From the exterior, Ligne Roset’s complex in Briord, France, is little to look at, just workaday cement- and-metal factories near the base of the Alps. But once you step inside, the operation bursts into colorful life, with dozens of workers hefting gigantic bolts of fabric, manning robotic sewing machines, and operating cartoonish foam cutters and glue sprayers.

The family-owned company has been making furniture in this location for 38 years. On a recent fall afternoon, the cavernous Briord 1 factory was running full throttle, all the workers focused on turning out French designer Inga Sempé’s Ruché sofa, introduced in 2010 and already iconic. The sofa’s simple form—a slim beech frame draped with a cushiony quilt—belies the effort it takes to produce one: ten-and-a-half hours of labor and up to 11 different craftspeople’s hands.

“When you see a finished object, you can rarely imagine all the work that went in to it,” muses Sempé. “All the sleepless nights for the designer, who stays up thinking about just one curve, all the people who built it.” We tour Ligne Roset’s factory to learn just what it takes to make a Ruché.

1. The Frame
Each Ruché is made on demand, and with 35 fabric and leather choices, hundreds of color options, and four frame variations (natural beech or stained red, blue, or gray), the piece is almost endlessly customizable. The frame starts as raw timber housed underneath a corrugated-metal canopy on Ligne Roset’s 15-acre Briord campus. When an order comes in, workers feed the wood into a high-tech preprogrammed machine that mills it into ten square-sided posts and drills holes where the pieces will connect. A craftsman then assembles the ends of the frame, connecting the pieces using wooden pegs and glue. Next, it’s passed along to a technician in a ventilator mask who sprays the wood with a transparent stain or varnish. Once dry, the frame components, seat, and steel- springed backrest are joined with glue and pegs, and Velcro and strips of zippers are stapled to the places where the quilted cover will eventually attach.

2. The Foam
In one corner of the 382,000-square-foot factory, stacks of colorful, spongy foam await their fates, each hue indicating a different density and use. After quick work on the computerized foam cutter, the three pieces of foam that will eventually comprise the backrest travel on a wheeled trolley to the glue booth, a white-walled space resembling a walk-in industrial fridge. A technician sprays a sheet of pliable purple memory foam with a water-based adhesive and then carefully folds it over the other two foam layers and a steel spring grill to complete the backrest. All these cushiony layers will be invisible beneath the quilted cover but will immensely improve the sofa’s comfort.

3. The Cover
Ligne Roset is fanatic about fabric quality. Before a bolt is used, workers unroll it completely and inspect it carefully for color variation, nubs and pulls, and other defects. If the quality is suitable, an automated 17-foot-long Gerber Cutter cuts the fabric according to the pattern. The colorful cutouts are piled one stack per sofa and labeled with the future owners’ names and hometowns before they are wheeled to the sewing area, where they meet up with thin sheets of precut batting. Seamstresses layer the fabric and batting and attach them to a frame that temporarily holds the pieces together. The frame is then inserted into a gigantic preprogrammed sewing machine that quilts the surface with the “broken grid” of lines that Sempé devised to create the cover’s signature texture. It takes an hour and a half for the machine to make its 2,008 stitches, with cold air constantly blowing on the needle to prevent broken threads caused by friction and overheating. Once the quilting is complete, the women remove the cover from the frame, speedily snip off loose threads with scissors, and use an electric cutter to trim it to its final shape. Other sewers then stitch zippers on to the cover’s edges to enable it to attach securely to the wooden sofa frame.

4. The Final Assembly
The physically taxing job of assembling the final product is most frequently handled by men in the factory, but Laurence is a nimble, notable exception. After assembling the sofa and fluffing the cover she readies it for shipping and boxes it up.

“I love to see the different parts from the factory all united at the end,” says Laurence, a small, muscular, ponytailed woman who has the glory job of transforming the various pieces into a finished Ruché, all in about 15 minutes. She starts by carefully arranging a final sheet of foam inside the cover, ensuring it lies flat. Then she drapes the piece over the frame, aligns the seams, attaches the corners and edges with the zippers and Velcro, and then firmly and deliberately places well-calibrated karate chops to the corners. If she needs to, she can consult her quality-control photo, a glamour shot of one single perfect Ruché. After a few additional adjustments, which include hitting the cover with both hands outstretched to “fluff” it, this particular Ruché is ready to ship to Germany. “It’s not an easy model to make,” Laurence says proudly, “but it’s such an interesting one.”

