What’s Happening: After decades of ups and downs, the Aluminaire House has permanently relocated to Palm Springs, where its architect, Albert Frey, pioneered “desert modernism” and practiced for more than six decades.

The Download: By the time Albert Frey arrived at Ellis Island in 1930, the 27-year-old had already apprenticed with Le Corbusier and studied his Five Points of Architecture. Frey hewed to them closely while teaming up with close friend and former Architectural Record editor A. Lawrence Kocher to design the Aluminaire House, one of the earliest examples of International Style. Unveiled at a 1931 design showcase in the soaring exhibition halls of the erstwhile Grand Central Palace, the boxy, three-story structure was clad entirely in aluminum and glass, intended to be mass-produced, modular, and affordably made using inexpensive, off-the-shelf materials. The prototype polarized the public. More than 100,000 visitors toured the exhibition in just one week; a young Philip Johnson picketed it.

Since then, the Aluminaire House has endured ups and downs, being disassembled, reassembled, protested, relocated, and spared from demolition by a whirlwind of negligent owners. The influential structure is now being relocated once again, this time to a permanent home: a parking lot outside the Palm Springs Art Museum, where it will open to the public on March 23. Along with trustee Lee Marmol of architecture firm Marmol Radziner, the institution has led a months-long restoration that involved adding features like weatherproofing and air conditioning. “We have to keep it from melting in the desert sun,” Marmol told the New York Times. “If you think about a metal box in the 125-degree summer sun, it would be hot enough inside to damage any finished materials.” Not that visitors will be allowed inside. Meeting today’s accessibility requirements would mandate major design changes, so the house will instead stand as a beacon of Modernism to be admired from afar.

Palm Springs makes a fitting home for Aluminaire House. In 1934, Frey migrated to the Coachella Valley and quickly fell in love with the magnificently barren California desert and the mysteries it contains. (In a 1936 letter to Le Corbusier, he was dazzled by the “intellectual milieu in Palm Springs” and its “wild, savage, natural setting.”) He’d go on to reshape the city’s design vernacular in a “desert modernism” style: low-slung yet triumphantly linear structures marked by an adroit handling of low-cost materials, sublime earthy color combinations, and geometric compositions. His prolific six-decade career saw more than 200 buildings come to life there, including Palm Springs City Hall, the iconic Tramway Gas Station, and his longtime residence Frey House II. The latter now belongs to the Palm Springs Art Museum, which recently opened an exhibition about his indelible imprint on the city. A local outlet christened him “The Modfather” and cites him as a key reason why Modernism Week is so highly attended.

In Their Own Words: “After working with Le Corbusier, my aim in life was to use permanent materials that don’t require maintenance,” Frey told the Times in 1998, the same year he died, at age 95. “It [aluminum] was an up-and-coming material, much more durable than wood, or plaster, which cracks. And it went up very quickly. The house was built in 10 days.”

Surface Says: We just can’t believe that anyone would call the house ugly.

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From March 20–21, the fragrance, skincare, and fine jewelry brand will host Austin fashion retailer ByGeorge at its San Antonio Atelier. The two-day event kicks off with a cocktail hour, and guests will have the opportunity to shop ready-to-wear from Bernadette, Ulla Johnson, JW Anderson, Alaïa, and Bode, alongside Cultus Artem’s latest jewelry and beauty lineup. Admission is by RSVP only.

New York City may be chock-full of bars that forge the feeling of stepping back in time, but few have the Home Studios touch. The Brooklyn firm founded by Oliver Haslegrave has garnered an avid fanbase around designing cult-favorite bars and restaurants—a beloved Montauk staple, a Nantucket institution, a neo-trattoria in historic Cambridge—that exude contemporary charm yet are deeply rooted in the history of their locales. So he leaned on that same formula when tasked to remodel The Wren, a cherished English-style taproom in Manhattan’s bustling East Village known for upscale pub fare and handcrafted cocktails. A timeless appeal and central location has afforded the self-proclaimed “Bowery’s best bar” longevity in a frenetic area otherwise marked by constant change, which Haslegrave tapped into when envisioning its second act.

