Architecture and Interiors
Ingenhoven Associates Fashions a Luxurious Retreat off the Coast of Germany
Lanserhof Sylt is not a typical spa. Situated on the windswept German island of Sylt, in the Wadden Sea, the resort promises to improve health through fasting, massage therapy, and medical treatments such as Cellgym infusions. Guests pay $8,000 a week to eat next to nothing—think wheatgrass shots and tiny portions of vegetable soup—and cleanse their bodies of harmful toxins. The Sylt retreat, which opened last summer, is Lanserhof’s fifth location. Founded in 1984, with properties in Lans, Austria, and Tegernsee, Germany, the brand has built a devoted A-list following, Christoph Ingenhoven, founder and chairman of Ingenhoven Associates, among those who have submitted to the strict regime.
Interior Design, February 2023
Olson Kundig Offers a Fresh Narrative on the Life of Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is famously enigmatic. He reinvents his own history, rarely grants interviews, and skipped the ceremony when he won the Nobel Prize in 2016. Dylan’s archive, which the George Kaiser Family Foundation acquired that same year, hardly clears things up. Now held at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, its over 100,000 items—including notebooks, recordings, and videos—reveal little about the man himself. For Olson Kundig, the firm selected to conceive the center’s interiors and exhibition design, the musician’s mystique presented an opportunity to take an unconventional narrative approach to the $10 million endeavor.
Interior Design, September 2022
NOA* Network of Architecture Transforms a 17th-Century Monastery into a Chic Hotel and Spa
For centuries, residents of Arco, a northern Italian commune overlooking Lake Garda, could only guess what was behind the 25-foot-tall stone walls of Serve di Maria Addolorata. There was nothing to see from the road, and passersby on the way to the lake could easily miss it. Stephanie Happacher had never even noticed the imposing structure on the edge of town, though her family has had a vacation home nearby for years. But recently, she and her husband, Manuel Mutschlechner, who were living in Zurich at the time, heard that part of the 3½-acre complex was for sale and arranged a visit. Arriving with no expectations, they were stunned to discover a monastery and an overgrown garden dating to 1689. “It was a whole world behind those walls,” Happacher remembers. The couple bought the property in 2019 and hired NOA* Network of Architecture to convert it into a 40-room hotel and spa, a serene sanctuary now called Monastero Arx Vivendi.
Interior Design, December 2021
Markzeff Captures California’s Coastal Beauty at Alila Marea Beach Resort in Encinitas
As a boy growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, Mark Zeff slipped out of the house one morning and took a train to the ocean. “My mother woke up and couldn’t find me,” the Interior Design Hall of Fame member and Markzeff principal recalls. “A friend and I had gone on a mission to collect sea creatures.” Armed with jam jars and formalin, they spent the day gathering specimens like anemones and brought them back home. “I was punished heavily, but my mother also encouraged me to do it again,” Zeff says. He’s gravitated to the sea ever since, scavenging, surfing, and scuba diving around the world. In 2018, Zeff evoked this history in a pitch to design the Alila Marea Beach Resort in Encinitas, a beach city in San Diego County.
Interior Design, November 2021
Diana Kellogg Architects Designs an Oval Sandstone School in Northern India
This year, many girls from rural areas around Jaisalmer, a city in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, will attend school for the first time. They will put on blue uniforms and ride a bus to the Rajkumari Ratnavati Girls’ School, a 10-classroom structure in the Thar Desert. In a region where female infanticide and child marriage are shockingly common, it is remarkable that a school for girls even exists. Yet the building, developed by the American nonprofit organization Citta (Sanskrit for consciousness) and designed by Diana Kellogg Architects, transcends its function. Made almost entirely of hand-carved sandstone blocks, it supports local craftsmen—including some of the girls’ fathers—and proves that heritage architecture can take an elegant modern form.
Interior Design, August 2021
Stera Architectures Crafts a Jaw-Dropping Seaside Villa in Sardinia, Italy
Stefania Stera has visited Sardinia all of her life. Born in Rome, the architect has lived in Genoa, Venice, Paris, and Fort-de-France, Martinique, but she always returns to the rugged Mediterranean island, where her family owns a granite quarry and has a house. “I’m very attached to my Sardinian origins,” confesses Stera, who founded her Paris-based firm, Stera Architectures, in 1992. As a child in the 1960s, she scrambled over the rocks, admired Cini Boeri’s brutalist Bunker House from the beach, and saw northeast Sardinia transform into a chic resort: the Costa Smeralda, or Emerald Coast. Decades later, Stera paid homage to her beloved landscape in a three-level, seven-bedroom villa in the town of Porto Cervo.
Interior Design Homes, Spring 2021
The founder and director of Ministry of Design, Colin Seah, admits that his firm was not an obvious choice to design a high-end bank. “We’re a bit of a black sheep,” he says. “It’s our natural impulse to be slightly rebellious and question convention.” The Singaporean architect has earned accolades for such edgy constructions as the Race Robotics Laboratory, a futuristic black cave, and the piercing triangular Vanke Triple V Gallery. Investment banks, by contrast, favor plush but predictable interiors. Yet Citibank Singapore was ready for a change when it held a competition to create the Citi Wealth Hub, a wealth-management center downtown. The RFP called for out-of-the-box thinking and a fresh, world-class experience. MOD’s outsider perspective worked to its advantage: The firm won with a proposal for what it called a “banking conservatory” filled with tropical plants.
Interior Design, June 2021