Click here for an extended look at designer Inga Sempe’s creative process.

“The computer is a tool; I can’t do without it,” says Förster. “But the nice thing about making models is that in the process of doing, I’m more open to mistakes—maybe I put the tape in a way that I don’t intend, but it shows a new possibility. In a computer everything is perfect. When I make models, it’s intuitive and rough: I take a flat piece of paper, I cut it, I tape it. It’s very quick. I find it very refreshing.”

Read more and watch slideshow here.

Still, this is no primitive lean-to. There’s electricity, hot water, and a kitchen—not to mention iPads, Internet, and a clawfoot tub. By day, the couple trims trees and chops firewood. At night, they sit around a campfire and eat Japanese curry, listen to Phish, and balance their laptops on their knees. This is what a modern back-to-the-land effort looks like.

Read more and watch slideshow here.

Thomas Phifer is one of the most subdued architects you’ll ever meet. Sitting in his all-white New York office in a navy suit, reclining diagonally in a straight-backed chair, he speaks in a low and measured tone. When he’s being pensive—–which is most of the time—–he closes his eyes as he talks and bobs his hand gently in front of him like a conductor, as if coaxing out words. To hear him better, I lean in, block out the blaring car horns outside. In this way, he is like his architecture: exquisitely quiet, subtle, and absorbing.

Phifer has been practicing architecture for 34 years, as a partner at Richard Meier’s office from 1986 to 1996, and as founding principal of his firm, Thomas Phifer and Partners, since 1996. He designs beautiful buildings—–minimalist steel-and-glass houses, a daylit museum—–but his architecture is about much more than eye candy. “We work a lot with nature, trying to bring people more in touch with their environment in a subliminal way,” he says, in a subtle South Carolina twang (he grew up in Columbia and went to architecture school at Clemson University). “Our buildings want to be helping hands, bringing people closer to understanding the sun, and light, and the change of seasons. For far too long, buildings have been fortresses, cutting people off from nature.”

His masterwork to date—though he’s far too humble and cool-headed to call it that—may well be the Fishers Island House, a second home he designed recently for Tom Armstrong, the director emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and his wife, Bunty. Set on an island off the coast of Connecticut and surrounded by gardens, the house embodies Phifer’s design sensibility. The pavilionlike building sits lightly in the landscape, both aesthetically (with its wraparound glass facade and minimal interior walls, the place is literally see-through) and ecologically, thanks to geothermal heating and natural ventilation. An aluminum-and-steel-rod trellis encircles the house at roof height, modulating natural light that washes in through the 12-foot-high glass walls.

During the design process, Armstrong stopped by the office weekly to check on the house and discuss the latest drawings. That could be an architect’s nightmare, but Phifer embraced the opportunity to relate so closely with a client. “The closer the collaboration, the better,” he says. “To hear the voice of the person who will inhabit a place and see it come alive in the built work is for me what architecture is all about.” While the house was still on paper, Phifer’s office made Armstrong miniature, to-scale models of both the interior walls and the couple’s collection of 20th-century abstract American paintings, so he could figure out the best way to display his art. “He gave me this incredible toy,” recalls Armstrong. “With most architects, it’s ‘Give me the program and I’ll give you the design.’ But Tom really worked with me. He’s not a screamer or a monster ego. But when he’s on the right track, he proceeds with great strength and brings you along.”