“We aimed to capture the essence of a bygone era while infusing it with modern comfort and style,” Haslegrave tells Surface about the newly revamped bilevel interior’s rustic charm and wintry ambience. That’s largely thanks to wood-paneled walls, hardwood floors, walnut-trimmed black paint, and abundance of warm-toned sconces by the likes of In Common With, Allied Maker, and Rejuvenation. The upstairs bar is where most of the action happens, and it’s hard to imagine the night not flying by when socializing on its chocolate-hued upholstered booths that pair perfectly with Breuer chairs and Carrara marble tabletops. Fortunately, the cocktail menu’s inventive concoctions—the jittery Midnight Espresso, the habanero-tinged Speedy Gonzalez—are sure to keep the energy levels high until sunrise.

When the final component of the decade-long renovation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greek and Roman galleries was finally unveiled in 2007, what the public didn’t see was an abundance of deadstock stone shelved during construction. Long relegated to storage, the offcuts can now grace your living room thanks to the natural stone enthusiasts at Sfrido Estate. Recently launched by Giacomo Canali, the nephew of family-owned Italian stone purveyor EuroMarble, the brand intends to create limited-edition design objects using precious marble from its sister company’s quarries across Europe.

The brand’s inaugural Museum Collection is a sterling debut. Comprising four round-top tables designed by Milanese firm a617, each piece is clad top-to-bottom in interlocking marble offcuts. Bases are made of prestigious Statuario marble; Marinace, a rare sedimentary stone from Brazil sourced from the museum’s deadstock, forms the tops. “It comes from rivers filled with different rocks over centuries,” Canali tells Surface, “so each block presents a wide composition.”

Speaking of composition, Sfrido Estate’s future collections aim to tell stories through stone—something that Canali should have no trouble conveying when the brand officially debuts during Milan Design Week. “The legacy of my family put me in the position of knowing a lot about the natural stone industry, and I understood I was attached to it when my friend asked me why I couldn’t stop touching the walls of buildings while we were traveling,” he says. “My fascination with marbles, granites, travertines, and any kind of stones is a never-ending process where Mother Nature keeps teaching you. [She’s] the best designer.”

Vanessa Friedman’s most recent big byline was the interview heard ‘round the world, or at least the fashion world: a rare sit-down with Phoebe Philo. One of the industry’s most aloof talents, Philo has overtly rejected the mantle of industry “personality” or influencer. Instead, her talent, point of view, and willingness to all but disappear at what many saw as the height of her career catapulted her to a level of superstardom that reached a fever pitch with the release of her eponymous collection’s first “edit” in 2023. Still, even Philo’s most devout fans have had some questions, which she acknowledged in her interview with Friedman: What’s her brand story, let alone her label’s return policy? And those prices?

Anyone hoping for overwrought explanations might be disappointed, but approach the story optimistically for a stroke of clarity and you might just find it. To Edward Enninful, Bella Freud, and Ruthie Rogers, a few of Philo’s friends who were quoted, none of this is news, but Friedman shows the rest of us sides of the designer that we don’t normally see. From the playful: “‘I always tell my kids, the more you mess about, the more you find out,’ she said, using a fruitier term than ‘mess,’” she writes; to the idealistic “I don’t know why it can’t just be continuous,” Philo says, lamenting what Friedman describes as the industry’s “planned obsolescence” baked into the fashion season system as we know it.

And it sounds like a better system for payments, returns, and client care is coming to Philo’s brand soon. But she takes the last word on those prices: “The intention, really, is that the pieces stick around for a while. They have to be made well, and they have to be considered. That tends to come at a price point.”

When: Until April 3

Where: El Retiro Park, Madrid

What: The artist’s latest nature installation, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, takes over the vaulted interiors of an artificial mountainscape. As with their previous exhibitions at the 2022 Venice Biennale and Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Okoyomon unleashes the might of nature in the face of mankind, this time in response to Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s unfinished composition Mysterium. And although animatronic bears and live butterflies have played roles in their past shows, this one incorporates a chimeric, animatronic lamb in a nod to both the title and writer Anne Boyer’s essay of the same name.

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Lasvit is a cutting-edge manufacturer of breathtaking works of glass that bring beauty, pleasure, and Czech soul to customers worldwide. Lasvit combines the authenticity of glass with creative craftsmanship and innovative ideas to create bespoke lighting sculptures, art installations, and glass collections.

Surface Says: Lasvit’s bold lighting and tabletop designs, created in partnership with boldfaced names such as the Campana Brothers and Zaha Hadid Associates, are such venerable works of art that it’s easy to forget that they’re also entirely functional.

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