Hi there, housemates,

For the final story in our 10th issue, Alex T. Williams brings us into the home, studio, and garden of Constantin and Laurene Boym, also known as Boym Partners. These sites are filled with tokens of friendship from fellow artists and designers, as well as their own personal archive of work made over four decades of practice together. The duo are currently creating a new collection of nature-based “readymades,” to be exhibited at Available Items later this month. During the interview, Constantin picks up a piece of bark: “People just step over these things,” he says. “Nature gives them to you for free.” Looking back at their older designs, like the Searstyle pieces developed in the ’90s (made from replacement parts for Sears furniture), there’s a clear thread of making the familiar unfamiliar through remixing and shifting context. What sticks around takes on new meaning as the world changes around it.

Speaking of sticking around—next week marks our one-year anniversary at Wrong House! I’ll be sending out a little note next week commemorating our first 12 months in publishing, and then we’ll start rolling our our next issue: “Home Economics.”

Happy Labor Day!

—Lila Allen

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Written and photographed by Alex T. Williams

The first thing Constantin Boym wants to show me isn’t inside his house.

Instead, we—that’s me, Constantin, and his wife and partner in design, Laurene—head into the woods beyond, following a narrow path through young maples to what he calls Boym Park: a small landscape of ideas assembled during the isolation of the pandemic. There’s a tiny “thinking cabin” furnished with a Donald Judd–like daybed built from scrap lumber; a low bench oriented precisely north (confirmed by the compass permanently embedded in the seat); and a museum-like display of found birdhouses. Nearby, a twisted piece of rusted steel, unearthed when the Boyms had an old garbage dump removed from the property, stands upright as a sculpture. Constantin refers to it as the genius loci: the spirit of the place.

“This is all Constantin’s thing,” Laurene quips as her husband continues the tour. “I’ll just keep my mouth shut until we get to my part.”

I do manage to get them to pose together for a quick photo on “North Bench” before we eventually get to Laurene’s part, a long outbuilding, which I call a “shed”—an error Laurene quickly corrects.

“It’s my studio,” she says. “The wording matters. Everyone likes to romanticize the kooky old lady, hiding away in the woods. But we live this way by choice; it’s the only way we’re able to create.”

I first met Constantin and Laurene in 2008, when I was a young designer working at Areaware. The two of them were already fixtures of New York’s design world. Back then, I mostly knew them through work that included tiny objects: Buildings of Disaster, cast collectibles commemorating architectural tragedies throughout history. The following year, they received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Product Design.

Today, they split their time between New York City, where Constantin has long taught industrial design at Pratt Institute, and a quiet ridge above the Hudson River. Perched on a steep slope at the latter, their compact but charming country home displays the accumulated evidence of two lifetimes in design.

Nothing feels overly curated or precious. The objects seem to have accumulated there through friendship, work, and time. A George Sowden lamp sits beside one of Constantin’s early Searstyle pieces, furniture reconfigured from items procured through the Sears catalog in the early ’90s. Up a ladder in the loft-like bedroom is a Nathalie du Pasquier painting they recently rediscovered in a sheaf of drawings after forgetting they owned it. There are prototypes, books, gifts from old friends, and pieces acquired through decades of exchanges with fellow designers.

“Almost everything here has a souvenir quality,” Constantin tells me. “More than design, it has memory.”

Outside, freight trains loaded with shipping containers rumble past. Though it’s the only thing to disturb the otherwise peaceful afternoon, the mournful whistles interrupt our conversation throughout.

“It’s all Amazon junk,” Laurene says as another one disappears down the tracks.

As we settle around a weathered table overlooking the valley, the dozens of objects and stories I’ve just absorbed begin to cohere into something larger, and I find myself wondering what thread the Boyms see running back through their four decades working together. The theme of this issue is Holdouts, and I ask what the phrase means to them.

