And while we do admire some of those ambitions, we’ve been increasingly drawn to projects that make the water feel like part of the city. Real projects that real people can live in, swim from, have a beer on, and enjoy.

MAST makes the case that we can be a lot simpler (but no less considered) in our ambitions for life on the water, with projects like Bedding 1 and Sauna KKF that feel more like extensions of cities than speculative visions for the future.

We found ourselves sat next to the founder of Plus Pool not too long ago and asked her about the motivation behind building a pool in the East River, expecting a lofty statement about the environment, climate resilience, or some grand vision for the future.

“People just want to swim.”

Delightful. MAST seems to agree.

For Sauna KKF, MAST worked with the city of Copenhagen to design a place on the water that would feel as normal as spending time beside it.

KBHØ1 is the first in a planned archipelago of floating islands, it creates new places to swim, kayak, fish, and gather throughout Copenhagen’s harbor. Who said public parks had to be on land?

For all the talk of floating cities, Slusen is interested in something much simpler. Built within a former shipyard, the floating neighborhood brings together homes, workshops, gardens, and shared spaces on the water.

Moored alongside Paper Island, Bedding 1 is a floating guesthouse and community space by Arcgency and MAST. It’s the first piece of a larger vision for the harbor, where the water becomes a place to meet friends, spend the night, or hang around for a while.

Consider us part of the MAST fan club.

I first visited Copenhagen three years ago during a long layover on the way to a wedding in Lithuania. Like any good planner, I arrived with a list of restaurants, museums, and buildings I wanted to see. When I asked my bartender how he’d spend 72 hours in the city, he told me to “just wander.”

It was somewhat frustrating advice at the time. Three days never feels like enough, and I’ve always had a tendency to treat travel like an optimization problem. But I took his advice anyway, and I think he was right.

There are some cities that do need a checklist. Copenhagen certainly has those too, and you should absolutely make time for the Louisiana Museum and take a boat around the canals. But I found the city was at its best in the spaces between destinations.

Use this guide to pick a few anchors, leave room to wander, and don’t worry too much about checking every box. If you’re headed that way and want to know where we’d start, here’s the FIELD GUIDE.

FIELD GUIDES are available to paid subscribers. Each one includes a saved Google Map with every recommendation linked in one place, plus updates as we find new places worth sharing. Planning a trip to Copenhagen (or anywhere)? CONCIERGE@LINEAR-MAGAZINE.COM.

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We also added a few new hotels to the STAYLIST this week, including Anantara Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam (thank you to Adam Mayer for the recommendation), and the new Four Seasons in Cartagena.

Next week, paid subscribers will get the Copenhagen Field Guide — a light guide to how I spent 72 hours by myself in the city.

A moment of appreciation for DRAFTED, for all of us who’ve been designing our dream home floor plans in Figma. As much as I’d like to believe otherwise, there’s probably a reason architecture has its own tools, and it’s about time someone made them easier to use. Easy enough for more than 120,000 people to generate 325,000+ homes in the past month alone, in fact. Feels like a pretty good sign they’re making something people want. The team also just announced a $16M fundraise to keep building. Cheers to the team, and thanks for supporting the MAGAZINE. Drafted.ai.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a roundup of new projects, and with so many new subscribers joining recently, I thought it’d be fun to share a handful of recent finds. There’s no theme to this one, other than that they’ve caught my eye over the past few months. Most of them are recently completed, too. (New paint smell.)

Among them: a Sea Ranch renovation that’s making it even more painful to know I still haven’t made the trip out there, and a new creative hub on Edinburgh’s waterfront that’s helping write the next chapter of Leith.

Sea Ranch Treehouse, by John Haag (1972), renovation by Catherine Kwong (Sea Ranch, California)

This one was completed in 2020 (though published in 2025), but I’ve been in such a Sea Ranch mood recently I thought it was worth including anyway. The house was originally built in 1972 by John Haag as part of the original Sea Ranch development, which emphasized a consistent design language of cedar cladding, folded forms, and a connection to the land through preserved views, coastal access, and reforestation.

Unlike many Sea Ranch projects, which either preserve the house in museum-like glory or extend it for contemporary living, Catherine Kwong’s renovation emphasizes restraint, largely restoring it to how the house might have felt in 1972. The refreshed millwork looks super clean, and minimal interventions like a new window seat and gingham tile in the kitchen (which I think I like, but I’m still deciding) add a refreshing sense of clarity to a house that’s now more than 50 years old.

I love all of the angles here, and the resulting pockets of light you get through the windows. It does an exceptional job of framing the views, which feels counterintuitive when you’re somewhere as beautiful as the Sonoma Coast — my first instinct is to open every wall and soak it all in, but there’s something about a picture window that makes you slow down and spend more time with what’s already there. I’m overdue for a visit.

C1 Workplace by Bruzkus Greenberg (Berlin)

Offices are continuing to borrow from hospitality. I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it, because I think it’s one of the more exciting (and necessary) evolutions in office design.

Bruzkus Greenberg is known for this kind of work, but unlike some of the projects I wrote about in WORKING FROM HOME, that use domestic and hospitality references as a kind of brand-philosophy-in-space exercise, Bruzkus leans into the idea of building a third place that simply makes people want to come in.

The space is dotted with custom furniture and high-end vintage pieces. The philosophy here is that if you can make a space feel nicer than what someone could have at home, they’ll be more likely to come in. Looking around, it’s hard to argue with them. It’d work on me, I think.

“The model for the office of the twenty-first century should be a hotel lobby or a bar or a library or a living room — or better: all of the above.” I’m inclined to agree.

Brown’s of Leith, by GRAS (Leith, Edinburgh)

In Edinburgh, GRAS reworks a former engineering workshop on Leith’s waterfront into a gathering point for food, making, art, work, and events.

This project becomes more interesting when you understand Leith as not just a neighborhood, but Edinburgh’s historic port, shaped by ships, goods, immigrants, and industry, with a reputation for being a little rougher around the edges than Edinburgh proper.

Unlike a lot of industrial neighborhood revitalization efforts that result in luxury condos, climbing gyms, and axe throwing, GRAS seems intent on preserving the industrial fabric of Leith. Not for the sake of preserving the warehouse itself, but for preserving the conditions that made it meaningful.

The Oculus, by Hayley Pryor (Byron Bay, Australia)

It’d be easy to call this a “tiny home,” which, though technically true, feels like it comes with the impression of mass-produced sheds on wheels for HGTV.

What makes this project special is the level of craft and care that went into designing it. For the Oculus, Hayley Pryor borrows from the forms of Australian sheds, which occupy a strange place culturally. Simultaneously farm buildings, workshops, storage spaces, backyard studios, and often DIY projects, they’re not quite homes, and they’re not quite outbuildings either.

Australian architects have long found architectural potential in the shed, treating one of the country’s most common building types as an opportunity for experimentation. Part of the appeal, I think, is that sheds are inherently anti-luxury. They’re utilitarian, regionally specific, and largely shaped by necessity, which feels significant as so many residential projects today feel driven by excess.

The Oculus makes a compelling case for small homes having just as much design rigor and craft as larger, more expensive ones. If anything, it’s more impressive when you consider the results of the space, and the constraints they had to work with.

Quarry House, by Winwood McKenzie (Melbourne, Australia)

If you’ve followed LINEAR for a while, you know I have an affinity for Melbourne worker’s cottage extensions. I love the site constraints, the preservation of the original facade, and the negotiation between old and new.

The more time I’ve spent looking at them, though, the more I’ve started to notice the subtle differences

What makes this one interesting is its courtyard-oriented layout, which at times feels closer to Mediterranean or Japanese courtyard houses than the more familiar rear-addition model. Rather than treating the garden as a destination at the back of the house, Winwood McKenzie weaves it through the plan itself.

As much as I love the dichotomy between old and new in some cottage extensions, there’s something special about an extension that disappears into the sequence of rooms.

