Yellowtrace

10 stories

YellowtraceBusiness on the Outside, Party on the Inside: The Fun House in Kamnik, Slovenia by Alto Design Studio. From the street, the Fun House gives absolutely nothing away. It’s a newly built, three-storey family home with a gable roof, sitting politely among neighbours of similar size and materials on the…

10.18

YellowtraceExperimental Roma by Rodolphe Parente Brings Marble, Steel and 1970s Vibes to a Former Bank. A bank is a strange place to go looking for hedonism. Banks are built to reassure: sober, solid, permanent.

10.14

YellowtraceA Window Built for Orchids: The Swiss Watchmaker Behind Vitrocsa. Sunrise House by MCK. Photography: Michael Nicholson. Clifton House by Anthony Gill Architects. Photography: Rory Gardiner. Lavender Bay House by Tobias Partners. Photography: Justin Alexander.

10.12

YellowtraceCasper Mueller Kneer Design a Perfume Fountain at the Heart of Caron’s New Paris Store. Runway sets are the most short-lived architecture there is. A few minutes of drama, then the trucks arrive.

10.11

YellowtraceNo Botox: Raúl Sánchez Lets a Mataró Heritage Home Wear Its Age at La Casa del Pirata. Few houses come with a backstory like this one. In 1820, eighteen-year-old Antoni Cuyàs left Mataró for Argentina with little more than rough navigation skills, and not many years later he’d become…

10.07

YellowtraceLilac by Bureau: 44 Square Metres, One Counter and Two Domestic Worlds. How many square metres does a home actually need? Bureau has been poking at that question for a while.

10.05

YellowtraceSampling the 80s: The Ken Club in Paris by Rodolphe Parente and Marion Mailaender. When Mireille and Pierre Benzaquen opened the Ken Club in 1985, Paris had seen nothing quite like it.

10.04

YellowtraceMadeleine Castaing Meets Manhattan: Inside Child Studio’s New York Debut. Before Alexy Kos and Che Huang touched a single length of velvet, they were thinking about Madeleine Castaing’s midnight blue and leopard print, and Renzo Mongiardino’s tented 1960s salons.

10.01

YellowtraceFarrell Wray Architects Build a Concrete Gallery Around a Tree They Refused to Touch. Most architects get a brief. Farrell Wray Architects got a brief and a non-negotiable stakeholder: an existing gum tree standing between two buildings at Marcellin College in Bulleen, Victoria.

09.30

YellowtraceEllison Studios Gives The Least Public Room In The House Its Best Furniture Yet. The bedroom is usually the last room in the house to get the good furniture. It is also the least public, which is why it tends to absorb the hand-me-downs, the frame that came with the apartment…

09.28

A room is a decision about how you want to be tired at the end of the day.

I live in forty-eight square metres in Tokyo with one good chair and far too many bowls, so I have had to mean that. I trained as an architect and left to write, which my teachers took badly. Uchi (内) means inside, and it means home: the room you come back to. The palette comes after the tiredness. So does the name on the lamp.

This is where I keep what the world's rooms are doing. Around seventy sources, read in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, French and English: an apartment in Seoul, a house outside Taipei, a Copenhagen showroom seen from here rather than from Denmark. East first, because east is where I am sitting.

Each story is a headline, an excerpt of a few lines, one photograph and a link to whoever did the work. We never reprint the piece, and the photograph belongs to the person who took it. When a room was written up in Korean or Italian it stays in Korean or Italian here; the link takes you to the writer's own words.

I am not trying to be complete. I am trying to notice.

— Mio Tachibana, Tokyo