Constantin answers first. “Being a designer is a difficult career. It’s a lot of work, a lot of effort, and relatively little money. So people find dignified ways to get out of it. They become manufacturers. They go into academia. They go digital.” He pauses. “So what is a holdout? Someone who turns 70 and doesn’t retire to Florida. They still keep making collections of objects. Still having little exhibitions. God knows why.”

Laurene laughs. “I have a different definition,” she says.

For her, holding out is more about resilience. “The passion keeps driving you. You still feel like you have something to say. I don’t know what else I’d do if I wasn’t a designer. I’m always holding out for something. I always think we’re going to turn a corner.” She smiles. “It’s a carrot and a stick. We keep chasing the carrot… and getting a stick up our ass.”

The Boyms have never chased a recognizable aesthetic. “Our design was never about style,” Constantin says. “It was about attitude.” For decades they’ve been fascinated by things other designers largely ignored: souvenirs, keepsakes, ready-mades, overlooked materials, found objects, and everyday artifacts.

He picks up a rough piece of tree bark from a new series they’re developing. “People just step over these things,” he says. “Nature gives them to you for free. They don’t see them.” The goal with this new work isn’t simply to transform the bark into an object—it’s to make someone start to notice the bark differently. “If somebody sees bark in the woods later and remembers the object, that’s the connection.”

The idea of giving ordinary things extraordinary permanence has followed the Boyms throughout their careers. Whether they’re designing souvenirs, collecting found objects, or rescuing pieces of bark from the forest floor, the fascination is ultimately the same: how ordinary things accumulate meaning over time. Constantin distinguishes carefully between souvenirs and keepsakes, but both communicate the idea that the value of an object isn’t fixed by its maker or its material, but by the life that is lived around it. When it comes to keepsakes, he says, “anything can become one. Obsolescence doesn’t apply.”

He references a Sottsass telephone they’ve had for years. “It doesn’t even work anymore, even if we had a landline. But we still keep it.” Laurene nods. “You can buy a pancake turner on Amazon that functions perfectly,” she says. “But it doesn’t have the magic or sparkle of something somebody really cared about.”

I ask whether the AI and digital landscape of today interests them. Technology, they insist, is simply another tool. Laurene happily uses Midjourney to sketch ideas quickly for clients. Constantin experimented with 3D printing the maquettes for their Buildings of Disaster models before abandoning it. “Something was lost,” he says. Collectors noticed it too. “They looked less alive.” He went back to making them by hand.

Neither of them romanticizes their profession, even when reflecting on their most successful moments. “There is a lot of heartbreak in design,” Laurene says. Manufacturers disappear, projects die, and years of work can evaporate because an engineer decides something can’t be produced or a company quietly stops returning calls. “You put your heart into something.” She shrugs. “And then they stop calling you.”

For Laurene, career interruptions have been personal as much as professional. She spent years caring for family members. Lyme disease—contracted on their property—stole nearly six years from her. During the pandemic lockdown, her form of art therapy became driving to the Dollar General at the bottom of the hill, buying ordinary packaged food, then returning home to paint the labels.

I ask if painting represents an escape from design for her. “I started out as a painter,” she explains. “Then I designed OXO tools. It’s all been one interwoven journey.”

A new body of work they’ve spent the summer developing is also one of their closest collaborations, so I ask how their partnership has evolved over the years. Laurene refers to her role on the project as the “sourcer of wood,” but accidentally calls herself “the sorcerer of the wood,” which makes us all laugh. She is largely responsible for painting and visual direction while Constantin handles the mechanics.

“We work as one organism,” she says. The collaboration, she believes, has only gotten better. “We flip roles all the time.”

Before I leave, I ask one final question: If you had to abandon this place tonight forever, what single keepsake would you take?

Constantin remembers a friend who underwent brain surgery carrying a childhood teddy bear into the operating room. When he woke up, the nurses had wrapped the bear’s head in bandages to match his own.

Is the bear here? I ask. “No, but it was a beautiful story.”

Laurene thinks for a long time. Finally, she gives up: “Choosing one object is like choosing between children.”

