Azure Magazine

Prolific texas philanthropists Mickey and Jeanne Klein are also avid art collectors — meaning these are folks who appreciate a creative concept. So when they approached Lake Flato (the same San Antonio–based firm that designed their house) with a simple enough ask — two beloved long-time employees wanted to relocate from Midland to Marble Falls and needed an office from which to run the Kleins’ day-to-day business — there was an implicit understanding that the project had the potential to become

Last month, AZURE hosted a talk between Antoine Roset and Glenn Pushelberg at MUST Société in Toronto. Roset is the co-CEO of Ligne Roset with his cousin Olivier Roset. Together, they represent the fifth generation of the founding family behind the globally celebrated French furniture brand. With over 165 years in business, Ligne Roset is synonymous with elegant modernism. While the company is also reissuing classics by such mid-century icons as Pierre Guariche, which show its dedication to pres

Indigenous house emerges from the land. It takes conceptual root in the Highland Creek Ravine, which surrounds it, and flourishes within its own distinct landscape, which is as integral to the building (indeed, it’s almost indecipherable from it) as is its architectural form. Earth ramps that rise from a landform planted with medicinal and other native tree and plant species lead up to the second storey of the ovoid building, which is composed of a curving grid of glue-laminated timber. Its shin

1 Get a Grip PHOTO: Andrew Lusztyk Known for its bent tubular steel furniture rendered in boisterous colours, Division Twelve introduced its first soft-seating offering during NeoCon 2026 — the Pohm lounge chair. Riffing on the French word for apple (pomme), Pohm was designed by Nicole Marion of Winnipeg-based Studio Marion to be warm, familiar and inviting. Paired with a signature bent-metal frame and two plush cushions, the simple form of the seat is accented by an

Illuminating films, collectible furniture, magical kinetic art and more — our November 2027 events roundup has something for everyone. As we cling to the cool autumn weather while getting psyched for the holiday season, put these energizing cultural appointments on your calendar. 1 ADFF Toronto — TIFF Lightbox The Architecture and Design Film Festival lands in Toronto with a series of thought-provoking documentaries that dive into the humanist heart of architecture and design.

Along the base and uppermost portions of Cadence, a red-brick residential project designed by Canadian-British architect Alison Brooks in London’s King’s Cross neighbourhood, rows of double-height arches of varying widths establish a lively sense of rhythm. Brooks has heard people link these arches to a full range of different architectural styles and movements — everything from Afrofuturism to Middle Eastern design. To me, they bring to mind the Land of the Sweets interlude in The Nutcracker, d

“I was working in the lab, late one night…” begins Bobby Pickett’s Halloween anthem “Monster Mash.” But Victor Frankenstein isn’t the only one engaging in a little experimentation during this time of year. The studio can also be its own form of laboratory, where designers and sculptors let their wildest instincts lead them in conceptual new directions. While these explorations don’t always produce the most practical furnishings, the outcomes n

The trees have taken over Place de Catalogne. This circular space in Paris’s 14th arrondissement was designed by Ricardo Bofill in the 1980s as a grand plaza flanked by baroque-postmodern apartments. But in 2024, the site was remade by the government of Mayor Anne Hidalgo as an urban forest. Some 470 oaks, hornbeams and Montpellier maples now shade the place, transforming what had been a hot and inhospitable location into a refuge for people, plants and the odd songbird. This is Paris now: A

The haunted house has become one of horror cinema’s most recognizable archetypes: a looming Victorian mansion, creaking staircases, dark corridors, an overgrown garden. But what might be even more unsettling than these architectural clichés is the idea that any place has the potential to become the site of something sinister. This Halloween, we’ve rounded up four films whose settings may hold as many surprises as the stories that unfold within them. 1 Exit 8 (2025)

I may be a design journalist, but when I go to Montreal, I’m there for one reason: to eat. As soon as I land, my first order of business is to secure a smoked meat sandwich at Schwartz’s deli. From there, each weekend jaunt becomes an exercise in crossing as many restaurants as possible off my ever-expanding list of must-tries. I’ve long believed that Montreal is Canada’s foremost culinary destination, and it turns out that hunch is backed by data: In 2026, the city is home to 28 of the country’

