AD100: The New Taste

[gentle music]

Taste is a concept that can be very limiting.

[upbeat music]

Is this taste good taste, bad taste?

Whose taste? Whose taste is it, you know?

I think that the very notion of taste

is something to kinda push through.

The AD 100 is a annual list of talents in architecture,

interior design, and landscape design

who we, the editors at AD,

feel were important and influential in that year.

It's really hard because it's 100 names

and there are clearly more

than 100 notable talents in the world.

We have multiple meetings.

They can get heated.

People can make a case for someone.

I would compare it to a red carpet.

When you look at a major red carpet,

you wanna feel that you're seeing the stars of today

and the rising stars of tomorrow.

I really look at the AD 100 as a group of super talented,

influential individuals who can really help us

to explore the idea of taste in a richer way.

[gentle upbeat music]

When you first use the word taste, I think of food, right?

[bright music]

When you're eating something and whether you like it or not,

there's no right or wrong to that.

There's the things that you like

and the things that you're like, oh, I don't like that.

And for me, it's the same with taste and design.

This whole culture of the L-shaped sofa and beige,

sort of minimal, safe beige.

I hated beige, but I think hopefully,

the culture is changing a little bit.

Rooms or interiors are becoming more personal,

and that's the key element.

[bright music]

A lot of the way that we see the world,

it's so conditioned in our thinking that it's hard

to understand the ways in which it's restricting us.

[bright music]

That's why I wanted to be a designer in the first place,

was the kind of unbridled sense

of imagining what's possible.

[bright music]

I think often, in the early stages of a project,

you sort of experiment with things

that are somewhat jarring,

[bright music]

a little sort of ugly.

Something in it provokes you, or attracts you,

or maybe even repulses you.

But that's why you need to poke at it more.

There's people who are very avant garde,

who are really out there,

pushing the boundaries of architecture.

You're also getting a peek into the homes of people

who we feel we might know or have an opinion about.

How does Kylie Jenner live? How does Kendall Jenner live?

A designer like Martyn Lawrence Bullard,

he is the celebrity whisperer.

Nobody does celebrities like Martyn

and gives you that fantasy lifestyle

and that sort of California dream.

I think they feel they can explore all the fantasies

around how they want to live with no judgment,

and the way that someone feels they're most comfortable

and fulfilled and happy in their home

is probably ultimately good taste.

[birds chirping]

We are in my living room here in my house in LA.

It's really Daisy's house. [laughs]

[upbeat music]

We have this wonderful domed ceiling.

It was sort of my own version

of the Sistine Chapel. [laughs]

Designers' homes are our experiment pads.

So you have to try things for yourself.

These amazing palm trees came

from the Yves Saint Laurent sale.

It's my mad mix. It's things that make me happy.

[upbeat music]

There's been a lot of wild requests over the years.

The sex room is a big one these days.

People love a sex room.

We've had a room that had to be quilted

in black patent leather to look like a Chanel handbag.

Not quite sure what that fantasy was, but I'm down for it.

At one point somebody asked me to gold leaf a garage.

We parted ways over that one.

People say to me all the time,

oh, what is it like decorating for celebrities?

What's it like doing these houses?

Everybody in the world is the same at the end of the day.

But the difference with a celebrity

is that they can't run down the road,

you know, to get a pint of milk.

[upbeat music]

So you have to create everything that they need.

It's really about creating real, real personal space,

where they feel protected and where they feel joyous.

Interiors have to be joyous.

They have to be spaces that make us happy.

[playful music]

From about the age of 10 or 11, I started collecting things,

and on my way home from school every day,

I would stop off at vintage-y junk shops

and I'd go rummaging through

to find out what they've got in new that day.

What I was doing was training myself to become a designer,

but I wanted to be an actor.

[ragtime music]

By the time I was 21, I thought,

Right, I'm going to Hollywood.

I'm gonna be discovered and I'm gonna be a movie star.

I ended up getting cast in a movie.

Basically I was cut out of the whole thing in the end,

but what happened from that is I met one of the producers

and he and his then girlfriend came

to this little house that I had.

You know, everything in my house was from the flea markets

and they were like, oh my god, this is amazing.

Will you come and decorate?

I thought, maybe if I do it,

they're gonna put me in another movie.

