Interior Design Top Magazine Stories of 2009

Staff -- Interior Design, 12/28/2009 12:00:00 AM

We're counting down the top 10 magazine articles on InteriorDesign.net! Here are the 10 most popular design stories of 2009.

10.

Fast Food Versus Health Food
Turmeric-spiced rice simmered in orange juice or a cassis-elderberry lhassi may not be the first items to come to mind when you think of a fast-food joint. Ditto for a nature-themed design. Yet both of those ingredients went into the recipe for Nat. Fine Bio Food, an organic café in Hamburg, Germany...

9.

Bel Air Beauty
A. Quincy Jones and Frederick Fisher met only once, but they share quite a history. Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects occupies the Los Angeles building designed in the 1950's for the office of Jones & Emmons, and Fisher became friends with Jones's widow, Elaine, during the renovation. But it didn't stop there...

8.

Barbie's Dream House
Even on bustling Huaihai Lu, one of the main shopping arteries in the megawatt city that is Shanghai, the House of Barbie is a behemoth. The six-story flagship is also the very first store devoted to the world’s favorite doll, who turns 50 this year...

7.

The Un-Private Apartment
When Gisue Hariri and Mojgan Hariri designed a speculative Digital House in 1998, it was a captivating if unlikely stab at tomorrow's "smart" shelter, replete with embedded sensors and digital wallpaper. More important, however, the experiment catapulted Hariri & Hariri—Architecture into the realm of high art as part of "The Un-Private House" at New York's Museum of Modern Art...

6.

A Healthy Dose of Design
While 2008 may have been a less-than-banner year for many businesses, health-care design still provided a good source of revenue, what with technology advancing, boomers aging, and facilities getting overcrowded. Witness the numbers we gathered from the top Interior Design Giants for 2009. Of those 100 firms, 49 did work in the health-care sector last year...

5.

It Took a Village
Kuala Lumpur is one of the world's more surreal capitals. It's a hypermodern, high-tech Blade Runner-ish city of the future, its glittering skyline crowned by the arabesque spires of the Petronas Twin Towers... 

4.

High Style, Home-Style
Boutique or bigger, hotels are getting more hospitable...

3.

Blissed Out
For one fortunate young family, heaven is just an elevator ride away. New York is notoriously a city of tiny, windowless kitchens and bathrooms, so any apartment where both are spacious and light surely qualifies as domestic bliss...

2.

Investing in Creativity
It's a teaser. Break the name Artis in two, art is, and it implies a gallery or an art consultancy. So does the minimally appointed white reception area. Its glossy-white biomorphic desk could be mistaken for a piece by Zaha Hadid, whose stools, in fact, line the window wall straight ahead...

1.

Mansion in The Sky
After years in a lavish house in Greenwich, Connecticut, two soon-to-be empty nesters heeded the urging of their children and decided to return to Manhattan in what their architect, Steven Learner, calls an "incredibly brave" leap of faith...