Interior Design Trends 2016

Yes it's the New Year Time to look at the upcoming interior design trends for 2016

Here are some of the collections that I see as strong or continuing trends:

Rose Quartz and Serenity

Global color authority Pantone surprised the design community by naming not one but two colors for the 2016 edition of its Color of the Year forecast. The pastel pink Rose Quartz and powder blue Serenity may seem like a sugary sweet selection but according to Pantone, the pairing is in fact part of a more unilateral approach to color—a commentary on the current societal movements toward gender equality and fluidity.

From Interior Design Magazine      Read more 

Design Detox

"Comfort Zone" by Valspar.

Offering a complete color palette cleanse, some of the major wallpaper and paint brands are moving towards quiet and calming hues for 2016. New York-based hospitality designer and entrepreneur Stacy Garcia tells us ‘the growing emphasis on this need to always be connected has created a movement to find quiet simplicity amongst the noise.’

Signaling a move away from cold greys to warm stone hues in 2016, Sherwin-Williams has announced Alabaster (SW 7008), a hue symbolic of new beginnings, as its 2016 Color of the Year. Also wiping the slate clean is paint brand Benjamin Moore, who has selected Simply White OC-117 shade as its 2016 Color of the Year while Valspar paint says that its restorative 2016 color palette ‘Comfort Zone’ is an antidote to a ‘fast-paced lifestyle’ and will ‘balance the mind, body and spirit.’

Warm Metals

This is a trend that I mentioned last year and it continues into 2016.

Particularly effective in the bathroom and kitchen space, rose gold, brass, copper and gold will continue to dominate in 2016 according to London-based interior designer Gemma Gordon-Duff of Gordon–Duff & Linton who suggests pairing them with raw, natural materials such as marble and wood. "Good quality materials like this are a great investment because they will never go out of style," she advises. Read more

Mid century is still a trend however now it is mixed in with other pieces, the Don Draper look is over. The Danish buffet pictured below hosts antique Turkish candlesticks and resides comfortably under a turn-of-the century birth of Christ painting. 

Photo: Kimberlee Jaynes Interior Designs Inc.

Do you need inspiration for your holiday table decor?

Just a few days left before Christmas! What are you using for your table decor?

Here are some easy bold statements that are sure to make your guests smile.

Candles wrapped in tree bark nestled in ornament clusters with a few green sprigs.

A bare branch laden with lights and birds, a tiered cookie tower filled with ornaments sitting on a mirrored square …enchanting.

Add brightly colored pillows to your dining chairs. Greens surrounding a hurricane candle holder sprinkled with a few gold ornaments and crackers at each place setting make a festive table. 

Using one element like Christmas trees in varying sizes and lots of candles setting on a gold table runner create a whimsical feast for your guests!

Make your own 'snow globes" craft store carry scatter snow and miniature deer, trees and houses. Children and adults with love this.

Thanksgiving Table Decor Ideas…I've gathered some surprises.

ThanksGIVING is right around the corner…How festive will your table be?

Do you need some ideas?

Clever Libby Langdon came up with this "Thankful" stone place cards and centerpiece idea…write the guests name with a black sharpie pen on a river rock for each place setting.

Have pens and stones on a buffet so that when guests arrive that they can  write what they are thankful for on a stone. 

Place thankful stones in the  center of your table and add votive candles. Great conversation starters!

I love anything FRESH…Lemons, pears, mini artichokes, apples,grapes and persimmons make a colorful and easy table decor when dropped into tall glass container. Amazon has a great price on glass containers $29.95 for three!

Continue the fresh theme…a simple gross-grain ribbon tied around each place setting with a sprig of rosemary and sage make an appealing fragrant bundle your guests will surely love.

Pine cones, magnolia leaves and pheasant feathers OH MY! Gorgeous and simple in its elegant nod to Thanksgiving. Gold dipped fall leaves with green plates make the table come alive!

A galvanized container, gourdes, ivy, colored bottles, nuts, persimmons, candles and a fresh rose or two give this table setting a casual feast for the eyes.

Whatever you plan on doing for a table decoration …the most important element is FUN. 

Be playful in your mix of ingredients there are no decor rules and besides you know what I say "Rules are made to be broken."

