From the Agent: "Recently reimagined by fashion designer and Palm Springs style icon Trina Turk, the home has been transformed into the radiant Soleil House. The floor plan is thoughtfully composed to enhance both privacy and flow. The primary suite is positioned poolside, immersed in light and landscape, while guest bedrooms are discreetly set apart at the opposite end of the home. Adjacent to the pool, a flexible bonus room offers an ideal retreat for a den, office, or studio. Soleil House is a rare and compelling expression of Palm Springs modernism, where architecture, site, and sky converge in a continuous, immersive experience of space, light, and landscape."
Photo by Simon Berlyn
The living area features a tiled fireplace and a conversation pit with bright built-in seating.
A live/work community of tech founders pops up in the suburbs of Texas, Trump’s ballroom firm receives a secret multimillion-dollar contract, and more.
Donlyn Lyndon, one of the original architects of California’s Sea Ranch and a longtime educator, has died at 90. He spent his life creating and teaching about environmentally-conscious design. (The Architect's Newspaper)
In Lockhart, Texas, a 1,200-acre live/work campus called Proto-Town is home to young robotics, energy, and defense start-up founders, most of whom live in trailers nearby. The community is part of a broader trend of Austin suburbs becoming a hub for "hard tech" companies. (The Wall Street Journal)
The Trump administration sneakily awarded Clark Construction, the firm in charge of the ballroom, a no-bid, $17.4 million federal contract to repair Lafayette Park, near the White House. This move tripled earlier cost estimates and cut out any competition through a rarely used "urgency" exception. (The New York Times)
Anchorage, Alaska, is trying to tackle its housing shortage with a new initiative offering free, preapproved ADU designs as a way to streamline the building of new housing. Here’s how the city says it plans to achieve its goal of building 10,000 homes in the next 10 years. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
At Salone del Mobile in Milan, experimental materials met collectible design spectacle.
In Milan last week, while Dwell’s visual media editor ran around town to find the very best that design week had an offer, executive editor Kate Dries stopped by Salone del Mobile, where she found everything from seaweed-based lighting by Studio Suyangchoi to a stool and chair made of compressed coffee grounds by Studio Banda. (Dwell)
Neither as minimal as roller shades nor as expressive as full drapery, the silhouette occupies a middle ground of softness with structure.
The elegance of Roman shades has long made them a designer staple, but for many homeowners, committing to the style can feel daunting given the precise measurements and long lead times required to bring the look to life.
The direct-to-consumer drapery brand TWOPAGES aims to reframe the category—not just in how they look, but how they’re specified, ordered, and installed—streamlining a traditionally showroom-driven process into a more accessible model.
The brand’s origins are telling. Founder Ray Chen started TWOPAGES after running into the same friction that stumps many homeowners when it comes to drapery: opaque pricing, confusing customization menus, and steep markups. His solution was to strip the process down to its essentials, with a drapery company centered around made-to-measure craftsmanship, an intuitive ordering model, and clear pricing. More than 600,000 household transformations later, it’s clear he wasn’t the only one who was looking for personalized window solutions that are as simple to shop as they are to live with.
With the intimidation factor (and designer price tag) removed, the classic Roman shades warrant a second look for your next window upgrade.
They’re made to fit
Rather than positioning customization as a premium upgrade, TWOPAGES treats made-to-order as the default. Their Roman shades can be configured across a range of fold styles and lift systems, with each piece tailored to the exact dimensions of the intended window.
For instance, the stylishly slubby Liz linen or the rich mid-weight Jawara—two of TWOPAGES’ best-selling collections—are available in a wide range of colors, all customizable to suit your specific vision.The process offers the ability to calibrate light, privacy, and proportion, so the shades feel fully integrated into the architecture of a room.
The soft curve design shown here features a relaxed silhouette with upturned sides for added visual charm.
Custom Front Slat Roman Shade features crisp lines and a cordless design for a clean, safe, and modern look—fully customizable to fit your style. Pair it with our fabric collections, including the popular TWOPAGES Liz Linen, to bring natural texture and timeless elegance.
Custom Front Slat Roman Shade features crisp lines and a cordless design for a clean, safe, and modern look—fully customizable to fit your style. Pair it with our fabric collections, including the popular TWOPAGES Liz Linen, to bring natural texture and timeless elegance.
Gently arches in the center when raised, creating a relaxed silhouette with upturned sides for added visual charm.
They’re not a monolith
The collection features 13 fold styles, 10 lift types, 18 curated collections, and more than 200 color options to be exact. Some designs are clean and structured with tailored folds, while others take a softer approach. Their Relaxed Roman shades, for example, feature a slight curve at the hem, diffusing light in a way that works especially well in bedrooms and living areas. Other designs highlight function, with motorized options or no-drill installations that prioritize ease, flexibility, and everyday use.
The flat fold design allows for a sleek, contemporary look.
