From the Agent:"Step inside this beautiful, expansive four-plus bedroom, two bath home and fall in love with its warm character and thoughtful design. The midcentury-modern style shines through with vaulted and beamed ceilings, custom touches, and lots of natural light streaming through the new windows. The bright, main-floor living room invites you to relax and soak up the sunshine, while the two family rooms—each featuring a cozy fireplace—offer perfect spaces for gatherings or quiet nights in. You’ll appreciate the modern lighting, abundant storage, and two-stall garage for convenience."
Photo by Kaleb Rotering
Recessed lighting makes the upstairs common areas glow.
Photo by Kaleb Rotering
A wall of east-facing windows spans the dining and living room.
Tom Pritzker’s Epstein ties complicate the Pritzker Prize announcement, Trump gets swift approval of his White House ballroom plans, and more.
Downtown L.A.’s Oceanwide Plaza, which has become known as the Graffiti Towers for the street art covering its facades, have found a potential buyer. KPC Group and Lendlease are teaming up in a joint venture to acquire the long stalled and bankrupt project for $470 million. (Bloomberg)
After it was recently revealed that Tom Pritzker had extensive contact with Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire and heir to the Hyatt Foundation has stepped down as its executive chairman. The news is now delaying this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize announcement, which typically happens the first week of March. (The New York Times)
The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts—which is supposed to be an independent federal agency, but is stacked with appointees of Donald Trump—approved plans for the $400 million White House ballroom after a single virtual hearing, despite ongoing litigation and public outcry. Here’s how the approval was whisked through. (Bloomberg)
In 1986, writer and native New Yorker Judith Chernaik had the idea to slip poetry into the ad slots of the London Underground, turning packed train cars into ad hoc poetry galleries. Now, Poems on the Underground reaches millions of commuters, and has even inspired other programs of the like. (The New York Times)
Even renters of "affordable" housing in NYC are struggling to pay their rent, prompting calls for a new diversion court to fast-track aid and keep residents housed.
Photo by Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
NYC’s so-called "affordable" housing is proving too expensive for many low-income tenants, with a recent analysis finding that government-subsidized landlords filed more than a third of the city’s 120,000 eviction lawsuits in 2024, largely over unpaid rent, prompting calls for more emergency aid and rent assistance. (Gothamist)
Signature pieces and leftover materials from the late founder’s namesake furniture company cohabitated with him, his wife, and their three children in the same building where the line was manufactured.
Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the December 2001 issue.
The Heltzers of Ravenswood, Chicago,have the kind of unconventional lifestyle that might belong to the characters in a John Irving novel. However, instead of residing in a ramshackle hotel or a boarding school, they live in a furniture factory.
Actually, the three-story brick building was built in the 19th century to house a candy factory, with a small orchard next door to supply homegrown cherry flavor. It is one of a string of industrial buildings, all past their prime, stretched out along a railroad line that used to carry freight but is now mostly used by commuter trains. Michael Heltzer, 40, a furniture designer and manufacturer, purchased the building from the Chicago Historical Society in 1987. When he moved in, the former orchard was a vacant lot cluttered with empty Thunderbird and MD 20/20 bottles. He camped out on the third floor and began, in a modest way, to manufacture steel, concrete, and glass tables and chairs downstairs.
Today, the Heltzer factory takes up 13,000 square feet of the building, including a basement metal shop, a first-floor wood shop, and an office that occupies half of the second floor. Finished pieces are stored in a warehouse several blocks away, and are sold through a string of showrooms, most notably one in the Chicago Merchandise Mart.
The factory building also houses a floor and a half of living space (3,400 square feet) for the Heltzers and their three children, George, Rose, and Henry, who range in age from two to seven. While urbanites across America move into lofts that are often carved out of facsimiles of industrial buildings, the Heltzers live in a real factory that is still very much a factory.
Michael Heltzer started out his professional life as a lawyer at a white-shoe New York firm, Milbank Tweed. But Heltzer, whose wardrobe favors T-shirts, worn jeans, and dust-coated clogs, was not at home on Wall Street. "I knew I was in trouble when I started picking up stuff on the street and making things at night," he recalls. Eventually, he left New York behind, moved back to his native Chicago, and started taking classes at the Chicago Art Institute, while continuing to practice law.
"A teacher from the Art Institute gave me keys to his factory," Michael continues. He spent all his spare time learning how to use vintage, prewar machine tools. "I was welding, forming, bending."