Images Google and Libby Langdon

Modern Sewage Treatment

In one of my other lives, I write about Long Island Sound, where pollution and improvement to sewage treatment plants is a big issue. New York City is investing tons of money to fix its treatment plants, four of which sit near the far western end of the Sound. A bit farther west, in Brooklyn, the city is upgrading its Newtown Creek plant. The Times published this terrific picture of it today. -- ta

Stone's Celanese House on the Verge of Being Sold

While maneuvering continues about the fate of the Alice Ball House, two doors away on Oenoke Ridge Road in New Canaan, Edward Durell Stone's Celanese House is on the verge of being sold. Contracts have been signed; the closing is still to come.

Of course anything can happen between signing of the contracts and the closing, but it looks as if the Celanese House, a real gem inside and a conversation starter if nothing else on the exterior, will be bought. The listing was for $4.9, so if the final price is anywhere even near that, it won't be a teardown. There's background here and here.

More Maneuvering in the Quest to Protect the Alice Ball House

A settlement of a lawsuit between the owner of the Alice Ball House, which Philip Johnson designed, and the Town of New Canaan has been scuttled by neighbors of the Alice Ball House who don’t want to see the part of the property near them developed.

(I’m paraphrasing much of this from a very hard-to-understand story in the New Canaan Advertiser, here.)

The decision by the neighbors – William and Linda Powell – means that Cristina Ross, the owner of the Alice Ball house, will reapply to do exactly what the Powells don’t want: namely, to build a house behind the Alice Ball house and convert the Alice Ball House into its pool house.

Presumably if Ross applies to the Town, and specifically to the Town’s environmental commission, to build what they agreed to in the court settlement that the Powells’ scuttled, the Town will approve Ross’s application.

Now bear with me here. This is fairly convoluted but I’ll try to get the background right: Ross applied to build a house on her property behind the Alice Ball House. The environmental commission said no, so Ross filed a lawsuit appealing the decision. The Powells live behind the Alice Ball House and as adjoining neighbors, they had the right to join the lawsuit on the side of the town.

Ross and the Town subsequently agreed to settle the suit. But it takes three to tango, and without the Powells’ signature, the court was not able to approve the settlement.

So essentially the Powells are forcing her to go through the process again. Presumably they are hoping that Ross, knowing that the Powells will appeal if the Town approves the application, won’t want to spend the money or the time defending the appeal.

Or perhaps they’re hoping that if they continue to stretch out the process, a buyer will come along who wants to preserve the Alice Ball House but not build near the Powells.

Ross probably would prefer that too, but thus far there are no buyers. In the meantime, her permit to demolish the house is still valid, I think. I'm told, by the way, that the Alice Ball House has been rented for the next three months, so it won't be coming down any time soon, if indeed that's still a real threat.

There's plenty of background on this issue here. -- ta

I can't stop thinking about this house

Eggleston Farkas Architects in Seattle designed the Methow Cabin which I first saw on wonderful below the clouds. I just can't get it out of my head! – GF

The Cape Cod Modern House Trust

The town of Wellfleet, MA, voted to give $100,000 toward restoration of a Modern house, one of 17 that The National Park Service owns there but doesn't have the money for their upkeep.

The Cape Cod Modern House Trust, which promotes the documentation and preservation of significant examples of Modernist architecture on the Outer Cape, wants to use the money to restore what is known as the Kuegel/Gips house with the hope of eventually preserving more.

The Kugel/Gipps house was designed by Charlie Zehnder who built over forty highly original houses, all on the Outer Cape. He also was one of the prime movers behind building the local drive-in movie theater on what was once an asparagus field . . .

The web site’s overview explains how this concentration of little Moderns came to be: In the late 1930s, on the isolated ‘back shore’ of Wellfleet, a group of self-taught architecture enthusiasts began building experimental structures based on the early Modern buildings they had seen in Europe. Through mutual friends they invited some of the founders of European Modernism to buy land, build summer homes and settle . . . In the three decades that followed, these architects built homes for themselves, their friends and the community of internationally influential artists, writers, and thinkers that took root nearby. Though humble in budget, materials and environmental impact, the Outer Cape’s Modern houses manage to be manifestos of their designers' philosophy and way of living, close to nature, immersed in art and seeking community.

