We are planners-designers who align buildings with owners to create cultural dialogues with identity defined by your sense of beauty and your biography expressed through your history, objects, and stories. Our studio creates aesthetic spaces for life and work — places that reveal who you are and what you value.
We strategically visualize concepts from the outside-in and the inside-out because each of us is constantly interacting with where we live, work, eat, rest, and play.
We want to know what attracted you to the building or block; daily rhythms; artifacts you treasure; structural elements to be accentuated or diminished; program and design objectives; how you, the property, and the site may change over time.
These tangibles and intangibles are the pulses that transform interior and exterior spaces to produce physical, social, and emotional coherence, whether as a private residence, public district, or commercial enterprise.
Throughout our lives we shift focus, preferences, priorities, communities. It is rare to permanently fix our live-work spaces because needs and desires fluctuate. Recall how a mood changes when a painting or a chair is relocated, a color is added or subtracted, a room function is altered, kerning and synthesis is applied.
Our favorite spaces should create emotions not abstractions; real life not stiffness; places that nurture as we cross thresholds from day to day, moment to moment, in contextual connection. Sometimes our environments seem like strangers we bump into on the street, other times we intentionally manifest our sweethearts. When we truly see one another in each other, it is a love affair with our surroundings — two forms momentarily merged into one where every gesture is mutually affirming and reverberates with beauty.
This is the experience of homecoming and should be the way we feel about the community where we live, the street where we work, the places where we gather, the tables where we dine, the rooms where we dream, the windows through which we look.
Life is nuanced, layered, and fused by experience, appreciation of imaginatively beautiful work, and perceptions of our environments. What should your community, street, block, and home look like to make it resonate and feel gratifying?
Art-Force creates aesthetic environments eclipsing two-dimensional architecture and three-dimensional interior design to include time and space in design of the places where you live and work. We are planners, designers, problem-solvers, and imaginaries committed to make the experience of your physical surroundings reverberate with what makes you feel whole and serene.
For twenty years, we have worked with buyers, sellers, and realtors to transform physical spaces that resonate with current and potential owners.
ASSIGNMENT
Renovation of kitchen, bathroom, and backyard for early 20C home of approximately 1300 square feet.
INSPIRATION
Explored relationships among spatial voids.
DESIGN RESPONSE
The small scale of the rooms and intimate adjacencies accessed over three-floors suggested a palette of oversized tiles for wet areas and vertical wood slats for new interior and exterior boundaries — materials to enlarge spatial experiences. The house sold quickly at a profit because of a jade plant in a Mexican terra-cotta pot carefully placed at the entrance. The buyers insisted that the plant convey with the property.
OUTCOME
It is important to remain surprised by what motivates a person to make an acquisition.
ASSIGNMENT
Restoration of single family home and side yard circa 1880 for a couple who enjoyed entertaining, cooking, and gardening; in the 1920s, the property had been divided into four small apartments.
INSPIRATION
Kinetic sculpture emphasizing horizontal and vertical movement.
DESIGN RESPONSE
Created double-width rooms to break the tension among the stacked apartments and accentuated a mobius function for circulation between the front and rear staircases. Custom designed stainless steel counters, open shelving, and large storage drawers for the kitchen; two studies on separate floors for working from home; and, cultivation of ten-foot tall sunflowers and an asparagus patch to share with neighbors.
OUTCOME
The next owner was a therapist confined to a wheelchair who needed a home office and an expanse of kitchen surfaces for prepared foods. We are reminded that geometric movement is powerful.
ASSIGNMENT
Conceived an addition to a mid-century glass box house set below grade in the woods.
INSPIRATION
Taoism.
DESIGN RESPONSE
We resolved the oppositional forces of nature’s dynamism visible from every facade set within 90-degree angles inherent in mid-century vernacular where functional details are magnified. Designed a small identical addition attached to the main rectilinear form thereby establishing an “L” with views into each structure. An aesthetically seamless transition was achieved by matching original construction materials of limed cypress, brick pavers, and glass. Extensive landscape stonework was added to direct the transit of water channeled under the house during rainstorms and remained beautiful when dry.
OUTCOME
A visitor, appreciative of the quality and originality of work by artists and artisans, asked if the property was for sale. It sold with half of its mid-century furniture and artworks.
ASSIGNMENT
Assisted a client during her transition to living alone in the same house purchased twenty years earlier with her large family.
