The Wallpaper* Architects Directory 2026 welcomes Hoyer Arkitektur, a young Danish practice joining our annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios.

Who: Hoyer Arkitektur

Danish architect Thomas Høyer founded his namesake studio in 2022. With a headquarters in Ebeltoft on the Jutland peninsula, Høyer Arkitektur works on a variety of projects that explore architecture’s relationship with nature. ‘In an age marked by accelerating pace and digital overstimulation, the studio sees it as a central responsibility to restore our connection to the physical world - not as an act of protest, but of care; not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity,’ Høyer explains.

The architect’s philosophy revolves around feeling and slowing down, as he argues that silence, reflection and emotion can play an important role in daily life and should therefore be seriously considered in design - just as importantly as function tends to be. It is this detail and admiration for the everyday that sets his emerging practice apart.

Høyer explains: ‘We pursue a restrained beauty rather than the spectacular - stripping away the unnecessary to let light, tactility, craftsmanship, and material honesty carry the architecture. We treat the building site as a place of responsible dialogue with nature, and we see our practice not as a universal formula but as a language of relationships between people, materials, and landscapes — one we believe can grow in significance, not just in scale.’

What: Ebeltoft

The practice’s Ebeltoft project is a key representative of its overall approach, exemplifying how gentle architectural construction and a preference for organic materials can offer a result that is friendly to its natural surroundings. ‘Our biggest influence is the encounter between body and surroundings — the conviction that understanding arises not through thought and logic alone, but through lived, sensory experience of place,’ Høyer says, and this is evident in his design of this modest timber house.

Placed gently on a high plateau formed of ancient glacial meltwater valleys and hills during the last ice age, Ebeltoft is defined by its prominent roof with its deep overhangs. Created using a modular building system and organised internally as a series of communal areas, interconnected and without corridors, the house features a central atrium that connects users with the tree canopy and sky above. Meanwhile, a colonnade of timber columns wraps around it, forming a terrace across the entire house, making this residential project at once introverted and extroverted, adapting easily to its residents' needs.

Why: Architects Directory 2026

When the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory was conceived in 2000, it was built as our bespoke international index of emerging architectural talent. Now in its 25th edition, our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe (now comprising over 500 alumni) champions the best and most promising young studios - a snapshot of talent showcasing inspiring work from all corners of the Earth with an emphasis on the residential realm.

This year’s anniversary survey includes 30 young studios (one for each of the 30 years of Wallpaper*), from Australia, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Ghana, Greece, France, Ivory Coast, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, India, Morocco, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, and Vietnam. Welcome to the promise, ideas and exciting architecture of the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026.

hoyerarkitektur.com

The Wallpaper* Architects Directory 2026 includes Various Associates, a young Chinese practice that now joins our annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios.

Who: Various Associates

From designing a skatepark in Qinhuangdao, to a beach club in Sanya, to fashion boutiques in Shanghai, and an Adidas flagship in Seoul – the work of Various Associates is indeed varied, spanning hotels, retail, residential, workspaces, galleries and urban spaces. The Shenzhen-based studio was co-founded by Qianyi Lin and Dongzi Yang in 2017 with a focus on cross-disciplinary and research-led design; the pair studied interiors and architecture, respectively, at the Royal College of Art in London.

This approach is driven by the duo’s ambition to activate original spatial experiences that are both holistic and transcending. In their work, the layers of a space – from branding, to product, to materiality and architecture – each commit to a guiding concept without hierarchy, resulting in an immersive vision. It’s a philosophy they describe as: ‘Working in the future for the present.’

To achieve this, the team has expanded beyond architects to include material engineers, artists, graphic and experience designers. This collaboration across disciplines elevates Various Associates into a ‘platform’ where ideas are central and conventions are always challenged. The mode of open-thinking and experimentation results in spaces where architecture, art and technology are blended and experiential potential is endless.

What: Gong's House

This curious house in the ancient village of Yongjia is built around the distinct social dynamics of a family reunion. Designed for the families of six siblings (30 people and counting), its challenge was to consolidate cross-generational needs and a rural-urban divide of lifestyles. To ensure separate activities can always be shared, spacious rooms are linked and layered with open connections. Games of mahjong between elderly Gong family members unfold alongside children’s playtime, supervised with ease by tea-sipping parents.

Ambient natural light and countryside views flow in through the abstract composition of windows that pepper the facade, echoing the ‘staggered orderliness’ of the vernacular houses of Jiangnan. Seeking to resolve the spirit of local rural construction and the efficiency of industrial urban methods, the architects developed a plant fibre brick that combines the intelligence of both, as well as being highly insulating and breathable, ideal for mitigating moisture during the rainy season.

Why: Architects Directory 2026

When the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory was conceived in 2000, it was built as our bespoke international index of emerging architectural talent. Now in its 25th edition, our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe (now comprising over 500 alumni) champions the best and most promising young studios - a snapshot of talent showcasing inspiring work from all corners of the Earth with an emphasis on the residential realm.

This year’s anniversary survey includes 30 young studios (one for each of the 30 years of Wallpaper*), from Australia, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Ghana, Greece, France, Ivory Coast, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, India, Morocco, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, and Vietnam. Welcome to the promise, ideas and exciting architecture of the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026.

various-associates.com

In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Meet the Autogrill Bridge, Italy’s ubiquitous motorway restaurant chain

Carlo Ratti on the Autogrill bridge

Here we are, in the middle of Italy's great summer exodus. Today we are driving along the ribbon of asphalt that links Milan to Naples, the Autostrada del Sole, “Highway of the Sun”. Through the shimmering afternoon heat, a vision appears ahead. What could it be? A truck that has strayed across the median? An oversized billboard? A giant frog about to leap, after plunging us into a Lilliputian world?

We accelerate, and a few hundred metres on, the mystery is solved… It is all three things at once: the Autogrill bridge (Autogrill is Italy’s ubiquitous motorway restaurant chain, so dominant that its brand name has become the generic word for a rest stop).

It straddles both carriageways with a shortcut that would be forbidden anywhere else on the motorway network. It is a branded landmark, complete with the inevitable Autogrill sign. And with its exposed structure, it resembles a nimble creature frozen in the instant before a jump.

Few people know that this innovative architectural type attracted some of post-war Italy's greatest architects and engineers, from Angelo Bianchetti to Pier Luigi Nervi.

In the 1960s, the motorway was one of the great stages on which modern Italy performed, and the bridge Autogrill became its suspended gallery. It connected not only the two sides of the road, but two Italies as well: north and south, outbound and homebound, families on the move during the summer migrations. At the time, Italy looked in awe at America's highways, yet instead of simply copying their model, it created something distinctly Italian: elegant, urban, and entirely its own.

One of Bianchetti's original drawings depicts the Montepulciano bridge Autogrill, now sadly demolished. Beneath a great asymmetrical T-shaped Corten-steel beam hangs the glazed bridge itself, visually lightened at one end by a dramatic cantilevered staircase. The carriageway below is so smooth it mirrors the sky. Along it glide improbable automobiles whose silhouettes recall Carlo Mollino's Bisiluro or Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion.

The real surprise, though, awaits upstairs. There, in the dining area, a sort of Newtonian inversion takes place. Looking through the windows that plunge directly over the traffic below, the building seems to rocket backwards at extraordinary speed while the cars remain perfectly still beneath it. 'It is impossible to step twice into the same river of sheet metal,' Heraclitus might have declared.

Even more impossible today, since the lack of long-term vision for Italy's motorways has led to the demolition of many of these remarkable structures. The iconic Montepulciano bridge Autogrill, mentioned earlier, was torn down in 2021. The one at Fiano Romano, just outside Rome, has stood closed for years and now risks the same fate. Many others simply deserve careful restoration to recover their original elegance.

Which is precisely why they deserve to be rediscovered. They could once again become what they once were: the manifesto of an optimistic country, confident enough to look to the future with lightness and imagination - and capable of creating elegance where one would least expect it, even above a ribbon of asphalt.

About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti

Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: ‘Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?’ Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.

Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: ‘objects should keep us company’. Especially during this scorching summer.

carlorattiassociati.com

A dreamy Paros house sits nestled in the picturesque fisherman’s village of Naousa, the Greek island settlement equipped with small boutiques and quaint cobbled paths. Welcome to Villa Sol Mare, a restored Cycladic house that preserves its original architectural language while welcoming comforting contemporary touches.

Inside Paros house Villa Sol Mare, a Greek island dream

The project was spearheaded by Isola Studio. Founded in 2021 by Chaido Kaproulia and Eva Lavranou, the Athens- and Corfu-based architecture and design studio restructured the original 90 square metre space to fit three bedrooms and bathrooms.

Cycladic architecture dates back to the early Bronze age, and was crafted by islanders to withstand harsh coastal weather, with white surfaces reflecting the beaming sun to keep the interiors cool. Although practical in nature, its distinct minimalistic style is now iconic, complimenting Aegean waters.

The Paros house's exterior looks like a postcard from busier sister islands like Mykonos and Santorini, with its hand-applied textured plaster, timber windows and Aegean blue shutters. Inside, local craftsmanship prevails. Terracotta flooring and timber joinery complement the white-washed plaster. The house feels fluid, almost ocean-like, each room rhythmically cascading into the next as harsh angles are softened by the use of smooth plastering.

The kitchen is set beneath a barrel-vaulted arch, where custom walnut cabinetry is integrated within plaster-sculpted surfaces. The bathroom offers a different material palette. Vanities are made from red travertine, and marble from the nearby islands of Tinos and Naxos.

The roof of the home is a tranquil oasis. The architects reinforced its structure to support a pool, which can be accessed via an unfolding sequence of terraces, garnished with native planting. Built-in seating and dining areas act like a series of courtyards. Here, visitors can enjoy the house’s connection to the island’s landscape.

The bespoke furniture and joinery spotlight the local craftsmanship (the island is known for its stonemasonry, marble and ceramics), while the house as a whole showcases Paros’ calming architectural nature. Ultimately, Villa Sol Mare is a place to gaze across the horizon and drift away to the chirping sounds of crickets, basking in the summertime heat.

isola-studio.com

Dharq Arquitectos is a Chilean architecture studio that makes it into the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026, our latest annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios

Who: Dharq Arquitectos

Patricio Huidobro founded Dharq Arquitectos in 2019. Based in Santiago, Chile, the practice looks to develop residential projects in rural areas where conventional urban services are absent.

‘Our practice sits between architectural design, construction, and research,’ explains Patricio Huidobro. ‘Many of our projects emerge from built prototypes or experimental structures that later inform residential work. This approach allows us to test ideas about structure, modularity, and environmental systems directly through construction.’

Many of the studio’s projects emerge from research on modular structures and essential forms of dwelling. Influenced by architectural and technological thinking, Dharq Arquitectos understands buildings as systems rather than isolated objects. Says Huidobro, ‘The exploration of lightweight structures, environmental systems, and minimal frameworks for living — developed by figures such as Buckminster Fuller or Reyner Banham — continues to inform how we think about architecture today.’

Dharq Arquitectos is motivated by the question of how architecture can enable habitation in territories where infrastructure is scarce or absent. The studio is interested in how minimalist structures can organise space and climate to support daily living.

Why: Architects Directory 2026

When the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory was conceived in 2000, it was built as our bespoke international index of emerging architectural talent. Now in its 25th edition, our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe (now comprising over 500 alumni) champions the best and most promising young studios - a snapshot of talent showcasing inspiring work from all corners of the Earth with an emphasis on the residential realm.

This year’s anniversary survey includes 30 young studios (one for each of the 30 years of Wallpaper*), from Australia, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Ghana, Greece, France, Ivory Coast, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, India, Morocco, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, and Vietnam. Welcome to the promise, ideas and exciting architecture of the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026.

Alongside designing residential homes, Huidobro has taught architectural design studios focused on housing at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile for the past thirteen years, while continuously researching themes of efficient infrastructure and autonomous habitation.

What: Sliding Doors House (Casa Corredera)

Chile’s Casablanca Valley is just 30 km from the Pacific Ocean, welcoming sea breezes and a refreshingly cool climate. Nestled in this coastal valley is Sliding Doors House, a single-family dwelling surrounded by pine forests and agricultural land.

Dharq Arquitectos explores the relationship between indoor and outdoor living through twenty-two sliding panels. These sliding doors help regulate light, ventilation, and privacy. The structure takes on a form similar to a pavilion. Its lightweight framework of timber floor framing and a galvanized steel roof structure is suspended on concrete piers, allowing it to be raised above its context.

When the panels are opened, the residence becomes an open space, fully immersed in the environment. Says Huidobro, ‘The architecture operates less as a fixed object and more as a climatic device capable of modulating transparency, air, and views throughout the day.’

dharq.cl

There is a reason serious design fairs tend to avoid the word ‘community’ – it usually signals the absence of one. Jia Curated, the Bali-based annual gathering founded in 2022 by Budiman Ong, Rudi Winata and Yang Yang Hartono, is an exception. Built around the Indonesian principle of gotong royong – communal effort, the kind that once brought villages together at harvest – it has quietly become one of the region's most anticipated creative appointments. The 2026 edition relocates to Pengembak Beach in Sanur, where 15,000 square metres of coastline threaded with mangroves and pine trees frames this year's theme, Nature Weave.

Explore Jia Curated's 'Architecture in Scale' show

Among its returning programmes, 'Architecture in Scale' stands out. A maquette showcase curated by Charmaine Chan, Design Editor, Culture at the South China Morning Post, the exhibition gathers 25 models from practices across Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan – including Kengo Kuma + Associates, andramatin, Elora Hardy's IBUKU Studio and Cheng Tsung Feng – each selected on a single curatorial diktat: that biophilia is load-bearing, not decorative.

Chan’s personal pick for the show's defining work is revealing. Elok House, completed in Singapore in 2007 by Chang Architects, crams a three-dimensional landscape into a narrow terrace plot just off Orchard Road, with light wells running down both flanks, a retaining wall that doubles as a waterfall and trees growing through apertures in the floor.

‘A squirrel once wandered in carrying a mango seed, which eventually took root in a wall and grew a sapling,’ Chan says. A model may struggle to capture that particular detail, but its spatial logic, she argues, shows you exactly how that could happen.

‘You can't really see a building when you're standing inside or beside it,’ she says. ‘A model cannot lie in the same way. If a building needs to breathe through a certain void, or a roof needs to shed water towards a specific point, the model must show how.’ At a scale small enough to see the whole system at once, a building's relationship with its site becomes instantly, completely readable.

For a fair committed to positioning Indonesian and regional design beyond the anonymity of craftsmanship into something more fully its own, Architecture in Scale makes its argument without rhetoric, using twenty-five maquettes, each a quiet proof of concept.

'Jia CURATED 2026' runs 13–17 August at Pengembak Beach, Sanur, Bali

jiacurated.com

President Donald Trump’s plan to build a 90,000 square-foot, privately-funded ballroom next to the White House has been mired in political and legal quagmire. That still hasn’t shut down work on the sprawling structure, which has been steadily rising from the ground since it broke ground last autumn.

But a federal appeals court ruled Friday that construction on the ballroom site cannot continue without direct congressional approval. The 2-1 decision, handed down by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, upheld an earlier decision by a district court to block work on the project.

‘Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence,’ the court wrote. ‘The President has no – and claims no – constitutionally assigned authority over that property, which is designed and maintained for the use of all Presidents, current and future, and for the American people.’

The decision marks another chapter in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit that advocates for historic buildings and sites across the US, against the National Parks Service, the federal agency that oversees the White House and its grounds.

‘This is a great day for our country and for the American people's right to voice their opinions about the historic places they cherish, including the White House,’ said National Trust president and CEO Brent Leggs in a statement. ‘From the beginning, our position has been clear and consistent: the law states that only Congress can authorize the construction of a ballroom at the White House.’

‘This decision is particularly meaningful as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and advocate for renewed protections for historic preservation,’ Leggs added.

The defendants have 14 days to decide whether to appeal the decision.

President Trump, however, was clear about next steps. ‘We will be immediately appealing to the United States Supreme Court,’ he wrote on Truth Social – indicating that the ballroom battle is far from over.

The Wallpaper* Architects Directory 2026 includes Place of Work, a young practice out of Canada, which joins our annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios.

Who: Place of Work

With two bases, in Halifax and Toronto, Canada, this young studio was only founded four years ago by architects Jennifer Esposito, Duncan Patterson, and Will Perkins. The trio enjoy taking their cues from each project’s context and the region’s vernacular, just as much as they do from the everyday experience, they explain. ‘Ordinary things excite us,’ they say. ‘The way light angles across a wall. The sound a door makes when it closes. The coolness of stone under bare feet. We’re drawn to these specifics because they contain what is essential: ritual, site, material, time.’

Bridging the gap between ‘representation and reality,’ the real and the imaginary is ‘where architecture happens,’ they add. Place of Work may still be emerging, but it has a range of ongoing projects across Atlantic Canada and Ontario. It consciously picks commissions that allows them to work closely with clients and get stuck into the particulars and the detail in each and every design, the team emphasises.

Yet if you ask what the architects primary references are, the discussion comes back to context and setting. ‘[Our biggest influence is] Place. Not as a romantic idea, but as a physical and cultural reality that architecture either responds to or ignores. Architecture requires deep listening. Climate, topography, material culture, and history are forces that shape our approach. But place doesn’t mean anything without people. What we share is a belief that architecture begins with human ritual: how people wake, gather, retreat, and rest.’

What: House In A Meadow Between Forest And Sea

One of the team’s newly completed works, only delivered this summer, House In A Meadow Between Forest And Sea, is a bespoke single-family home in the rugged coast of Nova Scotia. The project, conceived as a summer retreat for a retired couple on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, offers a design that negotiates the dramatic environment with its powerful winds and the daily needs and rituals of its owners.

