A bit late

If someone asked me to write a profile of Wes Anderson, I would start with corduroy. His stovepipe corduroy suits, I think, are the key to his personal mythology, one that’s a little bit country earl, a little bit little kid, and a whole lot self conscious. While I too love corduroy, particularly printed skinny wale corduroy, I do not like Wes Anderson. Rushmore was very funny, but Bottle Rocket was boring, The Royal Tenebaums was in love with its own tableaux, The Life Aquatic was boring and in love with its own tableaux, The Darjeeling Limited ditto. (Maybe it all went awry when he started writing titles that start with the somewhat pompous The.) I will see Fantastic Mr. Fox—my father read the Roald Dahl book out loud to me and my brother, and I can still hear him doing the farmer’s voice—but I am worried.  As Richard Brody’s new New Yorker profile of Anderson points out…and then fails to follow up on…Mr. Fox is wearing a corduroy suit just like one of Anderson’s. If you were casting the stop-motion animated version of your life, wouldn’t you also want to be voiced by George Clooney?

Brody is an Anderson fan, and his profile is so much better than the recent design and architecture features I have complained about. Brody writes the New Yorker’s film blog, and knows his stuff, and makes a case for Anderson while checking off all the biographical boxes, discussing his retrospective use of technologies and defending his allergy to forward plot momentum. What he obviously does not care so much about is Anderson’s visual world. When I see one of Anderson’s movies that’s all I can see, and I think that is a problem. The people in The Royal Tenenbaums move about their crazy house as if they were stop-motion animated puppets. Fantastic Mr. Fox sounds perfect for him, since he has a team of hundreds willing to do his bidding in a way many actors would not (though he does have his core group). Brody talks about the way Anderson filmed on the street in India for The Darjeeling Limited, but I don’t remember any fluidity or unplanned grace, only the train (above), decorated to within an inch of its life.

To me any deeper understanding of Anderson’s films would have required a look at his life. What does his Paris apartment look like? What’s he wearing? That girlfriend (Juman Malouf) mentioned in passing is a costume designer. Does she have anything to say about the corduroy? Maybe this approach seems shallow, fashionable or all-on-the-surface, but I feel there is a whole visual language that isn’t being explicated in this profile, or in lots of other profiles of people working visibly who aren’t designers. Design criticism isn’t just about designed objects, it should be about everything we are forced to look at.

Much online excitement about the D/R exhibition, opening tomorrow. I am heading up to Cambridge tomorrow to attend, and very happy to meet the many D/R staff I interviewed for the book. I expect the party-goers will be wearing Marimekko, as Jane Thompson and Sheila McCullough do in the image above, by Elsa Dorfman.

In the Boston Globe.

On the T Moment blog.

On the Dwell blog.

I thought the Kelly Wearstler fan-fest was over last month, when both Vogue and the New Yorker treated her to long profiles, lovingly and uncritically describing the new 1970s direction her decorating has taken. But lo, two of my November magazines feature more Wearstler: Cookie (R.I.P.) has her clever clever idea for book display (put them on shallow shelves, facing out, just like in a store!), Metropolitan Home her shared Malibu beach house. From what I have read, I can’t imagine Wearstler needs to share, so I couldn’t help but wonder how that works on summer weekends. Plus, with all the big shells and puffball sofas, there’s hardly any room for people.

After my last Wearstler post, I discovered a world of fellow haters, most notably the blog Mirror Mirror, which often features her in the Go Fug This Room category (given my love of the Fug Girls and home design I wish I had thought of this myself). And I am sure they too will have a field day with this so-called “beach house.” Never before have I read a beach house story in a shelter magazine in which the beach was so totally invisible. Yes, floors, walls, ceilings and furniture are the color of sand, but the overall effect is of a tasteful marble coffin. Do they need giant squishy chairs in hell? Why isn’t the man on the shelf wearing a bathing suit? Did she import that fireplace from turn-of-the-century Vienna? My new thought is that the de rigeur photoshoot image of her adorable boys jumping on the furniture is there to give the space some energy, and to cover up the fact that there is nowhere to sit. You can only perch or succumb.

