This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media.

Almost two years ago, the married artists April Gornik, 67, and Eric Fischl, 72, bought a deconsecrated white clapboard church in Sag Harbor, N.Y., a former whaling village on the East End of Long Island, where they have lived for more than three decades. Inspired by its stone foundation, rare in an area with mostly sandy soil, and the craftsmanship of its soaring rafters, the couple were loath to see yet another local building become an opulent private home.

Eager to draw upon Sag Harbor’s history — the village is home to a vibrant and longstanding African-American community and Long Island’s first synagogue, and is a haven for artists and writers — Ms. Gornik and Mr. Fischl have transformed the church into a community arts center and artists’ residency.

The conversion of the Sag Harbor United Methodist Church has been a labor of love for the couple, who sold their lofts in SoHo to raise money for the project. It is also the latest and most ambitious of their arts-related initiatives in the area. For the Sag Harbor Partnership, Ms. Gornik has already researched a number of walking-tour apps, one featuring the local cemetery, where Elaine Stritch, George Balanchine and E.L. Doctorow were laid to rest.

And when the Sag Harbor Cinema burned down in December 2016, the couple led the campaign to buy and rebuild it. The new state-of-the-art cinema replicates the original’s Art Deco facade and neon sign. It will open to the public once gatherings are again deemed safe.

The Church — as the new center is known — is a valentine to bygone eras, when Herman Melville haunted the town’s docks and local bars; John Steinbeck relaxed by a wood-burning fire in Harbor Cove with his dog, Charley; Langston Hughes read poems aloud on a friend’s porch; and the sculptor and performance artist Gordon Matta-Clark inhaled fragrant breezes in his mother’s garden. It represents the couple’s effort to restore Sag Harbor as a beacon for all artists.

Following are excerpts from an interview with the couple in their home in January. They have been edited and condensed.

Let’s start with a brief history of the Church.

APRIL GORNIK It was built in 1832 as a Methodist church, and it was originally located on High Street, way up top of a hill that overlooked Sag Harbor. It was moved down to its present location on 48 Madison Street in 1864.

ERIC FISCHL It was deconsecrated about a dozen years ago and bought by a developer, who wanted to turn it into condominiums. When that didn’t work out, an interior designer tried to use it as a studio and a showroom for her hand-painted wallpaper and design products. She found out very quickly that the building was severely compromised due to age — apparently, the tower leaned six degrees out into the street. Then somebody came along and put lots of money into reinforcing the structure, expecting to turn it into a luxury home. But unfortunately, he and his wife broke up and he no longer had a use for his dream home. So it went back on the market.

What was your first impression when you saw it?

FISCHL On the ground floor, when I walked in, I saw these 11-foot stone walls with windows in them. My first thought was, “This is amazing!” The stones were fantastic. And there was this wonderful combination of openness and weight. The ceiling was covered, and the upstairs was full of scaffolding, so for a while you couldn’t tell how incredible the rafters were, but you could sense the bones were beautifully put together. The craftsmanship back then was remarkable. The 50-foot roof beams were hand hewn.

GORNIK It’s really amazing to see it all opened up. At the very top, there are two giant joists initialed by workers from 1864.

FISCHL One of the reasons Sag Harbor became a shipbuilding town was because there were forests of 100-foot white pines here, and white pine grows straight. So for masts, they were ideal.

GORNIK True to form, people decimated them. Decimated and didn’t replant.

So you basically bought a shell?

FISCHL With some wonderful structural integrity to it. And that became a goal of our design: to see the structure as the finished product. Our architect, Lee Skolnick, refers to this type of job as archaeological architecture.

How did you go about choosing an architect?

GORNIK In 1985, we bought our first home here, a little farmhouse on Harrison Street. A year or so later, we were looking for someone to renovate it. The artist Susan Rothenberg, who then had a place on Burke Street, said, “Oh, you should use my architect, he’s really great. He lets you draw on all of his drawings.”

FISCHL That was Lee. Since then we’ve used his firm for numerous projects.

GORNIK Including this house. Lee has also worked on a number of public spaces. He’s been wonderfully generous in contributing most of his fees.

FISCHL We’re all acting in good faith, which seems perfect for a project in a church.

So, it’s just the two of you funding it?

GORNIK Right now, yes, but we’re establishing a new 501(c)3 — a kind of public charity, which means that donations are tax deductible, and the money goes to the programming and operations moving forward. The plan is to finish construction and open as soon as safety and public health allow it.

