Social media advocacy marketing just doesn’t work for design firms. The content being posted is just too subtle, or too confidential, and the stakes far too high. After all, what employee of an architectural firm in his right mind would risk blogging, sharing, tweeting or posting about a project voluntarily on his own Facebook page, or Twitter account? It’s…
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Where designers go for antiques
by Louis Postel, first published in New England Home / Connecticut | November, 2016 How do you separate the super serious designer from the merely serious? Had you been at the opening of the R.T. Facts Gallery on 8 Barns Road in Kent, CT one Saturday night in June, the difference between super serious and serious would have been as…
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Beauty and the Beasts: Exploring the Art and Architecture of Estate Agriculture
By Louis Postel, as seen in New England Home, Special Spaces, November 2016 If you close your eyes and listen to the clip-clop of a great steed being led across the cobblestone courtyard with a three-spouted fountain playing counterpoint into a cistern behind, it’s easy to imagine yourself reincarnated as one of those riders born to royalty you read about…
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Today’s Design Tack
by Louis Postel | Trade Secrets | first published in New England Home, November 2016 “Are you calling about the Olympics?” asked designer Lynne Shore of Rhode Island Kitchen and Bath in Newport, RI. “So many reporters have been calling. It turns out the state of Rhode Island wants to give all its Olympic medalists special license plates, and there’s…
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Major Mashups
by Louis Postel as seen in Showboats International, November 2016 The Modernism Moment looks here to stay for mega yacht design from hull to hardware. The clean lines born of Modernism’s form-is-function aesthetic just makes so much over-arching sense, especially at sea. Efficiency, elegance, and a low-key elitism continue to find inspiration in Le Corbusier’s Vers Un Architecture of 1923,…
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Mapping Social Media | Graphisoft USA
by Louis Postel for Graphisoft USA | July 2016 How the AEC Community is discovering new ways to build business on Main Street Part One: First stop, Pinterest. “I know at least half my advertising works,” said the prosperous business man. “The problem is figuring out which half that is.” For AEC professionals charged with allocating resources to promotion and…
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How Low Can You Go? | Showboats International
by Louis Postel Coffee tables just slightly elevated from the floor endure a bad rap for being hazardous to your health. Strategically deployed to trip you up, or whack you on the shin, they’re blamed for contributing to yet one more surface for collecting clutter. But Low tables may also contribute to world peace, at least in that bit of…
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New Partner Feels Lost
Dear Louis: Are we a professional organization, or are we a business? As far as our architectural practice is concerned both models seem to be trading in degraded currency. I find myself wracked with anxiety over this question, as I nurture our ideas and projects, often rooted in strange places with strange languages throughout the world. While I am amassing…
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High Meets Low in Monaco
by Louis Postel in Showboats International, September 2016 Princess Grace Designer George Stacey Who invented who took two seemingly irreconcilable ideas — casual and chic — and put them together to revolutionize the interior décor and furnishings? Arguably, it was George Alford Stacey (1901-1993) who decorated five homes over 28 years for Monaco’s patron saint, Princess Grace, including the Palais…
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Why Can’t We All Have 100 Acres?
Liliane Wong runs the Interior Architecture Department at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence where she has been teaching since 1998. Though there’s no apparent connection between her early interest in pure mathematics and what she does now, it’s not hard to imagine one. “I was interested in describing the changing shapes of clouds as they moved through…
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Through the Looking Glass
Trade Secrets by Louis Postel, first published in New England Home, July 2016 Transparency. Transparency. Transparency. Now, more than ever, we want to know what’s going on. Not the appearance of what’s going on, but what’s really going on. Transparency, after all, is the stock in trade of the design profession: the play of light and shadow, windows and walls.…
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Bath Bling for Showboats
by Louis Postel | Showboats International, July 2015 Wed the spirit of water to the spirit of light and out comes a mega yacht! Or a custom faucet. Or to look at it from another perspective, if a yacht is indeed a woman, jewelry for the bath can make or break her presentation. Especially when counter-poised with stripped-down minimalism. Case…
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Deliberating a Lifetime in Design
Trade Secrets by Louis Postel | New England Home July – August 2015 If you were to design your own life — not someone else’s house — what might it look like, when you’re over fifty, or sixty, or seventy plus? It’s nice to think about walking the shoreline, the sandpipers scooting away, then quickly resettling. How to readjust oneself…
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Ahoy to Hollywood
by Louis Postel for “Boat Life” in Showboats International | July 2015 When visiting the homes and yachts of mega stars, how aware we become that for these lucky few they’re always on stage whether they like it or not. As soon as you cross the threshold, or step off the tender, the stars’ personae seems to grow on their…
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It’s a Hard Life
Exploring Couture Surfaces for Showboats International by Louis Postel | January 2016 The most challenging thing about the latest generation of laser-cut surfaces of couture stone and shell is this: you can’t use too much of it. Its very uniqueness defies book-matching, the art of joining pieces together to resemble an open book. Those crazy veins and swells of color…
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Avon Masterpiece Calling
Simply Perfect first appeared in New England Home July 2013 by Louis Postel Cabriole legs, Louis XVI legs, fluted and reeded legs, legs trimmed with bronze collars, legs with brass toe pieces called sabots, legs with a barley spiral twist… Legs and more legs stride across the loft wall at Masterpiece Woodworks in Avon, Massachusetts. Of all the imaginable leg…
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D for Design in our Polar Vortex
From Trade Secrets by Louis Postel published in New England Home Back in April, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston introduced a show called D is for Design (through February 22). The curators juxtaposed works on paper from its own collection, a refreshing and synergistic mix of design, art and architecture — disciplines that in our specialized, super-efficient world…
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The Design Comedy
First published in New England Home May/June 2014 | Trade Secrets by Louis Postel Deep in the dark woods of design a professional might easily find herself lost in mid-career. After all the meetings and memos, calculations and re-calculations, what does it all mean? What do I really want?What do my clients want? What does the world want?
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Lots of glass – but where’s the class?
On the New MFA wing and More from Trade Secrets by Louis Postel first published in New England Home ♦ It is not for us to argue that taste is a moral issue. Still, what’s with this handful of nervy designers knocking Boston’s spanking new, $500 million dollar American Wing at the MFA? What side are they on in Boston’s…
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The Architecture of Cosmetics
The Packaging is art. The thinking behind it is science. What a beautiful combination. by Louis Postel {First published in Season in the Sun Magazine, Palm Springs, CA. My friend Stewart Weiner was the editor and publisher. Before that he was the editor of Writer’s Digest, an editor at TV Guide, and somewhere in between , Stewart and I worked…