INSPIRATION
Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.”
DESIGN RESPONSE
Repositioned furniture (most importantly her vintage roll top desk previously sequestered in a back room) and brought into bright light with views onto a lake; reviewed and relocated an art collection of photographs and prints; and, explored new layouts, colors, and textures for bedroom, home office, two bathrooms, kitchen, and new large deck with seating elements. Assisted with fine art acquisitions to replace those she had outgrown.
OUTCOME
It is healing to kern and redefine how spaces and rooms are used to establish new perspectives on how we see ourselves and what we have collected throughout life to enable expansive breaths of fresh air.
ASSIGNMENT
Redevelop and redesign 9500 square foot century old industrial building for an artist’s live-work space and gallery.
INSPIRATION
Owner’s passion for racing motorcycles and the sovereignty of existing of metal, wood, and concrete throughout the structure.
DESIGN RESPONSE
Echoing the inherent simplicity and functionality of open volumetric space, we reused wood from beams, walls, and elevator shafts to design and fabricate tables, doors, and countertops. Corrugated metal and steel became walls to minimize use of sheetrock. And emphasizing the artist's use of linearity in work process, 18’ movable tables were constructed from ceiling joists to accentuate existing string-courses of brick. New windows were installed and original floors were sanded and finished to reveal history and inspire reverberations.
OUTCOME
Nationally recognized by annual Remodelista Design Award for its fundamental connection and identification between owner and space.
ASSIGNMENT
Conceptual design and art direction to unite spaces with fine art to mirror the owner’s soul.
INSPIRATION
The perspective that aesthetics eclipse reason.
DESIGN RESPONSE
Past collaborations with client over multiple projects at the same site – renovations, organizing a growing art collection, offering design considerations prior to construction – help see anew that which is loved and made a heartbeat.
OUTCOME
Sometimes asset realignments assist appreciation for initial ideas and acquisitions. To be able to grow and change – holding hands with our buildings and objects – is a sensual love affair.
ASSIGNMENT
Create a sanctuary for creative and spiritual connection with the environment.
INSPIRATION
Constant reminder to be humble and defer to nature’s rhythms.
DESIGN RESPONSE
Drone documentation of existing natural assets established views of the ocean and a marsh to locate the project site for a 1500 square foot home with a studio-guest space twelve feet above grade and rising into the tree canopy with a ceiling height of more than twenty feet. The center of the home is a kitchen form accessible from four sides; sunken living room; mutable dining-work area for working alone and large dinner parties; wood-burning fireplace; and, perimeter window seating. Constructed with enduring materials of stone, wood, and reflective glass, the project makes tangible the relationship among art, life, and habitat to support holistic wellbeing.
OUTCOME
Attention to how spaces communicate and evoke quiet reflection with ineffable layerings of experience. When a building or room advances our sense of self and wholeness, we are on axis.
Janet Kagan is Founding Partner of Art-Force. For 20 years, she has worked with buyers, sellers, and realtors to transform physical environments to resonate with current and potential owners who desire assistance with home acquisition, renovation, and visualization of what could be. Her innate talent for imagining remarkable spaces that honor each client's inherent assets of cultural and aesthetic orientation are the inflection points that become expressions of art and beauty. She is inspired by balance among natural elements, designed forms, material choices, and striking structural solutions.
"Relationships, like roads, are the infrastructure connecting us with our spaces. We design metaphorical highways and intersections joining who you are and what you value to your places of work and home. Our partnerships with clients recognize their distinct aesthetic vocabulary, intrinsic assets, individual motivations, and self-interests so we may articulate resonate storylines that honor, care for, and protect the soul of the place. We then translate and transfer into design what you revere about yourself so all of us can celebrate you."
She also leads strategic planning, design, and field-directs studio work in neglected neighborhoods and rural areas to creatively address social, economic, and physical injustice. Working in association with local leaders, artists, artisans, designers, and nonprofits, each project recognizes and strengthens cultural, artistic, and aesthetic imprints of place.
We welcome the opportunity to share with you additional information about the studio and our projects. If you are interested in learning more about Fellowship Opportunities for creatives seeking to extend their talent and deepen their craft, or our Acknowledgment of outstanding creativity in neighborhood development expressed in spaces that are original and inspiring, please be in touch.
@artforcedesign
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