Working in close collaboration with landscape architects Brackish Design Studio, Place of Work crafted a floorplan that is orientated to offer both protection from the weather and views out towards nature. Two wings, one containing the primary suite, the other housing guest rooms and a den, are united by a central living space that connects movement and functions both inside and out.

True to their overarching values, the architects draw from the site’s conditions to elevate their proposal: ‘Light is treated as an orienting element. Clerestories bring warmth and a sense of time into the main living spaces, while north-facing openings frame views across the meadow. The resulting architecture is shaped by site, climate, and use—distinct from the landscape, yet deeply tied to it.’

Why: Architects Directory 2026

When the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory was conceived in 2000, it was built as our bespoke international index of emerging architectural talent. Now in its 25th edition, our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe (now comprising over 500 alumni) champions the best and most promising young studios - a snapshot of talent showcasing inspiring work from all corners of the Earth with an emphasis on the residential realm.

This year’s anniversary survey includes 30 young studios (one for each of the 30 years of Wallpaper*), from Australia, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Ghana, Greece, France, Ivory Coast, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, India, Morocco, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, and Vietnam. Welcome to the promise, ideas and exciting architecture of the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026.

placeofwork.ca

Heinrich Simon’s famous 1874 saying, 'There is no such thing as bad weather, there are only good clothes,' rings true for those living in or visiting Scotland. It also resonates with the aptly named architecture studio Dress for the Weather, which has recently transformed a stone-built Victorian schoolhouse into Island Cottage, a contemporary family home.

Inside Island Cottage, a redesigned Victorian schoolhouse

Nestled on an island on Scotland’s west coast, the old former schoolhouse building contained the teacher’s quarters downstairs and a classroom upstairs. Now, the new layout features three bedrooms and an extension, with views over the sea to the Kintyre Peninsula and Arran.

‘The client had originally conceived the project as a rear extension to the cottage; but seeing the rear (and I’d say main) facade of the cottage for the first time, it was clear to me that we needed to work with it,’ explains project architect Matt McKenna. ‘The views out to the west from the site then determined the orientation for the extension. So, the existing site had already sort of determined the main moves. This then gave us the courtyard space that we have now, formed by both the historic and new facades.’

The home has an L-shaped plan. The existing stone facade has been restored with a new slate roof installed. The extension comprises a timber frame with large, glazed openings framing the expansive vista.

Inside, the bedrooms and bathrooms can be found in the original cottage, while communal living spaces are located in the extension. A new entrance area has been integrated, highlighting the exposed stone of the cottage and acting as a bridge between the old and the new.

‘The weathered timber cladding and stonework have helped give a neutral tone to the building, which sits well within the colourful landscape,’ notes the architect.

The residence is an example of how a design can champion both what was there before and what is on site now. Says McKenna, ‘ Whether you're in the hall where the gable of the cottage is exposed internally, or in the courtyard where we’ve tried to keep the composition equal, the overall experience is enhanced by bringing the old and new together. This gives the project a balance.‘

dressfortheweather.co.uk

The Wallpaper* Architects Directory 2026 includes Marilia Pellegrini, a young architect and her São Paulo practice, who joins our annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios.

Who: Marilia Pellegrini

Following stints at both Brazilian and international studios, architect Marilia Pellegrini set up her independent practice in 2016 in São Paulo. Her mantra? A bespoke, highly architecture-and-craft-led approach, she explains: ‘Each project comes with its own repertoire and should be crafted like a hand-embroidered piece.’ Centred on this, Pellegrini and her team are always keen on delivering a well-rounded result, where they can integrate architecture, interior and furniture design to optimal results. ‘Beauty in things and kindness in people motivates me. Giving back beauty in my projects and being kind to my clients is the least I can do,’ she adds.

Having learned from some of Brazil’s most prominent architects and designers gives the team an important edge, the architect believes: ‘Gustavo Penna, still during my time at university, taught me poetry. The sensitivity of a project begins with the pencil stroke. Rene Gonzalez, a master of composition and trained by Richard Meier, taught me that no line exists on its own. He taught me to compose. Last but not least, Arthur Casas taught me balance - colour scheme, textures and materials; harmony - between curves and straight lines; and the importance of being complete as an architect.’

At the same time, ‘The influence of my creative process changes constantly, at every moment,’ Pellegrini adds. ‘The only great influence common to all my works is nature.’

What: Casa das Palmeiras

Conceived as the ultimate urban sanctuary, Casa das Palmeiras sits at the heart of São Paulo, in the suburban enclave of Alphaville. A low-lying, single-floor volume, slightly sunken into the terrain and engulfed in greenery from a leafy garden, the home is framed by the palm trees that inspired its name.

Behind a relatively opaque street-facing exterior, a flowing, breezy interior unfolds, where indoor and outdoor living blend seamlessly across living spaces that open fully to the outside and al fresco areas that blur the boundaries further against a landscape created by designer Renata Tilli. This creates a sense of not only comfort and functionality, but also luxury, Pellegrini explains.

A neutral, predominantly light-coloured surface palette underlines a softness inside and out, composed of beige limestone, light-coloured wood and soft stone. The project includes four bedroom suites, a guest bathroom, a gym and an expansive, open-plan living space for relaxing, cooking and entertaining.

Why: Architects Directory 2026

When the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory was conceived in 2000, it was built as our bespoke international index of emerging architectural talent. Now in its 25th edition, our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe (now comprising over 500 alumni) champions the best and most promising young studios - a snapshot of talent showcasing inspiring work from all corners of the Earth with an emphasis on the residential realm.

This year’s anniversary survey includes 30 young studios (one for each of the 30 years of Wallpaper*), from Australia, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Ghana, Greece, France, Ivory Coast, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, India, Morocco, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, and Vietnam. Welcome to the promise, ideas and exciting architecture of the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026.

mariliapellegrini.com

Those who entered Berlin in the West after 1979 passed a building that felt like an alien entity wedged between a stark, mid-1930s exhibition centre, a motorway, and a turn-of-the-century neighbourhood. The unusual structure was squat and elongated, with spiral staircases protruding like insect legs from its exoskeleton; it seemed frozen in a mechanical forward motion. Still there to this day, the ICC is one of Berlin’s great sleeping giants: a building once constructed with a single function in mind, like decommissioned airports or an animal testing facility; and it is now waiting for its new purpose.

The ICC (Internationales Congress Centrum), designed by the couple Ralf Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte, was conceived to serve conferences. It features two large auditoriums, seating five and two thousand bodies respectively, and about eighty smaller spaces, restaurants and a roof garden, at a scale that rivalled East Berlin’s multifunctional Palast der Republik or Paris’s Centre Pompidou.

Explore the soon-to-be-transformed ICC Berlin

At the time of its completion, locals called it a spaceship, with its visible structure and multi-level exterior staircases. Clad in metal, futuristic in appearance, it looked like a machine in a landscape shaped by automobile traffic. It is almost inaccessible to pedestrians, wrote architecture critic Julius Posener in 1979: ‘People have to sneak into this menacing building,’ he lamented. It is awkwardly placed, isolated from the city, like a self-contained, self-propelled engine for economic growth. Accessing it from the underground taxi deck, people would be guided through areas, seemingly processed as if on an assembly line, from reception to auditorium, from restaurant to toilet.

The ICC’s carapace was intended to shield it from noise and vibration, making the metal cladding functional and not just an aesthetic nod to the space age. However, the comparison with the Centre Pompidou does it no favours, because the Paris building - said Posener in 1979 - is embedded in a city and in a network of streets at a pedestrian scale. It does a much better job at inviting visitors in.

The whole building with its elaborate ventilation system - conference attendees apparently smoked profusely at its time of completion - needed to be rebooted like an old desktop computer if it wasn’t in permanent use. It rarely operated at full capacity and was deemed inefficient and too expensive. So, since 2014, the ICC has been out of use. It took five years, until 2019, for the structure to be listed as a historical monument. Little happened there, save for a large-scale art show during the COVID pandemic.

In 2022, an initiative led by local PR specialists and architects pushed the gargantuan building back into the public eye by suggesting it be open 24/7 and available for cultural use. In the autumn of 2024, actors across the political spectrum initiated a competition for ideas and designs. Given the pace of redevelopment elsewhere in Berlin - Tegel or Tempelhof airports, for example - a decade between closure and project initiative seems relatively short.

On a sweltering day in late June, not far from the ICC, the news was unveiled that a partnership of nine architecture studios and engineering firms was taking on the project. They have two and a half years to enable the redevelopment. ‘The aim,’ says Björn Werner, architect at Max Dudler, one of the nine partners, ‘is to breathe life back into the building.’

First, what’s needed is a viable concept. Graft and Max Dudler, two of the partnering firms, envision multiple uses. Bike paths will connect the site to the neighbourhood; there will be more green. The site should cease to be a blind spot that is scorching hot in the summer and devastatingly grey in winter. The partnership proposes to add two high-rises opposite the ICC's northern and southern facades to connect them to the complex, creating plazas and opening up the currently closed-off structure.

The aim is to draw on the ICC’s existing formal language but make it sleeker. For the inside, the partners are thinking about different formats. Concerts, for example; the Berlin Philharmonic could use the venue. Or, after some adjustments, the auditoriums could house table tennis tournaments or boxing matches.

One of them might turn into an exhibition space, and the unused rooms spread throughout the building could become artists’ or recording studios. The ideas are many; little is settled. ’The formal language of the building gives us a lot of orientation: the way the car park extends under the structure, which seems to prop itself up via the staircases; the materiality, the rounded corners, variability of the facade, horizontality, layering, the transitions of the body to its exterior,’ says Graft’s Thomas Willemeit.

Flexibility is one of the words Willemeit and Björn Werner use a lot when talking about their project on this summer day in the Graft office on a street corner in Berlin-Mitte: ‘To grant the ground floor expression is essential.’ These are problems that Posener outlined at the close of the 1970s show; the then-architecture tackled other problems than what is required for present day operations. The past era's promises of an automobile-centric city have not been fulfilled. On the contrary, they turned into an urban nightmare. In the 2020s neighbourhoods and urbanity are more connected, fewer cars are used and pedestrian lifestyles are prefered.

‘In Berlin, we have been led to believe that large-scale projects - like the transformation of the two airports - proceed very slowly,’ explains Willemeit. ‘We need unconventional partnerships to find commercially viable solutions, and we shouldn’t wait for a single international player to give us one.’

Another idea is for the new ICC to be open to all, without a ticket, staying accessible late into the night. A possible model for that is Oodi, Helsinki’s central library, which provides space to make music, play video games, and study. Public space, such as that of a library with a multitude of uses, is vital for an open society. Werner adds: ‘We can turn this symbol of failure and stasis into a symbol. It is possible when municipality, investors, and cultural politics get together.’

When asked why they took on such a volatile project, Willemeit muses on the decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when East and West experienced tech-fuelled optimism. ‘This building, spaceship on the outside, plush on the inside, embodies this hope for the future.’ He adds: ‘As architects, we have a great affinity to positive visions of the future.’

icc.berlin

Atelier Ko joins the Wallpaper* Architects Directory 2026 – welcome this young Benin practice into our annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios.

Who: Atelier Ko

Osvaldo Gounon and Kemi Amede founded Benin-based Atelier Kọ in 2022. They both studied architecture in Benin and then abroad in Strasbourg and Bordeaux, respectively. Gounon and Amede want to help improve the architectural landscape in West Africa. Through their work, they aim to create buildings that are meaningful, contextual and useful.

Atelier Kọ works across both residential and hospitality projects, and their approach is rooted in the systematic application of bioclimatic principles. Whether it’s a new-build or a renovation project, the team is keen on creating authentic projects and is strongly inspired by local culture, materials, climate and ways of living. ‘We try to design architecture that is contemporary without losing its connection to place,’ Gounon and Amede explain.

Benin itself has the strongest influence on their practice. ‘The context, the climate, landscapes, building traditions, social habits and cultural references,’ they explain. ‘We are also influenced by the need to reinterpret local know-how in a contemporary way, so that our projects are not nostalgic, but anchored, efficient and relevant today.’ One of their biggest challenges is the local construction ecosystem; few established professional companies exist, and some traditional skills and techniques are gradually being lost.

What: Maison Itan

The restoration of this Aguda, or Afro-Brazilian house, built between the 19th and early 20th century in Benin, Africa, demonstrates Atelier Kọ’s considered approach to the modernisation of heritage buildings. Four independent units are divided equally over the ground and first floor. The two upper-storey apartments are accessible via existing external staircases.

The main facade has been renovated without altering its original configuration and finished in a pink Siena earth coating. Internally, a cement screed floor is a like-for-like replacement of the original. And at the rear, the new north-facing terrace creates a connection between the main building and the shared garden. Here, clean, uniform lines contrast with the decorative main façade. Bespoke timber joinery has been employed for the supporting columns, decking and the screening, while the roof has been re-covered in terracotta tiles that complement the pink hue of the main facade.

Why: Architects Directory 2026

When the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory was conceived in 2000, it was built as our bespoke international index of emerging architectural talent. Now in its 25th edition, our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe (now comprising over 500 alumni) champions the best and most promising young studios - a snapshot of talent showcasing inspiring work from all corners of the Earth with an emphasis on the residential realm.

This year’s anniversary survey includes 30 young studios (one for each of the 30 years of Wallpaper*), from Australia, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Ghana, Greece, France, Ivory Coast, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, India, Morocco, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, and Vietnam. Welcome to the promise, ideas and exciting architecture of the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026.

atelier-ko.com

Located in a spectacular spot on Spain’s Costa Brava, the Staempfli House is new to the market via Sotheby’s International Realty in Spain. Built on the seafront in the town of Cadaqués in the heart of the Cap de Creus Natural Park, the terraced house has balconies that overlook the town’s main beach.

The Staempfli House was built in 1958 for the Swiss-born art dealer George William Staempfli (1910-1999). Staempfli moved to the US in 1935, took up a role at the venerable New York dealership of M. Knoedler & Company and served as curator of paintings at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts from 1954 to 1956. In 1959, he set up his own dealership, the Staempfli Gallery on 77th St, with his second wife, Emily McFadden Staempfli.

This Catalonian house served both as a bolthole and a place to entertain the European artists he represented. The town itself was a favourite spot of Salvador Dalí (the Casa-Museu Salvador Dalí is a short walk away on the adjoining bay) and other key artists including Picasso, Miró, Duchamp and Richard Hamilton were also visitors.

The house was extensively rebuilt in the late 50s by the British architect Peter Harnden and Italian architect Lanfranco Bombelli, partners in the exhibition design specialists PGHA Peter Graham Harnden Associates. Harnden and Bombelli were also regular visitors to Cadaqués and built extensively for themselves and other artists in the region.

The Staempfli House fulfilled a dual role as residence and museum, with house guests including Dalí and Duchamp, along with Isamu Noguchi, Harry Bertoia, and Xavier Corberó, renowned for his impressive house in Barcelona. The house retains these qualities in the present day, blending traditional tiles and timber with (then) state-of-the art kitchen and bathroom fittings, giving off an eclectic mid-century vibe.

Elements like the floating fireplace with integrated seating, the tiled ‘water mirror’ sculpture terrace, timber-clad ceilings, niches, arches and integrated furniture all come together to create a house that demands to be a backdrop for art and design.

Staempfli retained his New York gallery until 1988, representing Dalí alongside the Belgian realist Paul Delvaux and the neo-figurative artist Elmer Bischoff, amongst others. In retirement, Staempfli moved to Maryland, where he died in 1999.

The house in Cadaqués passed into similarly enlightened ownership, retaining its strong creative vibe. The town itself continues to be an artistic haunt into the present day, with museums and galleries adjoining the more traditional beachside restaurants and bars of the region.

Staempfli House, Cadaqués, Spain, €9,500,000, Spain-SothebysRealty.com, @Spain.SothebysRealty

Darren Petrucci considers each commission within the specifics of its place and within the context of his architecture practice. A recently completed Arizona home outside Phoenix is another entry in his ever-evolving approach to desert-based design.

In addition to considering responsive materiality set within arid conditions, 'recurring sensibilities happen in my work,' Petrucci explains. 'One of them is that the house is iconic in some form - something memorable or totalising.' In this particular case, 'the iconic form is a long, bent bar. We maximised the horizontal distance the lot could accommodate to capture that view and become a ridge line across the hill. Then the walls shift and move to adjust to the context.’

Tour this powerfully minimalist Arizona home

The strikingly contemporary home, dubbed the Shifted Horizon House and built for a family of four, faces landmark Camelback Mountain. Previous projects Petrucci completed with his firm, A-I-R (Architecture-Infrastructure-Research), also sit within view. 'We were hiking and realised we could perfectly frame Camelback Mountain,' recalls Petrucci, who is also a professor in the Design School at Arizona State University, of the site.

What developed was a split-level home with a plan in the aforementioned shape. The brief called for a home that would be ‘elegantly austere and really clean' in every respect - from the angular massing to the light switches, which eschew any digital functionality in favour of analogue tactility. Volumes constructed of concrete masonry unit (CMU) 'emerging out of the desert' interlock with a mass of stucco built without control joints, Petrucci says about the challenge.

The effort became an opportunity to explore the interplay of darker surfaces awash in the Arizona sun. 'The light is so intense that when you make a darker interior, it emphasises the interior and the light,' Petrucci says. 'The analogy I typically give a client is a football player putting black under his eyes to reduce glare.'

Dynamic indoor-outdoor spaces were achieved using materials including dark polished concrete flooring, grey-hued CMU block, and stucco — the latter of which A-I-R typically keeps to a minimum. The block itself is a conventional, standardised material, but its double-score profile, applied with careful customisation, 'creates this textured, fabric-like pattern on the wall,' Petrucci adds. 'It's all about the detail,' so he collaborated with builder Jason Smith of Identity Construction to additionally score certain blocks at the corners to repeat the pattern, making the material 'feel more monolithic.’

