PRE-ARCHIVE 001—006
THE SOURCE
The tableau, the research, and the resulting archive.
SLOANEHOME begins with STILL LIFE. At the tableau, objects, materials, books, drawings, and regional references are assembled into temporary compositions. These arrangements are photographed, catalogued, and preserved over time, becoming the basis for interiors, publications, Discovery Boxes, and future physical spaces.
Notice. The archival record supporting this work is protected through thearcadian.org
01.THe SourcE
PRE-ARCHIVE 00-01—00-06
SLOANEHOME is a studio, atelier, and evolving archive devoted to the study, method, and origin of contemporary domestic design. Based in Skaneateles, the practice gathers objects, interiors, and historical reference into a living body of work that treats the home as a cultural stage—where memory, craft, and contemporary life converge.
At the center of the studio is a large working table, understood not simply as furniture but as a tableau: a rotating surface on which objects, materials, and arrangements are composed, tested, and documented over time. From this ground emerge the visual studies, interior compositions, and material discoveries that define the work of SLOANEHOME.
The tableau functions as both laboratory and theater.
It is not a decorative display, but the first stage of a process that leads toward interiors, publications, and physical environments. Each composition is photographed, catalogued, and preserved within the growing SLOANEHOME ARCHIVE—a record of the studio’s evolving research into domestic space, cinematic narrative, and the continuity between analog place and digital form.
02.the Principal
MODERNITY IS ANTIQUITY.
SLOANEHOME is founded on a this CORNERSTONE; Modernity becomes antiquity the instant it is preserved.
In a cultural moment increasingly defined by speed and digital mediation, the human hand regains the authority.
Across the creative disciplines, the atelier re-emerges as the place where objects, interiors, and environments acquire lasting meaning. SLOANEHOME expands upon this lineage, recording the formation of the contemporary interior as it becomes the artifact of its time.
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03. DIscoVERY BOX SERIES
A Documentation Mechanism, with bespoke analog volumes.
The studio records its work through an immersive archival system. The Archival Box Series is a sequence of numbered volumes preserving the materials, studies, and documents from which interiors emerge. Each box gathers the components of an environment—palettes, material samples, drawings, and visual studies—into a single physical record. Part archive, part design study, and part collector artifact, the Archival Box reveals the process through which the studio develops its work.
The series begins with Archival Box 00, the inaugural archive of SLOANEHOME and its founding treatise. The Discovery Box Series introduces the methods of filmic production design, applying character-driven narrative to domestic environments with intent. Each edition exists as both original object and replica simultaneously.
Notice. The archival record supporting this work is protected through thearcadian.org
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04. THE PLACE
The Physical Studio + proposed future.
Within the village of Skaneateles, the Jordan Street Studio seeks to occupy a modest storefront in the historic district, operating as both emporium and adjacent atelier. Visitors first encounter the work through the tableau visible from the street, then through the studies and objects within. Over time, these discoveries extend outward into interiors, publications, and cinematic narratives rooted in place.
SLOANEHOME operates simultaneously as a studio, archive, and cultural experiment in the domestic environment. Through the rotating table, the Archival Box Series, and the Study Editions, the project proposes a contemporary model for how aesthetic knowledge can circulate beyond the digital.
In this way, the work expands gradually from a single table in upstate New York into a broader conversation about place, memory, and the enduring forms of home.
PRE-ARCHIVE 00-04—00-07
The first window “Return to Form,’ highlights historical storefront architectural types as if in their original use: Be it a hardware store, or antiquary, or curiosity cabinet. A time when cultural relevance was time-tested through dignified human interaction and near-theatrical level display.
05.The WINDOW
Our Public Access Point
Virtual window installations provide proof of concept via media until the full manifestation of the Skaneateles Emporium. Each installation is derived directly from the archive and arranged on the studio tableau. Once posted the window ‘stories.’ form a quiet theater that mimics their future as retail display.
Objects that illicit proper intrigue may be available individually, but the larger offering lies in the study itself: the palette, the spatial logic, and the visual language that produced the environment. In this way the window functions as both exhibition and invitation, drawing a following into the process through which the studio develops its work both in analog and digital form.
No. [interlude]
The work begins with place– where the study of architecture, objects, and atmosphere gradually reveal A story that was already there.
Archive Proclamation 01
The Domestic Study Editions
Published Interiors for contemporary audience.
While the Archival Boxes preserve the research behind the studio’s work, SLOANEHOME also translates these discoveries into Domestic Study Editions: authored documents that distill the intellectual structure of an environment. Each study emerges from a specific archive project and contains the material palettes, pattern systems, spatial arrangements, and written observations behind a room.
The studio revives the nineteenth-century tradition of the pattern book, through which designers such as Andrew Jackson Downing distributed architectural ideals to a broader public. Rather than offering objects alone…
SLOANEHOME offers the authored character of an environment.
The archive supporting this practice is maintained through The Arcadian, an independent research project devoted to place, landscape, and cultural memory in the region historically associated with Arcadia, New York. While SLOANEHOME operates as the physical studio and public face of the work, The Arcadian preserves the broader intellectual record behind it.
Research into local architecture, regional materials, historic gardens, and vernacular building traditions informs the environments produced at the table, keeping the work of SLOANEHOME rooted in the landscape from which it emerges.
STORIED INTERIORS
DOMESTIC STUDY
The first interior study emerges from one of the last remaining Gothic Revival picturesque houses in the region designed by the architect Alexander Jackson Davis, whose work, alongside that of A. J. Downing’s helped shape the American domestic imagination of the nineteenth century.
Citation: Alexander Jackson Davis architectural drawings and papers, 1804-1900, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University