Phifer traces his evolution as an architect back to 1976, when at age 22 he took his first trip to Europe (and first flight anywhere). He stepped off the plane and his mind was promptly blown. “Oh my god, this is outrageous, this is incredible,” he recalls thinking. “I was kind of skipping along in life, and then I went to Europe and my world opened up. Seeing the work of James Stirling in London, Aalto in Finland, Gaudí in Spain, the ruins in Rome—it was just an outrageous experience.” Later, while managing projects in Paris, Basel, and Barcelona for Meier’s office, Phifer observed and internalized the priorities that shaped European design—–such as access to natural ventilation and daylighting—–but that were largely neglected in American architecture at the time. “In countries like the Netherlands it’s literally against the law to put people away from a window,” he recalls now. “It’s a human right to have contact with nature. In America that wasn’t really a concern. It’s just a completely different idea about how to make a building.”

In 1995, Phifer won the prestigious Rome Prize and took a leave of absence from Meier’s office to spend eight months in residence at the American Academy in Rome. Dedicating himself to “studying daylight,” he visited the Pantheon almost every day, rain or shine. “It’s really a metaphysical experience to go in and understand what that building does and how that building represents eternal light,” he raves. “It’s the magic of the oculus, like everyone says. It was built for the ages. You can’t talk about that kind of permanence very easily in the archi-tecture that we make today.” When Phifer returned from Rome he decided to start his own firm, working, at first, out of his living room. His firm is now in west SoHo, with a staff of 25 working collaboratively around a hundred-foot-long table.

His first major commission was the Taghkanic House in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, a collaboration with his mentor, the legendary modernist landscape architect Dan Kiley, then age 87. “I’d never designed a house in the landscape before,” Phifer says. “We talked about how to embed architecture in the land, how to choreograph the arrival, how to allow buildings to deal with daylight and the land”—–guiding principles that continue to shape Phifer’s designs. The resulting house is a white-painted steel-and-glass box that rests on a hill; the rest of the structure is sunk into the earth, with a shaded glass face open to light and views. Since then, he’s designed airy and luminous houses and office buildings across the country, a United States courthouse in Salt Lake City, a student center for Rice University, and, most recently, the new North Carolina Museum of Art, an open-plan 120,000-square-foot museum where, as in the Fishers Island House, controlled daylighting illuminates the art and transparent walls reveal gardens and reflecting pools just outside. His firm also won an international competition to design a new streetlight for New York City, a taskhe found more difficult than conceiving a building. “It was so technically challenging,” he says of their design, which employs an energy-efficient LED bulb. “To my knowledge, it was one of the first designs for an LED streetlight, so we really had to push the technology.”

By all measures, Phifer’s firm is flourishing. But Phifer shrugs off any applause. “You have to practice for so, so, so many years before you even get a glimpse of the right way to do a building,” he demurs. “The more you see—–the Salk Institute and the Kimbell Museum that Lou Kahn did—–and the older you get, the more humble you get, because you begin to understand how those buildings are true masterpieces. Architecture is extremely difficult to make at that level.”

When I point out that not all architects get humbler with age, he raises his eyebrows and leans forward insistently. “Just one trip to the Kimbell and you feel like you’ll never do a building that’s even close to that. The building is completely timeless. The natural light is just breathless. It’s incredibly simple and powerful. When you’re a young architect, you look at it and you say, yeah, that’s beautiful. But when you get older you really begin to appreciate what a masterpiece is.

“More and more I’m thinking about life span,” he continues. “A lot of work we’re trying to make more permanent, making simpler and simpler forms. We’re into very quiet architecture.” Prodding him to think big, I ask him to name his dream project. “Another museum,” he says evenly. “Another house.”

Svetlin and Dessi were clearly up for something innovative and exciting,” says Schoenenberger, explaining why his firm took on the relatively small-scale, $300-per-square-foot renovation project. Schoenenberger and Kolatan’s boldest moves include an eye-catching sculptural Corian wall above the bed, whose curves create an arresting and ever-changing play of light and shadow.

To contain clutter and create a sense of spaciousness and visual continuity, the architects installed a laminate storage wall that stretches and curves from the entranceway all the way to the boys’ room. The floor-to-ceiling cabinets contain almost all the family’s possessions, from clothing and shoes to books and bedding.

The unit seamlessly transforms into a window ledge (hiding a heater) and a built-in bench. On the opposite side of the hallway, the storage wall bumps out to accommodate the television and entertainment system and gains some hidden extra space from the former lot-line window niches.

