Chill out–it's summer!

Cindy Allen -- Interior Design, 7/1/2003 12:00:00 AM

Instant messaging, instant gratification. Fast food, fast forward. Everyone lives for the quick fix these days. Speed has become a veritable tyrant dictating our latter-day lives. What started in our offices is now invading our homes.

For July, we simply said no—proceeding to take our sweet time through a portfolio of projects as spectacular as they are diverse.

Clodagh's reposeful Sasanqua day spa seems to spring straight from the low-country marshes of South Carolina. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Beers goes for dazzle at Tabú Ultra Lounge in Las Vegas, and Eren Talu out-Vegases Vegas with the 6-foot disco balls at Turkish hotel Hillside Su. Chill and glam find common ground in the Hollywood Hills, where Studio 0.10 Architects helps a 1962 house regain its modernist looks. Even in the office sector, we chose workplaces with a refreshing sense of humor. Take the color play at Lewis/Schoeplein's Los Angeles headquarters for the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. magazine. Or AG4 Mediatecture in Cologne, Germany. (The building looks like a pair of TV sets.) And the keg-shape conference room Mateja Mikulandra-Mackat designed for an ad agency in a converted Berlin brewery. (That's almost as cool as a tall beer.)

Getting away from it all, photographer Eric Laignel and stylist Patricia Parinejad put the studio behind them—and took to the open road. With a trunkful of rugs and carpets selected by market editor Alexa Yablonski, the dynamic duo staged a cross-county series of evocative combinations, matching the "indoor" power of design with the immense beauty of our land.