JORGE S. ARANGO is a freelance design writer, editor and stylist. His work has appeared in many
publications, including Metropolitan Home, Elle Decor, Robb Report, Luxe, Coastal Living, 1stdibs.
com and others. He is the co-author of four books on design, most recently Elegant Rooms That
Work: Fantasy and Function in Interior Design (Rizzoli, 2013), with Stephanie Stokes.
ANTOINE BOOTZ grew up in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne and in Marseilles before moving
to New York in 1981 to pursue a career in fine art and commercial photography. He has been a
contributing photographer at Elle Décor, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue Decoration and
other international magazines.
AYESHA KHAN, an interior designer by trade, travels the world scouting fascinating
interiors from Australia to Argentina. She writes the Fashionable Life segment, featuring an interior design at home, for Harper’s Bazaar’s 30 international editions. The
daughter of a diplomat, Khan speaks four languages and has lived all over the world.
SCOTT FRANCES is a New York–based photographer who specializes in design, architecture
and the decorative arts. After studying journalism and art history at Northwestern University, he
worked with the legendary architectural photographer Ezra Stoller and began to document the
work of modernist architect Richard Meier, a collaboration that now spans three decades.
FRANS VAN DER HEIJDEN is a photographer and designer based in Amsterdam. He and designer
Kate Hume launched their furniture company, Heijden Hume, in the late 1990s.
LAURA HULL is a fine-art and commercial photographer who lives in Los Angeles. Since 1996 she
has been regional editor for Meredith Corporation; she served as editor-in-chief of LA Architect,
and for 13 years she was the Los Angeles city editor for Metropolitan Home. Hull has taught at Otis
School of Art and Design, and her photography has appeared in California Home, Angeleno
and The New York Times. She holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate University, and her fine-art
photography has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the country.
MAXWELL MACKENZIE, based in Washington, D.C., and Minnesota, is an award-winning
professional and fine-art photographer specializing in architecture and interiors. Over the past 35
years, his photographic assignments have taken him to more than 20 states and a dozen foreign
countries. MacKenzie shot his first house by Robert Gurney for the Washington Post in 1989 and
considers himself extremely fortunate to have been chosen by the architect to continue to
document his extraordinary work.
MINDY PANTIEL writes about architecture and design for numerous national and regional publications. She is the co-author of The Professional Design Guide to Green Roofs (Timber Press).
ZOE SET TLE began covering the interior design world as a design editor at Town & Country and has
been a freelance writer and stylist for the past three years. Her love of design is also expressed in
her e-commerce shopping site, Maxwell Silver N Y. She was born and raised in New York City, where
she still lives.
MICHAEL SLENSKE covers arts and culture for various publications, including W, Architectural Digest,
Modern Painters and Art + Auction. In this issue, he got a look inside Laura Kirar’s subtle bedazzling
of the Palm Springs vacation home of jewelry entrepreneur Jessica Falvo.
MICHAEL WEBB is the author of 26 books, most recently Modernist Paradise: Niemeyer House, Boyd
Collection (Rizzoli) and Venice CA: Art +Architecture in a Maverick Community (Abrams). He was
born and educated in London, where he worked at The Times and Country Life before moving to
the United States. Michael now lives in Los Angeles in a classic Richard Neutra apartment that was
once home to Charles and Ray Eames.
TED YARWOOD is a Toronto-based interiors and architecture photographer who has contributed to all the Canadian shelter magazines and many U.S. and European magazines, as well as
documenting the work of top Canadian interior designers. After a more than 30-year career, he
has been fortunate enough to be able to cut back his shooting assignments and has been enjoying life with his wife and two grown daughters and traveling in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
CONTRIBUTORS
interiors
at the risk of dashing a few high-def
fantasies, interiors magazine’s headquarters is not an
icy white cube of symmetry and high resolution methodology. We are also not the kind of office with a mood board,
fresh peonies, a cashmere throw, and a set of French water-colors, for those inspired Thursday afternoons. That kind of
office seems to exist only on Instagram, as a teaser to a photo shoot that will be posted on a blog, which will eventually
be re-Tweeted. So, that content need is already being met.
We do have an impressive design library. Fabric bolts, paint
samples, an international editorial beauty pageant of
media kits and catalogs; towers of interrupted order and
fragmented thoughts. If the secret to successful people is a
choice between waking up early and ruthlessness with the
inbox, the dawn has my undivided attention—until other
things wash up on the cluttered shore. The other day I forgot
how old I was. For an alarming amount of time. I mentioned
this to our creative director, James Barra. “Starts to happen,”
he said, without looking up, as if I described worn-out
brake pads.
If being a creative means less room for other things (like a
memory), could that delay in the sequence become our
accidental but exceptional ego boost? In revisiting past
projects, does the work look better? And are we allowed to
enjoy a few hits from the Best Of album ahead of schedule?
When talking to Michael Slenske about her Palm Springs
project in this issue, the very prolific Ms. Kirar recalled sourcing a few pieces from her earlier product collections. It’s not
the same as shopping when you’re thumbing through the
instincts from the past-tense—concepts from another time.
Most people refuse to create in a state of disarray, but I
think creativity demands that chaos, or it gives us the cold
shoulder when we try to impose our own order. The last
page of this issue captures Georg Baehler of Noir furniture
in his artistic domain. We’re calling the section Portrait
because there is no such thing as background here. n
Arianne Nardo
Editor-in-Chief
FROM THE EDITOR
14april may 2014 ⁄