Brooklyn: Retro Authenticity

While staying in Park Slope for a few weeks last summer, I became intrigued by Brooklyn’s retro culture. It started with the furnished apart...

Why Design Now?

In a 2007 blog entry, I compared the last National Design Triennial, Design Life Now, with another exhibition, Design for the Other 90%, als...

Two Hotels in St Augustine

At the beginning of the 1888-89 winter season, Henry Flagler opened two opulent hotels in St Augustine, Florida: the Ponce de Leon, and the ...

Vizcaya

After a few days in Miami Beach and a brief Atlantis drive by, we continued around Biscayne Bay to Vizcaya, the former estate of James Deeri...

Miami Beach

My image of Miami was already tainted, mostly by episodes of CSI Miami’s mythical paradise of material opulence: a world of private yachts, ...

William Lescaze: Modernism at what price today?

With all my Lescaze research over the last couple of months, I've only just registered that William Lescaze's house at 32 E74th St, ...

William Lescaze: Early Interiors

Continuing my research on the career of William Lescaze, I thought it worth returning to Lescaze’s New York projects of the late 1920s, whic...

Whatever Happened to William Lescaze?

Of all the entries on this blog over the past three years, the one that has sparked the most interest in terms of emails and queries is this...

Manitoga and Japan

Following my last entry on Manitoga and the picturesque tradition, this entry analyzes links between Wright’s project and Japanese design tr...

Manitoga and the 20th Century Picturesque

Following last month’s introduction to Russel Wright’s Manitoga, this month’s blog entry is a brief consideration of Manitoga in the context...

Russel Wright: Manitoga

Constructed during the 1950s, Russel Wright’s Manitoga, a seventy-five-acre estate in the Hudson River Valley, was the culmination of a desi...