale Cockpen chair, hangs a full-length oil portrait, in the style of John Singer Sargent, of Lisa as a teenager in a peacoat with her basset hound, Alfred; the room’s rug — a geometric fantasia in peach, blue-green and lavender, equal parts Pop Art and Art Deco — was designed by Zelda herself, who drew it with Crayolas before having it custom made in Portugal. Upstairs, the children’s former rooms and their mother’s office are awash in hot pink, lime green and tangerine.

“We’re going to need to sell this place,” says Van Dusen resignedly. “It just doesn’t make sense to own it from afar.” But there are consolations, she reminds herself: Her parents’ joyful willingness to take aesthetic chances, to create an off-kilter monument as eccentric as it is warm, ended up influencing generations of their offspring. Her daughter, Ellen, was inspired by a crisp black-and-brown Clarence House fabric that Zelda once used to reupholster a sofa in the sunroom. In the young designer’s interpretation, for a textile in one of her recent collections, the colors are similar, but the lines are blurrier, soft around the edges — like a memory.

Photo assistant: Ross Ladenberger