She pauses, looks across the room, then points to a hanging set of Jasper Morrison’s barbecue utensils for HAY, which Constantin had earlier flagged as a personal favorite. “I definitely wouldn’t take those,” she says.

Ultimately neither can answer. The question might be impossible to answer. After spending a lifetime finding meaning in objects, how do you pick just one? The Boyms have made a practice of finding value in the things the rest of us might overlook. After 40 years, that discernment might be the most remarkable thing they’ve held onto. ⌂

Alex T. Williams is a designer and advisor working at the intersection of creative practice, business, and community building. A cofounder of the lighting brand RBW, he now works with creative entrepreneurs through dialogue, advisory engagements, and curated experiences focused on building sustainable, meaningful practices.

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Hey there, housemates,

Fifteen years ago, the writer of today’s story, Matt Cosper, and I shared a drink at a beloved local watering hole in our hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. At the time, not much was around it: A pawn shop was just up the block, and a new record store had opened nearby. By the time I moved to New York a couple of years later, development was creeping down the street. Condos were moving in, and the artists were moving out.

But this bar, The Thirsty Beaver Saloon—which served a drink called a “Thirsty Beavosa”¹ for 50 cents—ultimately became the unlikely protagonist in a David-and-Goliath battle for the soul of the city. Below, Matt walks us through its history, reflects on how its holdout status has changed it over time, and talks to a few of its patrons. (Mick Jagger, sadly, could not be reached.)

Til next week,

Lila

¹ Miller High Life—the “Champagne of Beers”—and orange juice.

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Written by Matt Cosper

There are dive bars and there are dive bars. Most of the proper ones aren’t places you want to be unless you are a committed alcoholic or member of the criminal underworld. My hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina definitely has some dive bars—nasty little spots tucked away at the edges, hidden in plain sight: places like The Surf Inn, a Lynchian pool hall incredulously nestled between a nursing agency and a concrete supplier. But in a city that has boomed on the back of vast banking interests and the transplants they hire, local color can be hard to find.

If you ask your average Charlotte resident to recommend a dive bar, they are going to point you to The Thirsty Beaver, an austere cinderblock structure on Central Avenue that has been there since 2008. There are bars on the windows and no landscaping; bras hang from the ceiling and beer memorabilia covers the interior, chockablock and messy. “Hee-Haw” plays on TV. On the building’s side—which is painted orange—a supersized beaver mascot in a cowboy hat raises a glass (presumably of the tavern’s beer, which starts at $2). But the story of the Thirsty Beaver is interesting mostly because it hinges on the strange mutations that can arise when the dictates of capital collide with local weirdness at the end of the world, because around a decade ago, a luxury condominium called Overton Row was forced to build around it.

In the 2000s, brothers Brian and Mark Wilson initially staked a claim and gathered a little community around The Rat’s Nest, a vintage clothing store where they trafficked in wares that signaled a post-ironic devotion to old-school outlaw country and motorcycle culture. They sold clothes but also hosted tintype photographers and musical acts—including their own band, The Loose Lugnuts—and drank a lot of beer. A bar made sense.

When it opened 18 years ago, the Beaver quickly established itself as an outpost of no-frills cool in a not-quite-yet gentrified corner of the Plaza Midwood neighborhood, an undesignated arts district on its way to being the neighborhood it is today, where asking rents are the highest of anywhere in the city. Opening up in a dusty lot not surrounded by much, The Thirsty Beaver expanded the borderlands of Plaza Midwood and became a home away from home for a loyal crew of bikers, cow punks, and folks from the neighborhood who didn’t like staying home alone to do their drinking. The bartenders were friendly, the jukebox was better than it had any business being, and it was a nice place to hide if the vibes up the street were a little too coked out. It was authentic, you might say.

When developers started buying up lots in the area around 2012 or 2013, there was one holdout: George Salem, a local property owner who leased The Thirsty Beaver its land, had no interest in selling. Offers came and went but Salem wouldn’t budge. In 2015, CW Development came up with a novel solution: they bought up all the land surrounding the Beaver and turned it into Overton Row, a 323-unit apartment complex built in a sort of horseshoe around the bar.