I liked reading the bios of the architects who built on the Cape, and the section called “others” which has stuff like, “Serge Chermayeff and Aero [Saarinen . . . you knew that] were sometimes seen rowing a small boat around Slough Pond with a rock and string, making a chart of the bottom and arguing about architecture.”

In addition to the predictable but necessary plea for monetary donations, the CCMHT is also seeking drawings, photographs and narratives – even in the form of loans – pertaining to these buildings to digitize and archive for future scholarship and publication. Donations of art and furnishings connected to mid 20th century modernism on the Outer Cape, however modest, are also being sought to recreate environments in the renovated houses.

We'll try to keep up on this as it would be a nice summer excursion: the CCMHT, in collaboration with Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, will be hosting a Modern House Tour in August 2008. – GF

photos from the top: Jack Phillip's Bug House - Photo courtesy of Florence Phillips; Charles Zehnder's Kugel/Gipps House, photo by Mark Walker; Breuer's Wise House - Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, NY, NY, photo by Joseph W. Molitor

A Modern Story from Dallas

There's a terrific story in the Dallas Morning News about a modern architect named Harold Prinz and his wife, Jeannette, and the future of the house the built in 1950, now that he's dead and she's 86. I like it because it's really a sweet love story about a couple who worked together on every aspect of their living situation, even though he was an architect and she wasn't. They shared the same modernist sensibility and persisted until they got the house they wanted.

In a way it reminds me of my in-laws, who were exact contemporaries of the Prinzes, similarly steeped in modernism and collaborated on their house here in Pound Ridge, even though neither were architects. Here's what the reporter says about the future of the Prinz house:

In an age of bulldozers and zero-lot-line McMansions, what will happen to this one-of-a-kind home?

"Regardless of its pedigree, the Prinz residence could turn into a teardown scenario," warns Peabody. "The very fact this is a midcentury home, of smaller proportions than most, makes it more of a target for an insensitive renovation or demolition."

One of Prinz's contemporaries shares Peabody's concern.

"O'Neil Ford once told me there will come a day when you outlive some of your buildings. He was absolutely right," says semi-retired architect Ralph Kelman, now in his 70s, and best known for his design of the Hilton Inn (now Hotel Palomar) and Willow Creek shopping center.

"Things are more flamboyant now," says Kelman. "I think midcentury design was, comparatively, more honest."

It's an ideal description for the Prinz home, and a quality Jeanette hopes someone else will appreciate about her husband's design.

"It's time to let this place go and let someone else love it," Jeanette says. "I just hope they don't paint over my redwood walls."

One interesting aspect of the tale is that the Prinzes wanted financing from the Federal Housing Authority, but the FHA wasn't interested in anything but a conventional house. The reporter writes:

The FHA had four chief complaints against Prinz's design for his Oak Lawn Heights residence:

1. The lack of windows on the west-facing front of the house

2. The large expanses of uninsulated plate glass

3. The nonconventional heating system

4. The unlevel lot

Ironically, all of the elements the agency cited as not fitting in with the era's design standards were the very components Prinz used to make the house literally fit in to its site and region.

The west-facing front – red brick wall, solid and demure – was designed without windows to avoid interior heating from the afternoon sun.

Conversely, large expanses of glass on the home's south and east walls beckon in the rays, open views to the side garden and lush ravine out back, and help warm the home with sunlight in winter.

The dramatic windows in the living room stretch to the ceiling rafters and follow the peak of the high-pitched roof. Plate glass works fine here, thanks to strategic overhangs, which help to moderate the elements. ...

I also commend the Dallas Morning News for its use of photos (I'm sure my commendation will make their day). I've complained a lot about how lame newspapers can be: over and over they write about modern architecture and include no picture. The Dallas Morning News created a slide show of a dozen black and white photos from the 1950s, here (photo 6 caught my eye because of the Jens Risom chairs).

The story also includes a link to PreservationDallas.org. One of our loyal readers is in the Dallas area. Maybe he can do a drive-by of the Prinz house and tell us what it looks like in 2008. -- ta

Move to Sarasota and Buy a Modern

I blogged like crazy about 18 months ago when Paul Rudolph's Micheels House in Westport, Connecticut, was razed by someone who preferred a McMansion. A reader in New Canaan who remembered that, and who lives in an interesting John Black Lee House, told me the other day that there's another Rudolph house on the market now, in Sarasota. The ad says you can be a hero by saving this masterpiece but it's not clear what the threat it. In any case, Florida is on my short list of places I'd probably never consider living, but I'd reconsider if I could live in this.