And they loved it, and my career was born.

[upbeat music]

Ellen Pompeo, who's a longtime client of mine,

loves the whole idea of Bardot slung on a chaise

in the middle of a beach with a daiquiri.

Quite like the sound of that myself.

[person singing in French]

I'm a huge fan of the French Riviera and that whole vibe.

South of France is definitely a huge inspiration.

[person singing in French]

You know, the materials, the teak of the house,

the sort of the concrete in the floors.

It has so many elements of the French 60s,

but the part of this house that I love the most

is that it's got so much of you mixed up in it.

It's got the sex appeal,

it's got the family life, it's got the actress.

It really does because design aesthetic is one thing,

but where is the character?

Where is the soul?

[person singing in French]

I took inspiration from Gio Ponti

for this marble wall in her bedroom.

[person singing in French]

In her living room, you are engulfed

in a glorious, glamorous Brazilian marble,

all reminiscent of the waves.

It's that subliminal connection

that really makes design work.

Design is to trigger us, not just

to make beautiful wallpaper.

And so my process to this day still is based on feeling.

When I think about creating a room, I really start

with the feeling approach.

How is this room gonna make you feel?

How is it gonna support your wellbeing?

You're trying to, you know, evoke emotion

and create a narrative through design.

[upbeat electronic music]

There's certain spaces that make you really static and calm

and there's spaces that cause motion and movement.

I love playing with that tension.

People like Pamela Shamshiri are really pushing to say,

you could look at your visual world in your built world

in a totally different way.

She's not just decorating the room

and like placing things in it.

She is beloved by her clients.

She is gonna live in that house with you

and experience that house as you would experience it.

[upbeat music]

This is my studio.

We wanted it to feel like a home and a house

and do for our team what we do for our clients.

And so we have a big communal kitchen.

There's a bar in like every room. [laughs]

[upbeat music]

A big thing about our firm is

that we don't really differentiate between architecture

or interior design or graphics.

Ideas are welcome from everyone.

We're definitely thinking about the whole picture

and it's really a holistic look because of it.

There's prototypes and materials and pieces everywhere.

I think my favorite object is a Frank Lloyd Wright

textile block that we found on a project

digging out the dirt.

It was right there in the ground, like five feet under.

You just don't know. You just have to be open and ready.

I think I just love it 'cause it's something we unearth

on a job site and it's a link to the past.

I'm always looking for those lessons like from the past

to carry forward and you know, making those connections.

[upbeat music]

Annie and Adam, they had such a hand in

coming up with their narrative.

It was, what if Wes Anderson

had bought a California Swiss chalet

and Yves Saint Laurent was coming over.

I think I'm a little obsessed with time travel.

I'm gonna sound like a crazy, [laughs] but...

[car engine revs]

My dad is Iranian and my mom is Italian.

We lived in a tower in Tehran.

It was very Miesian, the old and the new are side by side,

and you really get a sense of layers of history there.

I was really studious and dorky,

but also very escapist.

I was really into my books and a big dreamer

and just lots of fantasy and play.

[Reporter] 1979 Iran exploded in violence.

My brother, my mom, and I were here for Christmas

and then the revolution happened

and my dad got stuck and came out,

I think three years later, we left our dog,

we left our shoes, you know, we left everything

and there's something really empowering when you have

to reset up your life so abruptly overnight.

With all that loss, I dove into the fantasies of the home

and life for other people.

I feel really lucky that I get to carry that out

and have a hand in setting up

new chapters in people's lives now.

[gentle music]

This project that we highlighted

of Pam's is a historic house and it's a real knockout,

but a challenging house too,

to actually live a life in.

[gentle music]

Pam felt the spirit of that house.

The house was designed by A. Quincy Jones.

It was his favorite house.

[film projector clicks and whirrs]

It just took my breath away.

My client's a statuesque Persian woman,

she's a student of architecture,

and she's a patron of the arts

and starting a gallery.

I feel like you're a long lost sister for me.

We just have so much in common.

We were at a place in both of our lives

where we were in similar transitions.

Moving out of a marriage

or a relationship that didn't work.

Mm-hmm.

And then finding ways that we could reinvent ourselves.