The stucco is a key element in absorbing and transforming natural light. 'It can look blue-purple, or warmer,' Petrucci says, referencing the Japanese neutral chromatic concept of rikyu, which here serves as a bridge to shift with the changing sky and a link to the ground. In the primary spaces, many of the materials and finishes are one and the same.

A devotee of John Lautner, Petrucci has long been fascinated with the organic modernism pioneer’s theorising about the foundational spatial concepts of the 'canopy' and the 'cave.' The Shifted Horizon House integrates a third element. 'With every project there's a piece that's carved, and something that becomes the heat shield—and in between is "the court." It's like a courtyard inside the building.'

The residence's 15-foot-high central space, illuminated by clerestory windows, feels like a pavilion, with floor-to-ceiling glass panels that fully pocket to connect to the outdoors. 'You can think of the whole thing as a cave, a solid that's been carved out, but there are moments when you feel like the roof is a canopy,' he observes.

Other details and gestures establish scale and considerate touch points. A handrail transitions into the powder-room door handle, for instance, and nine-foot-tall, wood-lined walls add warmth to the multifunctional great room. 'It has a brutalist feel to it in many ways, but the curves and the wood ribbon that runs through the house are intended to bring a softer, more supple feeling,' Petrucci notes.

The 'wet edge' pool appears like a reflecting pool, with a hot tub border that disappears beneath the waterline, and the property features desert-appropriate landscape design by Phoenix-based Kris Floor of Floor Associates. The dramatic, double-sized, carved-out fireplace, built of CMU, continues a datum line in concert with the kitchen island and television. These decisions operate holistically on multiple levels, creating a testbed for ideas about desert living. 'It organises everything. Because of that alignment, I believe you relax. It keeps you grounded,' Petrucci says.

theairsite.com

Every year, the Wallpaper* Architects' Directory spotlights the emerging practices shaping the future of architecture. For its 2026 edition, our annual survey features 30 studios from around the world whose work is redefining residential design through fresh ideas, local knowledge and ambitious thinking. Among them is Civil Architecture, a young Bahrain- and Kuwait-based practice exploring how contemporary architecture can respond to the Gulf's climate, history and rapidly changing urban landscape.

Who: Civil Architecture

Straddling two Middle Eastern countries, Bahrain and Kuwait, Civil Architecture is the brainchild of two architects – Ali Ismail Karimi (registered architect in the former territory) and Hamed Bukhamseen (registered architect in the latter). Founded in 2017, the studio was set up as a response to the needs of our time, asking what it means to ‘produce architecture in a decidedly uncivil time, presenting a new civic character for a global condition,’ the two directors say.

A desire to find alternative ways to inhabit their region is central to the duo’s architectural explorations. This is not only about thinking critically, but also about physically intervening and creating solutions, the founders believe: ‘The Gulf is one of the centres of the globe's metabolism, and its architecture is a reflection of larger alchemical and economic transformations worldwide.’

‘The combination of design projects, exhibitions, research work and publications we feel positions us as a practice that attempts to define its context and the ways to respond to it.’

Civil Architecture has worked on a variety of projects, from exhibition design and publications to homes and civic buildings in the region, but its portfolio was built around strategic decisions, reinforcing its inherent fascinations. ‘We work in thematics, picking one-to-two-year projects internally that shape our interests, allowing us to develop an aspect of the practice and research trajectory. The influence fluctuates along these lines, allowing different pre-oil narratives, precedents, or ways of directing the practice to new formal projects,’ the pair explains.

What: House With Seven Gardens

It is not unusual for Gulf region houses to feel introverted. A mix of local traditions and climatic conditions means that often, residences here are courtyards that face inward - seemingly blank and windowless from the streetside. House with Seven Gardens was a response to a desire to maintain a healthy balance between those age-old ways of arranging domestic space and contemporary building codes, which typically dictate two to three-metre setbacks from the plot boundary – which effectively invites that ancient courtyard typology to be inverted.

Located in the suburban neighbourhood of Diyar Al Muharraq in Bahrain, the project takes advantage of the gap created between that setback and the boundary wall to create ‘miniature gardens in multiple courts.’ This also allows for each room to have its own courtyard, which in turn maintains its own planting and lighting conditions - and therefore, character. Additional openings on the street-facing wall ensure the building has a relationship with the context around it, too.

Why: Architects Directory 2026

When the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory was conceived in 2000, it was built as our bespoke international index of emerging architectural talent. Now in its 25th edition, our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe (now comprising over 500 alumni) champions the best and most promising young studios - a snapshot of talent showcasing inspiring work from all corners of the Earth with an emphasis on the residential realm.

This year’s anniversary survey includes 30 young studios (one for each of the 30 years of Wallpaper*), from Australia, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Ghana, Greece, France, Ivory Coast, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, India, Morocco, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, and Vietnam. Welcome to the promise, ideas and exciting architecture of the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026.

civilarchitecture.org

There is one name almost inextricably bound to Palm Springs’ mid-century architecture: the American architectural firm Palmer & Krisel. The partnership between architect William Krisel and developer George Alexander produced thousands of homes that came to define the clean lines, indoor-outdoor living and innate optimism of the region’s famous desert modernism. Yet what many people don't realise is that the architectural language that transformed Palm Springs was first explored not in the desert, but in California's San Fernando Valley – more commonly known as, simply, ‘the Valley’.

Now on the market is one of the earliest examples of Palmer & Krisel's collaboration there. Completed in 1954, this home in Corbin Palms, Woodland Hills, belongs to a neighbourhood that served as an important testing ground for the design principles that would become synonymous with California modernism. Today, Corbin Palms remains one of Southern California's most significant – yet often overlooked – mid-century modern enclaves.

This renovated post-and-beam residence expresses many of the architectural ideas that would soon define Palmer & Krisel's celebrated communities. An exposed timber structure, soaring vaulted ceilings, clerestory glazing and an open-plan layout fill the interiors with natural light, while expansive walls of glass beckon the outdoors in. The emphasis on openness, climate-responsive design and economy of means – achieving the greatest architectural impact with the fewest necessary elements – would become hallmarks of the firm's later work in the desert.

The home’s recent renovation honours that legacy. Contemporary materials and modern systems have been integrated without compromising the original architecture: a kitchen with custom white oak cabinetry, quartz countertops and polished concrete floors sits easily within the home's framework, while a restrained material palette keeps the focus on the expressive post-and-beam structure at the heart of the design.

Outside, the integration of architecture and landscape – central to Palmer & Krisel's vision of California living – is evident. A swimming pool, outdoor kitchen, dining terrace, mature citrus trees and landscaped gardens extend the home's living spaces into the open air.

While Palm Springs will always be most closely associated with Palmer & Krisel, Corbin Palms deserves recognition as the place where many of the ideas that would define California modernism first took shape. For the home’s next custodian, this is not just any mid-century residence – it is an opportunity to own a chapter in one of the most influential stories in American residential architecture.

The Palmer & Krisel home is listed with The Value of Architecture for $995,000.

Casa da rua Escócia is located in a verdant part of São Paulo. Designed by local studio FGMF Arquitetos, the new house doesn’t cover the largest floor area. Instead, clever design plays spatial tricks with the site to maximise the sensation of being immersed in nature. As the architects note, the house was ‘conceived as an exercise in restraint, the project prioritizes the outdoors, turning the garden into its true protagonist.’

From above, the house wraps around its site, presenting a boundary wall to its neighbours whilst breaking up into a series of angular, fractured spaces overlooking the slim garden plot. This façade is clad in wood and punctured by flush-fitting shutters that can be opened up to reveal sliding glazing within.

The ground floor can be entirely opened up to the garden, with the cantilevered forms on the levels above providing varying levels of shade throughout the day. There is a certain poetic intent here,’ the architects write, ‘these volumes evoke tree canopies, gently shading and protecting the path below, where slender pillars — like trunks — define a small, constructed grove.’

It is certainly a verdant space. Densely layered sub-tropical planting terminates every vista, adding to the feeling of a house immersed in nature. Clever planning creates a multiplicity of angles out, across and through between interior and exterior space, an effect heightened still further by the sliding glass doors opening off the ground floor reception spaces and animated by the play of light from the pool.

The main reception space is reached directly off the main entrance. This is a double-height area that forms the core of the house, bisected by a first-floor level bridge that unites the bedroom areas. There’s also a sunken media room on this level; here, the light is modulated with just a slit of glass revealing the garden.

Outside, a generous terrace includes covered areas as well as space for a barbeque and dining area and a patio adjoining the pool. The house splits the site to allow for a smaller, more private terrace at the rear.

The main staircase leads up to what the architects call the ‘tree canopy’, a level with family bedrooms and a guest suite above the media room. The structure uses a combination of poured concrete and steel frame. The concrete is exposed at the rear and side boundaries to serve as an enclosure that disguises what is within, while a more lightweight timber-clad steel structure is used for the first floor level. In this respect, the house’s construction mirrors the sense of a visceral, earthy ground level beneath a canopy of timber and vegetation.

‘This is a house of modest footprint but remarkable spatial richness,’ say FGMF, a firm founded by Lourenço Gimenes, Rodrigo Marcondes Ferraz and Fernando Forte. ‘It is a place where architecture dissolves into landscape, and where every gesture seems to invite the eye outward, as if the house itself were almost not there.’

Australian practice Matt Goodman Architecture Office makes it into the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026, our latest annual round-up of exciting emerging architecture studios.

Who: Matt Goodman Architecture Office (MGAO)

Matt Goodman Architecture Office (MGAO) favours simplicity. The Australian firm, which was founded in 2016, works with robust yet familiar materials to create residential projects across the country that balance function with beauty.

Architect and founder Matt Goodman strips back complex project briefs and injects them with a minimalist simplicity through natural materials and a refined palette. ‘I am driven by my desire to design through construction,’ shares Goodman. ’I came into architecture relatively late. Once I found my passion, I knew architecture was the profession for me. I wake up every day driven by the desire to do good work. I hope this motivation stays with me until the day I breathe my last breath.’

While many a studio tries to distinguish itself from its peers, Goodman is more focused on creating projects that are quiet and considered. He tells Wallpaper*: ‘It seems like most people these days are trying to stand out from the crowd – for one reason or another. I feel I am more focused on trying to fill the space behind the crowd.’

Goodman’s evident sense of peace in finding his purpose seems reflected in MGAO’s works, which exude a considered calmness.

What: Olive Street Cabin

When Goodman designed Olive Street Cabin, he was faced with his most challenging client yet – himself. The house, perched on a hillside in Separation Creek in Victoria, Australia, was designed for the architect’s own family. The design recalls that of ‘fibro’ beach shacks – basic holiday homes popularised during the 1950s and 1960s – a number of which had been lost to local bushfires in 2016.

This contemporary take is robust and bushfire-safe, constructed from Colorbond steel, blackbutt timber, and Barestone cladding chosen for its durability. Inside, it has two bedrooms and a bathroom, while the living spaces open up towards the expansive vista, uniting indoor and outdoor living.

The single-storey rectangular volume unveils itself slowly. The corrugated façade slides back to channel visitors into the main living space, which opens up to the central feature: the windows.

Taking up an entire wall, the back windows frame the ocean. The landscape has always been a main source of inspiration for the architecture firm, as Goodman explains: ‘The contexts in which we practice are my biggest influence. The local context of a specific project has always interested me, and [has led to] a desire to respond sensitively to these sites. We have been lucky enough to work in some stunning landscapes – and I am always drawn back to the power of these places, their character and history.’

MGAO’s cabin is compact and considered. Every detail serves a purpose in a project designed for enjoying the views and the coastal setting.

Why: Architects Directory 2026

When the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory was conceived in 2000, it was built as our bespoke international index of emerging architectural talent. Now in its 25th edition, our annual listing of promising practices from across the globe (now comprising over 500 alumni) champions the best and most promising young studios - a snapshot of talent showcasing inspiring work from all corners of the Earth with an emphasis on the residential realm.

This year’s anniversary survey includes 30 young studios (one for each of the 30 years of Wallpaper*), from Australia, Bahrain, Benin, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Ecuador, Ghana, Greece, France, Ivory Coast, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, India, Morocco, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, and Vietnam. Welcome to the promise, ideas and exciting architecture of the Wallpaper* Architects’ Directory 2026.

mgao.com.au

The opaque, geometric concrete volumes of this new Miami house belie the dramatic expression and spatial generosity of its interiors. Welcome to Cherokee House, a project named after the Miami Beach street it sits on, which inspired the intention to pay tribute to the people whose rich cultural heritage, artistry, and enduring legacy the street name represents. The luxurious home was designed by Colombian Karlos Perez (whose own Medellin House is an ode to tropical modernism) and his practice StudioKP2, in collaboration with Corradi Group.

Discover a new Miami house by StudioKP2

In the case of this Miami house, Perez pulled out all the stops to craft a building that feels rich, layered and contemporary. 'The overall feeling I want this home to invoke is admiration and awe. I want it to be a surprising and exciting experience to walk through it. I always aim for epic artistry, something brand new that the visitor hasn’t seen before. The house offers exceptional privacy while maintaining an open, airy feel, thanks to its expansive living spaces,' he explains.

Mass, materiality and light play a key role in defining the home's mood and atmosphere. The composition comprises two primary, blocky concrete elements and a third, lighter, glazed one, which connects the two. Wood, stainless steel and stone dominate, proposing an exterior and interior that flow together effortlessly and as one.

Meanwhile, even though the street facade may feel mysterious, with few openings, and the entrance sequence feels compressed, once through it and inside, the home doesn't feel insular at all – swathes of glazing connect the living areas with a green, surrounding garden throughout.

The living room and kitchen, in particular, flow together as one open, inviting space. This is also Perez's own favourite spot in the property: 'It’s designed to bring people together and inspire meaningful moments with family and friends. The seamless connection to the outdoors creates a relaxed, airy atmosphere where the interior and exterior blend effortlessly.'

Responding to Miami's subtropical climate, the home makes the most of its terraces and indoor/outdoor living opportunities, which include shaded open-air living spaces and a spacious swimming pool.

Spanning two main levels, the Miami house has its ground floor entirely dedicated to the entertaining and social parts of the home, while upstairs are three bedrooms (one of which is the primary suite with its own walk-in wardrobe). Meanwhile, the circulation core becomes an event in itself, taking the shape of a wide, sculptural staircase.

The result speaks for itself – and the feedback Perez has already received is gratifyingly aligned to his original design intention, he says: 'Several neighbours have come up and affirmed the amazement I wished to invoke. One of them said it’s a true masterpiece that stands out from all other houses in Miami Beach. I feel like my mission is completed when I’ve caused an emotional impact, even if it’s negative. I want our projects to invoke some kind of reaction, make you feel some type of way, preferably inspired.'

studiokp2.com

In a new Wallpaper* summer series, 'Objectify,' architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Meet the Campari Soda bottle, the design that houses the country's favourite aperitif

Carlo Ratti on the Campari Soda bottle

It announces itself by silhouette alone. Around six in the evening between June and October, it becomes the destination of a collective migration, the pivot around which Italian life reorganizes itself. This is the Campari Soda bottle, the first single-serve aperitif in history.

To design it, in 1932, Fortunato Depero simply turned a glass upside down. It has stayed the same ever since: a frosted, inverted goblet, without a label, the name etched into the glass. In the same way, Campari inverted the idea of the aperitif, which stopped being something mixed by the bartender and became a prêt-à-boire, a drink already sealed, fresh and pre-mixed. An exact measure, one that stays cold and never goes flat.

The liquid inside the bottle has older origins. Gaspare Campari, the tenth child of a Lombard farmer, perfected the secret recipe in Novara (a city between Milan and Turin) in 1860, colouring it with cochineal, a parasitic insect. His son Davide, who grew up behind the counter at the Caffè Campari in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (the city's famous shopping arcade), turned the family business into an empire.

The bottle had no ordinary designer. Depero was a leading figure of the Futurist movement, part of the inner circle of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and believed that advertising was 'the most vital of the arts.' Futurism, though, was no mild faith. It celebrated speed, machines and war, and it soon fell in with Mussolini's regime. In 1943 Depero published A Passo Romano ('At the Roman Step,' a reference to the goose-step march), a book of openly fascist verse that he tried to have forgotten after the war.

In a similar way, the Campari bottle became the opposite of everything its author believed in. Another about-turn. Futurism exalted speed and strength, so much so that it launched a crusade against pasta, that 'passéist food' which 'weighs you down, brutalises, deludes you as to its nutritional value, and makes you sceptical, slow, pessimistic.'

Today the Campari Soda accompanies one of the least futurist rituals one could imagine, the pleasure of lingering in the sun over an aperitif, your gaze lost in the melting ice. A bottle born to embody a militant, nationalist modernity is bought, more often than not, in the little grocery shop downstairs. Same cone, same red, opposite meanings.

What do all these about-turns tell us? That design does not follow simple paths. Objects are born for a precise purpose and within a particular cultural context, but then they resurface elsewhere with unexpected meanings.

It is much like natural evolution, used to make sense of the artificial world ever since Samuel Butler's 1863 pamphlet Darwin among the Machines, a long chain of trial and error in which success is impossible to predict. Iterations, as engineers would say, do not respond linearly. Forms survive, migrate, adapt; meanings transform. One generation after another, everything can turn upside down.

When the day ends, the bottle sits empty on the metal table, refracting the last light of evening. An avant-garde that wanted to conquer the future has ended up bottling the present: red, cold and stubbornly idle.

About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti

Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: ‘Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?’ Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.

Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: ‘objects should keep us company’. Especially during this scorching summer.