The drama around the land deal and the visual interest of the new situation was catnip for the media. In the years since, it has stayed a cause celebré for champions of the underdog and connoisseurs of architectural oddities. Mick Jagger posted a picture of himself drinking there undisturbed when the Rolling Stones stopped in Charlotte. The little dive bar that could has become what a dive bar cannot be: a tourist attraction. And in news that will surprise no one, that kind of attention has a tendency to change the vibe of a place.

The concept of psychogeography is simple: There are cities made of concrete and glass with human animals moving through them hither and thither. Woven through are secret cities—diffuse and mutable burgs constructed from habits, aggressions, eroticisms, and encounters, always in flux and contingent on the emotional and intellectual experiences of their inhabitants. This constellation of secret cities is more real than real. The psychogeographies of a place are its soul. And soul has long been a point of contention in conversations about Charlotte.

Built at a trading crossroads for Indigenous tribes and defined by banking activity for much of its history, Charlotte is a town whose soul has been caught up in facilitating the flow of capital. The city’s growth into a metropolis has proceeded with a sense of frictionless comfort, insulated from the murky past of the American South. But the past is never really dead; it’s not even really past. No matter how we try to tear down or paper over history, a specter remains, resulting in a sort of double exposure. In some places, the past peers back at us with no separation at all. The effect is unsettling.

This is where The Thirsty Beaver enters a sort of uncanny valley of nostalgia, progress, and the inexorability of change. In its aesthetic and affect—and by holding out against development—The Thirsty Beaver projects an image of nostalgia, facing off with the forces of so-called progress.

Whether you see this resistance as a noble act of preservation or a stubborn reactionary position, the fact of things is that it is an illusion. As our good friend Heraclitus reminds us: “All things flow”—which is, of course, anathema to beavers, who spend their entire lives dedicated to honoring an instinctual drive to impede flowing water. The symbolism works almost too perfectly. One wonders sometimes if the author of this Universe has no sense of subtlety.

Capital demonstrates its true genius in how it handles these places where the veil is thin. Rather than hide or mask these zones, the solution is a handy bit of necromancy, turning the ghost into a commodity itself. The Beaver is accessing a particular register of southern nostalgia: a blue-collar, redneck past that is hilariously out of place in the gentrified environs of Plaza Midwood in 2026. The bar was always a nostalgia trap—a temple to an idea of the South that likely never existed, at least not in such a concentrated dose. And given the way the neighborhood has changed around it, and the way those changes have contributed to the longevity of the joint, it’s hard not to see it as a sort of campy postmodern redneck theme park, the sort of thing that wouldn’t be out of place in Las Vegas, or in a district of Elon Musk’s fantasy of a Mars Colony.

The late great cultural critic Mark Fisher, quoting Italian anarchist philosopher Bifo Berardi, wrote eloquently about “the slow cancellation of the future.” This concept shows up tacitly in most cultural criticism at this point, nearly a decade after Fisher’s suicide: That there’s nothing new under the sun; everything is a remake, or a prequel or a spin off. Nostalgia is the primary form of expression and experience in a world where those in the driver’s seat lack a compelling or inspiring map of the future, or where the myth of a linear, positivist history has been debunked. We lean on hopes of getting back to some lost past, of being great again as we were in our golden age, or at the very least take comfort in old episodes of “Hee-Haw.” Nostalgia is cozy and comforting for some, but the problem is that it isn’t actually real. It’s a simulacrum, a copy without an original.