Heltzer’s first product was a glass-and-stainless-steel cafe table on a concrete pedestal. Using contacts he’d made through family and friends, he sold it directly to architects and restaurant owners. "I got 6o orders the first month," Michael says. "Then I quit the law."
Today, the Heltzer line consists of over 150 products, everything from teak-covered coat hooks (they use up the scrap wood left over from larger pieces of furniture) to wall units, all linked by a shiny, stainless-steel aesthetic.
When he moved into the old factory and began the long process of restoring it, Heltzer was single. In 1991, his girlfriend, Elizabeth, a social worker, moved in and in 1993 they were married. "When I moved in, it was Michael and two people working with him downstairs," says Elizabeth, 37. "Upstairs, it was a bedroom and an open loft space."
As soon as Michael and Elizabeth started having children, they began carving rooms out of the raw space. "Henry was born in January of ’94. We needed the space to be different, so we turned a walk-in closet off the bedroom into his room. As the business started growing, more things came upstairs."
The empty loft gradually filled up with the ever growing Heltzer line of furniture.
"This was the showroom," Elizabeth says. And she remembers the old days, when potential clients would call and say they were on their way over. She and Michael would frantically clean up the mess made by a family that was growing almost as fast as the product line.
"When Rose was born, it pushed us out of the back of the building, and we moved to the front. Then the back space was for the kids." The room in the front, which was the primary bedroom, is now dominated by a sleeper sofa and a VCR. Elizabeth calls it the "late-night movie room." Hanging over the sofa is an old black-and-white scene showing some big piece of industrial equipment at work. It looks like one of Lewis Hine’s photos of heroic factory workers, but Michael says he found it in a dumpster. Today, the parental bedroom is, once again, toward the rear of the building.
The floor immediately downstairs was rented out to tenants, and when they moved out, bedrooms for the two older kids were framed and painted down there. Then George was born and a third bedroom was added.
The style of the Heltzer furniture sets the overall tone for the living space: Room dividers and stair rails are made from woven strips of mahogany that are used in the furniture line. The bathroom is tiled with hand cut pieces of aqua slate left over from the renovation of the Chicago showroom. The prototypes for the teak hooks hang on the bathroom wall. The dining table and chairs are signature Heltzer pieces in steel, glass, and wood. One of the latest products, a glass birdbath on a concrete pedestal, is out in the garden.
Downstairs, the small, brightly painted children’s rooms surround a communal playroom that is outfitted in pure Heltzer. Stainless-steel panels were custom designed for the children so they could hang up their art projects with magnets. They have their own "work" area, where small chairs surround stainless-steel tables mounted on wheels. Michael also made a series of wooden hutches for their toys and art supplies.
On a summer afternoon, the youngest, George, can be found sprawled, bottle in mouth, on a beanbag chair in front of a Sesame Street video while his older brother and sister are at day camp. Unofficially, the play area extends into the office immediately next door, where Rose often hides under the desk of the marketing manager.
In a 2001 interview, the prolific maker—who died in 2011—discussed growing up alongside modernism and her push against the movement’s insistence on simplicity.
Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the February 2001 issue.
Eva Zeisel has an opinion on Putin. Also on Totem, Hillary, and Beauty. That is, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, because she follows international politics; Totem, the New York design store, because she follows design politics; Hillary, the public figure without the last name, because she follows domestic politics; and Beauty, the life force, because she is wise.
She also has strong opinions about the design of the century she has lived through. She was born in 1906 and began work in about 1920, when she was an educated, prosperous, potter’s apprentice in her native Hungary. After firsthand experience of Europe’s upheavals that, for Zeisel, included solitary confinement in the Soviet Union and encounters with Nazis, she came with her family to New York just before World War II. She was welcomed with the offer to design a dinner set for the Museum of Modern Art, an affirmation for a designer if ever there was one.
In 2001, many of us have statements to make about modernism. But very few people (except Philip Johnson, who is Zeisel’s age), can speak with firsthand experience of most of the design movement’s decades.
In 1946, after the dinnerware commission, she was given an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. While she was setting it up, Greta Daniels, the curator of the show, told Zeisel of her idea for an exhibition on "the rise and decline of modernism."
In hindsight, Daniels was clearly early on to something half a century ago. However, rumors of modernism’s death have been greatly exaggerated. And interminable, too. While this eternally ending aesthetic may outlast all of us, "I was practically born when it was born," says Zeisel.