BDNY is the place to be if you’re in the hospitality business. It presents the industry’s most respected design minds and brands. This year’s edition, under theme “Designed to Be Remembered,” looks at “the details, materials, and moments that make a space unforgettable.” While BDNY hosts a series of engaging talks — among them are the BDNY Power Players: Women Leaders in Hospitality Breakfast, presented in partnership with NEWH; and a fireside chat with Marcel Wanders — its bre

Kick a soccer ball into the air, and the path it travels will trace the curved shape of the Freedom Mobile Arch, a mass-timber roof designed by Revery Architecture (with structural engineering by Fast + Epp) as part of Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition (PNE) amphitheatre revamp. And what better way to inaugurate the structure than by having it play host to this past summer’s World Cup festivities? Throughout June and July, the venue served as the home of FIFA Fan Festival Vancou

Responding to the continuing rise in wellness-based hospitality, Nokken has introduced the Super Sauna to the industry: A modular, plug-and-play structure that brings the luxury of restorative contrast therapy to a range of settings in under a day.  Since its founding in 2022 by U.K. designers Nathan Aylott and James Van Tromp, Nokken has been upending the conventional approach to hospitality by developing wellness-based amenities that fit seamlessly within nature. Applying knowledge and expe

In the Western Cree language, the name “Winnipeg” translates to “murky water” — a nod to the two cloudy, silt-filled rivers that weave through the Manitoba capital. The Assiniboine River, which runs eastward from Saskatchewan, and the Red River, which flows northward toward Lake Winnipeg, converge at the Forks. The site has been a vital gathering place for millennia, first for the Indigenous populations who lived on this land, then as an active rail yard and finally as a vibrant public space tha

We are all familiar with grey infrastructure: the engineered “concrete” infrastructure of our cities, including roads, bridges, sewers, pipelines and rails. As designers, we might be familiar with green infrastructure, or landscape-based infrastructure such as green roofs, living walls, street trees, parks, wetlands and bioswales. Today, Canadians are becoming equally aware of the critical value of nature — and its building block, biodiversity. Without biodiversity, the basis of nature, there is

On an early October night at a private estate an hour’s drive outside Toronto, a chef stood at the edge of a sprawling backyard patio, sheltered by sugar maple trees in the early stages of changing colour. He was filling delicately thin crêpe-like jianbing pastry rolls with lobster, bee pollen and tianminjiang sweet bean paste, then placing them into a row of sculptural wooden mannequin hands, where they waited on a table to be collected by an intimate group of guests. Three other appetizers and

Office design is an exercise in reconciling competing demands. Not only do designers need to create spaces that accommodate many ways of working, they also need to consider practical concerns like circulation, wayfinding and technology — and, perhaps most importantly, how the space both reflects and fosters company culture. But often, they don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch. One of the biggest challenges with workspace renovations is to make all these needs fit within the constraints

How do you design for democracy? This was the key question for Team Urbis, a consortium led by Nordic Office of Architecture (and including Haptic Architects, Scenario, and i-d. Interiørarkitektur & Design), when they won the competition to transform Oslo’s New Government Quarter, just six years after the terrorist attacks of July 22, 2011 tore the area apart. Eight people were killed, and at least 210 were injured by the blast from a powerful bomb, planted in a car park under one of the gov

One of the biggest surprises at NeoCon 2026 (especially for me, on my first visit to the expo in over a decade) was what office manufacturers were not showing: casegoods and desking systems. With a few notable and impressive exceptions (here’s looking at you, Nienkämper), the focus was on communal areas anchored by soft seating that has evolved from “resimercial” to resolutely residential. The colour palettes, too, veered away from beiges, browns and blacks and toward fully saturated hues in red

Atelier HA’s reno of an apartment in the Saint-Cloud neighbourhood of Paris is a stylistically forward-thinking space that is nevertheless rich with history. First, there is the firm’s relationship to the home’s owner: a repeat client of Atelier HA who had hired the experimental studio for its very first project some ten years ago, and is now part of a family of four. For this follow-up, he, his partner and his kids placed full faith in Atelier HA founders Adèle Nourry and Hugo Vince