My review of 41 Cooper Square, the new Cooper Union academic building by Morphosis, is now up on Design Observer. An excerpt regarding the public space at its base:

At the sidewalk 41 Cooper Square might as well be set in the middle of a parking lot in Mayne’s native L.A. I was thinking of the criss-crossing concrete legs as Breuer-esque (there are lots of big boxes lofted on diagonal columns in his campus buildings in University Heights) when another building, closer to Mayne’s home turf, popped into my head: Eliot Noyes’s 1964 IBM Aerospace Building in Los Angeles, now the Otis College of Art and Design. Almost a cube, clad in precast concrete panels punctuated with windows that suggest a punchcard, Noyes’s building lifted its symbolic screens off the ground on shifted diagonal legs and does sit in the middle of a sea of cars. Noyes’s building offered shaded space at the base, before the glass entrance, but in Mayne’s building, the space between concrete and glass is narrow and empty. A strip big enough for some sociability opens up on the south side, where a bookstore is scheduled to open. Maybe they will put out a few tables? In their loneliness the interstices of the legs are filling with bits of trash.

WRT Urban Garden Room at One Bryant Park on Vimeo.

On Thursday I took my class on a field trip to One Bryant Park, the sustainable skyscraper that is almost complete at the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. We received a three-hour tour from project architect Serge Appel from Cook + Fox, including everything from the ice stored in the basement to the inside of the crystal crown. Next week they will all turn in reviews of the building (their first was on the High Line). My favorite moment of the tour was my first encounter with the building: I popped up from the subway on Sixth Avenue and saw through the lobby glass a set of wild green shapes. As soon as I was through the big glass doors, all the noise of the avenue stopped, and I was in a tall transparent room with three oversized aliens growing moss, vines and lichen on every side. A few others had found their way in and were eating lunch at cafe tables like those in Bryant Park across the street. It turns out this is a privately-owned public space, the Urban Garden Room, open to anyone, just off the building’s lobby proper. In summer the glass fronting the street will slide up, making it an outdoor eating spot. The verdant aliens are the work of landscape architects WRT, albeit derivative of Patrick Blanc. Few seem to know about the space yet, so if you work in midtown, I would make it an immediate lunchtime destination. It is a new iteration of pocket parks like GreenAcre and Paley Park (just up Sixth) and it will be interesting to see if it succeeds like those or fails like so many others.

I watched two episodes of the Sundance Channel’s new advertisement for Anthropologie, Man Shops Globe, and failed to be caught up in the drama. As host and buyer-at-large for the chain Keith Johnson keeps reminding us, he is spending a lot of Anthropologie’s money to go to South Africa. He is running out of time after he schedules two days in Istanbul for himself and his team. The artificiality of these constraints, the drive-by nature of his global “research,” seem insulting to all involved. This is not an “adventure” as Sundance promises, but a business trip. Besides time and money, the other thing Johnson spends his time talking about is the lack or originality in most of the indigenous crafts he surveys. What he means by that is that they are traditional, untouched by the design hand of American consumerism. But he can help them with that, suggesting ways to cut up their heritage into overpriced throw pillows. He just needs to find someone within THE NEXT THREE HOURS who gets that, and can send them on to New York.

To Johnson everything is fodder for something cuter, and he is the only one with the vision to make it so. Can he tell us about that vision? No, he can only drive his scouts onward, since like many fashion people, his vocabulary is limited to “new” and “next” and “twist” and “different.” There is no room for history and context and information about making. When he actually takes time to do something cultural—visiting an amazing wooden house on the Turkish coast—as opposed to shopping, he clearly feels guilty about it. All unconsumable pleasure is a waste of time, he implies. But then he sees the fuzz-edged throw pillow of his dreams, and the detour is worth it.

Maybe it has to be on public TV (but isn’t Sundance sort of hipper public TV, with all its green and documentaries and cinema?) but Antiques Roadshow does a much better job separating stuff from consumerism and imparting actual information. It may be terrifically square, but everyone and everything on it are treated with respect. The stories of the maker and the owner are drawn out, and the expertise of the appraiser is used. Yes, each segment ends in a dollar value, but rarely do things seem to be for sale. Money is being used as an index of worth, not a mode of tourism. Even modernists can learn a little design history: search the Roadshow archives and you find an Eames bikini chair, a Noguchi Radio Nurse, and many WPA posters. Man Shops Globe never mentions anything but the future.

If PBS tried Modern Roadshow they might be able to attract a younger audience. Or Sundance could put on a travel show in which artisans were featured doing what they do, without dollar signs dancing above their heads. There could be a link to buy later, but you would have to use your own judgment about whether it would work in your house, in the USA. Mr. Man Shops Globe is doing the judging for you, and marking it up accordingly, but he isn’t teaching you anything. Except maybe not to schedule only two days in Istanbul.

