Commissioned to design a small suite of offices in a noisy cardboard factory near Ben Gurion Airport, in Israel, architect Irit Axelrod decided to create an interior that asserts a sense of 'quiet power.'

With the concept of modern comfort in mind, the architects stripped the apartment down to the studs and built it back up with new drywall, flooring, fixtures, and finishes.

Owner: Chanel Completion Date: September 2010 Program: A single-story, 4,170-square-foot Chanel boutique located in the heart of SoHo. The store includes a ready-to-wear department, a watch corner, a beauty and fragrance area, a handbag bar, and a shoe section. Design concept and solution: Inspired by SoHo's artistic history, the architects sought to channel classic Chanel motifs and the New York art world with specially commissioned fixtures and artworks. When customers enter, they are met by a 10-foot-tall acrylic bottle of Chanel No. 5 outfitted with screens that play brand-themed videos. The interior finishes are classic Chanel black and white: a

One look lengthwise in a sun-speckled upper room is all it takes to see a spectrum of ideas at play in Gerhards & Gl'cker's exhibit pieces for the Saxon castle of Albrechtsburg, in eastern Germany.

Andre Kikoski Architect designs an elegant restaurant inside New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Ben van Berkel, principal of the Amsterdam-based architectural firm UNStudio, is known for his breathtakingly swoopy designs of sleek surfaces that never seem to end. The gleaming, aluminum-clad Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, with its double-spiral-ramped concrete structure, convincingly argues the case [RECORD, November, 2006, page 128]. After completing that nine-story-high, 270,000 square-foot building, you might think that a 5,840-square-foot (gross) residential loft would be too rinky-dink a commission. Van Berkel argues otherwise: “I’m not interested as much in the scale of a project as with the program,” he explains. In this case, he was asked to design a loft

Completion Date: December 2009 Program: A 1,345-square-foot salon in the basement of a commercial building in Tokyo's trendy Daikanyama neighborhood. Design concept and solution: Yamaguchi wanted to take a basic, stripped-down space that had seen a lot of wear from previous tenants and make it over without covering up the age and texture of the room. He preserved the open-plan layout--a simple rectangle with exposed wood beams and skylights--and painted the pocked concrete-block walls white. On the rough concrete floor, he filled in depressions with mortar, creating amorphous white shapes recalling landmasses--a "time map" highlighting the history of the space.

Completion Date: September 2009 Owner: Dr. Martens Program: A 1,938-square-foot pop-up store, including a stockroom and office, in London's Old Spitalfields Market. Design concept and solution: Charged with building a utilitarian, recession-friendly pop-up store that the popular shoe company can replicate around the world, Campaign modeled the Spitalfields store after a warehouse. Evoking the brand's past as a working-class staple (and later a countercultural favorite), the architects chose inexpensive industrial materials, all plentiful and easy to assemble. Gypframe metal wall units showcase shoes on the back wall, construction-site lamps dangle from the ceiling, and wood shipping pallets stack into readymade

Completion Date: 2009 Owner: Marcus Hotels & Resorts Program: A 960-square-foot basement lounge and dining room serving the janitors, cooks, and maids of Milwaukee's Pfister Hotel. Design concept and solution: Carving out a new canteen from a provisional break room and a smattering of residual spaces, the architects wanted to create a communal gathering place that offers a respite from the formality of the Romanesque Revival hotel upstairs. The perimeter of the canteen weaves around foundation columns and mechanical areas to unify all usable space into one room. A 21-foot harvest table anchors the canteen and encourages communal dining. In

Fast-disappearing, Shanghai’s nong tang (lane houses) combine European construction with Chinese notions of tightly packed residential life. From the street, these early-20th-century buildings present gabled facades — respectable and a bit staid. But once you walk through the door to the lane running between the houses, you encounter a messy world of clothes hanging out to dry, shutters flung open, people gossiping, and kids running around. Private space bleeds into the public realm, with some folks cooking in the shared lane and others bathing their children there. Neri & Hu Design and Research Office (NHDRO) tried to capture the spirit