A Welsh cottage, White Breakers, has been reimagined for the 21st century, courtesy of London-based architecture studio Unknown Works. The aim was to redesign an existing single-storey house on the edge of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park to improve both functionality and sustainable architecture – and to do so in the 'stealthiest' way possible.

Explore this reimagined Welsh cottage

The house offers long views of the Irish Sea and features large windows that bring in the natural vistas in all the main spaces. The architects sought to enhance this, implementing a muted colour palette inside and out, with dark colours outside and bright whites and timber accents inside. The slick look achieved makes the house discreet as well as warm and sophisticated.

Energy efficiency was a huge priority for the team and its client. Ensuring a low carbon footprint, both in terms of construction and the home's eventual habitation and operation, informed many of the design decisions. Keeping things nature-friendly was also crucial. A bat box was installed on the building's exterior, for example.

The clients, a pair of creatives with a main base in London’s Notting Hill, are a long-term Unknown Works collaborator – their London home was the practice’s first completed project, in 2016. This allowed the team to have flowing, in-depth discussions, working through the elements of the structure that needed updating and the best ways forward in each case.

It was ‘a bit of a Frankenstein building’, says Unknown Works director Kaowen Ho. ‘It was typically energy inefficient, like so many properties of its era, built with ad hoc extensions and very little thought given to the lifecycle of the building or how it might be used in the future, let alone sustainability or biodiversity. The house also showed signs of water ingress, thermal bridging and damp, amongst other critical construction flaws, whilst the interior was a warren of small spaces with no sensible layout or flow.

‘Overall, this is a stealthy, subtle and restrained design,’ he adds, ‘with the low-slung black, even brutal, exterior giving way to a very soft and bright interior, offering the warmth and welcome of a proper family home.’

unknown.works

A simple, minimalist enclosure surrounds this Osaka house, carefully concealing the richness that unfolds within the new-build home, designed by Apollo Architects & Associates. The project, a family residence set in a sleepy neighbourhood of the Honshu port city, is titled Moment – and explores moments of everyday spatial drama subtly, as befits the Japanese architecture tradition.

Tour this contemporary Osaka house

The clean, blind wall that surrounds the residence allows one of its key architectural features – its timber-lined, 1.8m-deep eaves – to be seen from the outside, hinting that there's more than meets the eye to this seemingly modest Osaka house. Stepping through the garden gates from the street, visitors cross a generous terrace and garden to approach the main home's glazed volume, topped by the slender feature roof.

The architects worked on the home's volume as if it were a gallery – crafting the entrance and the arrangement of lacquerware, woodwork, bonsai, and decorative artworks in a way that nods to an exhibition space. The living areas' double-height interiors also afford a luxurious generosity of space, underlining the same approach.

A central staircase, placed within sight of the main entrance, punctuates the home's more social areas and leads upstairs to a mezzanine library and study area. Beyond it, children's rooms and a guest room are tucked away towards the opposite end of the plan. The primary bedroom is placed on the ground floor, right underneath.

The home was designed to feel just as impressive at night as it is during the day, the architects say: 'At night, carefully arranged lighting accentuates the walnut ceiling boards on the underside of the roof eaves, further articulating the home’s nuanced richness.'

They add: 'A dry garden planted with vintage olive trees and other greenery lines the perimeter of the residence, integrating harmoniously with the modern architecture. Over time, as additional plantings, outdoor furniture, and artwork are gradually introduced, the residence is intended to age gracefully and continue evolving with its inhabitants and their lifestyles.'

apollo-aa.jp

Showcasing the world's most exceptional homes is what we do at Wallpaper*. The Architecture Edit is our monthly celebration of that mission – a running exploration of just how varied contemporary residential architecture can be, bringing together the houses that impressed us most each month for their design thinking, ingenuity and craft.

This month’s finds span continents, eras and philosophies: a converted canalside studio in Delft and a snow-set cabin in rural Ontario; a stone shepherd's shelter on Tinos and a stilted timber cabin above the Douglas firs of the San Juan Islands; a Pierre Koenig midcentury icon restored to its original bones and Frank Lloyd Wright's sole Tennessee commission.

A canalside studio

A traditional canalside house in Delft's city centre has been refurbished by DP6 Architects to create an open-plan living space, with a glazed rear façade added to the ground floor. What really caught our attention, though, was the new painter's studio in the rear garden. Built from Douglas fir with an exposed structure, the studio catches northern light through full-width roof lights and includes a kitchenette, WC and storage for canvases. Surrounded by new planting, an oval pool and mature trees, the space feels like a rural idyll despite its urban location.

A restored midcentury gem

Designer Jamie Bush spent years reimagining a 1966 Pierre Koenig house in Rancho Palos Verdes, stripping away a clinical early-2000s renovation to restore the architect's signature black posts, beams and folded-plate roof. Bush layered in craft through ipe-panelled walls, walnut cabinetry and custom terrazzo, merging midcentury modernist bones with an artisanal, textural sensibility, while landscape firm Terremoto activated the courtyards with drought-tolerant planting and an ocean-view fire-pit patio.

A wellness-focused townhouse

This subdivided Lisbon property was reimagined by architect McLean Quinlan for a wellness-industry client, creating a calming four-bedroom home plus a separate apartment and correcting acoustic issues left over from a 1990s split-level renovation. The ground floor houses a massage room, yoga studio, gym, cold plunge pool and infrared sauna – kept from feeling clinical through curtains and warm lighting – while the upper floors feature a kitchen overlooking the garden, Portuguese tiles and lime-washed walls.

A suburban brick pavilion

Olaver Architecture used a rare double-corner plot in Victoria, Australia, as the starting point for Hanslope House – a light brick pavilion that rethinks the conventional single-backyard suburban model. Two volumes are connected by a central corridor, splitting the garden into two distinct courtyards. Brick screens, terracotta gabled roofs and lattice details nod to the surrounding neighbourhood while giving the home a contemporary update, guiding visitors through a slow, layered sequence of arrival.

A stilted island cabin

This 400 sq ft guest cabin on Blakely Island in Washington's San Juan Islands was raised on stilts by Wittman Estes to minimise disturbance to the surrounding Douglas firs. Referencing Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden and Le Corbusier's Cabanon project, the compact 16-by-20-foot volume holds a kitchen, Murphy bed, bathroom and loft with bunk beds. Western red cedar construction, hardwood decking and large glazed openings – including a corner bathroom window – blur the boundary between interior and the great outdoors.

An organic-architecture renovation

Architect Nicole Hollis oversaw the renovation of Owl House, a 1970s Mickey Muennig design in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, previously restored by landscape architect Bernard Trainor. Muennig – an organic-architecture pioneer linked to Big Sur – built the redwood structure with radial trusswork, curved nautilus-shaped walls and sculptural skylights. Hollis restrained her intervention, keeping playful details like a mushroom-shaped kitchen window while introducing curved furnishings, hexagonal and terracotta tiles, and bold accents such as a red sofa and green sideboard.

A stone shepherd's shelter

Architect Kelly Spanou built this Cyclades home around a century-old stone keli, or shepherd's shelter, on the island of Tinos, retaining its irregular, non-orthogonal geometry rather than correcting it. Stone, raw concrete and reclaimed marble sourced from local artisans create an elemental, unpolished palette across two light-filled levels with sea views. The house embraces imperfection amid the mountainous terrain's dramatic natural forces.

A black cabin on a snowy slope

Silver Heights, a sleek black cabin set into a drumlin slope in Ontario's Trent Hills, feels almost embedded in the land. Architect Peter Braithwaite created it in concrete, black metal and rusted steel to withstand the region's climate, with white cedar adding warmth. Visitors move along a winding path to a weathered steel entrance, passing through a compressed corridor before the space opens into an airy room overlooking the Trent-Severn Waterway – a dramatic arrival.

Frank Lloyd Wright in Tennessee

This month, the Shavin House – Frank Lloyd Wright's only project in Tennessee – entered the market after nearly seven decades in one family. Seymour and Gerte Shavin commissioned it from Wright after getting married, rather than buying an existing house, and it was built in 1952 on Chattanooga's Missionary Ridge. The Usonian-style home features clerestory windows, mitred glass corners, a dramatic cantilevered carport and sweeping ridge-top views, and holds National Register of Historic Places status.

A renovated Somerset farmhouse

London studio Daytrip has renovated Springfield Farm, a 1990s house near Bath, turning it into a 250 sq m second home. While preserving the original tiered, timber-clad architecture, the designers added warmth with oak flooring, dark cherry timber, travertine and bronze finishes and bespoke and Scandinavian furniture. A new garden, wildflower meadows and a 12-metre pool complete the picture, while artworks by East London artists and a large bronze chandelier by Joe Armitage bring everything together with an unexpected flourish.

Nestled in its gently sloping site, this lush upstate São Paulo home, SL House by the Brazilian firm Padovani Arquitetos, features a low architectural composition that was conceived to flow with the landscape. The architects prioritised balancing voids and solid volumes to carve a residence that effortlessly integrates with the site's landscape – making nature a key element in the project's overall identity.

Inside SL House, a new upstate São Paulo home

The residence was crafted around the idea of layered volumes positioned so the eye and body are always directed toward the outdoors.

‘Each volume is envisioned as a layer unfolding to reveal the leisure area as the gravitational centre of the composition,’ says Lucas Padovani, founder of the firm. ‘The inspiration lies not in the mass itself, but in the void it frames: the outdoor space as the ultimate destination of every room.’

Positioned at the same level as the street, SL House is arranged to form a T-shaped axis. The 'voids' in the plan are enriched with intentional landscape design, which softens the transitions between the built volumes and provides constant access to nature.

However, achieving this proved more difficult than expected, as the architect explains: ‘The project's greatest challenge was transforming superimposition – a compositional principle that is inherently fragmented – into a unified whole. The intention was to create a house perceived not as a collection of juxtaposed volumes, but as a single architectural body, where the transitions dissolve within the experience of those who inhabit it.’

The firm used stone, which transitions smoothly from interior to exterior, and timber, which adds warmth, to unify the project. ‘These materials flow across the volumes, stitching together what geometry alone might otherwise separate,’ explains Padovani.

The ground floor is divided into two sections. One side houses two suites and a home office, while the other contains the kitchen, laundry and staff suite, as well as the main living spaces. A double-height living and dining area, which acts as the beating core of the home, physically connects all the different uses. Upstairs, visitors will find three suites, including the primary bedroom.

Says Padovani: ‘More than any particular room, the soul of the project resides at the threshold between indoors and outdoors – the point where architecture is no longer confined by walls and begins to merge with the landscape. The living room, gourmet area, and social spaces do not end at the glass or the deck; instead, they extend naturally into the leisure area, as though the house itself breathes through these openings.’

The landscape design was created as a mindful extension of the architecture, established via built planes, pathways, and stepping stones. Here, visitors will find a swimming pool, a reflecting pool, and a spa.

If there is one takeaway from the property, it’s the grand moment of suspension in the heart of the home. Padovani describes it as ‘almost one of quiet reverence before the scale of the space’. However, this sense of grandeur is not intended to create distance or a feeling of austerity; it is designed to be inviting. He adds: 'The expressive architectural gesture immediately translates into warmth, allowing the house to convey both a strong presence and a genuine sense of shelter.’

padovaniarquitetos.com

The Unesco World Heritage Committee has closed out its annual session with the decision to add 25 new sites to the World Heritage List. The additions span cultural and natural sites, from Iran's Alamūt Castle to Mongolia's Xiongnu nobility cemeteries and the historic medinas of the Comoros.

The list, reserved for places of ‘outstanding universal value to humanity’, increasingly embraces a newer category of heritage: 20th-century modernist architecture. Finnish works by architect Alvar Aalto and his collaborators, the modernist city centre of the Polish city of Gdynia, and the modernist architecture of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, have all been added to the list, signalling a growing recognition of modernism as the next frontier in heritage preservation.

Finland’s Aalto works

This designation covers 13 buildings across Finland constructed between 1928 and 1988, credited to architects Alvar Aalto, Aino Marsio-Aalto and Elissa Aalto and their studio. The buildings – a mix of civic, community and residential projects in both cities and rural areas – embody the modern movement's core aim of addressing social needs through architecture. The works are rooted in Finnish tradition, yet engaged with the international ideas sweeping through architecture over the 20th century.

Five of the 13 buildings are in Helsinki: the Aalto House and Studio Aalto in the Munkkiniemi suburb, the National Pensions Institute (KELA) building in the Töölö district, the House of Culture, and Finlandia Hall in the city centre. Visitors can explore the Aaltos' legacy further through a permanent exhibition at Finlandia Hall and a design museum exhibition running through January 2027. Finlandia Hall itself – refurbished between 2022 and 2025 – now offers short-stay apartments furnished with Aalto-designed pieces.

Gdynia, Poland

Unesco’s inclusion of city-centre Gdynia, on Poland’s Baltic coast, covers its key interwar-era streets and building blocks, showcasing how modernist planning principles were applied at scale to transform Gdynia into a major seaport for the first Polish Republic between the World Wars. The listing includes villas on Kamienna Góra hill and the surrounding residential architecture, which together mark a decisive break from historicist design traditions in Poland.

Tashkent, Uzbekistan

The Tashkent inscription recognises ten buildings constructed between the 1960s and early 1990s as part of the rapid reconstruction that followed the devastating earthquake that struck the Uzbek city in 1966. The buildings – which include museums, exhibition halls, hotels, a market, a metro station and residential complexes – show how Soviet-era planning merged with Central Asian spatial traditions, climate-responsive design and local craftsmanship to produce a distinctive architectural style.

The inscription makes Uzbekistan the first Central Asian country recognised for its 20th-century architectural heritage, and the buildings are now, by construction date, the youngest structures to hold World Heritage status.

A broader shift

The addition of these sites to the Unesco World Heritage List signals a wider reassessment within the heritage world of what counts as historically significant – extending protection not just to ancient monuments, but to the concrete, glass and steel of the 20th century.

When Olympia, originally known as the National Agricultural Hall, first opened in 1886, it welcomed a spectacle hosted by Paris Hippodrome Circus, which featured 400 performers, 300 horses, and six elephants. Since then, the Victorian event space in London’s West Kensington has hosted everything from international trade fairs to Vivienne Westwood's first runway show, and historic concerts by Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix.

Inside Olympia London

Nevertheless, in between such notable events, Olympia remained closed to the public for most of each year and had come to feel outdated compared to newer venues, such as east London's ExCeL centre.

However, this narrative has now changed. Olympia has undergone a massive £1.3 billion transformation and today features live music spaces, hotels, restaurants, and a new theatre alongside its preserved Victorian halls.

Spearheaded by Heatherwick Studio and SPPARC, the construction began in 2020 and the project has partially opened in summer 2026.

The architects decided to relocate all logistics underground and opened up 2.5 acres of accessible streets, elevated walkways and landscaped terraces. The masterplan also reimagined the 14-acre landmark to include year-round hospitality venues.

Entering via the street, visitors are welcomed to Olympia by two cascading escalators that run under the biophilic-inspired glass roofing. Reaching a mezzanine level, visitors enter the glazed ‘Canopy’.

Inspired by the design of Olympia’s original exhibition halls, by Sir Henry Edward Coe, it is formed of five curved structural steel arches. Each arch spans 22m, and together they support a transparent roof of 520 pleated glass panels. Beneath the glass canopy are various dining spots, from quiet cafes to buzzy restaurants.

Also part of the renovation are two new hotels: citizenM, a 146-room hotel inside the Grade II-listed National Hall; and Hyatt Regency London Olympia.

A new 3,800-capacity live entertainment venue, British Airways ARC, has just opened. Yet to come are a rooftop dining destination; and the 1,575-seat British Airways Theatre, the largest new permanent London theatre in almost 50 years (opening in 2027).

It’s estimated that Olympia will see annual footfall reach ten million across the whole destination and will contribute more than £600 million to the UK economy each year.

Says Thomas Heatherwick, founder and design director of Heatherwick Studio: ‘We’ve reimagined [Olympia] as part of London’s everyday life again, creating a new public street raised up in the air, sitting on top of the existing heritage halls. [This is] surrounded by London's largest theatre to open in 50 years [coming in 2027], a new performance venue, two hotels, offices, plus lots of places to sit and eat and be together. It is now a place where you can feel the city’s energy. The new Olympia reflects a quiet confidence, showing that we can take extraordinary British heritage and adapt it with care, imagination and purpose for the future.’

olympia.co.uk

Overlooking the leafy banks of the River Tiracol, a Goa villa, set on the state's border with Maharashtra, was conceived as an architectural platform for family life in dialogue with its untamed natural setting. Designed by the Mumbai-based architecture studio of Jugal Mistri, JMA Mumbai, the home, titled SeaSky Villa, was designed as a celebration of both the life inside it and its broader countryside context.

Tour a white Goa villa surrounded by leafy nature

The project's journey began in a slightly unconventional way. Mistri and the JMA team were not given a very specific brief in terms of the number of rooms or the surface area, or even stylistic restrictions. Instead, the architects were invited to create a physical expression of the practice's core principles of 'collaboration, community and context'.

The project's characterful site was a key driver in the design's development, the studio explains: 'The absence of fixed instructions allowed the architecture to emerge directly from the land. The first encounter with the site revealed no obvious vantage point or horizontal surface – only a continuous slope falling towards the river.'

Taking their cues from this environment, the architects went on to craft their spatial strategy – a home placed on a series of cascading 'plinths', arranged around a central axis formed by the road as it enters the property.

Broken down into smaller volumes and made to feel lighter through permeable pavilions and colonnades that define its façades, the villa now spans a deceptive 4,000 sq m. Three bedrooms are located on the ground level, orientated to look out towards the landscape, 'transforming each room into a private viewing instrument', the studio adds.