I finally got my hands on Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. Sunday, 14 February 2009, New York, by Leanne Shapton, and as will no doubt not surprise you, I loved it. It is a story through stuff, and if there is one thing reading and writing and researching design has taught me, it is that I am my stuff (and you are too). Maybe the book even inspired Significant Objects? Parenthetically, I am a little shocked by how few books I have reviewed on this blog, which reveals how few books I have read over the past months. I have read some books, but many of them were my long digression into my adolescent library (Pern, Betsy, et. al.), and the few others I hated. I hated Netherland so much I barely got through it, but I am embarrassed to admit my hatred. I just didn’t believe a word of it, didn’t like any of the characters, and was bored with Mr. No Affect Dutchman’s ennui. And this in a book that includes several visits to Floyd Bennett Field!

Important Artifacts, on the other hand, I loved so much I read it in two nights, while hosting my father, writing about the Bauhaus and Thom Mayne, and keeping up with Project Runway. The book is the story of a relationship told as an auction catalog, gifts, clothes, postcards, email, fake New York Times columns (there should be one called “Cakewalk”, I would bake everything), snapshots, salt-and-peppers all photographed and divided into lots. She is a little nutty, and a little needy. He is elusive, alcoholic(?) and narcissistic. That’s my interpretation. Since the entire narrative is between the lines, other readers may have a different sense of how things turn out. It is a tribute to the effectiveness of this technique that I could not help but evaluate Lenore and Hal as people, my contemporaries in media New York, and to judge the book by how I would feel about them if I knew them.

First, I could tell they were rather fancier than I am. His toiletry kit held rather more products than I like in a man’s, and he owned designer t-shirts. She had vintage bathing suits and Cosabella bras. Second, they were clearly trying too hard, right from the start, with their just-apposite postcard selections, and melanges of gifts expensive, kitschy, antique. The kind of gifts you give because you are trying to decorate the other person to match your ideal. I think I would have liked her if we had been old friends. She might even have written about one of my grandmother’s recipes. Had I just met her I would have been jealous, Why didn’t I think of that? (I never do.) He I never would have liked, clearly a dandy, a person who elevates their importance by always seeming busier-than-thou. Too old to never have had a serious girlfriend before. Too old to be dating a 27-year-old, however accomplished. The person who came off best is Anny, Lenore’s lovely sister, in just a few notes.

All my prejudices obviously came out as I filled in the blanks between those poodle figurines on the cover. When Lenore has to protest No! (she does like them) you know it is all over. A shared sense of what is adorable, and what is just tacky, is one of the most important signs of true love.

An SVA student of mine from last year, Frederico Duarte, alerted me to the New York NOW exhibition, which opened October 7 in the West 4th Street subway station. Designed by Rumors Studio, the exhibit replaces the usual slapped-up future-bomb movie posters with images of work being done by AIA member architects in New York City right now. The work ranges from the Second Avenue Subway to a Malin + Goetz boutique, Nehemiah Spring Creek Housing to the SeaGlass carousel proposed for Battery Park City. Following on the Museum of Modern Art’s installation in the Atlantic/Pacific station last spring, it gives people something worthwhile to look at while waiting for a train, and brings architecture to people who may never go to the AIA NYC’s public gallery (where the debate-friendly show Context/Contrast: New Architecture in Historic Districts now hangs).

My only concern is its placement in the tube-like corridors leading to the A/C platforms. I am too anxious a traveler to linger there (and am usually getting the F). Wouldn’t all these installations do better with the captive audience on the platform? And might they even entice someone off the train, if they were visible through the glass? The MTA Arts for Transit program has been a huge success, but the idea of temporary art, architecture and design in the stations might be an even better one. Like art on the walls of your home, it becomes unseen if you don’t rotate.

There’s a lovely confluence of modern architecture and waterfalls on the east side of Manhattan, and we managed to hit three excellent examples of the type during Open House New York. Our destination was the Japan Society, which just opened a lovely show of mostly stencilled textiles by 20th-century Japanese artist (once a Living National Treasure) Serizawa. There’s a kimono in the show from 1976 as luscious as any Morris Louis painting. My husband had never seen the Japan Society because he (like me until recently) had embarrassingly thought it was the same thing as the Asia Society.