If you have a space, place, or way of living you think we should know about, mind sending it my way? JUSTIN@LINEAR-MAGAZINE.COM.

We’re planning trips to Barcelona, Japan, Mexico City, Stockholm, Mallorca, the Alps, Portugal and Upstate New York. If you’re planning a trip here, or elsewhere, check out the STAYLIST, or email CONCIERGE@LINEAR-MAGAZINE.COM for custom, curated recs.

This week, I had the pleasure of checking out Sushi Koju, the new sushi spot in Ace Hotel Brooklyn. Incredible atmosphere — Studio Tre on the interiors. Highly recommend for the service alone.

Speaking of the , they’re on Substack now, publishing . is heading up their interview series, Frame of Reference, where they interview artists from their Artists in Residence Program.

They claim to be the first hotel on Substack, which if true, feels both surprising and overdue. Hotels are already in the business of world building anyway. It makes sense they’d want a place to talk more directly about what’s inspiring them, who they’re collaborating with, and what they’re actually paying attention to. Give them a read if you’re into that kind of stuff.

And in case you missed it, we just published THE DEFINITIVE LINEAR STAYLIST, an evolving collection of 120+ stays across 40+ destinations we think are worth traveling for. (Paid subs only, but if you have upcoming travel plans, send me a note and I’m happy to send over a preview of where we’d stay.)

Thanks to Drafted for sponsoring this week’s issue. Drafted lets anyone generate and remix home layouts instantly, then export them to PDF or CAD.

AMERICAN SUMMER

There’s a fantasy of American Summer that’s been moodboarded to include vintage Broncos, gravel roads, outdoor showers, and late-night beach parties you sneak out to attend. (Insert your chosen coming-of-age movie reference here.)

Of course, online, the whole thing has become its own lifestyle aesthetic. Surf Lodge hasn’t exactly been a sacred spot in Montauk since the group house crowd took over. Popeyes just announced a collaboration with them this summer.

Still, behind the performative posting, I think what people are chasing is real. Not the aesthetic itself so much as what it points toward. Exposure to the elements, spontaneity, wet floors, sandy feet, scraped knees. Living a little.

Consider the outdoor shower, now a fixture of the summer Airbnb moodboard. It may technically exist to keep sand and mud out of the house, but I increasingly think its real purpose is to provide a socially acceptable excuse to stand naked outside.

APOLOGIES TO OUR WEST COAST READERS

I didn’t set out to only feature homes in the Northeast, but I do think it provides a prime environment for this kind of lived experience. The feeling of wanting to get outside is amplified when you’ve spent all winter cooped up in your New York apartment, schlepping at your day job.

If Sea Ranch exists because Californians felt a pull toward the beauty of the land, weekend escapes in New York feel designed around the opposite: the desire to leave the city. The spaces and buildings, in turn, are designed to support everything the city can’t: getting outside, slowing down, wandering around barefoot, staying out too late.

For the Beachside Hotel in Nantucket, Parts and Labor Design finds the escape in the artists and craft movement of 1960s and 1970s Nantucket, designing custom furniture and fixtures that add a level of nostalgia for a time when latchkey kids roamed free. In Dezeen:

“We chose furniture, fabrics, and materials that are reminiscent of our childhood, even pulling from movies like The Sandlot for inspiration,” said Blue Flag Capital co-founder Brad Guidi. “There is something comforting and nostalgic when watching Sandlot so we asked ourselves, how do we evoke this feeling at our hotel?”

The references in the hotel itself are pretty on-the-nose — it’s toeing the line for what I’ll usually tolerate beach theme wise — but that’s sort of the point. It’s a version of summer that feels communal, imperfect, and nostalgic for childhood freedom.

But this feeling exists beyond the beach too. In contrast to the now performative, polished, and status-oriented era of the Hamptons, General Assembly reworked a 1960s bungalow in Amagansett to pull from the principles of Sea Ranch and create a weekend home that feels both hand-crafted and refined.

It’s a nod back to its more bohemian days: an East End of artists, eccentrics, and “romantic modernists” trying to, as Norman Jaffe put it,

“hug the earth, embrace the sky.”

Of course, both of these projects were carefully designed, but there’s a point where the image starts to overpower the feeling.

As I write this, I’m considering whether to include Studio McKinley’s Captain Balfour, also out east, in Montauk. It’s undeniably a cool project, even if it is a little more shiplap than I think we should feel comfortable with. But there’s something about a “shoppable” set designed by the founder of Surf Lodge, of all people, that starts to feel like the performative version of all this.

It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one. Where the Beachside Hotel and Amagansett bungalow feel like they’re trying to support a way of living, I can’t help but feel like Captain Balfour is aware of itself as an aesthetic product. It misses the point a little.

It’s the same reason these adaptations feel better than new builds. A weathered house feels lived in. It reminds you it’s okay to be outside all day, get a little dirty, and enjoy where you are.

LONG LIVE AMERICAN SUMMER

Not the aesthetic itself or the moodboarded version of it, but spaces that make you want to get outside, explore a little, and stop worrying so much about keeping everything pristine. Give me a house that feels connected to the land, resilient enough to survive real life, and not so precious I’m afraid to track sand through it.

Though, to be fair, I’ll still take the vintage Bronco.

At some point, our search expanded beyond homes and buildings into hotels, villas, ryokans, inns, and holiday homes we couldn’t stop thinking about — places we’ve bookmarked for ourselves, sent to friends, or practically begged people to go stay in.

Over the last few years, we’ve curated more than 1,000 projects for the Archive, including 120+ stays across 40+ destinations around the world. Eventually, it felt silly not to collect them all in one place.

So here it is: THE DEFINITIVE LINEAR STAYLIST.

WHAT TO KNOW

• Consider this an evolving atlas of stays we think are worth traveling for. More on what makes a stay feel LINEAR later, but it’s not all that different from what we think makes a great space in general.

• Everything here is hand-curated and vetted by us.

• We’ll add new stays as we discover them, so check back the next time you’re planning a trip. And if you need a recommendation for a city we don’t have yet…

WE’LL FIND YOU SOMETHING GOOD

Last year, we started a little experiment called CONCIERGE.

We asked you to tell us where you’re going, and we’d tell you where we’d stay. A surprising number of you took us up on it.

Since then, we’ve helped plan honeymoons through Japan, train trips through the Italian Alps, long weekends in Mexico City, and a handful of trips we’re still a little (very) jealous of.

Along the way, we’ve been able to help our readers get room upgrades, early check-in, late check-out, amenity credits, welcome gifts, and other perks. Which we think is pretty cool for a Substack.

If you’re planning a trip and want a more tailored recommendation — or just want to know what we’d would choose — we’re happy to help. Request a city in the comments, or send a note to CONCIERGE@LINEAR-MAGAZINE.COM with where you’re headed and what you’re looking for.

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And we know what some of you are thinking:

Why shouldn’t I just book with Amex/Sapphire/Atlas? Because you like supporting an independent publication. CONCIERGE is free to use, but when readers book through us, our hotel partners pay us a commission that helps fund the magazine.

Plus, we’ll throw in a few extra perks along the way, like room upgrades, hyper-local travel guides, and a kind of hospitality that makes you wonder… when is LINEAR opening its own hotel?

A FEW FAVORITES

Our STAYLISTS are reserved for paid subscribers, but if you’re curious what kinds of places make the cut, a few of our recent favorites include Villa Flor in S-Chanf, Pocketbook Hudson in Upstate New York, and Black Sand Hotel just 40 miles south of Reykjavík. And if there’s a stay we should know about, leave it in the comments. We’re always looking.

See you down there ↓

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On the recommendation of one of my Architecturally Curious friends, I spent the morning at IXV, a zero-waste coffee shop in Boerum Hill founded by a former J.Crew designer. Their sidewalk shed was built from reclaimed wood salvaged from an old Connecticut bathhouse that once stood down the road from IXV’s namesake. 497 Pacific St, Brooklyn.