She's so invested in this house

and wanting to bring it to its best place,

but also looking out for her own comfort

and her new needs as her kids left the house.

I mean, if I'm that in love with the building

and then add the person, then I'm hooked.

[gentle music]

But what I was really freaked out about was I could tell

that we really needed to make some big shifts.

There's a lot of guessing

and a lot of fantasizing about

what the architect's intentions were.

Like the kitchen, which is a circular kitchen

and probably something Quincy Jones

would have maybe never done,

but we had clues that it, he could have done it too, so.

I was standing above the great room

and everyone was down below waiting for answers from me,

which is like my life.

And I looked at the stairs, I could see

that each stair was a different length

and the floor pattern, there was also rhythm.

I was like, he was into jazz, he was into,

you know, free forming a bit.

I realized even though his was very geometric

and rectilinear, we could bring natural lines in.

I think as long as we're honoring the intention,

then we can take some liberties

and once we figure that out, it brings freedom.

I just really believe in being like humble and open

and looking for all those lessons within a building.

That skill of uniting the past, the present,

and something that feels futuristic, that is ultimately

what the AD 100 list should be doing.

Pushing us to think about the past in a new way.

I don't think, you know, the future of design

is something that we've never seen before.

It's an interpretation of the past,

in the context of the future.

I mean, Bjarke Ingles is an extraordinary architect.

He takes something that's sort of conventional

and then just knocks it out of the park.

To me, he's future thinker.

[upbeat music]

We are designing this single family home

like a big circle on top of a hill in northern Denmark.

The house is tailored to the sort of

unique desires of this family.

So imagine a single house designed

as much for the cars as for the people.

A single ribbon of rooms,

cars in one end and the living room in the other end,

wrapped around the top of the hill

where every room is looking out

over the landscape and out over the intimacy of the garden.

It has the effect that when he goes to bed every night,

he looks across his garden

and down into all of his parked cars and can say goodnight.

Just like my son says goodnight to his teddy bears.

At the same time, we are also designing a 3D printed home

for four astronauts to live on the moon.

The most effective way to do it is with a single pivot.

Then essentially two redundant houses,

one for two astronauts and one for two astronauts.

So strangely rather different,

but also rather similar program requirements

and architectural end results.

By committing to something fully,

you force yourself onto new territory where you may discover

and explore new possibilities.

And is that part of taste?

Yes.

He takes that idea of taste and he smashes it.

He pushes way beyond it.

The less that people stay harnessed to old think,

there's a much more openness

and opportunity to think about the individual

inhabiting the space.

What is their experience of the space?

We are in a position where we need

to design new ways of living.

If we can understand that people have different traditions

of using space and designing for them,

then we can support the idea that, you know,

people can be, that they can be in space,

they can be in public space.

The interior design of our bodies is so limited

and we have to, we keep on the suit the entire time.

Much of my entire life has been trying to, you know,

kind of make sure that my body feels really

comfortable wherever it's at.

[playful music]

I was trained in a very, very European model, Corbusier,

Mies van der Rohe, those were the names,

break those buildings apart

and you will understand architecture

in the 20th and 21st century.

But I couldn't break apart with exactly

what I was seeing based on the tools

that I had been supplied with.

Leyden is such an interesting talent, classically trained,

but he doesn't have a formula and your eye is surprised

and delighted when you look at the work,

because it's fresh, it's new.

He's not relying on like,

this is good taste and I always do it, you know?

Taste in my definition is a construct

started somewhere in about the 16th

or the 17th century in Europe.

[playful music]

It is not inherent.

Taste is something that one has to be schooled on.

So it is already confined to a very specific group of people

and a very specific place.

We talk about people either having it or not having it.

You know, the West African birthing chair,

does that have taste?

I find it strange to speak about things

like that in the construct of the word taste.

The way in which I approach design today

is staying completely open.

[upbeat rock music]

The Brooklyn Tower occupies the site

of the old Brooklyn Dime Savings Bank.

Also the first place

that my parents opened up a pass book account

as immigrants in this country.

The client, she's a Holocaust survivor.

She's started the renovation when she was 90 years old.

When I include my client's cultural backgrounds

and then the possibilities are just endless.

[upbeat music]

Malene Barnett is an incredible clay and ceramic artist

and the space is being designed not with an idea of 2.5 kids

and the dog, a profile of a family that doesn't live there.