Why do you see Sag Harbor as a good fit for a community center of this kind?

FISCHL When the cinema was being rebuilt, one thing that was so inspiring to me was that, of the $8 million raised for the purchase price, a million of that came from small donations, which meant that the base for this effort was broad and popular. The Sag Harbor cinema represented part of the identity of the town. And that got me thinking. If you have the cinema bringing in all kinds of interesting films, and doing educational programming, there’s an opportunity to reinforce that with other cultural programs elsewhere.

GORNIK If you do a little research into Sag Harbor, you come across these wild stories about how resilient the town is, and how people didn’t give up after fires and floods and blizzards and the collapse of whole economies.

FISCHL It’s a small town that has impacted the larger world. That’s in the DNA of this place. There’s always been an arts culture here because the town is, on some level, inherently cosmopolitan.

Did you weigh in with the public about your plans?

FISCHL I organized two panels to talk about various aspects of the art ecosystem in this area. They weren’t specifically about the Church. They were co-sponsored by Guild Hall and the Church.

GORNIK Eric said, “We have to stop thinking about art as art. We have to start thinking about how the Church can bring creativity to the community on a larger scale.”

FISCHL With art, everyone thinks if they can’t draw a straight line then they’re not an artist. Our feeling is that art happens way down the road, but there’s a lot in between that is stimulating and enriching, individually and collectively. We’re hoping to do a combination of programming that is based on creativity exercises and activities. We’re going to do exhibitions, conferences, lectures, demonstrations. We also see residents adding a level of stimulation to the artists’ community out here, and creating an energy for the town.

How much space have you set aside for the artists’ residency?

FISCHL There are four residences in back, plus a small kitchen and a dining area. And four studios.

As artists yourselves, what do you consider fundamental to include in an artist’s studio?

FISCHL I actually don’t know what other artists need. What I’ve found is that every artist has a different practice. We don’t know what medium the residents will be working in, whether they’ll be a composer, or a visual artist, etc. What we’re trying to do is create flexible work spaces. There will be movable walls, so you can expand or shrink the space, and plenty of outlets for computers and different kinds of lighting or power equipment or whatever might be needed. To a large extent, we’re still in the “build it, and they will come” stage.

How will you go about picking the residents?

FISCHL We are not going to do it by application. We are going to seek out recommenders who will find people in their various fields, and we will ask them if they’d like to come. It is still very much in the discussion phase.

GORNIK The bottom floor just feels like an incubator to me. It feels like the right place to do any creative act. Then there’s a mezzanine off which there will be a small library.

FISCHL The building used to be a meeting place for Alcoholics Anonymous.

GORNIK And the Rainbow School, a very popular local preschool, used to be there.

FISCHL So it has all of that energy still in it, an energy that has served people in need. And I think that’s the nature of a church, anyway.

This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media.

When Heather Kane was scouring her favorite London neighborhoods two years ago searching for an apartment to buy, she discovered a promising candidate on the first floor of an 18th-century townhouse on Harley Street, in the Marylebone area of the city center.

“I loved it,” recalled Ms. Kane, a 42-year-old technology executive turned design entrepreneur, who was born in Los Angeles and has lived in London since 2015. “Most of the apartments I’d seen had beautiful, original facades but were too pared back inside. This one was huge with high windows and ceilings, original plaster moldings, and an amazing terrace.

“I love London’s historic architecture and wanted to preserve as much of the period detailing as possible. I thought it would be an easy conversion, but it turned out to be 10 times harder than anything I’d done before.”

The cause of her difficulties was Britain’s labyrinthine architectural conservation system, which ensures that any changes to a building deemed to be of historic importance, like the Harley Street townhouse, must be approved by the local planning department. Ms. Kane’s home is in the City of Westminster, which includes some of London’s finest historical buildings, but whose planners are famed for their strictness and for having very particular opinions on what constitutes acceptable — and unacceptable —— architectural interventions.

Translating such a building into a comfortable, functional contemporary home is almost always intensely subjective and potentially contentious. One person’s interpretation of sensitive restoration can be another’s idea of architectural carnage, while a third might regard it as too timid. As Ms. Kane admitted, one of her challenges in navigating British conservation politics was having no knowledge of the planning system. Another problem was the difficulty of translating her needs and wishes into something that Westminster’s planners would approve.