The 1971 building by Junzo Yoshimura was the first by a leading Japanese architect in New York City, and is exactly what you would expect a Japanese architect, tasked with building a monument to his own traditions in Manhattan in the 1970s would do. From the outside, it looks like SOM in modest mode, with dark metal siding and long horizontal balconies. The underside of the second-floor balcony, which holds lighting for the sidewalk below, is lined with thin wooden flanges, softening the lights and the corporate lines.

Walk in, and the city literally falls away. The interior of the four-story building (later expanded to five) is filled bya fountain whose falls create a sonic hum that blocks all other noise. Trees and grasses grow around and in the water on two levels, and a wood-tread staircase leads you up to the second-floor gallery, also housed behind wood walls. It is as if a Japanese house and garden had been transplanted wholesale. The atrium has a plaque thanking Blanchette and John D. Rockefeller III, and it is another Rockefeller, John’s sister Abby, responsible for the falls (louder still) at GreenAcre Park on East 51st Street.

We happened upon GreenAcre, which I had read about many times in William H. Whyte’s Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (watch his films on YouTube) walking from the 6 train and had to stop. There’s a snack bar, and a pergola, and green-painted Bertoia chairs around tiny Tulip tables. This is one of the parks that Whyte used as the positive argument for the midtown plaza bonus in his book, and a rebuke to all those building owners who purposely design repulsive piazzas. It is both intimate and able to be scanned from the street, shaded and wide open. Once up the short flight of steps you could be anywhere. The Japanese influence is plain in that pergola, and in the stepped fall of water that separates the park from the synagogue to the east. The architects, Sasaki Associates, landscaped most of the modern corporate campuses of the 1960s, using water, naturalistic plantings, and changes in grade (all tricks of the Japanese garden) to make places appear larger than reality.

The last falls are adjacent to 100 United Nations Plaza, a double-waterfall set a few steps below the sidewalk and hard by First Avenue. There are just enough built-in brick stools and low walls for three small groups to happily eat lunch, and the rush of water masks the traffic. Right around the corner is the Choux Factory, selling the delicious custard puffs that are big in Japan. The owners obviously felt right at home next to the falls.

I think that Sam Mendes has a decorproblem. As I wrote about Revolutionary Road, which he directed, the suburban house in which the Wheelers reside is beautifully decorated in a modern style, but they fail to evince any emotion about their stuff. It is background, and the lack of emotion toward their surroundings contributes to the viewers’ difficulty in believing their inflated emotions toward their terrible situation: loss of artistic dream, entombment in suburbia. It is just a set, not a house, not a home, which makes it hard to get sucked in to the characters’ reality. Their cool modern chairs were speaking to me but not, apparently, to the Wheelers.

The same problem rears its head in the seeminingly entirely different, but really not so, Away We Go. Like Frank and April Wheeler, Burt Farlander and Verona De Tessant think they are better than the circumstances in which they find themselves. Unlike the Wheelers, they live in the 2000s, so they actually go off in search of a better home (their lucky baby hasn’t been born yet). Their search takes them to Phoenix and Tucson, Madison, Montreal and Miami, and in each place they drop in on another caricature of family life, each one set against a densely decorated backdrop. The characters they meet are too weird, too overwritten and too idiosyncratic, to be useful as contemporary satire. But their homes, each one larger than the last, seem to include every decorating cliche on the planet in a vain attempt to ground them in reality.

I know plenty of attachment parents. They hardly need to have a vast family bed, family money, and an over-attachment to seahorses to seem terrifying. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s constant plucking at her easy-access tunics told me all I needed to know about LN (formerly Ellen). But it wasn’t just her. Do “loving” parents have to display as much art by their kids as possible to pass muster? Do all homes in Miami come with teal chairs? Burt and Verona seem to be sketched as hipsters (work from home, drive a Volvo, facial hair) but he sells insurance futures and she is a medical artist. To these professions I found it hard to relate, and found them impossible to place. Would a seller of insurance futures really not know the difference between cobbling, carving and whittling? Would they live in a little house full of junk (or was that supposed to be Craigslist irono-junk)?

So many questions… My point is, Burt and Verona and all the people they meet stand in front of their homes like actors in front of a painted backdrop, and the semaphores of sofas and sculptures don’t go with the words being spoken. When Burt and Verona do find their home—and it is a beautiful one—they act as if it has been made just for them. But really, who wouldn’t love an antebellum mansion on the water, beautifully faded to Martha Stewart hues? Their taste doesn’t make them special. And it did not make me love them, or their movie.