When I think of Malene, I think of dancing

and so it's going to be a great space

to just shove things into the corner and everyone can party

and pull it back together very quickly.

So I'm a dance hall reggae queen

from the 80s and 90s.

Don't play anything past the 90s. You got it.

How do we create space that nurtures Black life

and what does that look like?

What's your, what's your thoughts you think that we need?

We made what is going to turn into the fireplace

as a ceramic installation.

You have been talking about this wall,

whatever this wall was supposed to be or was going to be,

but it's been a wall that you've been

very much interested in creating for a long time.

When I was making the work

and when I do, not just this project,

but my work in general, I look at the origins

of how the diaspora came about,

through Atlantic slave trade,

through colonialism.

Play house here.

That's it, yeah.

When people look at it, they ask, are they broken?

Yes, they're cut, but we could put them back together

and the idea is that we put these patterns back together,

because we create new stories, new narratives.

[gentle music]

I'm born and raised in Brooklyn.

My parents immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago.

My father came here to study art.

My mother got the kind of work that she could get.

She was a domestic.

And my father really took me under his wing.

Whereas other kids had a football field,

my Saturday afternoons were dedicated

to walking up Eastern Parkway,

heading to the Brooklyn Museum

and taking classes with college aged students.

And so here I was this 13 year old kid.

Just remember the first time I saw someone drop the robe.

There was not a moment in my life when art wasn't considered

as a part of my responsibility to my family.

My drawing happens everywhere,

on the back of an envelope, on the walls.

I draw a lot on drawings.

There's still something very peaceful about drawing to me

that connects me again to something a lot more basic.

People believe that they need so much stuff,

but for me, telling my own truth in my own space is critical

and I want to let my clients know

that in your personal space, you're allowed

to do whatever you wanna do.

[upbeat music]

When I walk through that turquoise door,

I'm gonna say I'm at home and I feel me.

[Leyden] The house is full with a lot of joyful moments

of not being as uptight as architecture can be.

[upbeat music]

If one is made to feel comfortable

in their bodies within the space, I'm all for it.

It's capturing somebody's personality,

capturing that dream and making it into decorative reality.

[Photographer] Gorgeous. Love it.

Beautiful. Turn the wrist out a little bit.

Beautiful. Does she have some diamonds on or something?

Yeah, in her ears, yeah.

[Photographer] Okay, great. Beautiful.

Okay, great.

Do you wanna see?

One of the things I love about the magic

of shooting a cover, particularly with a celebrity,

is that you can get a little spicy.

We definitely tempted Ellen with that.

We said, hey, how are we gonna get

a little bit of that sexiness for your shoot?

And so we thought, pull out her vintage car,

get you in an oiled up wet suit,

throw on some diamond earrings, give you a surfboard,

and let's see what happens.

You are able to make magic.

Not the same magic.

It's different magic for everyone.

That's what makes me tick.

That's what makes me happy.

Hey, that's the dream.

The power of turning fiction into fact

is the ultimate superpower of the designer.

This opportunity to really imagine

and create the most wondrous worlds.

The truth is, if we stick with established good taste,

architecture, interior design,

and landscape design would not be evolving.

You've seen the idea of taste in fashion and in movies

and pop culture and music.

It's always changing.

And I do think that's important in our practice too,

that we move forward into new ideas.

[upbeat music]

When it comes to taste, I think

what makes you happy is all that matters.

In a lot of ways, it's a feeling.

It's just a feeling of appreciation

and beauty and uniqueness.

If you have humility as a decorator,

which not everyone does, you want the room

to belong to the person.

And so you want to take this opportunity to make a portrait.

Each time I meet a client

and walk into a house,

I need to understand their personality

and how I wanna reflect that into the home.

I think that to make something useful

is actually quite beautiful.

Being Korean American, my parents always said,

you know, if you're not a doctor or lawyer,

you'll never be accepted.

And when I told my parents that I wanted

to go into interior design, they were pretty horrified.

Taste is about authenticity of yourself and the world.

If you can create a space that holds somebody there,

where they don't wanna leave,

where that's it and it's enough.

That for me is knowing you've done a good job.

[upbeat music]