What is real are people. Culture is what people do in a specific place under specific circumstances. It’s how people are, in context. And to a lot of people, The Thirsty Beaver has meant more than any one image or idea or economic function. It’s the place they saw their mild-mannered coworker drink too much and holler along to Waylon Jennings, where they made out with their ex, because they are a messy bitch who lives for drama, where they got lost in the intensity of being a human being living a human life. Glory and regret in equal measure. These things are what make a city worth a damn. There aren’t many corners of the world left where people can be people. It can feel like that anyways. Regardless of the vagaries of the market, or the weirdness of trying to exist IRL at all, when a city spawns a spot like the Beaver, it’s worth fighting for. And the best way to do that is probably to put some change in the juke box, grab a seat at the bar and tell the bartender your name when you order. ⌂

Matt Cosper is a playwright, poet and critic who lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina. Someone should publish his debut novel, Idle Hands. It is quite good.

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Hi there, housemates,

It’s been an interesting month in the culture war over AI. A few things I’ve been tracking:

— Substack embedding Pangram, an AI writing detection tool, into its content management system. Shots fired by Substack’s CEO, Chris Best: “We don’t want to wait until your Substack app turns into LinkedIn before we start to learn and make progress.”

— LinkedIn releasing a “Looks Like AI Slop” button

— Claude embedding a digital watermark on AI-generated text—a move the company says is to remain compliant with new transparency rules in the EU

— Online discourse around AI-generated fliers—I think we can all agree that brush script needs to take a pause? (FWIW, at the record store my husband and I run, we do not allow AI flyers to be posted—but will hand you a sheet of paper and a marker!)

— Brenda’s analysis of template slop

It’s hard to say if there’s genuine momentum here in the fight for human creativity; it’s possible these are just the headlines that rule my little internet fiefdom. I also don’t fully buy that tools like a “Looks Like Slop” button actually aspire to do anything besides train models to make more convincing slop. But it is vindicating to see companies and creators recognizing that slop proliferation seems to have run amok and that something is needed to rein it all in.

Where we as creatives draw the line around our own use of AI is the topic of today’s reportage from Elizabeth Fazzare. Speaking with designers at Laun, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and Studio Ahead, she learns where they’re digging in—and where they’re holding out.

How much AI can you take?

’Til next week,

Lila

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To AI or Not to AI?

For some designers, it isn’t a question

Written by Elizabeth Fazzare

Architect Rachel Bullock and designer Molly Purnell gave artificial intelligence the old college try at their Los Angeles–based design studio Laun. “We’ve tried to use it a couple times to research property descriptions or specific zoning code items,” explains Purnell, who notes that she was a “very early adopter” of ChatGPT three years ago. “It was wrong every time.” Since then, they’ve abandoned the use of any large language model for their business.

Among its boosters, there is a common argument that the AI battle has already been won: Everyone is using it, and you’d better, too; if you don’t, you’re behind. In reality, some people are not—or at least, not as frequently as that fallacy might make it seem. Many creative talents, in particular, are keeping their distance.

Where many designers draw the line is in allowing AI to touch the creative process. To create a residential interior, Bullock and Purnell take an analog approach: a client questionnaire that covers necessities like the number of bedrooms and bathrooms as well as intangibles like light, scent, and textural preferences. From there, the six-person Laun team sits around the conference table to sketch out ideas on trace paper, which are eventually formalized in a Revit computer model. Mood and materials boards are gathered, and the studio requires that all design development meetings occur in person. “It’s a lot more nuanced than anything that you can get out of an algorithm,” says Purnell. “It’s about evoking a feeling.”

At Los Angeles–, Mexico City–, and New York–based architecture and design studio Charlap Hyman & Herrero, the team begins each project pulling inspiration images from a physical catalog they have amassed over 15 years of practice. “We create a Bible for the project with all these things we’re interested in, and that becomes our North Star as we’re designing,” describes architect and firm cofounder Andre Herrero. “Our value is our ideas and our ability to problem solve.”

Homan Rajai, cofounder of San Francisco–based design firm Studio Ahead, has also banned AI from the design process. Like Laun, the studio sees a gap between nuanced human understanding and the smooth consensus-chasing hum of the machine: “The creative process is really emotional. How do you tell the AI, ‘Make this feel safe?’”