Photo by Matthew Hranek
"An exhibition of [Charles Rennie] Mackintosh was in Vienna in 1904 or 5, just before my birth. That had a large influence on early Hungarian furniture design. So my parents’ dining room was completely geometric. Our baby furniture was not only geometric, with round geometric rings on a square background, but was also made in unpainted fir, an influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. These were the first things I saw.
"I visited the Paris World Exhibition in 1925. It was a mixture of styles, most of them very sumptuous. However, it was the first showing of Le Corbusier’s furniture. It was awe-inspiring in its Puritan atmosphere.This I well remember."
At this point, Zeisel became, and remained, unenthused by the coolness of the modern aesthetic. She agreed with the negative opinion of critics at the time who said Le Corbusier’s work in the exhibition replaced sentimentalism with rationalism. "Simplicity is not a natural phenomenon. The shells of the sea, the leaves of the forest, the clouds of the sky, the wings of the butterfly, the palace of the spider—none would pass the test of modern simplicity," she protests.
In architecture and design circles the principles of the modern movement—"simplicity, truth in materials, geometric forms and lines, rejection of ornament"—have been dominant in the West since roughly the time they were displayed in Paris. We tend to think of Zeisel’s work as modernist, in a sense, when it employs clean lines, is monochrome, and is restrained. But for her part, Zeisel says, "The principles established in this century, which dictated what was good design and what was bad, stifled its inherently communicative nature. The modern movement tried to eliminate the communication between the maker and the people who looked at or used his things. To make things mute became an aspect of good design."
And she is not for the mute: She wants to delight the user of her products. She wants someone to find the bowl as beautiful as the strawberries it contains. It is as though she makes a gift for the user when she designs a piece for production.
Zeisel likes to tell a story that amuses her: Her daughter had been anxiously expecting delivery of a new printer, which had gone missing. Jean Zeisel got on the phone with the international delivery company and spoke with two regional directors, three office managers, and countless dispatchers. Computer systems were consulted, logs were perused. It turns out that the driver of the neighborhood delivery truck had thought the printer was too valuable to leave overnight and had taken it home to his apartment for safekeeping. His protective impulse had thwarted the entire organization, and Eva finds this absolutely hilarious and endearing.
So it’s not surprising to see that she abhors the idea of a home as a "machine for living." She has in fact embraced, if only to revile, Le Corbusier’s declaration that "we want objects to be our mute slaves rather than soulful friends. We want instruments. We exact from them punctuality, accuracy, and unobtrusive presence." Zeisel opts for soulful friends all the way.
And despite its popularity, when she saw modern work in Paris, even then, she chose not to emulate it. "I was always playful. I was far from taking my design seriously as any form of art at that time. But I thought then what I think now: that the designer must make soul contact with his client."
Images courtesy Ira Garber / Richard P. Goodbody / Montreal Museum of Fine Arts / Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts / Eva Zeisel
When it comes to things, this pleasing and connecting is done through what she calls the "magic language" of design. Its alphabet includes the shapes, contours, colors, sounds, and associations we have with objects. The lines of a vase might, especially in Zeisel’s hands, convey plumpness or silliness or elegance or grace or tenderness or wit.
And she may be Shakespeare—or perhaps Bach—in this language. In her Hallcraft/Century dinner service, two sensuous arcs rise to pull away from each other over a void; the whole set is a composition of echoing curves. Each element is a subtle form in itself, but they are infinitely recombinable. The shapes become like cyclical themes in a fugue, each more complex than the last through every new composition of bowl, plate, and cup.
What has been urgent for Zeisel are questions of purpose and meaning and intent in the making of objects, and she wants to know who is carrying this on. "Now, all over the world, museums are full of this good design. But it is not design itself, it is only what the modern movement said design was in this century! But what happens after that? If one museum says 2oth-century design, what does the next one say? What will the curators put in the next gallery? The modernists thought that they had finished design, but now something else must be made. What goes in the next room?"
Because she is 94, Zeisel does not feel any responsibility for answering that question. She has already filled rooms with her work, from MoMA to the British Museum. But she does advocate one value over all: "To me, beauty depends on one single person, on the person who looks at something and feels joy in looking at it because it pleases him without second thoughts, irrespective of whether it is useful, whether it is art, or whether it is in good taste. It is the love affair of the eyes with the things they focus on. As its enjoyment is immediate and spontaneous, it is quite impossible to put into words how to make beauty."
