Dwell

Should we get a task chair? It was a debate in my household as it was in many last year when aesthetics and ergonomics battled for primacy in our interiors. Not that a task chair can’t be beautiful. They just tend to bring a cubicle vibe wherever the

It’s so great that you are bringing attention to [the affordability] issue [Affording America, November/December]. We recently moved to Boston, where the idea of a starter home is nonexistent; single-family home sales are up 37 percent compared to th

Watering my plants. They’re so varied in terms of exposure to light, distance to forced hot air vents, and their own biology. @dprivitera Folding the laundry after it’s dried and then putting it on shelves in a closet. @this_julie_young Why can’t we

CASA COSMOS On a rustic strip of coastline near Puerto Escondido, Mexico, S-AR designed a beach getaway with an open concrete grid that frames its natural surroundings. COCKPIT IN WILD PLANTS Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP created a sunken retreat in Karuiza

A few months after moving from Salt Lake City to the east side of Austin, Texas, Creede Fitch and his wife decided to transition from renting a house to settling in and building a home. They soon found a lot they loved—5,837 square feet with a beauti

A dedicated office is now an essential component of many of our homes, but a lot of us have been making do with ad hoc, hastily set up spaces. It’s time to give your office a more intentional upgrade, but that doesn’t mean you have to make it look li

If your work-from-home setup is more cubbyhole than corner office, consider installing this 4K UHD simulated skylight to brighten your space and boost your mood. We see you raising your eyebrow, but its eight-hour playlist of serene, cloud-filled vie

Taking a Netflix break? Add a set of these light strips around the back of your television. They’ll automatically sync with whatever is on display, extending colors onto the walls for a cinematic experience that helps reduce eye strain after a day al

Sometimes a tactile reminder is worth 1,000 calendar invites. These 186 colorful stickers make the case for analog organization, not only as a break from the digital world, but for slowing down and sorting through priorities with a well-designed syst

Admit it—you miss water cooler chatter. Fortunately, Berlin-based Kids Creative Agency has introduced the next best thing, a device that emits an aural facsimile of office sounds to convincingly reproduce the buzz of the workplace. It might not inclu

The ergonomics experts at Humanscale developed this 10-minute online self-assessment tool to help people improve their work areas. It uses a scoring system to suggest easy-to-understand improvements, customized to your office setup. Inspired by origa

Designer Demar Matthews isn’t wasting any time. Fresh out of a master’s program in architecture at L.A.’s Woodbury University, he established his own firm, OffTOP Design, and hit the ground running by putting into practice answers to a question that

Alicia Hylton-Daniel’s epiphany arrived in the aftermath of a 2002 house fire in Durham, North Carolina. Although an artist at heart, she had chosen the more practical path of working as a paralegal and studying for her LSAT exams. Then came a bang o

The smart home has always been a solution in search of a problem. Why do I need an app to turn on my lights when a switch works just fine? And is talking to your house really the behavior you want to model for your kids? Be that as it may, the techno

To start the next chapter in their lives, Ben Sykes and Erin Connor went back to school. The couple wanted a place in the country, and they had their eyes on rolling, rural Grey County, two hours northwest of their home in Toronto. While searching fo

In pastoral Kontiolahti, 285 miles northeast of Helsinki, it’s a crisp autumn afternoon and Ulla-Maaria Koivula is dismantling a newly constructed beaver dam with a trowel and sickle. She’s the founder and CEO of the Palo Alto, California–based educa

It’s late October in Western Massachusetts and the countryside bears all the hallmarks of the season: browning leaves, flapping Halloween decorations, and yard signs asserting either political allegiances or opposition to a proposed marijuana farm. A

In 2011, through an act of what Lizz Wasserman calls “real estate divination,” she and her husband, Isaac Resnikoff, found a plot of unbuilt land in the Highland Park section of Los Angeles. To them, it was the perfect place to build a house and rais

Christopher James vividly recalls when he and his wife, Kristin Beinner James, first laid eyes on the pink and maroon house in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood in 2000. Divided into upstairs and downstairs apartments, the house was a wreck, and the thre

Justine Cormack and Marc Taddei are something of a classical music power couple. He is the music director of both Orchestra Wellington in New Zealand and the Vallejo Symphony, near San Francisco (their seasons are at opposite times of the year). She

On a recent evening in Denton, Texas, Anthony Marks and his partner placed a projector and screen in front of the new 672-square-foot guesthouse in their backyard. A dozen or so people spread around the adjacent pool deck and watched Young Frankenste

When I think about technologies, I think about ingenuity, creativity, and invention. I try to understand the minds of the humans who made them and the consequences of their creations. These little stone blades that I keep on my desk are forms of tech