Ron Meyers

Illustration by Ryan Ward Flicking your Bic beats rubbing two sticks together to fire up the briquettes in the barbie, but all a musical can opener does is open a can of worms. No wonder more and more people are feeling technologically challenged. In less than 100 years, tech invention......

Society can be so fickle. Just when we begin to get comfortable, comfort seems to go out of fashion. Do you really enjoy making love under the neon light you hung over your bed in 1987? Are you tired of kicking back on your concrete sofa to watch a game?......

Photo Illustration by Ryan Ward The world doesn’t have enough closets. Medicine cabinets are too small, kitchen cabinets waste too much room. Space, like gold and pork bellies, has become a commodity. Here in L.A. there’s something besides smog in the air. Everyone seems to have the same shelter-mag fantasy......

So you finally got your hands on the classic post-and-beam modern house of your dreams. Now you must ask yourself: Am I truly a modernist, or just another modern fashion victim? From L.A. to Palm Springs, one sees house after endless modern house filled with the same Ludwig Mies Van......

Doesn’t it just figure. Hollywood Regency, that glammed-out mode of movie-set-inspired interior decorating that for years made Los Angeles the laughingstock of uppity shelter magazines, has developed a world-class pedigree. Suddenly, design mavens everywhere are having wet dreams about Cecil Beaton, Billy Haines, oversize doors, padded walls, pink poodles, and......

Space, the first frontier. This is a voyage of the Designship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore our strange old world, to seek out new lifestyles and civilizations, to boldly go where no room has gone before. Unless, of course, you are a Borg, in which case you will be......

Electric light has permanently changed the way we see things, and confronted us with a whole new aesthetic of visual perception. Bright lighting allows surgeons to perform miraculous operations on the human body, but brushing our teeth or turning on a microwave is not brain surgery, so why do we......

Illustration by Ron Meyers WE'VE COME A LONG WAY FROM OUR EARLY HOUSING units — simple structures lined with packed earth. Why then, armed with the blazing technology of the 21st century, are we still led like sheep by the real estate agent's banshee cry of "Hardwood floors!"? What's the......

Windows are fascinating holes: They are the eyes, ears, nose and throat of any given room. And window dressings are our rheostats for light, air, sound, smell and visual perception. In the modern world, windows are filled with glass, invented about 3,300 years ago by potters in Mesopotamia, within the......

Illustration by Ron Meyers IT MAY BE HARD TO BELIEVE, BUT THE world's first interior designers worked very hard for a living. Long before Architectural Digest turned elitist lifestyle into fashion for the masses, long before interior design was the profession of choice for homosexuals, and long before Marie Antoinette......