Thanks to Drafted for sponsoring this week’s issue. Drafted lets anyone generate and remix home layouts instantly, then export them to PDF or CAD.

Where did all the people go, I wonder, as I scroll in pursuit of spaces more lived-in. Somewhere among our glossy magazines, we’ve lost signs of life.

I’ve found a few.

Some make me wonder where I’ll grow old, and whether my home will feel as beautiful and loving as theirs does.

Others take me back to being a kid again, swinging at dusk in the courtyard, dodging the geese and dog at your feet.

It’s not necessarily people I’m after, but signs they were there — a fire that needs tending, shed door left open in case someone stops by.

Imagining sandy feet and drinks after surfing with my friends.

Or cooking dinner for my family, in the same place it’s been done for a century.

Talking about everything and nothing under the sun.

Reminding myself that architecture is meant to be lived in.

Where did all the people go?

IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: ARARAT HOUSE (MARTINA GEMMOLA), MAISON AMTRAK (MARK MAHANEY), HARRIERFALL HOSTEL (YUMENG ZHU, XI YOUJI STUDIO), GARDEN PAVILION (ALEX SHOOTS BUILDINGS), WALK-STREET HOUSE (JOE FLETCHER), NISHIJIN MACHIYA (YOSHIHIRO MAKINO), FOREVER MOVING (JUSTIN CHUNG), MUSIC BOX (TREVOR MEIN)

Next week, bring your flip flops. We’re taking a look at AMERICAN SUMMER.

Between the gallery openings, studio open houses, and industry mixers, it can also feel like an event that’s still figuring out what it wants to be. As an industry outsider, I find myself less interested in seeing another showroom debut and more interested in the moments that get me into an interesting space, introduce me to a new perspective, or teach me how to see the city differently.

So I pulled together 14 tours, talks, exhibitions, experiences, and pop-ups that feel worth checking out, especially if you’re looking for something a little outside the usual circuit.

TOURS

Art Deco Icons of NYC Tour
May 1–June 30 — Midtown

Untapped New York is hosting a series of walking tours exploring the city’s Art Deco icons, from famous skyscrapers to more overlooked landmarks. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to romanticize Midtown, here it is.

Constantini Townhouse Installations
By request — Upper East Side

Constantini is hosting a series of installations and private events inside a seven-story townhouse listed at a “price on request in the mid-eight figures.” Access is by request, but if you can find your way in, it should be one of the highlights.

Wagner Park Walking Tour
May 19 — 6:00–7:30 PM — Battery Park City

NYCxDESIGN and ASLA New York are hosting a walking tour of the newly redesigned Wagner Park in the Battery. This has been on my list of new spots to check out, and it’s a nice reminder that Design Week doesn’t have to stay indoors.

TALKS

Architectural Photography & Narrative
May 14 — 4:00–6:00 PM — TenBerke

TenBerke is hosting a panel discussion with architectural photographers on how images shape perception, communicate ideas, and construct architectural narratives over time. A good one for thinking about architecture through a different lens.

Suchi Reddy in Conversation with David Graver
May 15 — 4:30–6:00 PM — Calico Wallpaper Showroom

Architect Suchi Reddy joins David Graver of Surface for a conversation on design as a sensory language beyond the visual, rooted in neuroaesthetics and wellbeing.

OBJECTS

One Night Stand: What We Bring to Bed
May 14–20 — citizenM Bowery

The American Design Club is presenting One Night Stand: What We Bring to Bed, an exhibition exploring “the objects, rituals, and identities shaping our space as we prepare for sleep.” Something about small objects tied to rituals feels more personal and attainable than a lot of the furniture collections on view. Plus, I love the citizenM.

Design Hotels: The New York Edit
May 14–20 — 11 Howard

Design Hotels is debuting its first-ever public exhibition, featuring collectible work by NYC-based designers in partnership with Lumens and Simple Flair. I’ve been finding myself more curious about lighting lately, and 11 Howard feels like the right kind of setting for this kind of show.

EXPERIENCES

FRAMA: Mechanics of Scent
May 14–20 — 11:00 AM–6:00 PM — 180 the Store

FRAMA is hosting Mechanics of Scent, a physical installation built around its Apothecary scent and the brand’s broader design principles. This is one of the more atmospheric Design Week entries, and I’ve been into FRAMA for a while so I’m excited to experience the brand’s world IRL.

Simon Hamui: New Works
May 14, May 28, and June 4 — 4:00–6:00 PM — K’ab Juun — RSVP only

K’ab Juun is presenting a solo exhibition of new works by Simon Hamui, including furniture and sculptural pieces centered around a musical console. Listening sessions will take place on select Thursday evenings by RSVP only.

Slash Objects: My Astral Mission
May 14–22 — 11:00 AM–6:00 PM — SoHo

Inside a historic, high-ceilinged SoHo loft, Slash Objects is presenting My Astral Mission, an immersive installation centered on the debut of the X Deck, a dedicated site for DJ equipment and records. The year of the listening room.

Terms & Conditions
May 14 — 6:00-9:00 PM — ThoughtMatter

ThoughtMatter is hosting an open studio party exploring what it means to be a “good neighbor” today. It’s a rare Design Week event that feels focused less on passive viewing and more on participation, asking how design shapes civic imagination, behavior, and the social contract of living together.

Inside~Out
May 18 — 11:00 AM–5:00 PM — Two Trees HQ, DUMBO

Two Trees is hosting Inside~Out, the fifth exhibition of outdoor design curated by Kin & Company on the roof of their DUMBO headquarters. The exhibition explores how rooftops might become more active urban habitats.

BOOKS

Common Things: Book Salon
May 14–21 — 12:00–6:00 PM daily — Common Things

Common Things is hosting a week-long book salon centered on ritual and care as spatial and collective practices. Their open reading room brings together books, zines, and independent journals on domesticity, material culture, and contemporary rituals. I’ve been on the hunt for zine inspiration, so this is high on my list.

Hudson Wilder x Phaidon Design Bookstore
May 14–20 — DUMBO

Hudson Wilder is partnering with Phaidon on a Design Week bookstore in DUMBO. A good stop if you want something more casual and browseable. This is one of my favorite design stores in the city. Hudson Wilder’s founder, Conway, has become something of an evangelist for the DUMBO design scene — worth saying hello if you see him.

I’ll keep updating this as Design Week unfolds, so check back for new additions and send over anything I should have on my radar. I’ll be at the FOR SCALE launch party at the Ace tomorrow, so come say hello.

New York’s New Museum reopened to the public with an expansion by OMA, though some have noted parts of the building still feel unfinished. The London EDITION announced a year-long partnership with the Design Museum. LACMA’s new Zumthor-designed extension is now open to the general public. IKEA announced plans for a Museum of Furniture Studies inside a former warehouse, designed by Cobe. And Sotheby’s opened Marcel, a restaurant inside their new home in the iconic Breuer Building on Museum Mile where everything’s for sale. (I’m checking this out in a few weeks.)

The urge to get out and do stuff is feeling very real.

And good timing, because New York Design Week starts Thursday. Stay tuned for a special edition later this week for where we’re headed and what’s worth seeing.

The great defrosting.

Thanks to Drafted for sponsoring this week’s issue. Drafted lets anyone generate and remix home layouts instantly, then export them to PDF or CAD.

This week, we’re looking at a few projects by Giampiero Tagliaferri, whose work reflects his own dual identity: part Milanese modernism, part California informality.

Before launching his own studio, Tagliaferri led brand and retail design at Oliver Peoples, where he helped pioneer a more layered, contextual approach to luxury retail at a time when eyewear stores were converging around a globally similar minimalist aesthetic. His 2015 Milan flagship, designed around the feeling of a 1950s Milanese apartment, shifted the store from a place that sold glasses into a place that projected a world.

That same instinct runs through his interiors today. His projects feel refined, sensual, and deeply personal — spaces shaped through texture, references, local context, and objects collected over time.

