Volume
Phaidon
100 of the most creative Interior Design Projects selected by 10 acclaimed Curators from around the World.
A lavishly illustrated volume, Room presents 100 exceptional emerging designers, selected by 10 international leaders in the interior design world; featuring curators from a broad range of disciplines, including groundbreaking design publications, world-renowned academics and tutors on design, influential interior design practices, cross-genre innovators and industry leaders. This international panel have each chosen 10 of their favourite interior design projects that have broken new ground in the last 5 years. Arranged alphabetically by designer, the book features more than 700 photographs, renders and drawings. The result is an up-to-the-minute collection representing the best of both global and regional interior design around the world. The variety in curators ensures a uniquely broad remit of interior design is covered, from retail concept stores, ephemeral dining experiences, stage design, art installations, hotels and home living. Each critic has written exclusively for this publication on each of the designs they have nominated—projects that they believe to have made a profound impact on the course of contemporary interior design. The book also includes biographies of all interior designers and curators.
- Nacho Alegre
- Michael Boodro
- Tony Chambers
- Aric Chen
- Miles Kemp
- Ko Matsubara
- Jon Otis
- Robert Thiemann
- Alan Yau
Curators
House of Dust
Nacho Alegre
London-based, Italian-born architect Antonino Cardillo believes that “if light is the raw material of architecture […] light, when it encounters a solid material changing its nature and form, reverberates on other surfaces in a game of divisions until [it] decays into darkness.” This is certainly the case for Cardillo’s project House of Dust, located in Rome. And although a lot has been written about it, I was attracted to it at first glance; it instantly brought back memories of the best postmodern, neoclassical architecture that I was revisiting at the time—Bofill, Moneo, Tusquets—but with a more personal and very contemporary view.
In the design for this private apartment, Cardillo used materials and colours to delineate spaces and define uses. Neutral colour tones denote public spaces, as found in the living room, while the colour pink indicates more private rooms. The living room’s neutral-coloured theme is explored through a multitude of textures: a rough-plastered ceiling, smooth grey walls that bend to form the perimeter floor, which in turn frames a carpet-like wooden floor at its centre. The bedrooms and bathrooms sit behind tall, arched doorways with pink knobs, which conceal a pale pink ceiling and walls, while a ghost-like sheet surrounds the shower area.
The room’s layout, dictated by the golden ratio, together with its textured outline give the room a sense of order and proportion. Deep, recessed, tapered windows reveal the surrounding city while streaming daylight inwards, as if illuminating a cavernous space. In this space, Cardillo’s use of texture and colour, natural light, shape and proportion is exquisite and poetic.
Cardillo’s House of Dust was the opening feature of the teaser for Phaidon’s ROOM volume