Crafted from a premium linen-cotton blend, this Roman shade offers a soft texture and natural drape—bringing effortless comfort and elegance to your window space.
TWOPAGES Motorized Roman Shade - honored to be included in the ASID 2025 Fall Design Product Guide. The Motorized Roman Shade offers wireless remote control, allowing you to open, close, or adjust multiple shades with ease. No matter where you are in your home, enjoy seamless control over light and privacy—no reaching or pulling required.
Transform your windows with our luxurious Liz No Drill Flat Fold Roman Shade Cordless. Elevate your space with elegant, tasteful style and premium functionality.
They’re surprisingly pragmatic
Though they may look fussy, the innovations in Roman shades make them easy to adopt in your home. TWOPAGES’ aforementioned no-drill installation options sidestep one of the most persistent barriers to upgrading window treatments, particularly in rental spaces. Integrated, motorized shade options, meanwhile, operate almost invisibly (no wrestling with cords required).
For renters and anyone who would rather not commit to drilling into walls or window frames, TWOPAGES’ No-Drill Roman shades deserve a particular callout. The mounting system installs in minutes without tools, leaving walls and frames completely intact—a meaningful distinction for anyone living in apartments, dorms, or temporary spaces where security deposits loom large. These shades hold firmly in place for everyday use, but can be removed and repositioned just as easily without visual compromise.
The motorized shades are operated with a wireless remote control, allowing you to open, close, or adjust your shades easily.
They stuck with off-the-shelf materials to design a 650-square-foot unit that’s now part of the city’s model plan library.
In the summer of 2023, Logan Havens and Gustavo Silva restored a historic adobe in Tucson’s Barrio Kroeger Lane neighborhood. They learned by doing, developing an understanding of the structure and its materials, and how to update the modest home to meet their needs. But before the couple even finished the remodel, they were already plotting their next project. When the City of Tucson introduced a competition for an ADU model plan library, Gustavo, a designer, and Logan, a photographer, developed a design that adapts the adobe vernacular of the Sonoran Desert. Then, at the rear of their plant-filled lot, they built an example where Logan’s niece, an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, is currently living.
To stay within their $100,000 budget, the couple aligned material, aesthetic, and labor considerations. Building with insulated concrete form (IFC) blocks that were plastered and coated with lime wash, for instance, eliminated the need for drywall and painting crews. Visible materials such as wood, construction hardware, and troweled concrete floors are part of the design intent. Kitchen and storage systems are from Ikea. And, not least important, significant sweat equity, along with a tight-knit network of fellow designers and skilled tradespeople, made their financial planning realistic.
The plan for the 650-square-foot, one-bedroom unit, dubbed the Detached Sonoran ADU, is now part of the City of Tucson’s ADU plan library. For those interested in building one, Logan and Gustavo have compiled a step-by-step guide to go with the plan set, which includes a contractor list that can help with a build out. (The couple estimates that with professional help, a unit can be built for around double what they spent.) Here’s how Logan and Gustavo built their ADU, and how you can build one, too.
Home Depot Special
Gustavo: When Tucson opened up a competition for a model plan library, Logan reached out to all of his architect friends, and he was like, "Someone design something good. We just need to have good designs here."
Logan: They were all too busy. And so I was like, "Gustavo, would you do it with me?"
Gustavo: When we were designing the ADU, the code was more stringent than it is now, so our whole thing was that it had to be something Logan could build. We were pushing for nothing to be custom—everything had to be available at Home Depot, or somewhere, so anyone could build one. We also designed it to be built as is. You can change a couple of things, but there is no way of modeling the design beyond that.
Logan: The building is 38 feet wide, and the average lot size is 50 feet, so that would give you the five-foot setbacks required by the city on both sides for the average lot. We designed one side of the house for privacy, and kept the plan as narrow as possible to have more yard space between houses. The ADU has a traditional Sonoran-style three-sided parapet, and then ten feet is the highest we could make the ceiling without having an engineer. So everything is within existing code, including materials and allowances.
In the mid-aughts, a first-of-its-kind modular project in Manchester tried to reverse decades of distaste for factory-built housing that had held strong in England since the postwar period.
Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the April/May 2005 issue.
Prefabricated housing has long been the bastard child of British architecture. Born out of a postwar desperation to shelter thousands of people left homeless by bombing raids, over 150,000 prefab houses were erected in the five years immediately following World War II. Built for speed rather than aesthetics, their temporality, lack of attention to design, and shoddy construction standards became evident in the decades to follow. Though their owners often came to love them as symbols of renewed hope and modernity, the reality of deteriorating asbestos concrete, leaky window seams, and poor insulation resulted in a recent government-led demolition crusade.