In the era of tasteslop and what I’ve called “Algorithmic Modernism,” it’s refreshing to see interiors that not only feel lived in, but individual. No two feel quite the same.

In his work on a Milanese Pied-à-Terre, Tagliaferri filters avant-garde Italian references through the atmosphere of a hotel suite or bachelor pad. The whole space feels quite sculptural, full of sharp lines and dramatic forms that somehow never overpower the room. It’s playful and sensual without losing its sense of ease. I feel like I need a good robe to be here.

Being a Milan-born brand, it makes sense Sant Ambroeus would tap Tagliaferri (also a regular there himself) to design their Aspen location. Faux fur, marble, wood grain, and textured stone all echo one another, giving the space a warmth and tactility that feels distinctly Aspen. The faux fur especially feels like a risky gesture that somehow makes the entire interior warmer and stranger in the best way.

And I’m always drawn to spaces that reinterpret Alpine forms. There’s been a broader return to these kinds of interiors lately too — tactile, wood-heavy, slightly 70s. More Milanese living room transplanted into a ski town than rustic lodge cliché.

In his redesign of A. Quincy Jones’s 1938 personal residence, Tagliaferri described wanting the house to feel like “a time capsule, but one that was still alive.” There’s something about layering across time that amplifies the architecture rather than overpowering it. The huge window walls, cork surfaces, and slanted geometries somehow feel even stronger because of the interiors around them. You stop reading the house as a collection of periods or styles and start experiencing it as one continuous space.

1 Hotel Austin is now accepting reservations — we just added it to the Linear Concierge collection. We’re currently helping readers plan trips across Japan, Stockholm, Mexico City, Italy, and elsewhere. If you have a trip coming up, send us a note: concierge@linear-magazine.com.

Gehry wasn’t a stranger to sailing. He’d belonged to the California Yacht Club out of Marina del Rey, and spent years sailing and racing his Beneteau (also called Foggy). The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall were designed to evoke the sense of wind and sails in their form. It makes sense then that one of his most personal reflections would be on the water. It was something he’d thought about for years. “I never had the resources before,” he said. “And once I did I was busy doing my buildings.” He finally designed Foggy in 2018.

Over the last few decades, yacht design went mass market. Enthusiasts wanted a life of luxury on the water without sacrificing performance, and it led to a surge of yachts that feel more like condos than boats.

There’s a disconnect when you go below on a Beneteau. It’s comfortable, but the interior isn’t designed to move with the boat. You lose a sense of where you are. The boat’s in motion, but your living room is indistinguishable from your living room at home.

Racing yachts are good at the opposite. You strip enough out that you’re fully aware you’re in a high-performance shell, but they’re not somewhere you’d want to spend time. They’re designed for performance, not inhabitation. “The boat has to work.” On a boat, everything is a tradeoff.

Most boats either remove you from the experience or overwhelm you with it. In doing so, they make the ocean feel smaller, more controlled than it actually is.

Like Gehry’s larger projects, stepping inside Foggy feels more like being inside a sculpted instrument, closer to a violin or cello than a yacht. The most striking part of the design is the lattice-work portholes and skylights, which cast light and shadows across the interior in fragmented, shifting patterns. I’m reminded of Ji Cheng’s idea of “borrowed scenery,” that framing a view makes you more aware of where you are, though Gehry’s framing is less about stable presence and more about controlled disorientation.

You feel it even in the colors and materials. A psychedelic carpet by Joyce Shin, Gehry’s daughter-in-law, pushes against the usual neutrality of boat interiors that try to smooth over movement, instead introducing variation and texture that keeps you aware of the space around you. Gehry even pushed against carbon fiber in favor of wood — heavier, less efficient, but closer to how a boat should feel. It moves away from the traditional open plan that merges the saloon, galley, and living spaces into one continuous room. In its place are corridors and passageways, a sequence of spaces that you move through, rather than settle into.

To be down below in Gehry’s yacht is to feel the motion of the ocean, the ebb and flow of the horizon, the reflection of light on the water in momentary glimpses. You’re acutely aware of the instrument you’re in, designed to move you through this place.

I fell in love with sailing for the feeling. The way the boat responds in the wind, the way the helm reacts in a gust, the way you feel connected to the water. Foggy makes the ocean feel a little bigger.

CHECKING IN AT HOTEL SAINT VINCENT

I’m back in New York after a long weekend in New Orleans. I don’t remember much from my visits as a kid, but I do remember sitting on the screened porch at my great grandparents’ house, and the slight breeze that shifted the humid air ever so slightly. I remember sitting on the floor at Preservation Hall, the first instance of what would become a lifelong love affair with live jazz. And I remember the whoops and hollers and parades through the street after the Saints won their home game.

For me, New Orleans was always less about Bourbon Street and more about the porches, the music, the people — the feeling of all of it happening at once.

I was excited to go back as an adult this time, and when I went to look for a hotel, wanted something that felt like New Orleans. That’s how I stumbled on Hotel Saint Vincent, a 75-room boutique hotel, housed in the former St. Vincent Infant Asylum, built in 1861 at the height of New Orleans’s Yellow Fever epidemic.

Hotel Saint Vincent sits on Magazine Street in the Lower Garden District, the side of New Orleans with the tree-lined streets, Victorian mansions, and boutique stores. The building feels almost imposing when you first arrive — a towering, three-story brick structure that feels heavy next to some of the smaller buildings beside it — the kind of weight that comes from having been an institution, and now, in a different way, still is.

In 2017, the property was acquired by hotelier Liz Lambert and her partners at McGuire Moorman Lambert Hospitality, who led a $20 million restoration before reopening it in 2021. The design, a collaboration between Lambert McGuire Design and local architecture firm Metro Studio, focused on preserving the building’s 19th-century bones — the brick facade, the ironwork, the central staircase — while layering in Italian, mid-century, and New Orleans vernacular influences. Much of the furniture feels collected rather than installed, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

Between two bars, a restaurant, a cafe, a boutique, and a courtyard pool, it feels as much like a place for locals to hang out as it does a place to stay. It’d be easy to spend an entire day here. (We did.)

We started the morning at the on-site cafe, Elizabeth Street Bakery, and took our Vietnamese coffees out to the courtyard pool. A jazz band set up nearby for brunch — we heard them before we saw them, the horn drifting over before we thought to look up. By late afternoon we’d moved to the veranda with cocktails, and by evening into San Lorenzo, the hotel’s Italian restaurant, before filtering through to Chapel Club, a dimly lit bar occupying the building’s original chapel, with live music on weekends and tasteful nudes adorning the walls.

Everything at Hotel Saint Vincent has a story — and the best adaptive reuse projects know the difference between what to leave untouched, what to reveal, and what to extend into something new. Every choice here feels considered. The original staircase rises three full floors. The front porch ironwork looks like it was never touched. Vintage furniture pulls from Art Deco grandeur and Italianate motifs. Even the marbled wallpaper in the bathrooms is drawn from diaries kept by Margaret, who ran the orphanage.

Like New Orleans itself, Hotel Saint Vincent feels richly layered. At one point we left our room late at night for a nightcap, and the ground floor was glowing — candelabras and tea lights set against red neon, locals mixed in with hotel guests, everything happening at once, but somehow holding together.

This is what New Orleans feels like.

If you’re planning a trip to New Orleans (or anywhere), send me a note and we’ll get you onto LINEAR Concierge. Hotel Saint Vincent is part of our collection — subscribers get access to curated stays, member rates, and a handful of perks.

In no particular order, a few places that stuck with me:

• Saint Germaine — a French-inspired tasting menu in a double shotgun house in Bywater. The evening progresses from backyard to bar to dining room. Don’t miss this one.

• Camp Place Residence — worth a quick detour if you’re nearby. A quieter example of how new architecture tries to sit inside the city’s older fabric.