The top areas contain expansive living spaces, which unfold through a variety of uses – entertaining and family rooms (defined by bespoke open-grain timber veneer panel joinery), kitchen and dining areas, both indoors and outdoors, including a striking open-air swimming pool and deck. Meanwhile, on the lower level sits a double-height studio loft, designed for independent living, its resident able to opt in or out of the social life of the family that resides above.

jmamumbai.com

Following 20 years of fits and starts, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open to visitors on 11 December 2026, according to an announcement released today. The museum, designed by late architect Frank Gehry, will join a cluster of starchitect-designed cultural institutions on Saadiyat Island, a 10-square-mile landmass off the coast of Abu Dhabi.

The project, a partnership between the Guggenheim Foundation and Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, will be a temple to modern and contemporary art from around the world – a collection the museum has been amassing since 2009.

While details about programming and specific artworks have yet to be released, the museum says that it will display works across mediums, including painting, sculpture, film, installation, digital art and more. A 2015 exhibition titled 'Seeing Through Light: Selections from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Collection' included works by artists including Yayoi Kusama, Rachid Koraïchi, Robert Irwin, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Douglas Wheeler.

‘The museum’s art collection is uniquely local and global, centered in the region but with works from all continents,’ said Guggenheim Foundation director and CEO Dr. Mariët Westermann in a statement.

Gehry, who died in December 2025, conceived of the building as an assemblage of 10 conical volumes that together create a ‘skyline’ of stainless steel mesh, glass and onyx. The 125,000 sq ft structure will contain 30 galleries which surround a towering central atrium. The museum, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, ‘is designed to impress at every level.’

The Guggenheim Foundation first revealed that it would build a satellite museum on Saadiyat Island in 2006, a project that would join Guggenheim locations in New York, Venice and Bilbao, Spain – a Gehry-designed project so successful that it became a byword for urban revitalisation.

Reaching the project’s finish line, however, wasn’t without hurdles and controversies. Contract changes and economic strain caused the museum, first projected to open in 2013, to be delayed for years. The treatment of migrant labourers on Saadiyat Island construction sites also drew fire from human rights activists and artists, sparking protests and eventually leading Gehry to engage a human rights lawyer to monitor site conditions.

Still, said Westermann, the ‘Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will be a source of wonder, a hub of connection, and a place of curiosity and joy for people from the United Arab Emirates and the world.’

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will join multiple museums and cultural sites on Saadiyat island, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel; the Zayed National Museum, designed by Foster + Partners; the Abrahamic Family House, designed by David Adjaye; in addition to the under-construction Dar al Funoon Abu Dhabi, a performing arts centre also designed by Gehry.

This new architect's house – Draper Studio’s spectacular double-storey extension to a Victorian home in south London – maximises the drama within its classic terraced template, common around the capital. Designed for studio founder Adam Draper’s own family, the house had already been extended, setting a precedent for more involved and extensive works once the household had got used to the space and explored how best to make it work for many years to come.

Explore this south London architect’s house

‘[Because we’d been] living in the house a few years prior, knowing the location was great for schools and wanting a space for the next ten years, we discussed removing the existing lacklustre rear extension and maximising the home’s potential space at ground and first [floor levels],’ says Draper. ‘Although we got planning for a double-storey front extension, we worked out what was needed most: a full-width ground-floor rear extension to unify the three key spaces of a centrally accessed house, and a new double bedroom above.’

The major manoeuvre is a common one – taking out the rear façade and replacing it with a glazed, full-width extension for a garden-facing kitchen and family room. It’s a familiar device, especially with London houses, but Draper and his team have excelled themselves with the detail and materiality, stretching the budget wherever possible, from using spare stone bricks from other projects (‘kindly donated by my clients for use here’) to the most efficient brickwork patterns possible.

‘Recycling a repurposed material became a comforting theme during these radical changes to our home,’ says Draper. Some of the concrete foundations from the old extension structure were used as gabion walls in the rear garden, for example. The roof cladding is raw zinc, designed to patinate, while the glazing is low-key and unobtrusive anodised aluminium, and inside the walls are finished in limestone blockwork.

‘Although the CO2 saving is relevant, using [the limestone] as a textural finish that glows in the daylight from the skylight above is the true value here,’ says Draper. ‘The ground-level concrete floor was a bit of an experiment,’ he adds. ‘We cast terracotta tiles, stones, shells the kids had collected on holidays past – although I was correctly stopped from putting Lego in as a retaliation for all the times I’ve stepped on it. The floor’s finish has texture – it is deliberately not perfect, and warm underfoot.’

The primary material is the Redwood-pine timber frame, which is left visible throughout. ‘It’s everything in the space: a warm-feeling enclosure that feels linked to the main house in the winter and a pergola-like structure extending the garden when the sliding doors are cast open in the summer,’ says Draper. ‘With careful placement of rooflights, you’d hardly know there’s a double bedroom above with all the daylight flooding in.’

Much of the work was fabricated off-site to minimise disruption (and allow the family to stay put and save costs during the build). ‘Using materials that are real as opposed to finishes is also important, whether that be the concrete floor, the limestone blocks of the kitchen extension flank wall or the unpainted hemp plaster of the dining room,’ says Draper.

Using off-the-shelf lengths of timber also dictated the scale and rhythm of the frame, which in turn zones the 34 sq m extension into its different areas: kitchen, dining space and playroom.

As well as minimising off-cuts and sourcing second-hand materials where possible, the architects also salvaged elements like bathroom brassware, all in the name of lowering the environmental impact of the build. ‘It’s good to confront waste first hand,’ Draper admits. ‘Can stuff be repurposed, reused or retained, not just as an echo or a statement feature?’

The new house succeeds as both a laboratory of ideas and techniques and as a warm, inviting family home. ‘It’s a privilege to design your own home and explore ideas that I’ve been unable, to date, to convince clients to go with,’ says Draper. ‘It’s a little bit of material experiment, a narrative of what a home can be, all unified in a large, warm volume that finally links the house and enables the spaces to cohere.’

Draper.Studio

This summer sees a five-year vision come to life: a Cornish eco-cabin landscape combining sustainable living with ecologically minded design. On a former airfield in North Cornwall, Koto at the Point is the latest addition to award-winning resort development The Point at Polzeath. It comprises 17 ‘eco-lodge’ cabins set within 11 of The Point’s 240 acres, a gently sloping landscape of diverse trees, meadow, and bright perennials, stitched together by over 400m of traditional slate-and-soil Cornish walling.

Explore a leafy Cornish eco-cabin landscape designed by Darren Hawkes

Sustainability-minded since taking on The Point in 2012 – transforming its golf course and health club amenities and adding environment-conscious self-catering apartments – owners Eva and Jeremy Davies wanted this next project to be yet more future-facing. 'We wanted to leave a legacy,' explains Eva, 'to be able to walk away and be proud of what we’d made.' Gearing the development around the core principles of habitat provision, biodiversity increase and climate resilience, Koto at the Point was an opportunity for the couple to steward the land. 'It’s been a bigger challenge than we ever thought it would be,' says Jeremy, 'but it’s something that we can feel incredibly proud of.'

Koto at the Point’s origins began in 2020, during the first pandemic lockdown, where, in a sense, one form of cabin fever led to another. With an idea forming to build a range of modern, sustainable, Scandinavian-style holiday cabins within a landscape rooted in its local surroundings, Eva had discovered Devon-based architecture and design studio Koto, and felt their principles aligned. 'Growing up in Norway, I spent a lot of time outside, whether in the mountains, the sea, or the woods,' she explains.

'The architects at Koto had worked in a Norwegian practice in Oslo for ten years and were very familiar with the sense of indoor-outdoor living, and the word ‘Friluftsliv’ – ‘free air living’ – which is ingrained in the Norwegian vocabulary. That’s why I fell in love with the Koto concept, and how they came to design the cabins.' Early in the project’s development, Koto co-founder Theo Dales introduced the Davies to award-winning, Cornwall-based landscape designer Darren Hawkes, with whom the practice had previously collaborated. 'When Darren presented his first plans – including the 400m of walls snaking through the site – it was a big moment. We just fell in love straightaway with everything he put on paper.'

Operating from a studio in Fowey, on the south coast of Cornwall, Hawkes' work encompasses everything from townhouse gardens and country retreats to 2026’s gold-winning Chelsea show garden and a new Maggie’s garden at Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Stirlingshire. In the case of Koto at the Point, it was the opportunity to be involved from the project’s outset that first attracted him, right down to pegging out where the cabins would be sited. 'Normally an architect has already decided where a building will be placed, so to be able to really think about how people would live within and relate to the landscape was really exciting,' he says. 'Alongside the fact that Jeremy and Eva wanted to do this at such a high level, with a massive commitment to nature.'

Working collaboratively with an ecologist, Hawkes reconfigured the flat, roughly rectangular and formerly closely mown airfield into a more dynamic topography. 'I wanted to break it up as much as possible,' he explains, 'cutting and filling, and creating the sense of a little envelope around each building.' While a central swale directs rainwater runoff towards an irrigation pond at the bottom of the site, the three curving walls (known as ‘Cornish hedges’ – a protected characteristic of the Cornish countryside) add further complexity to the landscape.

Handcrafted by a local contractor and planted with wildflowers and structural shrubs, these provide exceptional habitat for invertebrates, birds and small mammals. The real masterstroke of landscape design, however, is in the avoidance of hard boundaries. 'The walls divide and split up various sections, but then we use areas of rough grass, meadow, lawn, and garden spaces as a further buffer between cabins,' Darren explains. 'Meandering paths allow people staying here to walk through the site, taking them through openings in the walls in a way that feels playful, particularly for children. Yet it becomes clear where you start to veer into private space.'

Intimately familiar with the environmental conditions particular to England’s south-west peninsula, Hawkes has found something of a natural design niche with coastal gardens. 'Most of our projects in Cornwall and Devon are adjacent to the sea, so understanding how to build and maintain gardens in these environments is something we’ve learned a lot about; we’re continually learning what survives close to the sea.' This knowledge played directly into the tree and large shrub selections Hawkes made for the site, including characterful, often multi-stemmed specimens of spindle, pine, dogwood and juniper, sourced from tree nursery New Wood Trees in Totnes.

So far, over 130 trees have gone into the site, says Jeremy, and their density will be increased year on year. 'We’re surrounded by a lot of farmland here in North Cornwall, so just to be planting trees in an area where there aren’t many is wonderful,' he adds. Ensuring their establishment, alongside that of the meadows, lawns, and elegant pocket gardens of colourful heleniums, sea hollies and soft ornamental grasses – which are set so beautifully against the black of the cabins – is head gardener Natalie Buse and The Point’s head greenkeeper, Tom Collings.

Though the life of this landscape will mature and develop over decades, its component parts are beginning to coalesce already, after only a few years, settling sympathetically into the surrounding coastal countryside. Poppies and daisies spill from the walls; architectural trees are framed through the cabin glass. Returning to monitor the site’s biodiversity, ecologist John Sproull recently recorded an encouraging wealth of wildlife, from painted lady and meadow brown butterflies to goldfinches and meadow pipits.

Koto cabin owners have delighted, too, in seeing deer pass through the site, Jeremy says. 'We feel very privileged to have been working with Darren on this project; he fully understood what we were looking to do, just as we understood what he wanted to create.' For Eva, it’s now a moment for taking stock. 'When we stop and look at what we’ve created, sitting in one of the cabins and looking out at the hedges and trees we’ve planted, it feels such a privilege to have been able to do this.'

More information at kotoatthepoint.co.uk, where a few cabins are still available to buy

darrenhawkes.com

The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, over the almost six decades since its opening in 1969, had undergone changes and alterations that had taken it away from its original vision. It was nothing incredibly dramatic, explains Lisbon-based architect Teresa Nunes da Ponte, who worked on the restoration alongside French conservation architect and museum specialist Frédéric Ladonne, but the effect was cumulative. 'A lot of bigger and smaller renovations over 60 years meant that a lot of original details had been lost along the way.'

So when the decision was made to renovate and update the museum, the plan was not to expand or radically reinvent the museum she says, but rather to 'return it to the principles and rules of the original project' and amplify what had always been so unique and rewarding about the building and its spaces; its relationship with the 18-acre lush woodland and landscaped grounds of the Gulbenkian Foundation around it.

Discover the restored Gulbenkian Museum in Portugal

The museum is built around a private collection that is extraordinary in scope, explains Gulbenkian Museum Director Xavier Francesco Solomon, ranging as it does from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia via China, Japan and the Islamic world to 18th-century French art and impressionist masterpieces.

Unlike many great museum buildings that ignore their future contents, this one, designed by architects Ruy Jervis d’Athouguia, Pedro Cid and Alberto Pessoa, was purpose-built for the collection. 'Every part of the building was thought out very carefully in response to it,' says Solomon.

One of the museum’s most unique features, and one that makes it different from most of its modernist counterparts, continues Solomon, is 'the relationship between the architecture, the collection and nature.' In the Gulbenkian museum, this means you can pore over one of the world’s most important collections of 14th-century Mamluk glass from Egypt and Syria against a backdrop of plants and trees, and you can admire Jean-Antoine Houdon’s Diana statue as the leaves of neighbouring trees create seductive dappled shapes across her plinth and the wall behind her in the afternoon sun.

But this many floor-to-ceiling windows also came at a cost, says Solomon. 'It became a nightmare in terms of conservation, and we could write a whole book about the different types of shutters and curtains that were put on the windows to deal with it.'

One of the first things the architects did was replace these curtains and shutters with several layers of subtler and more advanced protection. The bronze-tinted glass was covered in a UV-filtering film, and a micro-perforated fabric screen was placed inside the windows. These can be pulled up when there is no direct sun, but even when they are down, they allow for full and unhindered views of the landscape.

Specific trees and shrubs were also planted in the museum’s two courtyards and around the building that will create shade as they grow, especially in the section with the 18th-century paintings, explains Nunes da Ponte. The result is that the connection with the surrounding landscape has not only been restored but improved. As Solomon says: 'All the negative aspects of natural light are blocked so you can actually enjoy the original vision better than you would have in 1969.'

Similar technological improvements have been made to the glass vitrines and display cases, which have now been fitted with anti-reflective glass that allows for deep views without any glare. The lighting has also been upgraded by French lighting design agency ACL to recreate the warm golden glow that was a feature when the museum opened and to create a soft illumination of the walls and individual pieces from rails and cutouts in the ceilings.

In terms of spatial flow, several partition walls have been removed in the European galleries, and the display walls have been designed not to join up so that no rooms within rooms are created. These gaps between the walls create a sense of transparency and permeability that was very present in the original concept, says Nunes da Ponte, and can also be seen in the Foundation HQ building next door.

'The idea is that you are always getting a preview of what is coming next, which creates surprise and anticipation,' she says. In the same vein, the original slatted wooden screen between the Asian and European galleries, which allowed for tantalising glimpses of the Rubens’ and Rembrandts from the Japan and China gallery, had been replaced by an opaque wall during one of the renovations, creating a division between the sections. A slatted metal and wood screen has now been put back, reinstating that sense of a sequence and connection between the rooms.

A few hero materials are used to great effect throughout the project, including timber, concrete, bronze, stone, leather and silk (the latter on the walls and even ceilings in two of the rooms, including the magnificent and more contemporary Lalique gallery). There are no painted walls, so the colour always comes from the material itself, explains Nunes da Ponte. And a lot of care and attention has gone into material combinations. 'A rule of the original project was that you never had a granite plinth on top of a granite floor,' explains Nunes da Ponte. 'It would have to be a granite plinth on a Lioz marble floor or the other way around.'

The most controversial part of the project appears to have been the decision to reinstate the fitted carpet throughout the Europe galleries that had been removed in 2000 and replaced with hardwood flooring. It’s a slightly lighter colour than the original carpet, a greenish beige instead of a dark green, but it is a game-changer according to Solomon.

'The experience of walking on it is much more pleasant, and there’s a sense that after the more monumental Islamic and Asian galleries you are now in a much more domestic setting,' he says. 'With the previous polished wood floor you could see all the lights and paintings reflected in the floor.' Unusually for a major museum with a significant and very varied collection, the experience of visiting the Gulbenkian museum is refreshingly peaceful and soul-nurturing. Even more so since this thoughtful and deeply considered restoration.

gulbenkian.pt

Elizabeth Darling’s new monograph, Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922-1932, is a fascinating insight into the formation and professionalisation of the entity founded as the British Broadcasting Company in 1922 and granted a Royal Charter in 1927, becoming the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). From an ad hoc collection of offices and studios scattered around various London locations, the newly minted Corporation started a search for a site for a dedicated, purpose-built HQ later that year.

Explore the history of Broadcasting House and the BBC in this new book

This book is the story of that building, and the locations that preceded it, along with the architectural, interior and design decisions that were made to create what has been described as a ‘Palace of the Ether’. Broadcasting House, located at the meeting of Langham Place and Portland Place in central London, officially opened in May 1932.

In modernist architecture lore, Val Myer’s monumental, curved edifice, with its façade of Portland stone and evocative sculptural exhortations of the ethos and role of a national broadcaster, has always been slightly overlooked.

The structure was considered Modernism Lite, perhaps, a soft-pedalled version of the more muscular and ideologically pure approach demonstrated by contemporary structures like Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff’s De La Warr Pavilion (1935). For the diehard modernists, the Corporation’s most effective expressions of contemporary design were in the interiors.

However, as Darling chronicles, it was the interior work of Raymond McGrath, Edward Maufe, Wells Coates, and Chermayeff that really set a standard, creating contemporary studio interiors that seemed completely in sync with the BBC’s mission to educate and modernise. Chermayeff and his peers were praised for their use of modern materials and contemporary furnishing pieces.

And yet, many of these pioneering spaces were swiftly upgraded and overhauled, either through wartime destruction or through sheer expediency – broadcast technology was moving fast, and they were quickly outdated.

