All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
As the editors of AD curated stories for this issue, themed around sustainability, we found that all the projects were, coincidentally, in some sense historic. Some homes were very old and had been sensitively renovated. Others were structures not intended for residential use but which had been cleverly repurposed, such as an industrial barge turned houseboat in Paris. Even the glorious Hudson Valley rose garden featured this month is part of a 120-acre estate that had previously been owned by a single family for five generations. Under the thoughtful stewardship of its current owners, the forested land is being conserved and the gardens have been lovingly reimagined to pay tribute to their original designer, Ellen Biddle Shipman, one of America’s first female landscape architects.
While the bathroom on our cover might have very au courant vibes, it is found inside a Brooklyn town house dated to the 1840s. Actually a pair of town houses, which Tal Schori and Rustam Mehta of GRT Architects restored using rigorous European Passive House standards. “Our practice loves engaging with historic architecture,” says Mehta. “We wanted to do right by these buildings.”
In Kyoto, a young couple, Sam Brustad and Yuki Shirato, turned to Pritzker Prize–winning architect Kazuyo Sejima, a cofounder of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA, to preserve their century-old machiya, a traditional Japanese residence type. “Sadly, it’s a dying breed,” says Shirato, noting that hundreds are demolished each year because many locals find the structures inconvenient, old-fashioned, or expensive to maintain.
Adapted for modern life, the past, present, and future harmonize in the many extraordinary dwellings preserved on these pages.