• Petula — a courtyard cafe and wine bar tucked inside KREWE in the French Quarter. An unexpected move from an eyewear brand, but it works.

• Turkey and the Wolf and Molly’s Rise & Shine — chaotic, playful, and a bit closer to the version of New Orleans I’m describing here

We also made stops at Cochon and Pêche — both worth it, and good anchors for the city’s more rooted side.

Grab a coffee from French Truck and take the St. Charles streetcar down to Audubon and back. We did this on a rainy day — watching the houses pass by felt especially right. Bonus points if you spot the church designed by Leonard Spangenberg, a former Taliesin Fellow. It’s hard to miss.

Headed to London next. More soon.

A few new additions to the archive this week — Vipp’s Upstate Shelter, a hospitality-inspired coworking space in London, and a new hotel in Berlin.

This week, I’m pulling a project from the archive to look at what AMAA calls non-finito — unfinished.

In a 2021 lecture to students in the Syracuse Architecture program, the cofounders describe their process less as designing and more as uncovering. It’s a trap, they argue, to rely on drawings as a final truth. Spend enough time peeling back layers, reading traces, and the building begins to show you what it wants.

Caffè Nazionale is set inside the 19th-century town hall of Arzignano, the ideal place to build around a philosophy like AMAA’s. Unlike its more preserved neighbors, Arzignano has been shaped by 20th-century industry, uneven growth, and layers of history stretching back to the Neolithic. There’s no single dominant narrative to defer to, no obvious “correct” version of the building to restore toward. Its identity is exactly what AMAA works with.

There's an inherent temporality in this kind of intervention. To reveal the patina — to expose those layers — is to acknowledge that the building isn’t finished. Not now, not ever. Life goes on.

We’re planning trips to Japan, Mexico City, London, LA, New York, and Palm Springs — concierge@linear-magazine.com

THIS IS A COLLECTION OF SPACES, PLACES, AND THINGS TO DO DURING A SHORT STAY IN THE PENINSULA. THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST, BUT RATHER A WAY OF SEEING THE PLACE.

THE SPACES AND PLACES BELOW WERE SELECTED FOR THEIR:

SPATIAL CHOREOGRAPHY

MATERIAL CONTRAST

AND THEIR ABILITY TO FRAME THE LANDSCAPE

THAT’S WHAT MAKES THEM LINEAR.

Read more

When cities appear only in the headlines, there’s a tendency to view them as something abstract. But cities are, of course, made possible by the people who inhabit them and build them over time.

Architecture is one of the clearest ways we remember that.

For thousands of years, Iran has been responsible for some of the world’s most influential architectural ideas. Passive cooling, courtyard urbanism, climate-responsive design, and deeply material-driven architecture all trace some of their most important precedents to early Iranian building traditions.

More than monuments, the windcatchers of Yazd, the gardens of Shiraz, and the brick vaults of Isfahan are architectural inventions that shaped how cities around the world think about climate, shade, and gathering.

Iranian architecture has also played a massive role in the way culture is organized, shaping how families gather, how cities function, and how people relate to climate, craft, and landscape. In this way, Iranian cities offer a remarkable study in ways of living, especially compared to the more flattened urban environments that dominate much of the modern world.

If we view architecture through the lens of archaeology, spaces can tell us a great deal about how societies function, what they value, and what they choose to preserve, whether through careful restoration or through evolution. You can see this tension between preservation and change across contemporary Iranian architecture today. I’m reminded of Gazorgah House by Torab Home in Yazd, a contemporary intervention within a historic palace and a distinguished example of Qajar-era architecture.

In other cases, contemporary architects extend these traditions into entirely new forms. Tehran, a city of constant reinvention, has long evolved by layering new ideas onto its existing fabric rather than replacing it outright, extending not just the city, but the social rituals that shape it. Projects like Kharposhteh Apartment by SE-BÆR Studio in Isfahan reclaim the rooftop as a social layer of the city.

These projects represent something fragile: contemporary architects in active dialogue with their own history, at a moment when that history is under threat.

At risk too is the brickwork, part of a long evolution of Iran's deeply material-forward building culture, that gives many of its cities their distinct identity. Now a global reference for what expressive mid-rise architecture can aspire to, contemporary architects like Tachra, Davood Behvandd, and Mehdi Qaimi are pushing the envelope on what brick, form, and craft can become.

When buildings like these are destroyed, we lose the physical record of how people lived — how they gathered, cooled their homes, built with the materials around them, and shaped cities to reflect their culture.

I’m saddened by the destruction, but I’m also optimistic. Iran has always been a country of reinvention. In places like Poland, Georgia, and Ukraine, we’ve seen movements of designers and architects return to rebuilding with renewed energy and conviction.

I was reminded of a quote from a Dezeen interview with the Ukrainian architect, Dmytro Bonesko:

“Designers have definitely become bolder and more interesting. Perhaps this is because, in conditions of war and prolonged stress, everyone realises that their life is limited.”

“There’s something very powerful in that – the desire to create a home when the world feels uncertain.”

I keep returning to that idea, the desire to create when everything feels uncertain. It's what Iranian architects have always done, and I believe they will again.

I don’t think this is aesthetic drift, and it isn't designers getting bored of white walls. Rather, it’s a response to a genuine architectural problem: if productivity has been decoupled from place, what is the office actually for?

If you can do your job from a couch in Lisbon, or a coworking space that feels suspiciously geographically ambiguous, what gives? You can spin up an app in a weekend, draft a strategy memo with AI, collaborate in the same document from three continents. The office can’t just be a machine for productivity anymore. It has to justify itself in a deeper way.

We've actually seen this movie before. Coming out of the industrial era in the 1960s and '70s, offices began to soften in ways that now get flattened into Mad Men nostalgia — wood paneling, low sofas, rooms that felt more like salons than production lines.

That shift wasn't random, and it wasn't just for the vibes. In 1964, Herman Miller designer Robert Propst published a research manifesto arguing that the office should be, in his words, "a mind-oriented living space." The furniture system he developed with George Nelson, the Action Office, gave workers standing desks, moveable surfaces, and the ability to shift posture and mode throughout the day. It was a spatial argument that thinking work deserved a thinking environment.

Around the same time in Germany, the Quickborner consulting team was designing what they called Bürolandschaft — office landscapes — replacing regimented rows of desks with organic, curving arrangements, plants, and informal clusters. The first one, built for a Bertelsmann publishing house in 1960, was described by its designers as creating "intimacy" within a large floor. Two very different approaches, but the same underlying conviction: the factory model had optimized the wrong thing, and space could say so.

The 2010s had their own spatial ideology. Open floor plans, converted warehouses, glass-walled meeting rooms suspended over triple-height atriums. Facebook's Menlo Park campus, designed by Gehry, stretched a single floor across nearly ten acres, one of the world's largest open floor plans, a spatial manifestation of the company's "move fast" philosophy.

Openness meant transparency. Transparency meant speed. The space itself felt like it was optimized, as if the building could A/B test its own layout. WeWork refined the formula into something even more legible. Exposed brick, eco-futurist phone booths, hot desks for the permanently mobile. For a while, it felt like the future.

But it also started to feel interchangeable. The same office rendered in slightly different brick tones. Same productivity stack. Same standups, same onboarding templates. And now AI compressing even more of it, turning what used to feel like craft into something closer to assembly. When everyone can execute, execution stops being the differentiator. Productivity becomes table stakes.

So what’s left is conviction. And conviction, it turns out, has a spatial logic.

A few patterns keep emerging. The first is zoning. Where the open office optimized for visibility, the new generation of workplaces optimizes for intention.

Dean Levin founded 22RE in Los Angeles with a fairly specific thesis, that the workplace should borrow unashamedly from the grammar of the home. Two recent projects show what that looks like in practice, and they’re different enough to prove the idea has range.