Once a design is digitally modeled, however, some firms do take advantage of AI visualization tools. Herrero uses Google’s Nano Banana 2 to render material textures and get quicker sign-offs on the project vision. The younger designers in Rajai’s eight-person office introduced him to AI software Tripo, which allows them to pull the vintage art and furniture pieces they have sourced themselves directly into photorealistic renderings. Tradeoffs like this save time, allowing designers to focus more of their working hours on creativity itself, they say. However, they are proceeding with caution. “As a tool to help convey the creative process, AI is great, but not in actually creating the objects or spaces,” says Rajai, who also designs furniture.

In the design world, like all creative industries, AI can have devastating copyright implications. Developers scraping artistic content to fuel generative modeling software can violate intellectual property law. Bullock and Purnell ask their clients not to feed their mood boards into generative AI software to avoid their conceptual work becoming part of the training data. But Rajai argues there are even more mind-numbing dangers. “If society is like a child, the algorithm is feeding you junk food,” he says. Using it in excess “makes the mind of the designer or creative team dull. You lose the human touch or even the human thinking process.”

Because it is trained on existing project images, any AI-based design is mimicry, rather than original thought—and its responses often lack the contextual considerations that a human creator would factor in. That results in AI-generated design that “just doesn’t feel rooted in anything,” argues Rajai. “It takes away from the magic of bringing artists and artisans together to create a reaction no one could control. The creative part of me likes that unknown.”

While Herrero sees a future world in which generative AI could become accurate enough to complete a set of architectural construction documents, he believes that artistry will always hold value. Increased adoption of AI might add to that, he says, but could play out a few different ways. “It comes down to what we value: Do we value craft? Do we value human-made imperfections? One scenario is that our mistakes are going to be seen as really special because a human made them,” says the architect. “The other is that no one knows how to do anything by hand anymore and we will start paying $1 billion for a vintage chair because the knowledge of a human building a chair is gone.” Any design aficionado certainly wants to avoid the latter—implementing judicious use of AI can help. ⌂

Elizabeth Fazzare is a New York-based editor and journalist who covers architecture, design, culture, and travel.

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Hi there, housemates,

This week, in the spirit of holdouts, we’re taking a closer look at a maker who’s working with possibly the world’s most ancient medium: stone. I’ve had the chance to meet a few masons and sculptors over the past year, and each time, I’ve been fascinated by the sheer physicality of the work they do. While most of the world is looking to make things easier, smoother, and faster, these folks remain doggedly attached to the hard stuff (literally). Below, Ben Dreith takes us inside the studio of Ethan Stebbins, a Maine-based artist and poet.

—Lila

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Written by Ben Dreith // Photos courtesy Ethan Stebbins

There used to be an archetype: the young romantic who is so moved by beauty that he decides to dedicate his life to art. This impressionistic youth did so against the advice of his well-intentioned (if narrow-minded) family who thought the child would be thrown against the wall of the technocracy.

Today, when everything—from image-making to thinking itself—is being mechanized, commodified, and optimized, we should all be grateful for this inclination: Outside of the rare guild, these artists may be the only hope for the endurance of waning craft traditions.

That’s its own kind of value—and it’s one that animates Ethan Stebbins, a Maine-based maker who describes himself as “genre-averse.”

Stebbins is known for handmade objects that combine rough-hewn stones with wood elements, joined so seamlessly that the two incongruous materials seem fused into one. When he isn’t earning commissions from clients drawn to his now well-known benches, he contemplates the stones strewn about his five-acre property in Maine, considering how they will take shape. “I like to leave a little room to design as I go based on getting to know the materials,” he says.

He laughs at my suggestion that his work may be somehow keeping the flame of stonework alive. He describes to me over the phone how he pushes through his commissions so he can find novel forms, drawing pleasure from the risk of each bang of the chisel against the unforgiving canvas that is stone.

His designs are straightforward, yet beguiling, and he talks about his work without unnecessary abstraction. There is a conceptual depth to the pieces, though. Stebbins leaves some of the stone raw, heightening the contrast between the handmade and the natural. He is also a poet.

Stonecraft is an old art, and poetry, at least in its oral form, is arguably even older. These days, the former is carried out mostly with machines—lasers, water jets, and diamond-covered drills. The latter is constantly on its last legs, or so we read. Both speak to a sense of risk: for beauty, and stewardship of tradition despite the forward march of technology. But Stebbins’s stonework is certainly not an exercise in futility. Citing an unwillingness to pursue poetry into academia, he has found success in his stone carving and just completed his second solo show, “Dichotomies,” with no-joke Manhattan gallery Les Ateliers Courbet.

Though he says he resists the “working-class poet” vibe and doesn’t write about working with stone, there are conceptual links between the two crafts—mainly their exacting nature. “I’m drawn to the precision of language and poetry, and the precision of joineries in stonework,” he tells me.

He sees the work ethos, too, as an overlap. “I think being a writer for so many years and having to be a self-starter and self-motivated—that crossed over into what I’m doing now. You don’t know if it’s going to succeed or not, you just get up and put your head down and work.”

Stebbins’s monuments are informed by the modern sculptors who pushed abstraction back into the organic: Noguchi, Chillida, Hepworth. His use of architectural stone roots the practice in a dialogue with—rather than domination of—natural materials. Sometimes moving the stones from one place to another is half the battle. “There’s a lot of work that goes into just acquiring these things and moving them,” says Stebbins. “So you want to be fairly certain you could use it for something.” He finds stones locally, sometimes in nature, but also in the plentiful granite quarries of Maine.

Stebbins sees inspiration in the work of the Inca, whose stonemasonry is still, in many ways, unparalleled. He’s quick to mention the fact that many of the structures were made by now-forgotten laborers who gave their lives for the posterity of what they built. Stone is the bearer of some of our most ancient stories, holding traces of the hands that carved them millennia ago.

Stebbins seems shy about carrying that legacy, preferring instead to focus on his admiration of craft, in the ways of seeing stone relayed through the ruins of the past. This dialogue never stopped and continues to call people who can see the seams of meaning running through stone and speech.

We don’t see the trope of the art-romantic as much anymore. It seems as though it’s quite difficult to make young people care about anything at all—but that may just be how folks recently cognizant of their own distance from youth always feel about the young. Maybe that comes from decades of grinding ambition down to fit into the presets of relentless productivity.

Today, much of the economic value in a piece of art, design, or craft exists precisely because of the time it takes to make. People are essentially buying a crystallization of labor—hundreds of hours spent making a piece; the millennia spent forming and weathering rocks. But beyond the market value of this time, there is a sense of story behind the stones, their gathering, the randomness of a human finding it, spending weeks or months with it, and then, of course, the intense work of the completion.

While carving by machine might be the norm for many, Stebbins’s method—“laboring over a stone over many days, and gradually seeing it take form”—has its own rewards. “A lot would be lost if I did it another way.” ⌂

Ben Dreith is a writer and editor living in New York. He is the US editor for Dezeen and co-runs the design Substack Extruded.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

PAST ISSUES

ISSUE 01: FINE, I’LL DO IT MYSELF ⌂ ISSUE 02: NO THOUGHTS, JUST VIBES ⌂ ISSUE 03: DON’T SIT ON THAT! ⌂ ISSUE 04: HOLIDAY SPECIAL ⌂ ISSUE 05: SWEATIN’ THE OLDIES ⌂ ISSUE 06: KITCHEN SINK ⌂ ISSUE 07: HACK JOB ⌂ ISSUE 08: OUT TO PASTURE ⌂ THE SHOE REPORT: MILAN DESIGN WEEK ⌂ A NYCxDESIGN CHORUS ⌂ ISSUE 09: GETTING WARMER

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About a week ago, a piece of New York City history revealed itself. For decades, a towering sign in Herald Square has concealed a five-story building that, around 1900, was snapped up by a department store rival hoping to gain leverage over Macy’s as they moved into the neighborhood. The plan failed; Macy’s built its retail monolith…

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We’re officially in the dead of summer—and though the weather here in the Hudson Valley is surprisingly damp and cool this week, things are heating up.

