Elle Decor

9 stories

Elle DecorELLE Decoroscope: Your November Design Horoscope Is Here The retrogrades end just in time for hosting season.

11.01

Elle DecorBefore & After: How an Artist and Architect Couple Turned the “Worst House” on the Block Into Their Dream Home In Brooklyn, artist Katherine Keltner and architect Douglas Gauthier transform a crumbling townhouse with equal parts drama and restraint.

10.31

Elle DecorInside Banqueting House, the Last Surviving Piece of the Lost Palace of Whitehall The building showcases Inigo Jones’s classical architecture and a monumental ceiling painted by Peter Paul Rubens.

10.28

Elle Decor8 Takeaways from Design Miami and Art Basel in Paris Inside the week’s standout moments, from Miu Miu to Madonna.

10.28

Elle DecorJackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s Onetime Manhattan Studio Hits the Market Listed for nearly $8 million, the two-bedroom carriage house is where the famed artists lived in the winter of 1950.

10.26

Elle DecorThis Designer’s Long Island Family Home Has Been 40 Years in the Making Phillip Thomas’s Bellport retreat is a laboratory for color, collecting, and the occasional improbable antique.

10.24

Elle DecorFront Office: Leset The celeb-favorite brand founded by Lili Chemla transforms a historic Los Angeles building into a design-forward workspace.

10.23

Elle DecorA New Way to Bring the English Garden Indoors British design house Sanderson celebrates the flora and fauna of the King’s garden in a refreshed collection of fabric and wallpaper.

10.22

Elle DecorCalling All Kitchen Icons The Monogram Iconic Kitchen Design Awards honor the visionaries redefining luxury kitchen design through exceptional creativity, craftsmanship, and innovation.

10.22

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo