MagazineFebruary 2022 Editor's LetterAD's Editor-in-Chief unveils what's in store for the February issue

By Amy Astley

January 5, 2022

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Email

The Cactus Store crew in their L.A. “Lab.” Photo: Ye Rin Mok

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Email

Preparing our February issue, the AD team was thinking about the power of design, landscape, and the built environment to challenge the status quo, stimulate the eye and the mind, and ultimately change the game. Surveying the many talents featured this month, it’s evident that each of them is profoundly radical in ways both large and small, dramatic and subtle, global and local.

With designer Billy Cotton, who created the bright and breezy room on the February issue's cover.

Photo: Tiffany Sage/BFA.com

Sophie Ashby and family at home in London.

Photo: Simon Upton

A house tour with Petrus Palmér, the founder of influential furniture company Hem (which global features director Sam Cochran describes in his story as “one of the buzziest brands to come out of Scandinavia since IKEA”), yields up plenty of inspiring words of wisdom along with a demonstration of innovative family living. When conceiving a resolutely unconventional house in Palm Springs, Brett Woods and Joseph Dangaran of L.A. architecture firm Woods + Dangaran eschewed references to pink flamingos and Rat Pack–era clichés, and opted for Miesian rigor: “We always refer to this as the anti–Palm Springs house, which we say with love,” says Woods, whose family resides in the striking structure, designed to be in harmony with the desert on a boulder-strewn terrain. In London, young interior decorator Sophie Ashby lives with great personal style in a charming town house and more broadly impacts her profession as a cofounder of the trailblazing program United in Design, which works with U.K. businesses to create more opportunities for people of color within the country’s interiors industry.

Petrus Palmér and family at their home outside Stockholm.

Photo: Erik Lefvander

Boundary-pushing designer Adam Charlap Hyman in his NYC kitchen. 

Photo: Stephen Kent Johnson

A few months ago I was fortunate to pay a visit to the experimental, groundbreaking Los Angeles greenhouse/landscape firm Cactus Store, and I can honestly say my mind was blown and my horticultural horizons expanded. The owners are hard-core plant people who educated me on rare, ancient, and specimen plants. “The idea was to bridge the insular community of die-hard botanists and the general public hungry for a connection to plants and the natural world,” says cofounder Carlos Morera, who is working on a TV series celebrating the plant/human relationship “through various cultural lenses.” Consider the game changed!

Adam Gordon and Kristina O’Neal with mini donkeys Sugi and Jinx at their Sonoma County Ranch, described as a “crucible of sustainability and creativity.”

Photo: Laura Resen