The first is Day Job, a creative agency that operates out of Ed Ruscha’s former studio in Glassell Park. Levin’s brief was to make something “communal and domestic — warm, playful and highly functional, like an elevated extension of working from home.” The conference room was conceived as a bedroom. The lounge as a living room. A sunken piazza at the center of the plan, lit by circular skylights, nods to Italian town squares. Each room tells you what kind of thinking happens inside it.

The second is Ceremony of Roses, a music branding company in Culver City. Same studio, different brief, different vocabulary. 22RE took a 1950s factory and carved it into distinct spatial registers. A huddle room modeled on a 1970s conversation pit, a burl-wood conference room built for structured debate, and a listening room with angled ceilings engineered to reverberate vinyl. Creative director Madeline Denley described the aim as translating “the artist’s purview” into space, “an analogue sensory experience with soft lighting, enveloping textures, and a deep natural palette.” The listening room makes an argument most offices would never dare to make, which is that shared, unhurried attention is worth designing around.

The more surprising version of this argument is happening in typologies where you’d least expect it. And And And Studio’s Century City law office, for a firm that could have defaulted to marble lobbies and power-signaling corner offices, instead traded private office square footage for generous communal areas, briefing the designers to make the space feel closer to a hotel lobby than a law firm. The result layers 1970s Hollywood references with modernist furniture and deep materiality. It’s a workplace that reads as curated and domestic rather than institutional. A law firm making that spatial trade-off is more telling than any creative agency doing the same thing. The stakes are different. The decision means something.

The second pattern is tactility. Velvet, steel, wood, stone. The more abstract our workflows become — and they’re becoming very abstract, very fast — the more grounding we seem to crave. Material pushes back against that abstraction. It says: this is real. We are real. What we’re building exists in the world. If everything digital is infinitely replicable, material becomes proof that something real exists.

West of West’s Puma Studio in West Hollywood uses fabric as a narrative thread throughout, woven into surfaces, draped across rooms, culminating in a staircase conceived around “the softness of ribbon.” For a company whose entire business is materials, it’s less a design choice than a proof of sincerity. The boardroom makes the same point with its suede plaster walls, sheer curtains, and cast-resin table.

The third pattern is consideration, or what architects might call specificity. To source the right table, commit to a fabric, design a layout that reflects how a company actually thinks rather than how a template suggests it should think. All of that requires taste and some degree of permanence. It requires you to know what you stand for. When I asked Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad and Antiwork about his brief for the new office, the instruction was essentially this: show people they’re working on something that matters. The space becomes an affirmation of belief. Digital is easy to replicate. Physical space isn’t.

The home and the hospitality environment have always been typologies built around belief — conversation, ritual, belonging, the shared idea that certain things are worth doing slowly and with care. The office, at its peak efficiency, shed most of that. What’s happening now isn’t nostalgia for the domestic. It’s a recognition that the spatial grammar of the home was doing something important all along, encoding values into the built environment.

In a world where almost anything can be generated, the hardest thing to generate is conviction. You can execute from anywhere. But you can’t absorb what a company stands for from nowhere. Space has always been one of the primary ways cultures transmit belief, which is why churches are tall, courtrooms are formal, and living rooms are soft. The office is joining that conversation again.

The question every workplace architect is now being asked, whether they know it or not, is the same one that has always defined the best buildings: what does this place say you believe?

Somewhere in your thirties, the city gives you a choice that doesn’t really feel like a choice.

You can stay in the apartment you’ve outgrown, in the neighborhood that no longer quite fits the life you’re building, or you can leave. Most people leave, and not for lack of love for the city. The math just stops working.

The United States is short 4.7 million homes, according to Zillow. Not in aggregate in some economist’s spreadsheet, but in the prime places where people actually want to live. The cities where the jobs are, where the culture is, where your friends live. In 2023, 1.8 million new families formed in America. Builders only completed 1.4 million homes. The gap didn’t make room for the new arrivals, let alone chip away at the shortage of homes left over from the Great Recession. And the product hit hardest by this isn’t luxury condos or Section 8 units — it’s the starter homes. Family-sized places inside the city. The rung on the ladder between your first apartment and the house in the suburbs you’re not sure you want. In 1976, small starter homes made up more than a third of all new construction. By 2024, that share had collapsed to around ten percent. An entire category of houses, and the life they enabled, quietly disappeared.

This is the graduation ceremony no one wants to celebrate. You live in the city until you can’t afford to any longer, and then you’re forced out.

The founders of the American Housing Corporation (AHC) decided this was an engineering problem.

Read more

I never chose to listen to NPR growing up, but I did listen to a lot of it.

I remember the long drives to the Unitarian church in Dallas, kicking my feet in the back seat, being briefed on everything from geopolitical tensions in the Middle East to racking my brain for the answer to Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. (Please tell me — I’m only seven.)

My parents listened to a lot of 80s music, and as a kid who fully believed he was destined to be a cowboy, I listened to my fair share of country music. But when we listened to NPR on those Sunday drives, I got to hear a different kind of music. John Schaefer’s voice was in there somewhere — steady, curious — hosting New Sounds, which he’s now been doing for decades.

At the time, I didn’t know what I was listening to. I just remember the worldliness of it. The sense that the music came from somewhere real — from rooms and rooftops and cities that felt far away from a car moving through Dallas. Between the monotony of a Texas highway and the intrigue of hearing a didgeridoo for the first time, the music gave me a third space. Not home, not church. Somewhere else entirely.

The other night, I found myself sitting inside Andrew Carnegie’s former library at the Cooper Hewitt, listening to John Schaefer again.

I was there for the opening of The Art of Noise, an exhibition exploring how design shapes the way we experience music. At its center is Devon Turnbull’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3, an immersive installation built directly into the historic library. Turnbull is known for his custom speaker systems and spatial sound work — previous installations for clients like Solange and projects like Public Records in Brooklyn have established him as someone who treats sound as architecture.

"Created as a 'shrine to music,' this listening room series invites visitors to experience music in a space designed to slow down and reflect, bringing back the joy of experiencing and sharing music together," Turnbull said. "My intention is to return to the kind of immersive listening we experienced when we were young, free from outside distractions."

What surprised me about the conversation between Schaefer and Turnbull wasn’t genre or gear, but their focus on rooms and presence. At one point, they played Musique de Nuit — kora master Ballaké Sissoko and cellist Vincent Segal, recorded live on a rooftop in Mali.

You could hear the air. Ambient road noise in the distance. The open sky above the instruments. It was airy but full, the kora and cello remaining present and clear. The Carnegie library absorbed the sound without fighting it — intellectual without being overbearing, grand without being loud, quiet without feeling empty. For a moment, I wasn’t in New York. I was on that rooftop.

Music shapes the space you’re in when you give it your attention. Good listening rooms are designed to support it.

Turnbull’s system doesn’t try to overpower the Carnegie library or retrofit it into a concert hall. It works with what’s already there — the proportions, the materials, the fact that this wasn’t built for amplified sound. The installation becomes a stage that accommodates the recording, giving the music space to transport you.

That kind of focused listening feels rare now. Music has become frictionless, ambient, endless. Listening rooms set a different tone. They narrow the field and make the act of listening the point. It’s part of why we’re seeing a resurgence of listening bars in the U.S. — spaces modeled after Japan’s jazz kissas, where patrons sit in near silence with meticulous sound systems. As postwar Tokyo apartments shrank, kissas became places to be alone, together.

Sitting in that library, listening to the same voice that once filled the backseat in Dallas, I realized something I couldn’t have articulated as a kid: I was using music to build other worlds. The minivan wasn’t designed to be a listening room. Neither was Carnegie’s library. But when you listen with intention, music creates its own architecture. It makes space inside the space.

The Art of Noise is on view at the Cooper Hewitt through August 16, 2026. Devon Turnbull’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3 operates during select hours with live programming. If you’re in New York, it’s worth sitting in.

