Editor’s Letter: Renovations and Reinventions

The homes in our annual American design issue all draw from history. Not the standard narrative, but one that’s real. It’s a story that comes out of the queer, Black, Indigenous, and other histories that have built truly great architecture in Dwell’s home country. It’s complicated and messy, but it’s more important than official traditions. It looks back. But it looks forward.

Some homes in this issue play with Gilded Age excess, like two townhomes in tony Sutton Square, an early-20th-century New York City enclave of exclusionary wealth. Renovating one—let alone two—may be an elite problem to tackle, but both homes contain ideas about preserving original buildings while updating them for contemporary life that could work in any historic home. One also contains stories about the unconventional households that have always existed in this country. Other homes have personal histories, like a cabin in the Adirondacks designed to pay homage to family and local traditions while carrying them forward in a structure that’s both simple and thoroughly considered, as designed by the emerging architecture firm Ideas of Order. Material honesty and formal clarity may be clichés, but they’re among the many values embodied by the building.

Does your house have a urinal? Mine doesn’t. But I can appreciate a couple’s update of a 2000s Fritz Haeg house in Los Angeles that preserves that quirk and many of the others original to the structure in an effort to make sure the structure remains the "very gay house" that the architect originally built.

This issue also looks at the realities of contemporary design in America. It considers the pandemic-spurred move of metropolitan families to the countryside or small cities and the affordable housing crisis in which the movement is complicit. We also consider the stamp "made in America" and the many ideologies to which it has been attached—most recently as a justification for tariffs that have already had a negative impact on the design industry. Used as a political tool, the "made in America" moniker is fundamentally nostalgic for a past that never really existed. It’s as loaded as a federal mandate to build new civic buildings in a Neoclassical style.

Whenever we touch on the realities of home and housing, I inevitably get emails urging Dwell to stay in our lane and present modern design as an empty fantasy. But every home affects its neighbors, its town, its bigger context, and that’s what makes the houses we cover important. We focus on innovation and possibility, but whether it’s in America or elsewhere, roots in reality are what make design inspiring.

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Top photo by Matt Martian Williams

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Head back to the November/December 2025 issue homepage