“We realize the space has limitations,” says Krastev. “Maybe when the kids get to be ten or 12 years old, we’ll have to move. But we can easily spend another five years here. On a day-to-day basis we’re very comfortable. We don’t have endless means or endless space, but our quality of life is very high.”

Keener: When we first came to Phoenix, we realized: People move here for the “weather,” but you drive around and you see that everyone is either outside squinting or inside with their shades drawn tight. So we wanted to create a house that was still connected to the outside.

Atherton: The house consists of three rooms: a bedroom on either end of the house and a living room in the middle. Each room faces a different direction, and each receives light in a different way. The west gets extreme sun exposure in Arizona, so we don’t have any openings on that side, except for the front door. The kitchen, laundry, and two bathrooms run along that wall and they are very compact, like in a ship or an RV. The hallway is a clear long path that connects everything, with a wall of translucent glass on one side and black plywood cabinets on the other.

Keener: Because of practical and budgetary reasons, we didn’t have the luxury of using crazy materials. Concrete block has been a part of building in the desert for a long time. The screen that wraps three sides of the house is just a standard thing you see everywhere down here—–generally used to shade parking lots and kids’ playgrounds. The floor is concrete. The walls are drywall. Our interest was in using standard things on a relatively unremarkable site and creating something that was more than the sum of its parts.

Atherton: The design process was fairly rigorous and very slow. We were the clients and the builders and the designers, so we were really our own worst enemies. Instead of just going to Home Depot and buying everything, we tried to make as many things as we could by hand, so that they would agree with the rest of the house. We wanted to accomplish as much as we could with just a few materials.

Keener: Basically the only things in the house that we purchased were the plumbing fixtures and the appliances. We made all the cabinets—–in the bathroom, kitchen, storage closets, and hallways—–ourselves, out of plywood that we dyed black. For a while the sinks and tubs were going to be concrete. But it never felt right. In the end we made them by hand, out of marine-grade plywood and marine epoxy resin.

Atherton: One of the challenges we faced was that at some point, the design started to reject ideas.

Keener: It was important that the rooms be pure spaces. The curved walls are just there to capture the light conditions from the windows. We’ve been very meticulous about locating distractions—–like closets or light switches—–in the hallway. We wanted to make something quiet enough to receive what’s going on outside. It helps that we don’t carry a lot of furniture with us. Before we moved into the house we lost our lease on a rental and shared a five-by-ten storage unit. It wasn’t even full; it was like half full. People come in and they say, “Whoa, art would look so good on these walls.” But I’ve never felt like this house is missing anything.

Atherton: There are some uncon-ventional aspects to the house, but we’re also using it as an architecture studio, and a pavilion, and a warehouse. If we’re interested in something, we can bring it in and experiment with it. When we were working on an art installation, we had two 300-pound blocks of ice in a tub in the middle of the room. At one point there were 800 yards of fabric piled up. We have a dog, and when we had all that fabric lying around, he loved it, he was like “Oh my god, it’s furniture.” And then it was gone.

Atherton: Our friends know that this house lacks a certain amount of comfort, but everyone adapts to what it does have. When people come over to eat, we usually sit on the floor—–we keep it really clean—–or outside. We’ve all adapted to what it means to not have a dining table. We don’t have a couch. It can be a bit of a problem. Like when we have our girlfriends over it’s hard to make them just sit on the floor or on a chair. And it’s very presumptuous to have the bed as the main piece of furniture in the house. One of the nice things about having a girlfriend is, she has a couch at home.

Keener: The house isn’t static. A photographer friend uses the place for fashion shoots. The other weekend we had 40 people in the living room listening to a classical guitar, bass, and flute trio. One night this woman played a solo piece on the violin in the dark, and the moonlight was bright enough to cast shadows on the screen from the oleander outside. It was so beautiful.

We have been fairly open with sharing the house with folks and that’s been really rewarding. It always surprises me with how grateful they are and how pleased they are with the experience that they have here. I think that people appreciate being in something so clear and consistent. They use words like “peaceful” and “Eastern” and “meditative” and “calm” to describe the space.