Being online is tiring. We’re constantly saving things for later — bookmarking, archiving, collecting — all in a rush to not miss anything. Images circulate endlessly, buildings flatten into backdrops, and context thins out. In the scramble to save everything, we lose the space to slow down, be intentional, and make the kinds of connections that help us actually understand the spaces and places we’re drawn to.

LINEAR exists inside that tension between depth and velocity as a way to move through the internet with a bit more intention, and to invite that curiosity into the real world.

For me, and I suspect for many of you, design isn’t something to consume passively. It’s a practice of noticing something, holding onto it, and returning when it matters. Not saving everything, but saving the right things. Over time, those moments of attention start to connect, shaping how you travel, what you value, and how you design your own life.

The hard part is that most platforms aren’t really built for this. And as a creator, finding that balance hasn’t always been easy.

The internet rewards volume and immediacy, but I’ve found myself enjoying the work more as LINEAR has slowed down. Essays feel more satisfying than roundups. Featuring fewer projects has made the conversations richer. The guides we’re working on feel less like quick hits and more like a lens into how we see the world. Lately, that sensibility has extended beyond publishing into one-on-one conversations, the trips we’ve planned with Concierge members, and the small events we’ve hosted. There’s a shared willingness to slow down and look more carefully.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love beautiful spaces, and I’m not immune to a good doomscroll through my Explore page. But I want more than surface-level admiration. I want to understand why things are designed the way they are, and how they reflect the place, the people, and the moment they belong to.

You can build a huge audience without that kind of depth. Plenty of people do. It just doesn’t feel especially interesting to me (or particularly meaningful). Over time, LINEAR has found its voice by resisting that pull — what’s become clear is that the work we want to do next takes time, focus, and collaboration.

All of this is to say: we’re introducing a paid tier.

Paid makes it possible to invest in deeper writing and reporting, to publish guides that go beyond lists, and to build experiences in the real world — dinners, walks, tours, open houses, and gatherings that extend LINEAR beyond the screen.

LINEAR will always have a free layer. Paid subscribers support our deeper work and new experiments, and get access to our member layer: member-only Staylists and Guides, perks and preferred rates when booking stays through Concierge, members-only conversations like virtual AMAs, and early access to IRL events.

This is an invitation to be part of what comes next: a slower, more thoughtful design publication that feels a little more human, a little more alive.

There’s something here, and I’m excited to keep building it with all 2,000+ of you.

—Justin

For a long time, America didn’t have a language for leisure. Not just for time off, but shared ideas about how rest should look, feel, and be lived.

In the late 19th century, when wealth arrived faster than cultural confidence, Americans looked elsewhere for inspiration. Mansions borrowed from France. Civic buildings from Rome. Social rituals from anywhere but home.

Watching The Gilded Age recently, this borrowing feels obvious in hindsight — ornament standing in for tradition, aesthetics doing the work of meaning. It’s tempting to read that period as naive or derivative, but it was also a culture rehearsing a way of living it hadn’t yet learned how to articulate.

Palm Springs would later do something similar.

By the mid-20th century, postwar America found itself with time, mobility, air-conditioning, and disposable income. What it lacked was precedent — leisure had to be invented. Palm Springs, with its open desert landscape and proximity to Los Angeles, became a permissive stage for that invention. It largely existed to be elsewhere, removed from work, war, and routine.

Enter Polynesia.

Spend enough time in Palm Springs and its Polynesian-inspired houses can start to feel kitsch — aesthetic experiments taken a step too far. Their low-slung roofs, exaggerated eaves, tiki motifs, courtyards organized around pools feel out of place standing next to the more familiar midcentury lines we’re used to seeing now.

If the reference isn’t obvious from the architecture alone, the names make it explicit. There’s Royal Hawaiian Estates, by Donald Wexler and Richard Harrison, often cited as a prime example of “Tiki Modernism.” And scattered throughout Vista Las Palmas are Charles DuBois’s Swiss Miss houses, or Alohaus, a loose portmanteau that folds alpine geometry into a fantasy of island life.

It’s easy to read this as themed architecture, but that framing mistakes the order of operations. These houses weren’t chasing new aesthetics for their own sake. They were trying to solve a problem that hadn’t yet found its form: what does “rest” as a culture look like?

The Polynesia being invoked wasn’t a real place so much as a collective projection — ease without obligation, pleasure without consequence, distance from Western restraint. These houses offered a way to step out of American life without leaving it entirely. They were sincere, even if they were imprecise.

Authenticity, as it’s often used in architecture, tends to assume an origin story — a stable culture expressing itself truthfully. But when a society is still learning who it wants to be — when there is no inherited language of leisure — form becomes a proxy. Fantasy fills the gap until something sturdier takes hold.

Palm Springs made room for that awkward middle stage, and in many ways it could only have happened there. Before the desert was understood as a living landscape in its own right, it was treated as a blank canvas for experimentation. The stakes were lower here. Lawns were already artificial, pools already improbable, and shade itself was already constructed. Nothing pretended to be natural, so nothing had to apologize for being invented. In that environment, the desert became a stage for performance.

Seen this way, the Polynesian houses aren’t embarrassing outliers in an otherwise refined modernist narrative. They belong to the same transitional moment. Before a culture can design with confidence, it tries on other identities. Borrowing precedes authorship. Imitation is rehearsal.

I’ll admit, I’m often skeptical of newly invented aesthetics. Too often, they collapse into pastiche, and novelty is mistaken for progress. But that critique assumes aesthetics were the goal here, and they weren’t. The goal was emotional. These houses were testing how much fantasy was required to feel at ease.

Over time, that question found different answers. Palm Springs’ more restrained modernism — the crisp lines, the confidence of proportion, the quieter material palettes — didn’t emerge in opposition to fantasy so much as after it. Once leisure had been lived, it no longer needed to be exaggerated.

These Polynesian houses feel dated now, but they remind us that architecture often appears clumsy at moments of cultural transition. When ways of living change faster than the stories we tell about them, buildings step in to bridge the gap. Sometimes they do so elegantly. Sometimes awkwardly. But almost always earnestly.

Today, authenticity is treated as a moral category. Yet many of our most beloved spaces began as imitations — sincere attempts to live differently before we knew how to explain ourselves.

The question, then, isn’t whether these houses were authentic. It’s whether they worked.

Palm Springs suggests they did, at least for a time. Maybe that’s what dream spaces really are — not visions of a perfected future, but transitional architectures. Places where a culture practices becoming what it doesn’t yet know how to name.

“Here’s your key” will be spoken for the first time at Nara State Prison in Japan this summer.

In June 2026, Hoshinoya opens its newest hotel on the site of the sole remaining example of the Meiji government’s Five Great Prisons — a red-brick complex that has stood for more than a century, built as part of Japan’s rapid modernization where architecture became an instrument of order and reform.

I’ve always been drawn to historical prisons. Walking through Alcatraz or Eastern State Penitentiary left a deep impression on me, even before I had language for why architecture mattered. Something about the deliberateness of their design — the prescriptive way space shaped daily life — stuck with me.

It’s an awkward fascination to explain. Prisons are inherently political, and rightly so. But set modern context aside for a moment and they become rigorous studies in living: how light is rationed, how movement is controlled, how circulation and visibility shape daily experience. Many spatial ideas we now associate with modern housing — minimal dwellings, daylight as a regulating force, and tightly ordered circulation — were explored in institutional buildings like prisons, however grimly, long before they entered domestic architecture. As architectural historian Robin Evans observed, it was often in institutional settings that architecture took on an active role, shaping behavior without instruction.

But it’s worth stepping back for a moment. When spaces designed for discipline and control are reabsorbed into everyday life — not as ruins, but as places of rest — they don’t just change function. They change the stories we tell about comfort and history, about what kinds of pasts we’re willing to live inside, and how easily we let ourselves feel at ease.

At Nara, circulation still follows the prison layout. Corridors remain long and narrow, their proportions largely unchanged, even as light is allowed to travel deeper into the plan. It’s a hotel now, but its past remains. Even the materials carry weight: much of the brickwork was produced by inmates themselves, which is hard not to think about when you imagine spending the night inside those walls.

