Explore a Whimsical Kindergarten in Xiamen, China

2023 Best of Year Winner for Kids’ Zone

Learning feels like an adventure at this indoor-outdoor kindergarten in Xiamen, China. With porthole windows, igloolike nooks, and mini balconies, the mod, nearly 200,000-square-foot ECNU Xiping Bilingual School Kindergarten invites exploration from its pint-size attendees. There’s hardly a right angle in sight: Curving walls and arched entrances create a natural flow between rooms, and sunny halls circle a central courtyard. The PAL Design Group team considered the wide-eyed perspective of the end user, conceiving spaces that would have excited the designers as children, like an art studio that resembles an illuminated cave. A palette of whites and greens, both man­made and natural, keeps the mood fresh: Lush vegetation frames the entrance and plants hang from overhead fixtures. They’re reminders of growth in nature—and the budding students.

joey ho; tommy kong; joslyn lam; daniel leung.

Workshop/APD Creates a Luxurious Penthouse in New York

2023 Best of Year Winner for Large Apartment

For repeat clients, Workshop/APD elevated a developer-delivered penthouse duplex in New York by instating luxury and shapeliness via an envelope of serene neutrals, sinuous elements, and top-notch materials. Take the gently curved burled-wood staircase and Venetian plaster finishes in the living room, and the main bedroom’s wall of antiqued mirror. Furnishings include enviable classics such as seating by Vladimir Kagan, José Zanine Caldas, and Eero Saarinen. Art curated by Barbara Cartategui gives pride of place to Jaume Plensa’s stairwell-adjacent sculpture. While light and airiness pervade the 5,800-square-foot dwelling, which boasts sweeping downtown views, more saturated exceptions appear. One is the moody charcoal-gray media room, a stage for cozy evenings of at-home movies.

Trippy Geometric Forms Shape This Award-Winning Bar Design

2023 Best of Year Winner for Bar/Lounge

The suprematist art movement, an early 20th–century style associated with manipulating basic shapes and colors to channel pure emotion, inspired the trippy geometric forms of Le Bar, a 2,000-square-foot watering hole in Nanchang, China. Matrix Design used different hues of light to distinguish each space, from the edgy VIP room to the warm and inviting central bar. The effect is accentuated by glass partitions that diffuse floor- and ceiling-mounted LEDs into a soft, ethereal gradient, lending the entire space an energetic yet dreamy quality. Additional accents include textured wall paint and antique brass fixtures. It’s the layering of these simple elements that creates a bold effect.

MATRIX DESIGN: wang guan; liu jianhui; wang zhaobao.

World-Class Art Meets Luxurious Living in This Toronto Home

2023 Best of Year Winner for Large City House

At 25,000 square feet, the house in Toronto, Canada belonging to a philanthropic couple is certainly expansive. That’s partly because it has to serve not only as a family home but also as the setting for large charity events. Hence these grand spaces designed by Burdifilek and warmed with ultra-luxurious materials and contemporary artwork. In the great room, for instance, walls are clad in cashmere, and multiple seating areas are anchored by a custom silk rug. Another gathering area is the airy solarium, its leafy potted trees capped by a glass ceiling allowing for additional verdant views of an exterior vine-covered wall. Green turns to creamy white at the three-story limestone staircase, which spirals around a custom 30-foot-long pendant fixture made of molded-glass cabochons.

diego burdi; paul filek; tom yip; michael del priore; john seo; anna nomerovsky; anna jurkiewicz; daniel mei.

A Must-See Country House in Muskoka, Canada

2023 Best of Year Winner for Small Country House

Located near Georgian Bay in a rocky landscape that has inspired many Canadian painters, this two-level, 2,200-square-foot retreat in Lake Rosseau, Muskoka, is deliberately simple—a pitched roof above an upper-level great room with bedrooms below—so as not to compete with the natural setting. The ruggedness outside is reflected in Studio Paolo Ferrari‘s extensive use of granite inside for carved sinks in a bathroom, the double-sided fireplace in the living area, and a large unfinished block that serves as the kitchen island. The other dominant interior material is Douglas fir, either whitewashed or limed, which covers the ceilings, walls, and floors. The Toronto-based studio also uses the blond timber for all the custom millwork and built-in furniture, including the principal bed—a stack of chunky slabs that combines the headboard, nightstands, and mattress platform into a single sculptural unit.