Photo by Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos
"The result is that anything with the word ‘prefab’ in it now carries a certain negative connotation," says Chris Stalker, of Manchester-based development firm Urban Splash, known for renovating derelict buildings and reconstructing undesirable areas. The government, faced with burgeoning populations working in town centers and limited room for expansion, is desperate for new urban housing and is using the earlier prefab boom as a model for current construction. Unlike that of the postwar population, however, the aesthetic standards of today’s consumers are much higher.
It seems fitting, then, that the first private, completely prefab housing project in England has just been built in Manchester, a city that has successfully grappled with its own set of negative connotations. Over the past 10 years, Manchester has gone from being a place known for its pall of industrial smoke and endless spires of Victorian architecture to a dynamic urban center. "Manchester was a center of the Industrial Revolution," Stalker explains. "An IRA terrorist bomb went off in the city center in 1996, and since then, the city has been visionary in reinventing itself as a European city. Ten years ago, everyone was living in the suburbs; now, there are probably 10,000 people living in the city center."
Urban Splash is at the forefront of this renewal effort. Its current focus is Castlefield, a brownfield area in downtown Manchester that’s gone from manufacturing squalor to nighttime scene in a short time. Cotton mills have been converted to apartments and high-tech businesses, canals host annual boat festivals, and art galleries, pubs, and cafes clog the area. Over the past six years, Urban Splash has constructed or refurbished four residential buildings in Castlefield. Their fifth, however, is perhaps the most exciting.
Photo by Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos
Moho (short for modular housing) was the result of a winning brief by Liverpool-based ShedKM, a young architecture firm whose inventive ethos nicely complements Urban Splash’s desire for constant innovation. According to ShedKM principal and director James Weston, "Urban Splash wanted to offer accommodation so that university graduates and key workers could afford to buy and live in Manchester’s city center." Apart from that, Urban Splash had no other requirements in its project brief.
To meet this need for affordable housing while maintaining high design and production standards, ShedKM began researching new technologies. "We’d been aware of one or two prefab schemes in this country, such as those by Cartwright Pickard Architects and the Peabody Trust, a nonprofit housing association," Weston says. "So we contacted Yorkon, the company that was making the prefab units for these projects, and went to see their construction process. Yorkon had used the technology for hotel designs and then clamped phony brick structure on the outside. Plus, the units had entirely traditional finishes and a conventional layout and design—just done with an off-site assembly. We felt that you could celebrate the idea of a modular off-site unit rather than trying to disguise it, and that the design quality was not meeting its full potential."
ShedKM drew up plans for an apartment complex that would appeal to younger residents—and that would be completely prefabricated by Yorkon. Urban Splash, affable and ever receptive to new ideas, immediately bought into the concept.
To maximize the possibilities of each unit, ShedKM designed apartments that literally turn the standard model on its head. Most other prefab apartments are a series of rooms that are built separately in the factory then joined together onsite. ShedKM, however, preferred to create fully formed apartments in the factory. The limiting factor, however, was the width of each unit, which had to conform to U.K. transportation codes and road sizes.
Instead of the traditional manner of joining prefab components side to side, the architects oriented the units on their ends, making all of Moho’s modules extra-long—with each comprising one complete apartment, eliminating the need for messy room seams and onsite electrical or power hookups within. Everything, from bathrooms and kitchens to cupboards and decorations, was installed in the factory.
From the Agent:"Rooted in the Northwest Regionalist tradition, this coveted Vista Hills home is warm, minimal, and deeply connected to its surroundings. 2765 SW Vista Drive is a 1954 one-level ranch, shaped and curated by a longtime art director and interior design photography stylist. The expansive living room, celebrated for its interior/exterior connection, features vaulted ceilings with painted exposed beams defined by low windows and long sight lines. The primary suite is private and serene, with wool carpet, wraparound picture windows, treetop views, and a luxurious bathroom with handmade tiles and heated floors."
The exterior is clad in black-painted rough cedar siding.
The single-story plan rests partly on steel beams, bending at its midsection to point toward a mountain view.
Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.
From the Architect:"Building on a complex and fragile site, a forested hillside, we asked, How do we settle into a sloping terrain without disrupting the landscape? Most neighboring houses seek to occupy the largest possible footprint, altering the surroundings to the maximum. We rejected the aesthetic of white walls that conceals concrete structures, major earthworks, and air-conditioning. The house is developed on a single story, set at the midpoint of the plot and supported by a lightweight steel structure. In plan, the house traces a broken line forming a 144-degree angle, orienting the cantilevered end toward views of mountains.
"This is a dry construction built with a sincere and environmentally responsible logic. It is a near net-zero energy house that combines unusual materials, such as steel sheet, with highly efficient ones, such as timber.
"The main structure consists of prefabricated timber-frame walls assembled on site with a lightweight timber beam floor system. One end of the house is embedded into the hillside, while the other cantilevers over it, supported by four galvanized steel columns braced with X-cross ties to minimize their section. A galvanized steel sheet envelope protects the timber beneath. The windows cut into the façade as large, frameless openings that, from the outside, dematerialize the house."