As the book also shows, modern interiors often sat side by side with more old-fashioned, traditional spaces, complete with ersatz fireplaces, drapes and libraries of leather-bound books. Regardless of the interior approach, the BBC set about presenting Broadcasting House as a central part of its identity, a role it continues right up to the present day.

This is a text-heavy book, rich with research and rewarding historic anecdote. It tells a story that is still being written, albeit with the BBC’s authority and role being challenged like never before.

'Palace of the Ether: Broadcasting House and the Architecture of the BBC, 1922-1932,' Elizabeth Darling, £45, LundHumphries.com

The canyons of Mission Hills, one of San Diego's most sought-after neighbourhoods, are home to the Bone Residence, one of Southern California's finest expressions of midcentury modern architecture. Commissioned to architect Richard Lareau by Jack Bone and completed in 1961, the residence is a symphony of warm cedar, glass walls and indoor-outdoor living. It is now on the market for $2.59 million.

The home embodies the philosophy that defined Lareau's career: that a house should do more than occupy its setting – it should engage with it. At the Bone Residence, a cascading series of decks and patios steps down the canyon, framing views of the downtown skyline, San Diego Bay, the Pacific Ocean and even Tijuana to the south. Inside, nearly every living space looks towards the canyon and the city beyond, while the post-and-beam structure – a hallmark of midcentury modern design – creates open, light-filled interiors.

The house also showcases many of the defining characteristics of California modernism: exposed structural framing that celebrates the building's construction, broad roof overhangs, strong horizontal lines and a restrained palette of natural materials, including timber and masonry.

Lareau is one of the architects most responsible for shaping San Diego's post-war identity. Completed only a few years after he established his own practice in the late 1950s, the Bone Residence helped define that architectural language, and is widely regarded as one of the finest-preserved examples of his work. Lareau would go on to design numerous custom homes throughout San Diego, as well as major institutional projects including much of the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University and the Mission Bay Visitor Center.

Although less celebrated than some of Lareau's later commissions, the Bone Residence remains one of the defining works of his early career and a landmark of San Diego's architectural identity. It distils the qualities that came to define California modernism: expressive yet lightweight structure, an effortless openness to nature and an architectural approach that treats dramatic topography not as a constraint, but as the foundation of the living experience.

The Bone Residence is listed with Keith York at Agents of Architecture.

In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Meet the Telepass, the design that ended the toll booth queue

Carlo Ratti on the Telepass

For decades, Italy’s great summer car exodus was captured by one well-defined image: the queue at the toll booth. Millions of cars on the A1, the A14, the A30 heading south, engines overheating, children crying in the back seat and, up ahead, a funnel of concrete. A frantic hunt for coins, tickets clenched between teeth, unnatural contortions through the diesel fumes of the car in front. The toll booth was a purgatorial rite in the fullest sense. Then, one day, a beep arrived.

We are in a garage belonging to Sixcom, an Olivetti spin-off, in late 1986. Three engineers, 24 and 25 years old, build a flat plastic transponder that an antenna can read while the vehicle is moving. One is versed in hardware, two in software. The prototype starts working within a 120 days. In 1989, in time for the Italia ’90 World Cup, the world’s first nationwide electronic toll-collection system arrives.

Over time, it would become a fully fledged mobility platform. An invention that earned one of Harvard Business School’s celebrated case studies, where it was even compared, in impact, to Netflix. As if innovation were the most interesting part. The most interesting part is the beep.

That confirmatory tone, the one you hear as the barrier lifts, is perhaps the most universally recognised sound of Italian motoring life. More than a horn, more than the rasp of a moped, more than the click of a speed camera. It is the sound of the toll booth disappearing. The Telepass has replaced purgatory with a single syllable. And today the same system has spread well beyond national borders, expanding into other countries.

The object itself is spectacularly ugly. A grey-beige rectangle of anonymous plastic, velcroed to the windscreen. The feeling, though – what the jargon calls UI/UX, user interface and user experience – is revolutionary. Like Nutella, the gadget has become a common noun. Italians do not say the ‘electronic toll-collection device’. They say the ‘Telepass’. When subscription prices doubled in 2024 and competition finally arrived, millions of Italians felt the strange sensation of discovering an object they had been looking through, without seeing it, for 30 years.

And for 30 years, the beep was also a data event. Each transaction records position, time, speed. Multiply all of it by ten million devices and two million daily transits and you have one of the largest real-time mobility-sensing networks in the world. At the Senseable City Lab, we have been studying exactly this kind of infrastructure, which reveals the breath of the city: where it congests, when it speeds up, and when it stops. The Telepass has done so since 1989, even before the expression ‘smart city’ was coined.

Summer has arrived, the exodus looms. Millions of Telepass units are preparing for their 15 seconds of glory: the barrier lifts, the beep confirms, Italy sets off again towards the sea. No halting, no coins, no ticket between the teeth. Purgatory is over. What remains is the beep.

About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti

Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: ‘Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?’ Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.

Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: ‘objects should keep us company’. Especially during this scorching summer.

carlorattiassociati.com

Dutch architects DP6 work across a variety of scales, from university campuses to town halls, sports centres and apartment buildings. The Delft-based practice has also turned its collective experience to a small number of exquisite private residential projects, including the secluded Villa Santpoort. For their most recent residential design, a painter's studio in their home city, DP6 is once again working in an urban environment, only this time at a much smaller scale.

Tour a modern painter’s studio and home in Delft

This commission, a house refurbishment and painter’s studio, is located in the heart of the city centre and involved not just the restoration of a traditional canalside row house, but the addition of a dedicated artist’s studio in the rear garden. Making the most of a generous garden plot – ‘a green oasis in the city centre’ – DP6 have inserted a low single-storey studio at the far end. Set apart from the cityscape, surrounded by new wild planting, it feels like a rural space adrift from the urban location.

One of the key aspects of the refurbishment was the re-shaping of the house’s ground floor and the rear façade in particular. By creating a new open-plan living, dining and kitchen space at the rear of the house, along with a new glazed rear façade, the architects have set up a dialogue between the existing house and the new studio. Each façade is fully openable, so in the summer months life can flow between the structures.

The garden includes new patios and an oval pool, along with natural planting that retains existing mature trees and winds new paths and beds around them. The studio has been built from Douglas fir timber, with exposed interior structure and a canopy above the exterior terrace, looking back towards the house.

Vital northern light is harvested via a strip of roof lights at the far end of the studio space; these run the full width of the building. The studio is also self-contained, with a WC and kitchenette and plenty of storage for materials and canvasses.

The architects have made extensive use of oak for the new elements in the main house. These include the kitchen and fireplace, as well as the open tread staircase and upstairs wardrobes. The original house was listed for its historic interest, and the front façade retains its traditional appearance, giving no indication of the new world that lies within.

In contrast to the compressed, efficient install that's often typical of high-end residential design efforts, Jamie Bush welcomed an extended timeline when transforming a midcentury Pierre Koenig house – a 1966 home originally designed by the Southern California modernism master.

‘It was this slow, layered process, which was wonderful,’ the Los Angeles–based, New York–bred designer says. The clients, who live in Washington, DC, bought the property as ‘a hideaway in California that they could escape to, but live a very different life. They tasked us to reimagine the house as a contemporary craftsman/artisan take on this midcentury treasure,’ Bush explains.

The four-bedroom, relatively compact house sits on a bluff in coastal Rancho Palos Verdes, a neighbourhood located south of Los Angeles. While the property was structurally intact, a prior renovation that Bush describes as ‘a clean, impersonal contemporary take’ on Koenig's celebrated post-and-beam work – which includes the famed Case Study Houses #21 and #22 – called for a soulful update (the project was first reworked in 2000 and subsequently again in 2014).

Revisiting this Pierre Koenig house's midcentury materiality

Bush took a hyper-sensitive approach to remove overly clinical interventions from the early 2000s. ‘This is a good example where Koenig would have black posts and beams and white walls, which we wanted to keep,’ he states. ‘Then there would be isolated moments of wood and colour with a lot of his buildings. It was an opportunity to bring in the crafted layer on top of this midcentury pavilion.’ As per the oft-followed West Coast impulse, exteriors and interiors would be seamlessly integrated, here in collaboration with SoCal native landscape gurus Terremoto.

Like all quality architectural rehabilitation projects that don't set out to make a time capsule, the founder of Jamie Bush + Co drew upon both intensive research and creative licence. ‘We basically did a partial restoration and reimagining of this house because they didn't want to recreate everything that was historical,’ he explains. His experience reviving other historical homes, such as John Lautner's Silvertop in collaboration with architect Barbara Bestor, informed the strategy.

So, the house's signature chevron-profiled folded-plate roof and its existing wood surface treatments, open floor plan, and footprint were to remain. Specific features begged for proper repair, notably the red brick-clad fireplace that had been swathed in dark grey by previous owners. Bush then took the bold yet fitting step of freshly coating the front door in a reddish-persimmon hue.

His handling of millwork illustrates how Bush identified and navigated certain currents in the Palos Verdes Koenig. ‘When many of these houses were built originally, they would have one craftsman that would build the cabinetry and the panelling,’ Bush notes. The primary bedroom is panelled in ipe tropical hardwood (this was preserved, as it was introduced during an earlier refresh), and the same cladding has now been extended to the library. The whole is articulated ‘in the same language’ as the building's exterior wood elements, resulting in ‘more enveloping and rich’ spaces.

He further explored material expression via walnut cabinetry and terrazzo surfaces in the kitchen and bathrooms. ‘There's a modesty and an economy, if you will, of using the same materials – maybe in different colours and in different ways – so there's like variations on the theme,’ Bush elaborates. When customising the earthy grey terrazzo mix, ‘I wanted chunky – that sort of slight primitiveness. It's not something necessarily that Koenig would use, but it felt right,’ he says. The result reads as refined Flintstones, less fictionally futuristic Jetsons.

A through-line of what he describes as ‘a modernist, natural aesthetic [with] a midcentury ethos of form and texture highlighting materiality’ emerged from this particular mix of furnishings, decor, and art that also operate as foils for the architecture's pronounced geometry. ‘It was a great challenge to heighten all the textures and the natural finishes and the wabi-sabi of the perfect imperfection in natural materials and patina of vintage pieces, and highlight it by eliminating strong colour,’ Bush observes. Nonetheless, artwork by the likes of Jonathan Ryan and Alexander Calder introduces subtle chromatic components.

Along with collectible objects of domestic and global origins ranging from George and Mira Nakashima to Sergio Rodrigues, Bush was drawn to historical and contemporary artisans and artists with California ties. Works by Florence Nolan, Peter Voulkos, Mattea Perrotta, Bradley Duncan, Casey Johnson, and Commune appear in the home's cosily scaled spaces. Outside, a large-scale, turquoise-hued installation commissioned from celebrated ceramic artist Stan Bitters animates a wall next to the pool, its reflection seen dancing on the water's surface.

To ensure that the indoor-outdoor spatial dynamic would feel ‘like one idea’, Bush called upon Los Angeles landscape firm Terremoto to transform the grounds by activating the home's two private courtyards, installing new plant life throughout, and enhancing the view corridors. Drought-tolerant, low-maintenance plantings are simultaneously environmentally preferable and practical, given that the homeowners are part-time residents.

Terremoto's plan integrated other design considerations, too. ‘Spare sculptural plantings made their way into the house as well,’ Bush says, emphasising the interplay among cacti and succulents, and the home's tactile artworks and sculptural furnishings. Steps away from the pocketing living room doors, Terremoto shaped an outdoor patio with a fire pit to function as a viewing platform for enjoying the proximity to the Pacific Ocean. The sandstone hardscape reflects ‘a palette that would respond to the interior finishes’, Bush adds.

This holistic, multidisciplinary coordination, which unfolded over multiple years, demonstrates how the design team found common ground between homage and interpretation. ‘We tried to honour and respect the original intent of these indoor-outdoor spaces,’ Bush says. ‘We think Koenig would have appreciated this level of consideration and craft if he were practising today.’

jamiebush.com

Alessandro Isola Studio has completed a sumptuous storage space for a private collection of Porsches in an undisclosed Italian location. Isola, who worked with project architect Roberto Zanlucchi to deliver the project, has shaped a monumental cabinet for cars, vertically stacked across a number of levels, with views up, down and through courtesy of glass floors.

Alessandro Isola describes the project as a ‘spatial experience that alters perception’, with a series of manoeuvres that lead the visitor through the interior to a point of dramatic reveal. Sober materials and tones are paired with splashes of rich colour, either through art, furnishings, material elements or, of course, the cars themselves.

For the most part, the space is dark and restrained, with floors and walls in black resin paired with a folded black-metal staircase. The car lift – an essential part of the space – is bracketed with glass barriers, and there are also skylights and large expanses of glazed floor that allow views down on to the top of the collection.

On the uppermost level, sliding glass doors open up onto a terrace. This space, which serves as a study and sitting area, is where the car lift terminates, and adjoining the planted roof a broad skylight provides views down into the heart of the collection, past three layers of Porsches.

‘By challenging instinctive perceptions of stability and depth, the project introduces a subtle yet persistent tension, transforming movement through the space into an active and heightened spatial experience.’

The project started life as an industrial building, with a complete overhaul transforming it into the ultimate collector’s retreat and display space. The exterior is kept deliberately plain and anonymous, and the sliding metal entrance gives no clue as to what lies within. Arranged across four levels, with a basement given over to utilities and plant, the car collection begins on the ground floor.

The rest of the building is what the architect describes as a ‘hybrid environment’ – the cars are always the stars but there is scope for hospitality as well as more private spaces.

For example, a dedicated professional kitchen is part of the programme, while a custom-designed 6m-long table sits on one of the upper floors, made from brass-finished metal with a form inspired by the classic Porsche silhouette. As part of the table support, the architects have incorporated a subtle Tangerine accent, a deliberate reference to one of Porsche's more vibrant and playful vintage colours.

The main spaces are all column-free, with structure pushed to the edge of the plan to allow for uninterrupted rows of cars. ‘Like a high-performance automobile, the building conceals significant technical complexity behind a form that appears effortless, precise, and controlled,’ says Isola.

A case in point is the highly engineered car lift, designed to fit flush with the ground floor when lowered. It can also take cars all the way to the topmost floor, alongside the bar area and wine cellar. There’s also a dedicated vinyl listening space here, along with direct access to the roof terrace with its outdoor kitchen.

Throughout the project, functional design is paired with playful, almost theatrical components. For example, in the deliberately dark and mysterious guest bathroom, the focal point is the basin, carved from a massive block of white Palissandro marble and fed by a ceiling mounted spout.

‘I visited the quarry to choose the original block, which was later cut and carved specifically for this project,’ says Isola, ‘The visible texture and natural fracture preserve the memory of its origin, connecting the finished space to the raw material from which it was created.’

Ultimately, the entire space is about creating these points of intense connection, with the Porsches themselves as the undisputed stars. ‘They’re not symbols of status, but objects of passion, engineering, and memory,’ says Isola. ‘The architecture accompanies them without competing for attention.’

AlessandroIsola.com, @Alessandro_Isola

For decades, one of architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg’s most intriguing works remained almost unknown outside of architectural circles. Sitting on a quiet stretch of Solana Beach, San Diego County, it was known only to the family who built it. Now, for the first time, the Chapman Residence has come to market (following Kellogg's Kravis Residence earlier this month), listed for $4.75 million, offering a glimpse of what happens when an ordinary tract house is transformed into a work of art.

In 1960, artists Wayne and Barbara Chapman purchased a modest suburban home. After marrying in 1969, they enlisted Kellogg to reinvent it. The transformation occupied much of the 1970s, turning an unremarkable house into something almost unrecognisable from its origins.

Kellogg worked closely with the Chapmans throughout the project. Wayne effectively acted as construction manager, recruiting friends to help source massive utility poles and thousands of board feet of rough-sawn redwood, while Barbara shaped the interiors. The result, therefore, is less a conventional architect-client relationship than a collaboratively hand-built home where, as Wayne later recalled, nearly every piece of timber bore his own fingerprints.

The roughly 3,900 sq ft, three-level residence is defined by Kellogg's signature organic architecture. Sculptural fireplaces anchor many of the interior spaces, while flowing, curvilinear forms dissolve the boxy logic of the original house. Redwood and glass dominate the material palette, complemented by hand-carved timber entrance doors. A dedicated ceramics studio was created for Wayne's practice, and arrival at the house unfolds through a sequence of Japanese-inspired gardens.

This experiential element was central to Kellogg's architectural philosophy. Drawing on Frank Lloyd Wright's principles of organic architecture, he pushed them into a more expressive, biomorphic realm. Here, structural elements evoke ribs and bones, while forms borrow from shells, plants and geological formations. Craftsmanship – in wood, stone and concrete – is inseparable from the architecture itself, and the relationship between house and garden is treated as every bit as important as the interiors.

Carved from the shell of an ordinary suburban house, with portions of the original structure retained even as its identity was completely reimagined, the Chapman Residence is unmistakably Kellogg. Yet it is equally a testament to the Chapmans, whose vision, labour and artistic sensibilities shaped every stage of its creation.

The Chapman Residence is listed with Keith York at Agents of Architecture.

A Lisbon townhouse, in the heart of the Portuguese capital, has been transformed into a calm oasis. The refresh was spearheaded by UK-based architects McLean Quinlan, who worked with the client, a couple with two children, who wanted a home centred on wellbeing.

Inside a wellness-inspired Lisbon townhouse

‘We wanted to create instant tranquillity, the moment you step through the front door,’ explains Will Mouland, associate architect and project lead at McLean Quinlan. ‘The space is enveloped by natural textures, diffused light and soft tones – I think it’s hard not to exhale deeply when you step into a space like that, particularly when it’s in contrast to the busy urban context.’

The client, the co-founder of a wellness company, asked McLean Quinlan to create an interior using natural materials and incorporate flexible family spaces; the façade must remain the same.