If you've been following even sporadically the efforts to build a modern, affordable prototype house in Philadelphia -- the 100K House -- you'll be interested in the first interior renderings, here.

Wondering what to do with an old barn? If it happens to be on Alex Haley's former farm in Tennessee, you let Maya Lin turn it into a library named after Langston Hughes, and you get something beautiful, here. -- ta

In the White City – Tel Aviv's new Bauhaus Museum

New to me is Tel Aviv’s “White City,” which comprises a collection of 4,000 International Style buildings built between 1931-1956 designed by immigrant architects trained in Europe who adapted the Modern style to suit Tel Aviv’s culture and climate. In 2003 it was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. (Wow - 4,000 buildings? That IS a city!)

A new museum has opened and it's premiere exhibition, opening April 25, includes original furniture, graphics, lamps, and glass and ceramic ware, by Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Christian Bell, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, and others.

The museum is in an International Style building owned by the philanthropist Ronald Lauder, whose beginnings were "as a single-story residence in the 1920s; it was enlarged, a decade later, by architect Shlomo Gepstein. By the 1990s, it was dilapidated and largely abandoned, except for the ground floor, which housed a municipal dental clinic."

Read more at Architectural Record's site. – GF

Stone's Mandell House

More than once over the past few months, while I was writing about Edward Durell Stone's Celanese House, in New Canaan, I clicked through folder after folder in search of a couple of pictures I had taken of Stone's Mandel House, which is up the road from where I work in Bedford Hills. I couldn't find it and assumed it had been deleted during a computer-space crisis. But no -- I had hidden it away on a flash drive. I found it today:



I was aware of the house's location and knew it had been on the market for some time, so I drove up there one day, with camera. I clicked off a couple of shots and then drove the rest of the way up the driveway to the house, at which point I noticed that it was not unoccupied. So I left. So, as an editor once admonished me, when I publish the picture, I'm publishing the evidence of my trespass.

The house is truly of the International Style and was built in 1933. We used to think that our house, built in 1939, was the first modern in Westchester. We've realized many times over that we were wrong, of course. That honor might belong to the Mandell House. -- ta

Keeping current with MoMA

So you can stay current with every aspect of the installations leading up to the official opening of the show on July 20th, here is the link to the Museum of Modern Art's Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition.

In case you don't know about it, the exhibition “features five full-scale contemporary prefabricated houses, to be constructed in the outdoor space to the west of the main Museum building, continuing MoMA's rich history of presenting full-scale architectural projects. Five individuals and architecture firms have been given the unprecedented opportunity to deploy both commercially viable domestic creations and entirely new, speculative prototypes. The delivery and assembly of these projects functions as a real-time urban event, visible to the general public from the city streets beginning May 22, when the first house arrives for assembly. This Web site is dedicated to the documentation of the design, fabrication, and assembly process of these specially commissioned projects.”

So, at the site linked to above, you can read all about the pre-assembly stuff – design, fabrication, delivery, etc. – for each of the 5 houses, and every Saturday there is a post by the curatorial team telling about behind the scenes aspects of organizing and bringing the show to life from their perspective. – GF
Illustration from KieranTimberlake Associates

Connecting Modern Preservation Efforts

Modern house tours and local preservation movements are far more numerous in the U.S. than I had thought before we started this blog. There was one we heard about the other day, for example, in Portland, Oregon, called The Street of Eames (although if their preservation efforts are unsuccessful, they might have to change their name to The Boulevard of Broken Eames).

I make a mental note of all these tours and things, and tell myself to start compiling a list, but so far I haven’t. And maybe now I won’t need to, because of this great idea, which I read about in an email from the people at the Glass House in New Canaan:

Modern preservation starts at the grassroots level. The Glass House is compiling, sharing, and connecting modern preservation grassroots organizations and communities across the United States. We will post and share these modern preservation links through a Google map and our website.

