Q+A #012: Hannah Martin [Senior Design Editor, Architectural Digest]
🔳 Cut-up, Cubist Architecture 🏺Ancient Furniture 🎩 Jim Walrod, "Furniture Pimp" 🎬 Nicola L.'s Director's Chair 📦 “Stuff People” 🛋️ Big Weird Lofts
‘Storied Spaces’ is the RIALTO newsletter featuring ‘Q+A’, a bi-weekly column that features guest curators from the community, whom we invite to share inspiration from their home library. In each edit, you will hear from creatives we admire about the analogue inspirations that inform their work and vision.
Hannah Martin is a New York-based editor, writer, and sometimes curator with a focus on modern and contemporary design, art, and architecture. She is the senior design editor at Architectural Digest, where she has worked for more than a decade, and is the author of Nicola L.: Life and Art (Apartamento, 2023), the first comprehensive monograph about the pioneering French artist.
Instagram: @_h_mart_
Website: architecturaldigest.com/contributor/hannah-martin
Q+A
[001] What is your favourite interior you’ve come across and why?
A recent favorite was the interior of the Paul Rudolph Institute, designed in 1989 as the architect’s own residence. Rudolph’s strange, cut-up, cubist architecture is so much fun to experience. It felt like a modernist Swiss Family Robinson treehouse, with all these little spaces connected by tiny stairways. My favorite part was that despite the architecture being so modern, the house was filled with his collections from extensive suite of milagros to ancient textiles to boomerangs. I like when a space has a certain density and as a person with a lot of stuff I find it useful to see how other “stuff people” display it in their homes.
[002] What is your favourite piece in your collection?
It always changes. Currently, one of the objects I prize the most is an anonymous-looking Director’s chair—the ubiquitous model with canvas seat and back—that came from the Chelsea Hotel apartment of Nicola L., an artist who I wrote a book about a few years ago. Nicola had such a presence in my headspace for several years and I still think of her irreverent spirit when I sit down in that chair to do some work or have a glass of wine.
[003] Describe your dream interior or set if you had no budget restraints.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about big weird lofts and how, unfortunately, building codes and zoning laws have had such a restrictive effect on the spaces we can live in. I recently saw photos of Philippe Starck’s loft in Paris, set up in an old woodworking shop. All the ceiling pipes are exposed, the kitchen cabinets are made from corrugated metal, and there’s a lofted bed with metal blinds that can lower down for privacy. I’ve been dreaming about my version of this place ever since.
[004] What has piqued your interest lately?
Ancient furniture. I recently wrote about the Klismos chair for my Object Lesson column and it got me thinking about the earliest known living implements. I love that what we know about these artifacts actually comes from imagery on funerary vessels, painted pottery, and bas-reliefs. T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings’s Furniture of Classical Greece is now on my wish list.
[005] Who other than yourself would you trust to decorate your home?
Jim Walrod. The late design consultant or “furniture pimp” as his friends lovingly called him made a really big mark on me when I first started writing about design.
Sadly, he passed away much too early, before we had the chance to become real friends. Jim liked to talk about living with things that really moved you–and not always in a positive way. Sometimes an ugly object was actually more potent because it made you feel something. I still think about that all the time.
I learned about so many of my biggest influences—even Nicola L., who I eventually wrote a book about—through Walrod, even if inadvertently. I’d love to see what he’d put in my apartment—and decorating a place with him just sounds like it would be really fun.
I. ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’
I bought this book when I was first getting into Italian Radical design, probably about a decade ago, and it’s been an essential reference for me ever since.
It’s the exhibition catalogue for the eponymous 1972 exhibition at MoMA in New York that really changed the game in terms of how people lived. So many important design developments can be traced back to that show.
The book itself is also an incredible collectors item with tiny cut-out furnishings like the Gufram Pratone and Massimo Vignelli dishes that float behind its vellum cover. Sometimes I use them as bookmarks.
II. ‘Freestyle: The New Architecture and Interior Design from Los Angeles’
I got this book recently and have been loving rediscovering some of the truly weird things that were built in Los Angeles in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s also a thrill to see early Frank Gehry work, before he was a starchitect turning napkin drawings into cultural institutions.
It can be easy to feel like everything has been done—and then some—but this book feels like proof that there is still uncharted territory. Even if not always my taste, I appreciate the transgressive qualities of these spaces. I also like digging into this chapter of radical American design that often gets overlooked.
III. ‘High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home’
I reference this 1978 book constantly, where Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin track the 1970s architectural trend that was trickling down into people’s homes. In their words, it documents “the use of utilitarian industrial equipment and materials, out of context, as home furnishings.”
Inside, they show cool, often loft-y interiors that feature mass-produced hardware store staples-turned-decor—laboratory sinks, ladders, factory lighting, exposed pipes, and one of my favorites, metal office blinds. It’s actually a very useful book if you’re brainstorming storage solutions or just want a cool new look on a dime.
IG Accounts to follow?
– @knifeforkspoon.co
– @alexpwhite
– @imrevolting
– @allthequeenshouses
– @joshitiola