Another contemporary house (‘tis the season for home design spreads), this one in the East Village, that I wrote about for New York Magazine. Be sure to click through the slideshow to see the second-floor facade open like a garage door. Insta-porch! The architect is Bill Peterson.

I write about three contemporary houses by up-and-coming New York firms for The Architect’s Newspaper this week, one by Christoff:Finio in the West Village, one by Morris Sato Studio on Shelter Island, and one by OBRA Architects in Southampton. This was my favorite moment: OBRA’s lattice pool house, a.k.a. the “freckle machine.”

In “Souvenir”, Mad Men welcomes back Joan, looking lovely. I am pleased Bonwit Teller had the sense to make her a manager. I am also pleased at the thought that Rachel Menken might return. Placing Joan in the parallel universe of the department store makes sense, as she is an operator primarily in the world of women (she never defeated Moneypenny), and now she has perfumed stairs to climb. It also underlines a point many have made in discussing her character: she is a throwback, with her Marilyn curves and feminine wiles, and can’t see that Peggy (might) be able to make it plain. Joan’s life plan is disintegrating along with society as the 1960s wear on.

The department store is also a throwback, the late nineteenth-century equivalent of the mid-twentieth century corporation (to which Sterling Cooper is an adjunct and replica in miniature): a production machine in which people are cogs, but a meritocratic one, a civilizing influence, and a world in which women actually have an edge. That’s the story, at least, in Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, one of my favorite books, with architecture, shopping, societal upheaval and romance all mixed together in one potboiling novel. I’ve rarely met another fan, but if you’ve recently reconsidered Dickens, it should be next on your list. And on Masterpiece Theater’s as well.

A pet project of mine is collecting ways the city could be made more child-friendly, not in an entitled-parent, breastfeeding-everywhere way, but in a common-sense, better-infrastructure-benefits-all way. More public bathrooms would make city life easier. Fewer revolving-gate entrances to the subway would make city life easier. More subway elevators would make city life easier. I want to write an article surveying the globe and highlighting the 10 things New York should do, especially now that everyone with offspring isn’t leaving. More parks, of more shapes and sizes, benefit all with more greenery, more places to sit, more things to do. If I had to guess at the heaviest users of urban parks I would guess marathoners and children (Jane Jacobs has excellent parks analysis in Death and Life). On the weekends, we sometimes go to three a day, early morning, morning, afternoon. I feel lucky I have three within blocks to choose between.

We are about to gain one more: Pier 6 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. As part of Sunday’s Atlantic Antic the BBP Development Corporation offered quick tours of the “adventure playground” due to open this December or January (it is in the foreground above, everything past the low building is but a dream). It seems like more work has been done on the piers in the past nine months than in the 20 years the park has been under discussion. The endless discussion and continuing funding controversy meant that many thought this park would never happen. Piers 2, 3 and 5 (4 is underwater) are still not funded. But this part is, and I suspect the parents of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and the Columbia Waterfront are going to go nuts for the new park. There’s topography, for one thing, a slide mountain and wooden ampitheater seating, like landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates’s Teardrop Park. There will be a sandbox with movable playhouse parts (my current go-to playground has a pink-roofed Little Tikes playhouse someone left behind, and it is the most used item there). And there will be a watercourse, maybe something like this one at the Montshire Museum. Whether it works as they say remains to be seen; some Brooklyn Bridge Park opponents have Teardrop Park in their Hall of Shame. And there’s still the matter of the future condominium tower looming next door…

Leading with the playground is a clever move on BBPDC’s part. They need neighborhood support (financial as well as fans) to get the park done, and half a pier full of satisfied and photogenic customers can only help. It seems a little crazy to open in the dead of winter, but I know I will be out there, in my parka, some Sunday morning at 8:30 a.m. Kids need to run, whatever the calendar says.

Of all the design classics in my house, the least effort went into the acquisition of the item above: Dieter Rams’s Braun ET44 calculator, 1978, which my husband found abandoned in the drawer of his desk at an architecture office and took home. He didn’t know what it was, just that he liked the feel of the buttons. Originally snowy white, ours has weathered to cream, but the = key remains that delicious mustard color.