There is, to be clear, responsible context here. Alongside the hotel, a small museum will open on the site, offering visitors a brief window into the prison’s history and social context, a necessary counterweight in a setting that risks turning history into role play.

I don’t know yet what it will feel like to stay there. But I’m curious how a place designed for confinement changes when it’s given time, light, and a different reason to exist.

Your cell is ready.

Years later, I’ve (luckily) outgrown my dream of living in Times Square and settled somewhere quieter, in Brooklyn. Over the past five years of exploring the city, I’ve found myself returning to places that reward attention — rooms that encourage presence, spaces that make time with friends and strangers feel intentional, and environments that capture the essence of New York.

The places I curate for LINEAR reflect that balance. Some amplify the city’s energy, others slow it down. A few offer necessary retreat — not as escape, but as counterweight. Together, they make the city feel livable.

This isn’t a comprehensive guide, nor a checklist of places you should see. Some of New York’s best moments are stumbled into, unprompted. Use this guide to orient yourself, set the tone for a day, or, if you’re local, explore something new with your Architecturally Curious friends.

This is our first guide to New York, but it won’t be the last. Consider it a place to begin.

GATHERING PLACES — SHARED PLATES — STAY A WHILE — ON OBJECTS AND DOMESTIC LIFE — FOR SLOWING DOWN — PLAN YOUR TRIP

GATHERING PLACES

UPSTAIRS at Public Records

Gowanus →

An intimate cocktail and listening lounge tucked above Public Records — custom everything, with Japanese-leaning restraint engineered for raw fidelity. The furniture program was designed in house, with speaker design by Devin Turnbull (Ojas). It’s the quiet foil to the more raucous rooms below.

Our take

Post-dinner decompression with a small group of friends who care about sound. Or a calmer entry point before the night unfolds.

Silence Please

Bowery →

Part listening room, part tea house, part record store, part hi-fi showroom — a cavernous space built around Silence Please’s own speaker line. Programming ranges from quiet listening sessions to meditative tea ceremonies. It’s alcohol free and intentionally calm.

Our take

Come for a deep-work afternoon or reflective one-on-one. Bring your friend who notices good design, both in sound and in aesthetics.

HEAD HI

Brooklyn Navy Yard →

An architecture and art bookshop with a small coffee bar, long beloved by designers. Programming includes intimate launches, listening sessions, book clubs, and small exhibitions.

7 Spring

Nolita →

7 Spring reimagines the board game cafe with an ultra-slick backgammon focus: espresso and pastries by day, a low-key social club in the evening. Art Deco cues meet ‘70s Hollywood polish, with rentable boards and casual instruction for beginners.

RHYTHM ZERO

Greenpoint →

A design-forward cafe in Greenpoint that functions with a well-curated art program. Rhythm Zero feels more living room than cafe, ideal for a quiet hour off laptop.

SHARED PLATES

Wild Cherry

West Village →

Film buffs meet the supper-club set at A24’s first restaurant, tucked inside the landmark Cherry Lane Theatre. Soft lighting and brick-lined walls shift the energy easily from pre-show drinks to intimate date night. Italian-leaning, compact, and transportive.

Our take

Go before or after a show, or claim a quiet two-top when you’re looking for intimate conversation.

Bridges

Chinatown →

A quietly ambitious Michelin-starred restaurant in Chinatown designed by Billy Cotton, designed as an homage to Parisian bistros. Classic technique and seasonal precision anchor the evening in a new-age take on Art Deco and Brutalist forms.

Tsukimi

East Village →

An intimate, counter-only modern kaiseki (12 seats) that choreographs the whole evening — seasonal, precise, and quietly dramatic. The luminous, restrained interior lets pacing and plateware take the lead. Michelin-starred in 2023 & 2024.

Our take

Book far ahead. Plan nothing after. Let the autumn-moon inspired space take control.

Theodora

Fort Greene →

Home Studios’ warm, wood-forward interior frames a Mediterranean-leaning menu in a pared-back corner space off Fulton. Textured plaster, brass details, and an easy-going soundtrack that makes a long dinner feel inevitable. It’s scene-y without the noise, hospitable without fuss.

Our take

Great for groups if you land the back table, or for a date in the alcove. Start with the small plates.

STAY A WHILE

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The Manner

East Village →

Tucked away on a tree-lined block in the East Village, The Manner is low-key hospitality at its most thoughtful. Quiet rooms, warm materials, and restrained interiors create a true retreat in the middle of the city — no lobby scene, no velvet ropes.

Our take

The Manner feels less like a hotel and more like your friend’s (extremely) well-designed apartment.

Ace Hotel Brooklyn

Boerum Hill →

A relaxed, design-forward place to stay in Boerum Hill, where rooms feel deliberately understated, utilitarian, and material-forward. Downstairs, the lobby functions as a true neighborhood living room — a steady flow of conversations, laptops, and chance encounters that gives the hotel its social pulse without overwhelming the stay.

ON OBJECTS AND DOMESTIC LIFE

GEM

SoHo

Flynn McGarry’s elevated pantry and tableware shop — Japanese knives, ceramics, and kitchen staples you didn’t know you were missing. Minimal, precise, and deeply considered.

Quarters

Tribeca →

A shoppable loft from the founders of In Common With, styled as a lived-in residence. Lighting, furniture, vintage, and coffee moments unfold across 8,000 square feet — an ode to craft and domestic scale.

Hudson Wilder

DUMBO →

Flagship studio, showroom, and cafe for the “Art of Casual Living” brand. Glassware, books, and a small coffee counter inhabit a 1910 landmark building with confidence.

USM

SoHo →

An honest encounter with a modern design classic. The New York USM showroom assembles the Swiss Haller system in configurations that reveal its modular logic and architectural potential, offering a rare chance to engage with enduring furniture systems in real space.

Our take

Don’t miss the listening room, a collaboration with Devin Turnbull (Ojas). Open Saturdays.

FOR SLOWING DOWN

Judd Foundation

SoHo →

Visiting Donald Judd’s 101 Spring Street home and studio is a sculptural lesson in spatial discipline. Tours take you through the artist’s preserved living and working spaces, where architecture, furniture, and objects operate as a single, uncompromising system.

MoMA PS1

Long Island City →

MoMA’s experimental sibling: contemporary work staged inside a former schoolhouse, where courtyards annd raw interiors are inseparable from the art. The building’s bones remain part of the exhibition.

Our take

An easy trip from Manhattan for a museum willing to take more risk taking than Midtown.

Noguchi Museum

Long Island City →

Isamu Noguchi’s studio-museum is transcendent — stone, light, water, and garden held in careful balance. This is a museum that rewards slow movement and sustained attention.

Our take

Visit for a palate cleanse — zero noise, maximum intention, and an in-depth look at the designer behind the lamps we’re seeing everywhere.

Cooper Hewitt

Upper East Side →

Housed in the historic Andrew Carnegie Mansion, Cooper Hewitt is the U.S.’s design museum focused on both historical craft and contemporary design inquiry. Its collection and rotating exhibitions reward close looking, and the building itself — a layered domestic artifact — underscores the discipline’s breadth.

Othership

Williamsburg →

Guided sauna + ice baths with breathwork and community rituals. It’s alcohol-free and design-forward. A reliable nervous-system reset in the middle of the day.

LINEAR Members get 11% off their passes in New York whe using the code LINEARINTRO at checkout, eligible once per person

PLAN YOUR TRIP

LINEAR Concierge offers booking support for the stays featured here and beyond — securing preferred access and thoughtful perks at our hand-picked, design-forward properties.

It’s best suited for trips where timing, availability, or place matters, like New York. Our goal is simple: to help you see a place at its best.

If you’d like help planning or booking your stay, you can start a Concierge request below. To learn more, email concierge@linear-magazine.com.

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