Architectural Digest January 2004

The AD100 represents our selection of the top 100 architects and interior designers whose work has been featured in Architectural Digest over the past several years.

Designer Suzanne Lovell was raised in a family of historians, who taught her to “appreciate craftsmanship as art,” she says. Her education bloomed under the tutelage of Olivio Ferrari, a Bauhaus-influenced architect, and at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where she worked before opening her own firm in 1985. Lovell says she strives “to integrate each interior with the architecture of the space and the client’s scrapbook of experience.” Though her commissions vary, she has a special affinity for “adaptive reuse,” wherein spaces conceived for one purpose are retrofitted to serve another – such as the artillery shed that she transformed into a house in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. “It offers an opportunity to create innovative solutions that can later be applied to other circumstances,” she says. Innovation, as it happens, is at the heart of Lovell’s ethos. “Our firm believes in respecting history but not in repeating the decorative styles of the past.”