Friday Favorites 8/29/2014

Cheryl Katz, Contributing Editor
As a student at the Royal College of Art, Genevieve Bennett studied mixed media and printed textiles. In 2008, the prolific artist established her own company to create bespoke leather pieces for interiors. Inspired by three-dimensional sculptural qualities, Bennett’s designs draw on a wide range of techniques to accomplish elegant results, like this detail from a sculpted leather wall panel.

Photo courtesy of Genevieve Bennet

Paula Bodah, Senior Editor
Women will probably relate when I say I love this piece—the Serpentine Chair from Hancock & Moore’s new Crown Jewels collection—the way I love a gorgeous dress know I shouldn’t buy. No matter how well the dress fits, or how its color flatters me, I will never have the right occasion for it. It will hang in my closet, eliciting the occasional wistful (or is it rueful?) sigh. I stopped in my tracks when I got a look at this chair with its slinky silhouette and its traffic-stopping combination of emerald and citrine. The front is luscious brocade and the back and sides are plush suede. It doesn’t matter that everything about it is wrong for my house, from the sexy shape to the color to the opulence of the fabric. I want it.

Photo courtesy of Hancock & Moore

Kyle Hoepner, Editor-in-Chief
It’s always interesting and pleasant to see careers, relationships, buildings, or ideas we’ve covered in New England Home develop over time. I experienced this particular pleasure again just recently, with the publication of Cape Cod Modern, now out from Metropolis Books.

Photo courtesy of Metropolis Books.

Many people know New Canaan, Connecticut, for its trove of twentieth-century modern architecture, but far fewer, I suspect, are aware that the outer Cape was home to a long-lasting community of Bauhaus émigrés and their friends and associates, a group including such eminent names as Gropius, Breuer, Chermayeff, and the like.

We first explored this overlooked bit of New England’s architectural patrimony in an interview with architect Mark Hammer in our Summer 2008 issue of New England Home Cape & Islands. Now you can find out much more about this artistic coterie and the fascinating, often experimental homes—some of which are now endangered—they created. If the structures and stories revealed in this book inspire you, you can even get involved in ongoing documentation and preservation efforts, via the Cape Cod Modern House Trust website.

Cape Cod Modern: Mid-Century Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape
Foreword by Kenneth Frampton
Text by Peter McMahon and Christine Cipriani
Photographs by Raimund Koch
Click here to purchase from Metropolis Books.