Atherton: There are lots of examples in history where an architect builds a home, and from that home, his ideas develop, and he becomes more fully realized as an architect. It doesn’t necessarily make the best or easiest home. But it does set a trajectory for future projects. We were both interested in building something that we could learn from.

“Cannabis buyer’s clubs” began cropping up in San Francisco in the late 1990s, after Proposition 215, which passed in California in 1996, removed criminal penalties for people who grew or possessed cannabis for their own medical use. Since then, a hodgepodge of legislative enactments and judicial decisions has more or less legalized the medical use of marijuana; today Sparc is one of 24 licensed dispensaries in San Francisco. In November, residents will vote on Proposition 19, a statewide ballot initiative that could legalize marijuana for recreational use in California.

Sparc’s founder, Erich Pearson, has legally grown cannabis in Sonoma and San Francisco Counties for the past 12 years, selling it to medical dispensaries and supplying it for free to critically ill patients in hospices. (Marijuana has been shown to alleviate nausea, neuropathy, pain and insomnia, and to stimulate appetite.) Two years ago, wanting more direct contact with patients, he decided to open his own dispensary, and in the process created a new model for marijuana distribution.

Pearson enlisted Sand Studios, a local architecture firm, to design a space that would help “remove the stigma around cannabis and make people feel marijuana is normal.” After all, as he acknowledged, “if we’re asking the government and citizens to allow medical cannabis, we have to show them a model they can feel comfortable with.”

The designer Larissa Sand toured a handful of Bay Area dispensaries to gain a better understanding of the business. (“Nothing against marijuana, but fine wine is my drug of choice,” Sand said.) While she was impressed with the sense of community and professionalism among growers and retailers, she found most dispensaries lacking when it came to aesthetics. “There was nothing current,” she said. “I wanted to create something beautiful, to elevate the product and give it the proper milieu.”

To that end, Sparc is spare, modern and well lit. Vaguely bong-shaped lights made of borosilicate science glass drip from the ceiling. Steel shelving holds dozens of apothecary-style wood boxes, each containing a different strain or form of lab-tested cannabis. Along another wall, a similar rack displays baby plants for sale. The sales counter is made of local oak, with inset glass-topped drawers exhibiting buds, salves and edibles like snickerdoodle cookies and “cosmic caramels.” According to Sand, such attention to detail sends a message to regulators and members alike that “this isn’t just some backyard moonshine.”

Of all Sparc’s design moves, Pearson is proudest of the facility’s semitransparent facade — a cascading grid of steel and glass patterned loosely on marijuana’s DNA and peppered with clear aquamarine panes. It was inspired in part by the Twin Peaks Tavern, a still-extant gay bar in the Castro that is said to have been the first in America to have clear windows (rather than blacked out) when it opened in 1972. “A glass facade represents transparency, legitimacy and a sort of coming out of the closet,” Pearson said. “It lets people know we’re not afraid of anything, that there’s no shame in it. It’s therapy for a lot of people.”

“Our fireplace is going through a bit of an awkward phase,” apologizes Anne Mooney, nodding at the hearth anchoring her family’s great room. It’s true: The shiny steel surface is mottled with constellations of orange-brown rust. The house’s exterior, too, is surprisingly mutable. Cor-Ten-steel scales arranged in a harlequin pattern cover the boxy, rectangular structure, which is nestled in a canyon eight miles east of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. Exposed to the elements, the scales have rusted to a deep reddish brown. During warm weather, the cladding expands and crackles, “like it’s breathing,” says Mooney.

It’s fitting that Mooney should talk about her house like it’s alive, because in a sense, it is. Mooney and her husband, John Sparano, are the founding principals of Sparano + Mooney Architecture, based in both Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. They designed the three-bedroom residence to be flexible and adaptable to the needs of their family, which includes their seven-year-old twin daughters, Claire and Audrey, and nine-year-old chocolate lab, Oso.

The changes evident in the untreated steel reflect “the nonstatic quality of domestic life,” says Sparano. “Two people get together, they get a dog, have kids, the dog dies, the kids go to college, they get another dog, their parents move in. The house is just a frame for it all to happen in.” The unfin-ished basement, for example, can become a rec room for their children and, later, a guestroom for out-of-town visitors. Later still, it can transform into an in-law for Mooney’s parents, who live locally and help with childcare.