The theme of our ninth issue this past month was “Getting Warmer.” When I came up with that conceit, I thought the stories would focus on hospitality: emotional warmth, hosting, home…

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Every day we inch closer to July 4, 2026, America is heating up. The sun is streaming through the temporary decals on the windows of Bank of America that read, “Celebrating 250 Years of the American Dream.” Printed summer picnic plates at Walmart go viral for their wording, “United States of America, 1776–2026.”

As people prepare for our …

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There’s a chair in the den at my father’s house that, to me, is perfect. It is large, red, and assertive, and bears a passing resemblance to Jindřich Halabala’s slutty little Art Deco armchairs for Thonet. The generous arms can accommodate a stack of books, my large water bottle, and a flotilla of TV remotes that you’ll find in a Boo…

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Each month, we’re inviting our community to submit their conundrums—big, small, petty, logistical, professional—for a second opinion. Need to know when to call it quits on a project? Or how to scale your crafty hobby into a career? Or what to do when your product gets knocked off? Over the course of two decades in cre…

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I first met the architect and designer Lucia Bartholomew when I was 19 years old, spending the end of a gap year in Santa Barbara before heading off to RISD. We discovered an unlikely shared connection: Her family spent summers on Squirrel Island, a small community off the coast of Maine not far from where I grew up. Our lives and car…

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Richard Nickel, the canonical Chicago preservationist and photographer, shot the Madlener House, home of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, on at least three occasions. The first was during its earliest incarnation as the imposing Gold Coast manse of a German liquor magnate. When the family cleared out, they tore…

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So here’s what happened. I had a multi-tab spreadsheet, a color-coded calendar, email invitations, planned social posts, multiple rounds of bus tickets, and around 15 coffee dates to carry me through NYCxDESIGN, New York’s design week. And then, suddenly, I had to drop all of it to hop a plane to Florida. It was, culturally speaking, about as far away from the city as I could get.

So for me, the busiest part of this season was over before it started—at least outside of the sad, glowing screen I stared at from a thousand miles away. But design week coverage at Wrong House stops for nothing! If I couldn’t be there in person, I still wanted an on-the-ground report from the Design Writing With Guts (™) fam that I knew would be pinballing around town.

The fruits of that labor—what I am calling our NYCxDESIGN Chorus—can be found below, with thanks to contributors Jesse Dorris, Dan Howarth, Adrian Madlener, Liz Ryan (whose illustrations carried us through the week), and my trusty fellow editor July Winters.

Hope to see you at the next one.

xx

Lila

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We are in the thick of what I refer to as “design season”—the triple-decker event sandwich of Milan Design Week (April), NYCxDESIGN (May), and 3daysofdesign (June). Here in New York, May is living up to its status as the “meat” part of the sammie, with exhibitions and events starting now, pretty much, and running ‘til Memorial Day …

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I’m sitting in the library at The Malin Savannah, fresh off a very long flight from Milan—where, like many of you, I was attending Milan Design Week for the last few days. If your feed looks like mine, it’s probably being pummeled with FOMO-inducing photos of negroni-splashed events, fancy installations, and very beautiful people. I will spare you another recap of those things. Instead, I am here to cover an underreported facet of the week that actually powers the whole damn thing. I am speaking, of course, about footwear.

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Hi there, housemates,

Happy week-before-Salone to all who celebrate. I’ve got my RSVP spreadsheet stuffed, my digital camera packed (!), and my sensible-but-still-acceptable-for-Italy boots ready to go. But, before I hit the tarmac: A new issue of Wrong House! Just for you!

Welcome to Issue 08: “Out to …

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By Lila Allen

At East Fork’s production facility in Asheville, North Carolina, a hulking machine kicks out 2,000 pots per day. But close by—in the same building, actually—a tall Texan-turned-Carolinian named John Vigeland is hand throwing pots on a company wheel.

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