And then when you click the link, it takes you to this:

With the idea that modern preservation starts at the grassroots level, the Glass House is compiling, sharing, and connecting links to modern preservation grassroots organizations and communities across the U.S. We will post and share these modern preservation links, through a Google map and our Glass House Connect page, as you continue to share them with us.

The Google map itself is here. It makes you want to start an organization just to be included. -- TA

Perdro E. Guerrero, "local" MCM photographer

While trying to find positive things to think about the redesign of Dwell Magazine (the only mag. I read pretty much cover-to-cover and still feel the need to save stacks of) I almost overlooked a story about Pedro E. Guerrero.

Guerrero became a photographer through of string of serendipitous events beginning slightly before 1939, when he showed up to register for art classes at Art Center School in L.A. only to find all the painting and drawing classes filled. All they could offer him were photography classes, which he took because he "would have taken embroidery classes rather than go beck to Mesa" (AZ, where he grew up and whose bigotry he wanted to escape).

At the age of 22, Guerrero brazenly drove out and presented himself to Frank Lloyd Wright who hired him as Taliesen West's resident photographer.

What was a complete surprise to me is that Guerrero, for a time, lived in New Canaan, CT, among so many of the Modern architects and designers who were active at the time. The ones he mentions in the story as being friendly with were Breuer, Stone, Noyes, Salerno, Gores, Christ-Janer, Risom.

His web site has collections of fabulous photos of houses by these architects as well as of Louise Nevelson and Alexander Calder, both of whom he photographed pretty intensively over years.

Although he is now 90 years old, it would be so great to have him as a speaker back in New Canaan at the next Modern House Day Tour and Symposium. The story in Dwell, which is really an interview, shows him to be a clever guy with a lot of fascinating anecdotes who lived through an amazing time, knew amazing people and has a lot to impart through his work and stories. Hang in there, Pedro, we'd welcome you back to New Canaan for the next MHD! – GF

Goodbye to Shea, Goodbye to Modern Baseball

I think the least-loved building that I love, and which also happens to be a work of modern architecture, is Shea Stadium. It is a big, impersonal bowl, one of the first of many major league stadiums built in that style, and even today, when I walk up the ramps and get my first look at the field, I grin with something like the same joy I felt on my first visit, in 1964, the year it opened.

In those days we almost always sat in the nose-bleed section. You could get a seat by giving the ticket taker 10 side panels cut from Borden’s milk containers, a promotion akin to sending in a cereal box top for a prize. The side panels had to be those with the Mets promotion on it, of course, but when we didn’t drink enough milk, my father would simply cut off all the panels and sandwich the ordinary ones inside the good ones, so it looked as if we had the right 10.

I was amazed, a number of years ago, to hear that people, even Mets fans, did not like Shea. When it opened it was nicer, to my 10-year-old sensibility, than Yankee Stadium, which until it was rebuilt in the mid-70s was an old dump. Unlike Yankee Stadium, it was new, clean, convenient, colorful – those big, corrugated steel panels on the façade look like the prototype for this blog – with plenty of parking, and it was modern, built next to the World’s Fair, a showplace of the modern world.

In truth, after it was renovated, Yankee Stadium was nicer. But I loved Shea more because I loved the Mets.

Both now are in their last seasons, and both will be replaced by the newest trend in new ballparks – ballparks built to look old. Which brings me to this question:

In the last 25 years, Americans have designed, built and enjoyed modern office buildings, modern libraries, modern museums, and modern houses. Why is it so hard to build a baseball stadium that looks like it belongs in the 21st century?

There’s more about that, here, in a good post by Michael Bierut on Design Observer. He argues persuasively that a new modern stadium for the Mets would have been perfectly justified:

But in reality Flushing Meadows is hardly the middle of nowhere, and has a potent design tradition of its own. Originally a city dumping ground memorialized as The Great Gatsby's "valley of ashes," it was cleared by parks commissioner Robert Moses for the 1939 New York World's Fair, and fifteen years later, the 1964 World's Fair. Its grounds were the site of some of the most iconic and entertaining visionary architecture ever built in North America: Wallace Harrison's Trylon and Perisphere, Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama at the General Motors Pavilion, not to mention the Unisphere, which still stands today within sight of the new Citi Field. Wouldn't any of these have made great precedents for a new pleasure dome to be built in Flushing Meadows? Or, to go a little further afield — but at least within the same borough — how about Queen's greatest piece of architecture, from the same year as Shea, no less: Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal?