Though their neighborhood, Emigration Canyon, is known as one of the more politically liberal neighbor-hoods in Salt Lake City, architecturally it’s still rather conservative. Emigration Canyon Road, which curves through a landscape of scrub oaks, native grasses, and wildflowers, is home to a smattering of modern houses by the late modernist John Sugden. But new houses here, as throughout the region, tend to be poorly designed, energy-inefficient, “wannabe mountain lodges,” says Sparano.

At 2,500 square feet, Mooney and Sparano’s house is easily one of the smallest in the canyon. In fact, in an effort to minimize excavation, maintain a compact footprint, and retain as many native oaks on the 1.25-acre site as possible, the architects designed and built it at the absolute minimum size allowed by the local architecture review board. “Some neighbors have had a hard time with it,” Mooney says. “Once, a woman saw me at the mailbox and said, ‘Oh, you live there?’” Sparano elaborates: “People in the neighborhood have told us, ‘We want big houses here.’ The prevailing mentality is that houses should be big to retain real-estate value. The premium is on quantity and scale, not on design and spatial quality. But we’re saying, ‘Here is a model: We don’t need a house larger than this. This is the perfect size.’ We wanted to show there’s another way of building in the West.”

They’re setting another important precedent, too: Their house is the first residence in Utah to earn a LEED for Homes rating. Though the application and inspection process was rigorous and expensive, adding 5 percent to the overall budget, Mooney and Sparano felt it was important to receive official LEED certification as a way of educating the public and furthering the cause of green modern architecture in Salt Lake City and beyond. “In Los Angeles, there are lots of people building LEED houses,” says Mooney. “Here, we can be a bit of a trailblazer and show that modern buildings really lend themselves to well-considered sustainable design.”

The architects and Utah-based builder Benchmark Modern integrated a broad swath of eco-friendly features into the project, from dual-flush toilets that save an estimated 48 gallons of water per day to radiant-heated concrete floors powered by a tiny, high-efficiency boiler. There’s a rainwater collection system hidden below the garage that is used to irrigate the drought-tolerant, native landscape around the house. The exterior steel cladding has a high percentage of recy-
cled content and comes with a hidden bonus: Mooney and Sparano can 
attach nearly anything to it with magnets, including house numbers and
a holiday wreath. “You can do a lot with magnets,” Mooney observes. Indeed: They’ve used them to affix their daughters’ art to the metal fireplace; to suspend bars of glycerin soap over the master bathroom sink; and to clad a bathroom wall with a bright yellow, backlit sheet of acrylic, which clings to the steel frame via magnetic double-sided tape, easily swappable should they crave a new hue.

The family uses barely any energy during the day. Ten-foot-high, double-glazed, low-emissivity glass doors keep the kitchen, dining room, and living room bright. In good weather, they accordion back to let the canyon views, scents, and breezes into the house. Ample cross-ventilation allows the airflow to act as natural air-
conditioning. In rooms without windows, such as the pantry and guest bathroom, the architects installed Solatube skylights, which efficiently collect and channel daylight from the roof into otherwise dark spaces (see sidebar, p. 65). Interior and exterior curtains close on tracks to cut sun exposure on hot days and provide thermal resistance. Eventually, when their budget allows it, the architects plan to install solar panels to cut their electricity use to zero.

Mooney and Sparano’s quest to open Utahans’ hearts and minds to the beauty of modern green design may be slow going, but they’ve got at least two happy converts to date. Audrey and Claire are thrilled with their new house, especially its stairs—–still a major novelty, after moving from a single-story bungalow in Venice, California—–and the smooth concrete floors, which they slide across on roller skates and in socks. Recently, Audrey was asked to draw a house in school. “She drew 
a brown rectilinear volume surrounded by pitched-roof houses,” Mooney says. “Her friends said, ‘That doesn’t look like a house!’” Mooney suspects the friends will change their minds after a play date—–and the new perspective will likely grow on their parents, too.

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