Zeisel, after all, has been at it for more than 75 years. We could say that she has fought the coldness of modernism in that time, but only if it is possible for giving pleasure to others to be a weapon, and for joy in that giving to be a strategy.
From the Agent:"World-renowned architect Bruce Goff’s Round House is a unique sight! Full of history and eclectic character, this innovative home will take you straight off Route 66 and back into the 1960s. The home is arranged in a circular floor plan with a large sunken ‘conversation pit’ at the center. Rising up from this pit is a large metal fireplace, its chimney surrounded by skylights, which is the centerpiece of the entire home. Outside, the house is wrapped in rock with triangular insets for doors and windows. Much of the stone is set to show off its drill marks, and numerous fossils are visible in the rock."
Photo by Wise Development
A ring of skylights illuminates the home’s central conversation pit
Photo by Wise Development
The home was originally awash in blue carpet and structural beams, however a renovation recast the space in neutral tones.
A new roof addition transforms the attic into a living area, complete with splashy colors and a surprising bathroom fresco.
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:"The project concerns the first house in a row of four terraced dwellings, built along a narrow plot. Originally conceived as modest workshops made with ordinary materials, typical of the fabric of Bagnolet, these structures have gradually been converted into family homes. They belong to that fragile typology of small workers’ houses—descendants of a precarious form of housing, sometimes close to the shack—whose transformation demands the utmost care.
"The existing dwelling consisted of a single living space on the ground floor with two low-ceilinged bedrooms and a bathroom tucked under the eaves. Following the birth of a second child, the clients wished to alter the roof to expand the attic space. The interlocking shape of the plots called for an intervention akin to embroidery. Every architectural gesture required delicate negotiation: avoiding intrusive views, preserving thresholds of privacy, and ensuring sunlight for the neighbors. Access located through the rear courtyard of a street-front building was limited to a single door and a narrow corridor. A social dimension was added to these technical and contextual constraints: responding to the tight budget of a young family for whom gaining extra space was essential. The bedrooms and bathroom would move to the ground floor, while the living space would occupy the upper level within a new volume—spacious and filled with light. This choice was reinforced by two key factors: first, the potential offered by this volume to be further divided vertically in the future (for instance, with a mezzanine workspace); and second, the climatic and lighting conditions. The ground-floor rooms, lit by small windows facing a party wall, remain darker and naturally cool in summer, while the new upper floor benefits from generous daylight and effective cross-ventilation through carefully positioned openings.
"The rooftop extension also had to contend with the structural fragility of the existing building, while remaining feasible through a lightweight construction system that could be assembled by hand, given the site’s limited access. A timber frame insulated with recycled textile fibers is clad in Eternit slates. Two exposed steel trusses were sized to allow the possible addition of a mezzanine above the living area. The roof pitch was determined so that the south-facing facade of the street building would retain its sunlight. The existing small Velux windows were reused on this facade and complemented by larger new openings directly aligned with the main spaces—the kitchen and the living room. The new volume is thus conceived as an adaptable space, capable of accommodating future transformations while redefining the home’s relationship to light, air, and everyday life."
From the Agent:"Welcome to Sylvan Wald House, a newly built midcentury-inspired home set at the end of a long, private driveway on 17+ wooded acres in the northern Catskills. The 3,115-square-foot residence includes a first-floor primary suite, white oak millwork throughout, and a wall of large picture windows with views that shift with each season. The first-floor primary suite offers a private deck and a spa-like bathroom with Carrara marble, Hansgrohe and Duravit fixtures, and radiant heated slate-finish porcelain tile floors. Two additional bedrooms share the main level along with a second full bathroom and a laundry room. The finished lower level offers flexible space with polished cement floors, a wet bar, a third full bathroom, and two sliding glass doors opening to the sloping yard; ideal for a media room, studio, home gym, or guest quarters. The location balances rural privacy with a historic river town atmosphere and amenities."
A Norwegian-style Morsø wood stove anchors the living room.
Photo courtesy of This Old Hudson Team at Houlihan Lawrence
A Morsø woodburning stove warms the living room.
Photo courtesy of This Old Hudson Team at Houlihan Lawrence
The kitchen features Bertazzoni appliances, custom oak cabinetry, and soapstone counters.
Photo courtesy of This Old Hudson Team at Houlihan Lawrence
