What’s Happening: A Seattle-based company is selling $300,000 kits to build low-slung structures inspired by the American architect’s Usonian homes.

The Download: In 1936, the writer Herbert Jacobs challenged Frank Lloyd Wright to design a high-quality house on a tight $5,000 budget ($111,000 today). Though he was accustomed to working primarily for wealthy patrons, the 69-year-old architect rose to the occasion and designed a modest, low-cost home that kickstarted a prolonged period of late-career innovation. His Usonian homes, referring to the term derived from “United States of North America,” responded directly to the landscape—they featured glass curtain walls, open-plan interiors, and natural materials like wood and stone. He’d go on to build more than 140 Usonian homes over his remaining two decades. They became prototypes for his utopian vision of Broadacre City and helped inform the ranch-style houses that populated postwar American suburbs.

Though Wright envisioned his Usonian houses with middle-class Americans in mind, owning one nowadays will cost you. That was until Lindal Cedar Homes started selling “kits” inspired by Wright’s designs. The Seattle-based company allows Wright-inspired houses to be built quickly, affordably ($300,000 for a single kit), and with minimal waste. Each of Lindal’s nine house models was designed by Aris Georges, a Wisconsin architect who studied and taught at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and updated them to fit contemporary living standards. Ceiling heights, for example, were raised to nine-and-a-half feet—Wright preferred low-slung buildings—while interior grids were elongated, yielding more spacious interiors.

The houses are even recognized by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, which emphasizes they aren’t authentic Wright structures, merely inspirations. Still, the foundation receives a small royalty whenever Lindal sells a kit. According to the Wall Street Journal, ten have been sold thus far, four finished. The modest $300,000 price tag includes the house’s post-and-beam structure and its envelope of siding, doors, and windows, but doesn’t account for interior walls, plumbing, electricity, HVAC, and landscaping. The Journal interviewed one customer in Asheville, who estimates spending $1.25 million total—still no small sum, but perhaps worth it considering the property appraised for $1.775 million. His motivation wasn’t money, though: he describes the finished structure as simply a “joy” to live in.

In Their Own Words: “In the Lindal Imagine Series, we wanted to modernize the homes themselves while remaining respectful of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian designs and underlying principles,” Georges told the New York Post. “In a Usonian home, the walls are independent elements around which space flows like water around a boulder, not like confining boxes. Walking through the house should be like talking a walk in the forest.”

Surface Says: Wright’s enduring relevance shows no signs of abating.

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Monaco has no fewer than six Michelin-starred restaurants to its .81 square-miles of land, and Marcel Ravin’s Blue Bay is easily among the most inventive of them. While the French-trained chef by way of Martinique deftly executes all manner of courses—his approach to vegetables, for example, is famously inspired by memories of harvests from his grandmother’s garden—his restaurant’s proximity to the French Riviera’s turquoise glow feels like a poetic indication of his most powerful muse and greatest strength: seafood.

As Ravin tells it, it was by preparing a multi-course feast for designer Alexandra Saguet that he articulated his vision for their collaboration on Blue Bay. “There is old Caribbean and there is modern,” Ravin says, and his is undoubtedly the latter. Influences from Japanese, Monegasque, West Indian, and Piedmontese culinary traditions collide on his tasting menu.

When: Until June 1

Where: James Fuentes, Los Angeles

What: The Massachusetts-based painter’s large-scale, vividly colored landscapes are informed by his daily bike rides through his home village of Florence. His shocking palette renders even familiar scenes—forest vignettes, nature’s “perpetual rot and rebirth”—anew. Here, he turns his focus to the spring and fall, whose crescendos of buds, blooms, and final expression of color punctuate the constancy of summer and winter.

On May 10, Faena Art hosted its annual fundraising gala at Faena Forum in Miami Beach. The theme for this year’s event, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” dazzled more than 500 attendees with a fusion of live music, roller dancing, and artful culinary presentations. Renowned chefs Francis Mallmann, Paul Qui, and Frederic Monnet led the charge with a monumental food installation, including a 500-pound bluefin tuna served as sashimi, hand rolls, and donburi bowls. Guests, adorned in “Funktastique” attire, were greeted by Miranda Makaroff’s abstract photo backdrop and immersed in a fantastical world.

The event showcased the works of such prominent artists as Carlos Betancourt, Cornelius Tulloch, and Suzi Analogue. Notable attendees included Jimmy Rip, Adam Weitsman, Sebastian ErraZuriz, Edgardo and Ana Cristina Defortuna, and Karen Grimson. Alan Faena’s opening remarks were followed by Cielo Tejido’s vibrant installation, leading into a roller-disco by artist duo “assume vivid astro focus” with performances by the Griffin Brothers and DJ sets from Amanda Portillo and Sabina Sciubba.

Ornare, well-established in the design market with a decades-long tradition of craftsmanship, brings legacy in architecture, design, and décor to customized luxury built-in furnishings. Specializing in utility and craft to outfit luxury residences, the brand is based on high standards, state-of-the-art technology, and quality.

Surface Says: With its numerous collaborations and reach across global epicenters of culture, Ornare’s status as a leader in built-in furnishings is a no-brainer.

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