This article is part of our Design special section on landscape designs.
Inventive Knitting: Textiles Powered by the Wind
Merel Karhof’s Wind Knitting Factory is a small, building-mounted windmill connected to a knitting machine that cranks out colorful textiles in four-inch-wide tubes. A Dutch designer who began experimenting with this old form of automation when she was a graduate student at the Royal College of Art in London, Karhof has brought her invention to the United States on a 10-day, three-state tour that began Saturday in Holland, Mich., as part of the America250 program.
“I wanted to make something with this invisible energy source surrounding me,” Karhof said of her leap into wind power. (That windmills are veritable motifs of her native Netherlands never really occurred to her at the time.) After experimenting unsuccessfully with various knitting machines, she came across one designed for children that efficiently produced textiles when attached to her windmill, which she adapts as scarves.
Karhof installed the first Wind Knitting Factory on a balcony in London, where a dark blue wool tube slowly emerged, eventually growing so long that it touched the ground. “It shows that the power of wind is all around us and is free — anybody can harness it,” she said.
After Michigan, Karhof and her factory will be at the Mid-America Windmill Museum, in Kendallville, Ind., on Sept. 19, and the Design Museum of Chicago on Sept. 22.
How many scarves will the tour produce? It all depends on the weather. “When there’s no wind, there’s no scarf,” Karhof said; merelkarhof.nl. — LAUREN GALLOW
Forest Homes: A ‘Cedar’s Swansong’
On a spindly bayfront peninsula in northwest Washington State, builders are blanketing the exteriors of clifftop houses with cedar orbs. Omer Arbel, the architect of the project, Governors Point, said the layers of wooden spheres are references to “cedar’s swansong” — that is, how climate change is killing off the region’s forests.
The development’s 125 acres, owned by Randy Bishop, the co-founder with Arbel of the lighting company Bocci, will have 16 houses on 27 acres, and the rest of the land will be a nature reserve open to the public. (Prices for buildable lots start at $5 million.) The homes’ sinuous floor plans, with some rooms resembling caves and others affording sweeping water views, will be wrapped around mature trees, protected from “the violence of the construction process,” Arbel said.
The exteriors’ wooden orbs, attached with steel rods, are expected to turn silvery and green as they weather and attract moss and lichens. Arbel plans to provide owners with maps of where the trees that provided the raw timber were felled.
Driveways and paths are being paved in zigzag patterns, echoing what Arbel called “the undulating silhouette of the trees on either side.” Native plants on the roofs’ soil layers will “extend the forest floor ecosystem over the house,” he said. Satchels full of sawdust are being used to press hemispherical cavities into the interior walls. Pearly local quartz is pigmenting the concrete.
Bishop’s home at the southern edge of Governors Point is set for completion this fall, as construction begins on Arbel’s house at the peninsula’s opposite end. The team is planning to open the development’s homes occasionally for public tours; governorspoint.org. — EVE M. KAHN
Ceramics Collection: Hardware With a History
The New York designer Harry Allen has long been inspired by the stuff of life. He has cast a piggy bank from a real piglet (no animals were harmed), and a door stop from a 1970s roller skate. Now, he is returning to his roots in ceramics for a collection of mugs with handles cast from vintage door hardware.
“I did a lot of ceramics in high school and almost became a potter,” Allen recalled, but he took a dogleg to study industrial design at the Pratt Institute. Although many of his products over his early career were manufactured in clay, he wanted to get his hands dirty in the studio again, he said, so a few years ago he returned to that material.
The Hardware mugs are stackable vessels with handles slipcast from drawer pulls, cabinet hardware and doorknobs. Allen made the rubber and plaster molds based on vintage finds on eBay or in salvage shops, including an Art Deco set he stumbled on from the original Waldorf Astoria hotel (shown). The mugs are made to order and are available on his website; prices start at $396 a pair.
“There are so many examples of handles, and I’m a bit of a collector,” he said. “Transferring something from one function or material to another makes you pay attention anew”; harryallendesign.com. — LAUREN GALLOW
Listening Club: A Stage Where Sound Is the Star
There will soon be music on Clinton Street all through the evening. Stylus, a new members club built around sound and a world-class acoustic environment, will open in early 2027 at 48 Clinton on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in a building that was a recording studio back in the 1980s and more recently a rehearsal space for the Blue Man Group.
Spread over five floors, Stylus features intimate listening spaces, an isolated basement sound chamber, a recording studio, a lounge and a private suite for overnight stays. The main listening room, called EPHMRL, contains a stage with large sculptural speakers designed by Devon Turnbull, an artist. Fifty-six more are hidden behind the walls and on the ceiling.
“We can change the acoustics of the room from a small jazz club to St. John the Divine,” said Devin O’Neill, co-founder of O’Neill Rose Architects, the firm that transformed what was a squat concrete building into a layered, multidisciplinary cultural space with a curved perforated aluminum facade and interiors bathed in warm reds and browns.
Dr. Arani Bose, a neurologist and the founder of a medical device company, is behind the club, which will offer programming day to night, including live performances, film screenings and sound stimulations. A full-time archivist will be on hand to select recordings for members from a trove of vinyl, and the Michelin-star chef Anita Lo will oversee a full kitchen. Still, the sound waves are the real star. “We had this secret dance party there a few weeks ago,” said O’Neill, and afterward, “people said their ears weren’t ringing.” Annual dues are $10,000, with a $5,000 initiation fee; stylus.nyc. — STEVEN KURUTZ
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