The firm began by reconfiguring the once uninspiring property. The residence was originally a series of subdivided homes that had been carved out of the property in the 1990s. During the process, McLean Quinlan discovered problems with the split-level floors, which left the house with echoes and bad acoustics.

Says Mouland, ‘The driving force behind the design was creating appropriately scaled spaces with an intentional flow. The aesthetic approach came from wanting to create a true oasis of calm, with an almost ethereal quality, distilled to the most limited palette of pale wood, stone, and natural plaster.’

The architectural firm settled on arranging the townhouse into a four-bedroom main house and a separate self-contained apartment above. The ground floor is centred on the client’s interest in wellness and meditation. This was achieved by creating distinct zones, including a massage room, a dedicated yoga space, and a gym.

However, it was important to step away from the functional feeling of a commercial gym, which led to the introduction of curtains and warm spotlighting for a more domestic atmosphere. There is also an additional custom cold plunge pool and an infrared sauna.

The use of Douglas fir throughout gives each room a cabin-like quality. The first floor is the main home entry and family area. A new kitchen, with a pantry, overlooks the garden, while Portuguese materials such as local tiles and lime-washed wall finishes are scattered throughout. The second floor, which is accessed by a repurposed Douglas fir staircase, accommodates family bedrooms.

‘There are so many spaces I love in this home,’ says Mouland. ‘The stairs, the wellness space, the pool changing garden room – but perhaps the space I’m most proud of is the relationship between the principal dressing room and bathroom.

'The dressing room is naturally lit, solely by borrowed light from other spaces, and yet it doesn’t feel dark. The chamfered wall to the bedroom and the glazed partition between the bathroom and dressing room, screened with the translucent linen curtains, are more successful than I anticipated.’

Stepping into this Lisbon townhouse, visitors are greeted with a moment of decompression. The light and soothing atmosphere that results from its organic materiality helps create a calming cocoon from the bustle of city life.

mcleanquinlan.com

Crystal Palace Park's dinosaur sculptures – the world's first life-sized models of prehistoric animals – are among London's quirkiest attractions. This week, the sculptures, originally created between 1852 and 1854, have been given a refresh as part of a wider regeneration of the park, which reopened to the public this month.

Led by Bromley Council and Crystal Palace Park Trust, the work supports the long-term restoration of the Grade II*-listed park, which was created after the Crystal Palace was relocated from the 1851 Great Exhibition to Sydenham.

At the heart of the scheme was the conservation of the Grade I-listed Geological Court, home to the dinosaurs. The sculptures – created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the guidance of palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen – were made when dinosaurs had only just been identified by science. Though many of them are now known to be anatomically inaccurate, they remain celebrated as a landmark of public palaeontology and a bastion of Victorian ambition.

During restorations, specialists used paint analysis, material testing and 3D printing to repair the sculptures while preserving their original materials – work that saw them removed from Historic England's Heritage At Risk Register.

Surrounding landscape work restored historic sightlines and topography, while the Upper Lake was desilted and fitted with a new recirculation system to revive its waterfalls. The Grade II-listed Italian Terrace underwent stonework repairs, the Grand Centre Walk, designed by park creator Sir Joseph Paxton, was reinstated as the park’s historic spine, and a bust of Paxton returned to its original site.

More than 7,500 tonnes of excavated soil were reused on-site, and new rain gardens and swales now help manage rainfall. Desilted lake sediment was repurposed into 500 sq m of habitat shelving, while around 58,000 sq m of wildflower meadow and 64,000 perennials have revived the park's once-famous horticultural displays.

Accessibility upgrades, a redesigned Penge Gate entrance echoing the Crystal Palace's modular architecture, a dinosaur-dig-themed play area, and a new timber Visitor Centre by Tate + Co complete the transformation.

Together, these efforts have secured the future of a uniquely Victorian vision – restoring a space where science, art and imagination first collided, and ensuring its prehistoric residents can continue to thrive for generations to come.

Drumhalla House in County Donegal, Ireland, has been an established event venue for decades, having originally opened back in 1990, and today it is a familiar and integral part of the community. Once arranged as three separate houses, the entire structure has, over the years, been reimagined as a single space, covering 626 sq m.

Tour Drumhalla House, its new portico and architectural features

Now, the venue has been expanded and overhauled, thanks to a 140 sq m extension created by Pasparakis Friel Architects. The rural studio, based nearby in Rathmullan, was tasked with creating a stronger connection between the historic house, its impressive grounds, and the landscape beyond.

The most obvious architectural intervention is a new timber post and beam colonnade that flanks the garden façade. Another colonnade structure serves as a new portico, a covered entrance beyond which is a grand reception area that serves as an orientation point for the various parts of the venue.

According to the architects, ‘the portico acts as a transitional space between the outdoors and the interior. From here, the house unfolds as a sequence of interconnected rooms designed for gathering and celebration: the drawing room alive with conversation, the bar softly illuminated in the evening, and the games room offering a more playful, animated retreat.’

The garden room is a more substantial intervention, a place for receptions and gatherings, beyond which is a dedicated wedding hall. The ground floor plan also accommodates important secluded spaces like a dressing room. Throughout the project, Pasparakis Friel has created a clear distinction between old and new, never relying on pastiche but also restoring and amplifying original features to create character and drama.

This is best seen in the colour and material strategy, which switches between light tones for daytime-focused spaces like the Dressing Room and Drawing Room. These are contrasted with areas intended for use during the evening (like the Library and Games Room), where the palette becomes richer and deeper and more intimate.

Likewise, the new architectural interventions are sympathetically inserted into the historic fabric, with the addition of new glazed openings that are in keeping with the rhythm and pace of the façade design as well as alignments to distant views. ‘These additions amplify the theatre inherent in social gatherings, enhancing the drama of arrival, encounter, and celebration,’ say the architects.

The refurbishment also extended to Drumhalla’s first-floor accommodation, where bedrooms have been given individual identities inspired by an overall sense of the Donegal landscape. Themes include Highlands, Coast, and Sky, tying in with the studio’s sense of place, driven by its rural location and interaction with local materials, crafts and artists.

‘Whether restoring a historic building or designing a new home, we create spaces that feel grounded, thoughtful, and enduring,’ Pasparakis Friel writes. ‘Our architecture is quiet but purposeful – tactile, responsive, and attuned to landscape and life.’ At Drumhalla House, these values are deployed to create a richly inviting space for the community and other visitors.

PasparakisFriel.com
DrumhallaHouse.ie

When Central City Plaza, a shopping centre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, first opened in 1973, it was a vibrant hub for Black life. Designed by the state’s first licensed African American architect Alonzo Robinson Jr. in the optimistic New Formalist style, the complex housed Black-owned businesses that included a bowling alley, attorneys' offices and a restaurant that dished up soul food and cordon bleu.

Over the decades, Central City Plaza fell into disrepair and neglect, and, even after a public awareness campaign halted the demolition of one its buildings, the campus’s future was uncertain. Today, however, thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation and The National Trust for Historic Preservation, Central City Plaza – in addition to four other historically-significant sites designed by Black architects and designers – has the opportunity to rewrite its next chapter.

The program, Conserving Black Modernism, was established in 2022 by the Getty in partnership with The National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to protect modern sites that are integral to Black history, many of which are overlooked and under threat. Sites are identified through an application process, with winners receiving $150,000 to conduct repairs, hire staff or undertake preservation planning. Since the program was launched, more than $4.85 million in funding has been distributed.

‘Conserving Black Modernism has helped communities in nearly every region of the US protect the work of Black architects and has helped broaden the very definition of modernist architecture,’ Joan Weinstein, the Getty Foundation’s director, said in a statement. ‘Teaming up with the National Trust over the past five years has allowed us to take actionable steps to preserve underrepresented sites that embody Black excellence in design, activism and resilience.’

This cycle's winners include Central City Plaza; the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanities Center at Texas Southern University in Houston.; The Park-Johnson Hall at Fisk University in Nashville; portions of Boston’s Southwest Corridor; and St. Mark AME Zion Church in Indiana.

The National Trust Action Fund, meanwhile, is distributing an additional $2.26 million to 22 more locations around the country, including a seed barn in rural Alabama that will serve as the future home of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, and barracks at Camp Naco in Arizona that housed the Black army regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

Read on to learn more about the grantees.

Central City Plaza – Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Central City Plaza was completed by architect Alonzo Robinson Jr in 1973. Robinson was Wisconsin’s first licensed architect and designed the complex in the New Formalist style, a rarity for Milwaukee. The plaza includes three buildings defined by arcades, concrete panels and sweeping porticos or ‘wings.’ The Salvation Army took over several structures in the early 1980s, and now runs a homeless shelter on the site. According to the Getty and the National Trust, the grant will fund a strategic report that will guide restoration and allow the Salvation Army to expand its services.

Martin Luther King Jr. Humanities Center at Texas Southern University – Houston

This building contains the School of Communications at Texas Southern University, one of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). The modernist building was completed by architect John Saunders Chase Jr. in 1969, just a year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The building, which features a sweeping roof and a central volume that appears as a series of stacked discs, is said to evoke King’s legacy. Chase Jr. went on to be a founding member of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), a group that has advocated for equity in the architectural profession. The grant will fund a report on the building that will identify key preservation priorities and delve into the building’s history.

The Park-Johnson Hall at Fisk University – Nashville

New York- and Philadelphia- practice McKissack & McKissack is the oldest Black-owned architecture firm in the US. In 1954, founding partner Moses McKissack III designed this campus building for Fisk University, an HBCU in Nashville. The low-slung three-story building is defined by a red brick facade and modernist proportions, and contains classrooms, administrative spaces and a lecture hall. The grant money will help develop a preservation and management plan for the structure, and help document McKissack & McKissack’s work on the greater Fisk campus.

Southwest Corridor – Boston

After activists halted the construction of a 12-lane highway that would cut through Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority built a four-mile park that contained a public train line in addition to a 52-acre park. The work, most notably the postmodern Ruggles Station, was led by Stull & Lee, Inc., a Black-led Boston-based architecture firm. The Getty funds will help document the site through 3D modeling, photography and more.

St. Mark AME Zion Church – East Chicago, Indiana

Designed by Wendell Campbell (who, along with John Saunders Chase Jr, was a founder of NOMA), this striking modernist church in East Chicago, Indiana was designed to evoke praying hands. The structure features a dramatic origami-like roof, triangular ribbon windows and an airy, column-free sanctuary. The grant funding will help the church create a preservation plan supporting ongoing maintenance and rehabilitation needs.

MVRDV has won the Shift International Architecture Competition with its proposal ‘Rotterdam Rocks!’. Shift, a social enterprise designed to enable large-scale societal change through art and architecture, launched the international competition last year, calling for designs for a ‘Shift Embassy’ – a major cultural destination in Rotterdam that aims to inspire visitors to help realise large-scale ecological and societal change. The competition asked for sustainable concepts for a future landmark which vie to be the next 'Wonder of the World'.

Discover MVRDV's biotopia 'Rotterdam Rocks!'

MVRDV’s proposal showcased a stacked landscape of living rocks that turn architecture into an urban ecosystem, a futuristic take on eco-brutalism that merges nature and public life. This ambition is captured in the studio’s idea of a ‘Biotopia’: a future world where architecture grows like trees, and streets are illuminated by bioluminescent light. The rocky green landmark acts like a living organism, with pockmarked skin to accommodate nature, and will be largely accessible to the public, allowing visitors to explore viewpoints, exhibition areas, and dining areas.

The €240-million purpose-driven destination will join other newly opened buildings in Rotterdam, including the Netherlands Fotomuseum and MVRDV’s Portlantis, a museum dedicated to the city's port. The Shift Embassy will span 25,000 to 30,000 sq m and will include a 200-room hotel, an observation deck, a conference and meeting centre, and a sustainable food court.

Seven stacked 'rocks' are arranged around two key pathways through the building; one for the exhibition experience and another for the project’s hospitality functions. A third exterior route twists up the sides of the 'rocks', leading to a publicly accessible viewing terrace, while the top of the building features a rooftop terrace for visitors to The Elysium: an immersive art space. The building’s façade will be covered with indents to provide a surface for soil, water, plants and animals.

‘Our first step in approaching this design was to expand the brief – we need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to create inclusive spaces for people, trees, plants, water, air, and animal habitats, balancing the need for new built space with new landscapes to compensate for our ecological impact,’ says MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. ‘Our design integrates these human and natural spaces, playing with porosity to keep the project compact while maximising its ecological value.’

The Shift International Architecture Competition was launched in January 2025. Eighty teams submitted proposals, which were whittled down to the five finalists, including architecture and design studios Ecosistema Urbano, Heatherwick Studio, Mecanoo, MVRDV, and Office for Political Innovation ( discover the Shift entries here), who have continued developing their designs since November 2025.

Describing the winning concept, the jury said: ‘MVRDV’s proposal is a remarkably bold, powerful statement that we expect will capture visitors' imagination and encourage them to come back again and again. Rotterdam Rocks departs from how sustainability is traditionally communicated, bringing together joy, discovery, and surprise into a new architectural language. We anticipate this building and its program will invite people to rethink their everyday behaviour and encourage new ways of living sustainably together.’

MVRDV entered a short pre-design phase in June to further test and improve its design. The refined version is now being unveiled for the first time, ahead of a local participation process in autumn 2026.

Shift’s longer-term ambition for the landmark project is to create a network of similar structures across six continents, each designed to help create a better and more sustainable way of future living.

shift.world
mvrdv.com

New Mexico-based artist, and Wallpaper* US400 honoree, Johnny DeFeo has an excellent motto: ‘The more seriously you take a silly idea, the more silly it can be.' His biggest, boldest and silliest idea to date has been to build a rentable house in the shape of a giant coyote head, in the desert just outside Taos. ‘It's a place to recharge and not worry about your Wi-Fi, and just have a quiet time in a place that is visually novel and beautiful,' says DeFeo. And like many great ideas, this one came to him in a dream. ‘So clichéd!' he adds.

Tour Coyote house and its quirky, mesmerising interiors

Six years ago, the artist and his girlfriend were looking to move from Denver to New Mexico, because ‘it had always been a romantic place in our minds'. Following a visit to a large, bucolic property close to Vallecitos, he had a vivid dream in which he saw five houses shaped like different animal heads surrounding a black pond. DeFeo immediately sketched out this zoomorphic camp, and while the couple didn't purchase the property, the imaginative vision lingered.

It wasn't until June 2022, when he saw an Instagram ad for an Airbnb competition, that DeFeo saw an opportunity to turn his dream into reality. The OMG! Fund was seeking proposals for ‘really weird' rental properties, and offering $100,000 each to 100 winning applicants to realise their fantastical projects. ‘I almost didn't apply because I hated the name of it so much,' DeFeo jokes. But he did and, after submitting a short written description, sketches, a budget proposal and a construction timeline, The Trickster, also known as Coyote Casita, was finally selected as a winner.

Then came the challenge of actually building it. DeFeo found a site in Arroyo Hondo and interviewed several local architects and general contractors, but none of them truly understood his vision. Eventually, he was introduced to San Antonio-based sculptor Jacob Tobar of Mas Rústico, who specialises in faux-bois concrete and has experience fabricating large-scale public art projects, and they were ‘immediately on the same page'. Intrigued by DeFeo's model and proposal, Tobar visited the site and took a few measurements, then assured him that what they would build together was going to be ‘a lot better than the model'.

‘He's my hero,' DeFeo says. ‘He came with all the know-how for making a big, concrete, crazy sculpture, getting the permits, and making it look how we wanted.' The pair set about scaling up the maquette into a 30fttall structure that would look visually striking while also comfortably accommodating paying guests. The key structural elements were calculated and constructed just as a typical house would be built, then additional concrete was slowly added and shaped over the top.

Over 30 tonnes of concrete, countless rebar lengths, and ‘gallons of sweat and blood' later, the finished building really does resemble a coyote's head. Its sharp-toothed jaws form a cavern-like entrance that DeFeo likens to the tiger-shaped Cave of Wonders in Disney's Aladdin. ‘There was something about walking into the mouth that I just thought was whimsical,' he says.

A balcony from the loft bedroom extends atop the nose, creating a perfect vantage point for watching the setting sun illuminate the distant peaks in a ‘bright fuchsia' hue. Guests can also peer at the mountains through the coyote's nostrils. While the concrete head is highly sculptural and textured, the back of the building is smoother and more orthogonal. ‘I wanted the rest of it to feel quiet, and definitely Southwest, but not in a knock-off, hackneyed way,' says DeFeo.

Inside, the house is much more akin to a traditional New Mexican adobe home, evoking the textured mud-plaster walls and rounded corners found across the region. ‘I love the softness of the architecture,' says DeFeo. ‘You don't do 90-degree angles out here.' Through the mouth-accessed arched doorway is a small foyer that leads to an enclosed, light-filled bathroom with a shower lined with stones and pebbles.

Further down the coyote's ‘throat', the polished-aggregate hallway opens into a double-height space. A small kitchenette with terrazzo counters, a walnut dining table and chairs, and comfy sofas create a snug living area. ‘It has pretty high ceilings, but it feels very cosy,' DeFeo says. The loft bedroom is spacious enough to accommodate a king-size bed and an antique storage cabinet. ‘The fact that it's nice inside makes it funnier that it's coyote-shaped,' the artist says.

DeFeo is still adding to the interior décor. He recently purchased taxidermy coyote paws, which a friend has used to create moulds to produce cast-iron drawer handles. Many of DeFeo's own paintings also adorn the walls, most of which he created specifically for the house, and which feature coyotes within the Southwest landscape. ‘I usually paint animals that are ubiquitous and that everyone has a story about seeing,' he says. ‘And the coyote felt Southwest to me.'

