Eva Hagberg

Tailor (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

Rarely has a first-time restaurateur's first joint been awaited with such a particular mix of media frenzy and outright impatience as Sam Mason's Tailor, which opened on a Soho side street in September. Mason, trained in the Wylie Dufresne (who strolled into the dining room one fall Thursday) school of New York-style molecular gastronomy, offers up a menu of twelve small dishes, nominally divided into Salty and Sweet. As we discover when we dive into our searingly intelligent snapper with avocado-pistachio ice cream or caramel panna cotta with corn sorbet, those are more guidelines than rules, and the cocktails – including a cheerleader-pink bubblegum martini and the curiously-titled Blood & Sand -- only further this grand experiment. Mason's got some real hits, like an un-missable pork belly with miso butterscotch, but some plates, like a "we're still not sure if we love it or hate it but boy are we glad we tried it" foie gras and peanut butter terrine, will only get better with age. Which, we're sure, they'll get to.

Starchefs (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

The International Chefs Congress starts out friendly enough, at Geoffrey Zakarian's Gramercy restaurant Country. There are cocktails and hors d'ouevres and chefs, chefs, chefs, most of whom have strolled in from their Manhattan restaurants, taking a break from slinging halibut and drizzling sauces but some of whom have flown in from San Francisco where they're fighting against the locavores and others who are just in from Washington DC or Miami or even Cleveland. It's a who's who of cooks: Noriyuki Sugie from Asiate at the Mandarin Oriental; molecular gastronomist Wylie Dufresne of WD-50; Gramercy Tavern's Michael White, making his mark in the wake of Tom Colicchio's departure; the irascible--and seemingly everywhere--Will Goldfarb.

Top Dror (Wallpaper)

Published January 2008

Dror Benshetrit seems charmed.

He might seem charmed because he moved to New York five years ago and has already established himself as a leading force in the city's crowded design scene, or he might seem charmed because everything he designs is just such a hit. Benshetrit might seem charmed because he just seems to meet the right people – real estate magnate-to-the-hip Michael Shvo; ultra-influential MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli, an early supporter; the people who commission for Bombay, Boffi, Puma, Levi's  – or he might seem charmed because everything he does is at once so completely obvious and stunningly novel.

Roman & Williams (Wallpaper)

Published March 2007

‘I want to see a world of flesh and bone,’ Robin Standefer, principal, with husband Stephen Alesch, of New York-based architecture and design firm Roman & Williams says on a Thursday afternoon, sitting at her office's long and thoroughly beaten-up conference table, one she crafted out of recovered wood and un-matched industrial legs. "A world of food, architecture, design, sex."

Five years ago, a little movie called Zoolander came out. Revered among the college set, admired by nearly everyone who saw it, the film was remarkable as much for its set design—skate ramps in the apartment, superfuturistic day spas—as it was for its quotability. Ben Stiller, who played the ‘really, really, ridiculously good-looking’ male model Derek Zoolander, loved what production designers Standefer and Alesch had done, and hired them to work on another movie of his, Duplex. The movie bombed, but it cemented Stiller's relationship with the pair. When the time came to renovate his Hollywood house, he called Robin.

American Beauty (Wallpaper)

Published December 2007

It can be hard to stand out on Martha's Vineyard. Overstatement – exemplified by, for instance, Larry David's 70-acre spread complete with stainless steel outdoor kitchen—is one way to go about making a dent on this most old-school deluxe getaway for the Eastern Seaboard's elite. The other, and better, is to understate, understate, understate.

Architecture Research Office, a Manhattan-based architecture firm, recently completed a sublimely understated house for a retired rabbi and an art and design curator. The couple, who commissioned ARO five years ago, have owned the site, in the town of Chilmark, since the mid-nineteen-seventies. Their previous house, a single water-focused band designed by local architect Richard Henderson, was just fine for the last thirty years but, with a decrease in commitments –the rabbi just retired – the couple found themselves with an increase in interest in, as it's locally known, the Island.   

An Economics Boost (Metropolis)

Published November 21, 2007 (link)

Designers often like to say they work from the ground up; it’s less often that they claim to have worked from the floor up. But that’s exactly what Dutch firm Tjep. did with its whimsical reception area, completed last summer, for the economics department of the vocational training school ROC, in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands.

The designers covered the floor with economics-related symbols and then extruded them into three dimensions to create the necessary furnishings—reception desk, conference table, foosball arena. Inlaid with bright-yellow icons of everything from pencils to gears to airplanes, the shiny beige base is busy and industrious (almost—fancy that!—like the field of economics). In the middle of it all lies a figure with an oversize heart. And that metaphor—focusing on “the heart instead of the wallet”—was at the center of the design approach, says Frank Tjepkema, who founded Tjep. together with Eindhoven classmate Janneke Hooymans.

Bambi versus Godzilla (esquire.com)

Published November 26, 2007 (link)

On New York's Bond Street, two titans -- of architecture, development, and sexy street graffiti -- battle it out to determine whose style will be dominant. This is the tale of the tape.

Everyone knows that architects are always competing. Whose glasses are thicker? Whose haircut more asymmetrical? Whose discussion of intra-matrixed diasporic space-making conditions more incomprehensible?

What everyone doesn't know is that sometimes, if rarely, it's the buildings that compete.

Two new condo developments rose above Manhattan's Bond Street in the last year. One is by Deborah Berke, a minimalist architect loved by her peers and clients, and, increasingly, the public as well. The other is by Ian Schrager and Herzog & de Meuron, Swiss titans who made their name with the Tate Modern. Bond Street may seem like a quiet downtown enclave, but make no mistake, this street has turned into an architectural battleground, where Schrager's luxuriously nostalgic style clashes with Berke's proportioned, rigorous capital-A architecture approach. The fight has far-reaching implications, between the need for faux-vintage nostalgia (or rather, the need to ground something in the here and now to say that we're here, now) and a desire for abstracted shape, for spatial expression, for out-of-context beauty. It's a global battle that happens to have an epicenter on the same block, in two buildings that are practically right next to each other. There's a local favorite, and a proven champion. There's an underdog, and an old-timer. There's Berke's Bambi at 48 Bond, and there's Schrager's Godzilla at 40 Bond. Let's see who wins.

Scar Tissue (Arcade)

Published December 2007 (link)

There's a scar at the top of my right leg. It looks like the British Isles, maybe Denmark, maybe Iceland. I'm not sure, I'm not a geographer, but it's a cluster of small brown shapes, some merging together, some trailing off to the left. The little dots look like the tail end of a comet compared to the big center of the scar, like the dust cast off by one giant moment.

Best of the Midwest: Columbus (Wallpaper)

Published August 2006

On a stretch of road in Columbus, Indiana, sandwiched between a Kohl's megabox hardware store and a Johnny Carino's Italian Country Kitchen, there's one of the most simple—and simply sublime—structures to have been built in the U.S. in recent memory. It might seem an unlikely location for such a picture of high modernism, for a return to what the building's architect, Deborah Berke, calls the "clean, strong, quiet" qualities of modernist architecture, but it's not. In fact, this town is one of the last remaining strongholds of architecture that, while often fabulous, just doesn't quite fit in anywhere else.

New Museum, New York (wallpaper.com)

Published December 3, 2007 (link)

It isn't often that an art museum has anything in common with a trash can. In fact, the new New Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened last Saturday in downtown Manhattan, just might be the only museum to be clad in the same wire mesh as its home city's refuse receptacles. And that, oddly enough, happens to be a great thing.