A Former Car Manufacturer’s Locale Becomes a Chic Paris Office

2023 Best of Year Winner for International Extra Large Corporate Office

For years, the modernist 1964 building at 75 Avenue de la Grande Armée in Paris housed the French automotive manufacturer PSA Peugeot Citroën, which left in 2017. Saguez & Partners restored existing details while also transforming 250,000 square feet of the interiors into a serene, biophilic headquarters for Boston Consulting Group that maximizes sunlight for 1,200 employees. Part of the triple-height former car showroom has become a cathedral-like lobby, café, and coworking space, with greenery creating semiprivate groves along windows, that’s open to the public; elsewhere on the ground level is the business center featuring a 180-seat auditorium.

Upstairs, closed offices convert into meeting rooms, library alcoves offer places to focus, and a large rooftop terrace boasts panoramic city views. Speaking of nature, during construction, 394 metric tons of CO2 emissions were avoided thanks to the reuse of 81 metric tons of materials.

pierre-olivier-pigeot; jean-philippe cordina; claire cieslak; christelle person; laurent brudner; jeff bazile; gaelle coen; marine belkebir.

Bold Hues Enliven This Must-See Creative Office

2023 Best of Year Winner for Small Creative Office

Capture creativity in an unconventional way. That was the charge presented to Interior Design Hall of Famers Brad Zizmor and Dag Folger’s team at Architecture Plus Information by the French advertising/marketing giant Publicis Groupe, itself engaged in harnessing that elusive commodity. Rooted in investigative research, the scheme for the 30,000-square-foot New York workplace for Le Truc, a new internal collective, is based on a clubhouse feeling, eschewing organizational structures of agency, department, and client typical of these offices. Instead, the interior is a compilation of diverse—and color-blocked—environments encouraging collaboration across disciplines as well as an organic spatial procession. Step into a pink tech-free meeting area, a dark moody nook, a library, or a state-of-the art production facility, each its own sensory experience. Meanwhile, workstations are, by design and necessity, sparse.

This Law Firm Office is Hospitality Chic

2023 Best of Year Winner for Small Corporate Office

More hospitality chic than staid corporate, Husch Blackwell’s au courant law-firm office in Clayton, Missouri establishes itself as an industry front-runner from the outset. It’s not just the colored ceiling soffit, curved furniture, multitude of potted plants, or considered detail of the marble and reeded-wood desk in reception. Characterful decorative elements abound throughout the nearly 12,000 square feet by Partners by Design, including velvety drapes in confab rooms, fiber art in lounges, and custom totems in corridors. Manufacturers specified are a who’s who of the trade: Arte, Designtex, Fireclay, Weitzner. Topping it all off (literally) is a penthouse amenity level that opens to an outdoor deck.

Peruse a Jewelry Store Brimming With Festive Flair

2023 Best of Year Winner for International Fashion Retail

For the CTF Guangzhou Experience Shop, the Lion’s Dance performed during Chinese New Year inspired One Plus Partnership to construct approximations of the animal heads from colored metal strips that hang in a pointillist pattern from the ceiling. The jungle king is represented throughout the 6,000-square-foot boutique in other motifs, too, such as the figurative drawings embedded in the terrazzo flooring and the furry seating upholstery and fluffy display boxes that evoke the dancing lion’s mane. Contrasting color schemes of orange-red and blue-green dominate the first and second floor, respectively, chosen as Cantonese symbols of good fortune and expansive energy.

ajax law ling kit; virginia lung wai ki.

For a Hotel in Colombia, Local Coffee Farms Supply a Key Material

2023 Best of Year Winner for On the Boards: Commercial

On the outskirts of Medellín, La Puerta de Puente Iglesias, an 180,000-square foot hotel in Jericó, Colombia, plans to honor the region’s Antioquian vernacular and Spanish colonial architecture. F05 Studio plans to salvage rock for construction from local coffee farms to blend the building with the mountainous surroundings. On the rooftop, rustic stone walls punctuated with arched portals evoking ruins will surround the pool. Inside is softer: a tranquil palette and Chantilly parquet flooring juxtaposed with the utmost in contemporary amenities.