The Trickster is the first of the five houses dreamt up by DeFeo, who is looking for financial backing to build the remaining rabbit-, doe-, bear- and fox-shaped guest houses. He readily acknowledges that the project is not for everyone. But in this part of the country, he notes, most people leave each other to their own business. DeFeo hopes that The Trickster encourages more artists to turn their offbeat ideas into reality, no matter the scale. ‘You don't have to build a box for a house,' he says. ‘You can just make something weird.' All in the spirit of serious silliness.

johnnydefeo.com

This 1970s apartment in Kifisia, in the leafy northern suburbs of Athens, sits among Beverly Hills-sized mansions and Michelin restaurants, and is itself located within a piece of cutting-edge 20th-century architecture. Rising above the capital’s ubiquitous graffiti-covered walls, the residential complex features a pair of twin towers that cantilever from central pillars like concrete umbrellas. In one of these is the newly remodelled home by Georgios Apostolopoulos Architects, as innovative as the building itself.

‘The apartment is part of the Stroggyli Polykatoikia (‘Round Apartment Building’) designed by architect Nikos Despotidis and built between 1973–1974,’ says Apostolopoulos of the pioneering building. ‘Despotidis explored new typologies of collective living, combining expressive form with rational construction. The concrete frame, continuous balconies and carefully choreographed circulation created a strong architectural identity – one that offered both structural freedom and spatial generosity.’

To complement this unusual site, Apostolopoulos reimagined the original one-bedroom apartment by completely reconfiguring traditional domestic boundaries. The process began with subtraction: all partitions were removed to reveal the apartment’s spatial potential and expose the existing structure.

The original layout comprised two long, narrow corridors leading separately to the bedroom at one end and the kitchen at the other, with the bathroom at the centre of the plan, and the living spaces confined to a small, elongated space with limited natural light. ‘Overall, the apartment felt fragmented, the bedroom was overly enclosed, the rooms were small, and daylight struggled to penetrate the interior,’ explains the architect. ‘Each function existed in isolation, reinforcing a sense of separation rather than continuity.’

The client’s challenging brief required fitting a kitchen, living and dining areas, plus two bedrooms, one bathroom and one toilet into this compact floor plan. For the architect, the answer lied in questioning the conventional role of room-making, resulting in a home conceived as ‘a continuous interior where light and movement flow without interruption’.

‘The client wanted to have a calm space within a busy part of the town and next to a busy road – a ‘cave like’ space that would accommodate all the functions that he needed,’ says Apostolopoulos. ‘To achieve this, we had to rethink how an apartment can be inhabited, questioning whether privacy is needed at all. This meant pushing the boundaries of conventional domestic layouts and exploring a more fluid, adaptable way of living.’

‘This idea required a high level of precision,’ says Apostolopoulos, which was only made possible by turning joinery into a key architectural element. ‘Danelis, the joiners we collaborated with, played a crucial role in realising this vision. Their craftsmanship made it possible to execute the movable elements and create the flexibility that we wanted,’ he continues. ‘The complexity increased further because all the air conditioning is hidden within the joinery, something that required careful co-ordination between design and construction.’

Equally key was the client’s willingness to agree to an unconventional concept with flexible, flowing spaces. The new floorplan includes a main bedroom that feels like a natural extension of the living area, with wardrobes acting as ‘layered filters’. On the other side of the apartment is a versatile space that can be used as a dining room, guest room or study thanks to an entire wall of joinery hiding a fold-down bed, integrated desk and storage.

‘When the joinery is closed, it reads as almost the room doesn’t exist, allowing the apartment to feel open and uninterrupted,’ says Apostolopoulos. ‘When needed, sliding doors create a private space, and the dropdown desk and fold-down bed allow it to shift effortlessly between a workspace and a bedroom. It is a room that appears only when required – and disappears when not required.’

At the centre of it all, replacing the old bathroom, is the new kitchen – ‘a social device treated less as a room and more as an inhabited object’. Anchoring the space is a large kitchen island overlooking the refurbished original fireplace, which is located between two floor-to-ceiling windows framing the balcony.

‘I was interested in the idea of concentrating all the kitchen functions into a single piece placed at the centre of the plan. Positioned this way, it allowed the kitchen to become the main socialising element, a place where cooking, conversation, drinking can happen. It also connects seamlessly with the living and dining.’

Slim-frame windows bring maximum light into the interiors, reinforcing the sense of continuity between spaces, while the simple, monochromatic palette – including microcement finishes across floors, walls and doors – allows Despotidis’ original structure to shine through.

georgiosapostolopoulos.com

In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Make way for the pedalò, where 'form follows fun'

Carlo Ratti on the pedalò

You hire them by the hour. There are never any discounts, and they look back at you with the swagger of someone who knows you'll struggle to stop once you've had a taste. It is, after all, the most democratic entity on the Italian coast: the pedalò.

It is July, and it shows. The beach hums in the afternoon heat. Children pack sandcastles with hands sticky from ice lollies. Along the shoreline, the fleet of pedalò waits patiently for its next crew.

Despite its humble status today, its lineage is illustrious. Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebooks a craft driven by pedal-powered paddles. He, in turn, it seems, had taken his cue from the Badalone, Filippo Brunelleschi’s vessel designed to carry heavy blocks of marble up the Arno for the dome of Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore.

It was such an inventive project that it earned, in 1421, an ‘exclusive privilege’, considered by many the first industrial patent in history. Its fate, however, was less glorious: the Badalone sank on one of its early voyages.

One had to wait, then, until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the modern pedalò to appear. Those were the years when the spread of the bicycle made pedals seem to turn up everywhere: on land and even at sea.

The word pedalò comes from the French pédaler: once again, the French beat the Italians to the marketing. The primacy of invention, though, may still lie in the Peninsula. In 1913, at Gargnano on Lake Garda, the blacksmith Angelo Terzi built the Terziscafo: a five-metre-long larch craft, driven by the pedals of a bicycle. The outbreak of the First World War, however, cut its development short: Terzi was called up by the Alpini battalion, the prototype was left first abandoned and finally sold to a fisherman.

Since then, the engine has stayed practically identical. What has changed, instead, is everything around it: an entire floating menagerie of pedalòs with a slide, a sunshade, cup holders or a sundeck; then swans, unicorns, flamingos, dragons, giant ducks. A catalogue of improbable creatures that, in the summer haze, slide into afternoon hallucinations.

It is exactly the opposite of what Pier Luigi Nervi had imagined. For the great Italian civil engineer, technique would gradually lead design towards ‘true’ forms, ever more optimal. As with racing cars. Or aeroplanes, all much alike because governed by the same laws of aerodynamics.

In other words, he believed in one of the many interpretations of the famous maxim: ‘form follows function.’ The pedalò, by contrast, is its reverse: once the technical issues are resolved, imagination can go back to power.

And perhaps this is the secret of its longevity. For generations, it has accompanied Italian summers without changing function, while constantly changing form. The masks parade by - swan, unicorn, flamingo or duck - but the playful experience stays the same. One could say: ‘form follows fun.’

About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti

Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: “Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?” Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.

Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: “Objects should keep us company.” Especially during this scorching summer.

carlorattiassociati.com

Olalekan Jeyifous is a builder of provocative futures. For ‘Hydricosmic Litanies', a new solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center (6 August 2026 – 3 January 2027), the Brooklyn-based artist, a trained architect and a Wallpaper* US400 honoree, imagined a society in Minneapolis that evolved around the ecology of the Mississippi River, which flows through the heart of the city. Working like an archaeologist discovering and documenting this culture, Jeyifous created digital collages of the cityscape, with highways that once displaced Black neighbourhoods transforming into waterways that sustain aquaculture, travel and housing. A series of 3D-printed sculptures depict the industrial, technical and cultural artefacts that this society produced and deities that protect them.

‘I'm always dusting off the fragments and figuring out who lived there, what they looked like, and what was important to them,' he says.

Meet architect-trained artist Olalekan Jeyifous

Jeyifous' worlds emerge from different parameters and narratives, but they share throughlines: communal societies, close relationships between people and natural ecosystems, and joyful Black life.

For ‘The Frozen Neighborhoods’, which appeared in MoMA's ‘Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America', he conducted a similar excavation of a society in which mobility was restricted. In ‘ACE/AAP', which won the Silver Lion award at the 2023 Venice Biennale, he depicted a world in which Pan-Africanism and decolonisation of the continent were successful, ushering in an era of renewable energy innovation and environmental restoration based on Indigenous land stewardship.

Jeyifous has become one of the leading artistic thinkers of our time. He rejects inevitable conclusions and instead sees alternative futures that invite us all to reconsider the trajectory we're on and what course-corrections might look like.

‘At a moment when so many of our social and ecological crises are also crises of imagination, Jeyifous' work offers something rare: a speculative language equal to the complexity of the world we actually inhabit,' says Taylor Jasper, the curator of ‘Hydricosmic Litanies'. ‘His practice understands that the future is sedimented in the past, shaped by what has been engineered, inherited, broken and remade. He gives us a way to think about culture as something tidal: always moving between what has been lost, what remains, and what might still be made.'

Born in Nigeria but raised in the US, Jeyifous wanted to be an architect from a young age, but was especially interested in cultural critique and using research, world-building and visualisation to provoke conversation. His thesis applied the Yoruba myth of the Abiku child (a spirit that is born to the human world only to die young and repeat the cycle because it does not want to inhabit the painful, unjust world of people, preferring to exist in the idealistic supernatural realm) to postcolonial nation-building and architecture's role in making spaces that support new systems.

Jeyifous identifies with the Abiku child's cycle-breaking. ‘I do not like what has been made of the world,' he says. ‘We could have built a world where different countries and different cultures respect each other.'

Jeyifous uses tools such as hand drawing, photo montage, collage and AI visualisations to design what he calls protopias. Distinct from utopias, which present unrealistic perfect worlds, protopias acknowledge an ongoing project. For this approach, Mabel O Wilson – chair of the African American and African diaspora studies department at Columbia University, and co-curator of ‘Reconstructions' – has called Jeyifous ‘the next Lebbeus Woods', referring to the cult figure who used visionary drawings to drive conversation about politics and ideology. ‘He's deeply committed to understanding architectural representation but using it as a language to point to the kinds of things that are going on socially and culturally,' Wilson says, noting how his work traces its lineage to Afrofuturism and hip-hop sampling.

Until 2004, Jeyifous worked as an architectural renderer. It paid the bills, but it wasn't creatively nourishing, so he decided to take a leap into art-making full-time while completing rendering projects on the side to support his work. By 2016, his public art commissions had grown larger and more frequent, and he was able to stop freelancing. He soon won a fellowship at the Socrates Sculpture Park and prestigious residencies at MacDowell in New Hampshire and the Headlands Center for the Arts in California.

After receiving a commission for a sculpture at Coachella in 2017, his practice took off. He has elevated a New York subway station with glass panels; created an installation at the threshold of the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago, in collaboration with artist Amanda Williams; and is working on a monument for Shirley Chisholm, who, in 1968, became the first Black woman to be elected to Congress.

Yoruban spirituality is at the heart of Jeyifous' world-building. It's a particular focus of ‘Ancestral Ecologies', an exhibition on show at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden until 25 October 2026. Created in collaboration with New York firm AD-WO, the installation features sculptures made from earthen tiles, recycled glass, material designed to decompose, and garlands inspired by African trade beads. Encountering these sculptures in the garden feels almost like stepping into a quiet moment within one of his verdant renderings.

‘There's a soft touch to environmental justice that he brings to the discourse that I really appreciate,' says Emanuel Admassu, co-founder of AD-WO. ‘We share a political agenda, and the way we think about liberation is not necessarily through big explosive gestures, but folks just tending to plants, folks spending time together with their family, and a lush, green environment.'

‘Hydricosmic Litanies' is on show from 6 August 2026 – 3 January 2027 at Walker Art Center. ‘

Ancestral Ecologies' is on show until 25 October 2026 at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

More on the artist at jeyifo.us

In Victoria, Australia, a light-coloured brick pavilion is perched on a rare double-corner site. ‘The site itself was the main inspiration,' explains Emlyn Olaver, director of Olaver Architecture, a firm based in Australia. The result is the studio's newest project, Hanslope House.

‘Rather than treating its openness as a challenge, we explored how it could redefine suburban living by creating a home that is simultaneously open and private. The design questions the conventional suburban model of a single backyard, instead using a sequence of courtyards and gardens to create a richer relationship between house, landscape, and street.’

The reimagined dwelling was conceived to challenge conventional ideas of privacy and engagement with the street. The residence comprises two volumes connected by a corridor, which divides the garden into two courtyards. The tradition of a single backyard is replaced with multiple outdoor areas in which to seek refuge.

Step inside the brick pavilion that is Hanslope House

Says Olaver, ‘The greatest challenge was balancing openness with privacy while negotiating planning controls. With three street frontages, the house is unusually exposed, requiring careful consideration of views, orientation, and enclosure. Achieving approval for zero setbacks to the side and rear streets was a significant part of the process, ultimately allowing the project to better respond to its site and improve internal amenity.’

The front door is set back within the façade, shaded by an alcove entry, and opens into the kitchen, dining, and living spaces. Each space is divided by brick screens and offers a visual connection to the surrounding gardens. The rear pavilion accommodates further living spaces and children's areas, while the main bedroom is connected to the courtyard.

The central spine is Olivar’s favourite part of the house: 'It’s more than a corridor,’ the architect says, ‘it is the project's organising element – a quiet threshold between public and private life, inside and outside, activity and retreat. Framed by courtyards and changing light throughout the day, it embodies the central idea of the project: that movement through a home can be just as meaningful as the rooms themselves.’

Hanslope House’s materiality nods to the surrounding suburban environment; Olaver has injected a contemporary touch with lattices and terracotta gabled roofs.

It feels familiar, yet entirely new, as Olaver explains: 'We hope visitors immediately feel a sense of calm and refuge. The progression through the unfenced front garden, sheltered entry and central spine is intended to slow the pace of arrival, gradually revealing light, landscape and interconnected spaces. Rather than a single dramatic moment, the house unfolds through a sequence of experiences that feel generous, grounded, and deeply connected to the garden.’

olaver.com.au

Plans have been revealed for London's BT Tower to be transformed into a hotel by London-based studio Orms Architecture. The consultation, which took place on Monday (13 July 2026), included details of the planned overhaul of the 177m-tall tower, such as the extension of the tower’s podium buildings, a swimming pool, and a public square.

The proposal also revealed the project's construction schedule – and it is sooner than you’d think. After the second consultation in July is finalised, along with planning consent granted from Camden Council in September this year, construction will begin in 2029, with the building set to open in 2033.

The future of the BT Tower in London

The American hotel chain MCR is behind the transformation of the former telecommunications tower, having acquired the building for a cool £270 million from the BT Group in 2024.

The proposal includes a restoration of the former 1930s telephone exchange, the Howland building, into hotel rooms. Plans also show the addition of a second staircase and four rooms positioned around the original concrete core of the tower, using this main body as the hotel's framework.

Additionally, the 1960s façade of the main ground-floor building will be renovated to accommodate shop fronts and other retail uses. Although there is no mention of bringing back the revolving restaurant, the public will have access to a revolving observation deck at the top of the tower.

There will also be a chance to swim at the tower, with plans for a rooftop swimming pool inspired by MCR's (and Wallpaper* Travel Guide favourite) TWA Hotel in New York. While it is available to hotel guests, the public will also be able to book a slot to use the heated, infinity-edge pool.

In consultation documents, Orms stated: ‘While maintaining the overall structure, we will remove unsightly modern additions to the 1960s exterior on the ground floor. We will then introduce retail on the ground floor and add a modest pavilion structure on the roof.’

The final part of Orms’ plan is to create a public square accessible from Howland Street and Maple Street. However, it remains uncertain what will be in store within levels 24 to 30.

Since the tower's completion in 1964, the building has undergone many iterations. Originally commissioned by the General Post Office to provide telecoms, it also housed a revolving restaurant, which closed in 1971 after a bomb exploded.

After its renaming to the British Telecom Tower in the early 1980s, the tower was closed to the public altogether from 1981. Since then, BT Tower has seen a 360-degree lighting display installed, in the early 2000s, but Orms’ plans for the tower are the most expansive to date.

You can read more about the consultation here

A Blakely Island cabin was designed for immersive forest living among the mature trees of the San Juan Islands archipelago on the Salish Sea. This corner of Washington state is rich in nature, with the particular site nestled between a glacial erratic rock and Douglas fir trees. Within this leafy setting, Wittman Estes has designed a private retreat drawing on the most basic of architectural escapes, in the tradition of Thoreau’s Walden Cabin and Le Corbusier’s 1952 Cabanon.

Tour this Blakely Island cabin in Washington state

Led by architect Matt Wittman and landscape designer Jody Estes, the Seattle-based architecture practice was well placed to tackle the challenge of this commission, a tiny 400 sq ft guest house deep in the woods and offering sweeping views of foliage and water. The raised volume sits on stilts to minimise disturbance to its natural site.

The bijou structure measures a mere 16ft x 20ft. The boxy volume contains a small kitchen, one Murphy bed, one bath, and an open loft area with two bunk beds. The interior is a simple and flowing single space, guiding the eye outwards towards the magnificent vistas.

Made primarily out of timber inside and out (a Western red cedar main body is accessed by a suspended metal walkway), the interiors feel cosy and warm. Between the hardwood decking that continues the forest's material palette indoors and the large glazed openings (including a generous corner-bathroom window), there's synergy between indoors and outdoors.

The Blakely Island cabin was constructed using modular elements and off-site fabrication. The entire house was prefabricated at the contractor’s yard in Everett before being moved, in parts, and reassembled on-site.

'Local materials and small spaces distil living down to a simple essence; in the words of Thoreau, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life",' the architects explain.

wittman-estes.com