I also found a great video on this blog. -- ta

What we're reading

I'm enjoying a book called Small Houses, by Carles Broto for many reasons. Here are a few:

Tadao Ando's 2004 4x4 house – look at the glass . . . or don't – just let your eyes pass through it. What must if feel like to be right up against that, looking out and back through the other side? (Too bad for the power lines and sea-side building blight on the non-sea sides . . .)


















I love the idea of a passel of kids bedding down in this camp-like setting by Schmidt, Hammer and Lassen.
















And this: my dream is to open the sides of the house up to the out of doors, like this house in New Zealand, by Crosson Clarke Carnachan. As my mother says, "Dream on, Beloved!" . . .

Broto also wrote The Compact House which, as Treehugger points out, is not to be confused with The Compact House. which also looks quite interesting.

So many books, no budget to buy! . . . Lucky are we that our library is well-funded and generous in its buying habits! – GF

(By the way, my sincere apologies for the bizarre layout of these posts. Perhaps there is a way to tighten-up the placement of photos and type, but I haven't figured it out. So frustrating for a graphic designer!)

Another Look at Stone's Celanese House

Edward Durell Stone's Celanese House, two doors away from Philip Johnson's Alice Ball House, on Oenoeke Ridge Road in New Canaan, gets a lot of press, because of its style and because of the terrific renovation job its new owner, Bruce Capra, did. Capra bought it to renovate and sell but, despite all the press, it's still on the market.


New Canaan/Darien magazine has a nice story about it, here. Fans of the house won't learn much new but for those who are unfamiliar with it, it's a good introduction. And if you click here you can read what I wrote about it and a similar Stone House, in North Salem, New York, back in November. These pictures, which are better than the ones I've taken, are from the Flickr page of MidCentArc. - ta

Love, Medicine and Better Hospital Design

During my most recent stay in the hospital – 8 1/2 years ago in Norwalk, to be exact – the best design feature of my room was a rainbow that my then-6-year-old-daughter made and which my wife taped to the wall. I learned a couple of weeks later, while reading Dr. Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine and Miracles, that the rainbow is a symbol of hope, and I still have two rainbows that Elie made me back then.

I also read in Siegel’s book (other than Walden, it's the only self-help book I've every read) that patients in hospital rooms with a view of the natural world have better medical outcomes than those who don’t. And so I was interested to read this article in the Atlantic about the importance of good-design in hospitals, and how hospitals tend to pay so little attention to it:

Consider diagnostic imaging departments. MRIs and CT scans can frighten many patients, and research shows that simple elements such as nature photos can ease their stress. Yet the typical scanner room still looks “as if it’s a workshop for cars,” says Malkin, with bare walls and big machines. One of the bleakest rooms at the UCLA Medical Plaza, where I spend my time, is a waiting room in the imaging center. Small and beige, it epitomizes aesthetic neglect, with stained chairs, mismatched tiles, and tattered copies of U.S. News & World Report. The only wall art is a drug-company poster on myocardial perfusion imaging—just the thing to comfort anxious patients.

The big exception, author Virginia Postrel points out, is maternity wards, where hospitals have been forced by competition to provide more home-like settings for families about to give birth. If patients in other wings and wards demanded it, hospitals would improve those places too.

I was pleased by the care at Norwalk Hospital. Nevertheless I hope not to go back. But if I do, I hope they’ve updated the place, with some thought to how to make the rooms more pleasant. They don’t have to be modern, just the result of modern-thinking.

It's a Big Mid-Century Modern World

Mid-century modern houses are everywhere...

Savannah, Georgia, has historic houses dating back to the 18th century but it also has enough modern houses to make a modern house tour a worthwhile fundraiser for the American Diabetes Association. Here's an introduction to Savannah's moderns by a writer named Robin Wright Gunn, whose father was one of that city's modern architects.

There are lots of good flash pictures on this website, featuring modern houses for sale in the Philadelphia area.

And here are a bunch of photos of mid-century moderns in Chicago's north shore, which apparently has the same problem with tear-downs that New Canaan has. Denver too, here. -- ta