As many bloggers before me have pointed out, here is the origin of all things Apple, design-wise. Here too are the coolest electronics ever, appealing to both technophiles and technophobes through sheer tactility, simplicity and (so I am told) good sound. Almost anything designed by Rams and his colleagues at Braun would, if re-released today, automatically be the best-looking thing in the kitchen, bathroom or stereo cabinet. Why do we have a million Eames chairs, and I can’t buy this mixer? One of the Rams designs in continuous production is his Vitsoe 606 shelving system: lovely, but so complicated that when it was sold at Design Research they imported white-coated technicians to install it.

I bring up Rams because I just heard the news that an exhibition of his work, Less and More, will open in November at the London Design Museum, and that there is an accompanying monograph that was available…and might be again by Christmas. Rams has been in the air for some time as an influence, acknowledged and unacknowledged, and my kitchen is a sort of shrine to Rams’s offspring. The current designer who owes him the greatest debt is Jasper Morrison, whose Rowenta coffee maker and toaster are almost pure Rams.

In 2007 Morrison published a book called Super Normal with Naoto Fukasawa, a designer for Muji similarly interested in all things white, plain, and functional. The book and accompanying exhibition were a sort of explanation in goods of their aesthetic philosophy, including brand-new items and classics like Luxo lamps. I have that coffee maker, along with Konstantin Grcic’s Krups toaster oven and the Tivoli iSongbook. No, I did not want to pay that much for a toaster. But I realized that I use it and look at it every day, and I did not want another off-white, uselessly streamlined Black & Decker on my new white countertop. That’s how they get you, and that was Rams’s genius. He created the useful everyday thing that you didn’t have to pay attention to. It was just perfect.

Design*Sponge alerted me today to the release of the first issue of Lonny, an online-only shelter magazine brought to you by some former editors of the late, lamented Domino. I wrote a couple of times for Domino and loved it very much for about 20 minutes each month, but it is only since its demise that I see what a particular niche it filled. Only Cookie seems to serve the same affluent, modern-but-not-minimalist, color-loving, kid-having mostly-female population, and they only run one house feature a month. (I love the Tennessee log cabin they show this month, with beautiful Matthew Hranek photography. My son even has all the same toys as the costumed tot in the shoot.) All the other magazines are too fancy, or too not-NYC, or too modern, or too too. I frequently found Domino too girly for my taste. Of course, we are now in the process of submitting our house to magazines to publish, and we would be foolish to turn our noses at any of them. Sometimes the critic and the proud homeowner cannot exist simultaneously.

I took a quick page through Lonny, and it recaps many of the choice elements in Domino: those front-of-the-book round-ups of a single material (Snakeskin! Disco! Prep!) in clothes, accessories and furniture; the little by-the-by remarks and practical tips; the variety of square footage and budget of places shown. But they also trumpet the freedom of the online format, and the fact that one of the features can be 35 pages. Now, is it just me, or is that not such a good thing? Yes, I have been frustrated by partial images and too-short glimpses of others’ domestic paradises in the past, but it has to be an awfully good, rich, fascinating place to warrant 35 pages of photos and I don’t think former Domino EIC Deborah Needleman’s country house and garden, lovely as they are, warrant that. The best effects, like the pewter-painted study, look almost too Domino to establish Lonny as having a different personality. Too many photos start to cheapen the effect, especially when you are virtually paging through. Isn’t the point of shelter magazines to show things looking their best? How else can we be aspirational? Does anything look best in 35 different ways?

I don’t want to be a grouch—I look forward to the progress of Lonny, looking for ideas to steal, gifts to buy—but the problem of the 35 pages of a single house is really the same as the problem I have with much of the web. Like a chump I believe in editing. Selecting the right images. Picking the right words. Paying attention (sometimes) to the word count the magazine sends you. Not just going on and on. These restrictions usually make a better product, however irritating they are in the short term. It is the same reason architecture is better for push-pull dialogue with a client. I hope the Lonny editors think hard about what the web could really bring: they have the insta-shopping in hand, since the items in each photo are clickable, but what about more unmercenary options and alternatives? With all the space in the world, I’d love to see wheels of red-and-white fabrics when I scrolled over a chair upholstered in just one, or more visual exploration of the visual steals people use to put their places together. I am endlessly fascinated by the evolution of taste, my own most of all, and there must be some way to layer that in with links. Go deeper into the best pictures, don’t just give us more of the shoot. We’re (not) paying for editorial judgment.