Like much of Marylebone, Harley Street originated as a speculative development by the Portland Estate, owned by the Duke of Portland, whose wife inherited most of the land between what are now Oxford Street and Marylebone Road, in 1741. Harley Street’s construction began in the 1750s, and the house containing Ms. Kane’s apartment was designed and built from 1773 to 1774 by one of the estate’s surveyors, John White, and Thomas Collins, a sought-after ornamental plasterer.

Grander houses were built nearby at that time — notably those designed by the Scottish architects Robert and James Adam on Mansfield Street — but the delicately rendered cherubs in Collins’s plasterwork would have been enough to distinguish this one. His renown may also explain why several of his ornate panels survived nearly 250 years of construction, including the house’s conversion in 1949 into flats. Collins’s skill also contributed to the entire house’s being given a Grade 2 listing, which is awarded to a building “of special interest, warranting every effort to preserve it,” in 1987.

Like many London apartments of similar vintage, Ms. Kane’s two-bedroom, first-floor flat combined some original elements with a motley assortment of additions dating from the early and mid-1800s, early 1900s, the 1949 conversion, and subsequent makeovers. Westminster’s planners insisted that all of those features be preserved and that any adjacent work match them. Ms. Kane was happy with that, but not with the planners’ response to her request for what she thought were modest changes to make her new home “more livable,” as she put it.

When she bought the apartment, Ms. Kane contacted Red Deer, a group of young architects who had designed the interior of one of her favorite London restaurants, Bourne & Hollingsworth Buildings in Clerkenwell. “It has a tumbledown historic feel, a little bit deconstructed, and I wanted a similar aesthetic,” she explained.

Together with Red Deer’s co-founder, Lionel Real de Azúa, she formulated a proposal to restore Collins’s panels and other historic detailing, while modifying the apartment’s layout, principally by relocating the kitchen to create a large open-plan space for entertaining, eating and cooking, and reconfiguring other areas to accommodate two bathrooms, rather than one. They also hoped to improve the insulation by installing thicker glass in the windows and an additional layer of floorboards and asked Westminster’s planners for permission to proceed.

“They came back with ‘no,’ without explaining why,” Ms. Kane said. “I ended up hiring a lawyer, and three sets of heritage experts. As soon as the third one, Kit Wedd of Spurstone Heritage, came in, things were smoothed out. Kit was an angel. If we’d had her in the beginning, I’d have got nine months of my life back.”

Even so, some of their proposals were rejected. The changes to the layout were approved, but not the thicker glass and floors. Ms. Wedd also worked with Red Deer to identify which aspects of the interior were authentic. “There had been so much work on the building that it would be very hard to distill it into a particular style,” said Mr. Real de Azúa. “The floor was a hodgepodge of pine, Douglas fir, oak and plywood. We discovered that the Douglas fir boards were original, so we found new boards to match and stripped everything else out.”

Similar principles were applied to the fireplaces, ceiling moldings and joinery. Some areas were so damaged that Red Deer had to improvise, for example by painting part of the guest bedroom wall gray to disguise the repaired plaster. As Ms. Kane is an avid collector of art and furniture with eclectic taste, they chose a palette of white, black and gray to create a neutral backdrop for her auction and flea market finds from different periods and cultures. She then created clusters of favorite pieces throughout the apartment, such as a 1956 Charles and Ray Eames lounge chair placed near a 19th-century landscape painting and an antique rug from Frances Loom, a vintage furniture company she co-owns, in the living area.

“I enjoy picking up things I like and mixing them up,” Ms. Kane said. “I loved doing that for the apartment, and I love living here. But I wouldn’t buy a listed building ever again.”

This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about crossing the borders of space, time and media.

Back to the Ether

Sight Unseen’s latest design show takes place where it all began.

Nearly every May since 2010 the online design magazine Sight Unseen has held an exhibition in New York presenting the work of up-and-coming creators. The event has always been scheduled to coincide with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair and thus take advantage of all the retail buyers and interior designers in the city at that time. This year, of course, the coronavirus upended everyone’s plans.

“For us, it was a no-brainer,” said Monica Khemsurov, who co-founded the site with Jill Singer.

To promote sales, the partners set up a digital storefront on 1stdibs where some of the new furniture, lighting and rugs can be bought. And though you can’t meet the designers face-to-face this year you can at least hear them — on audio clips in which the designers talk about their new wares.

They talk to each other, too. In an afternoon series on Instagram Live — 2 p.m. daily the first week of June — exhibitors compare notes. On June 1 catch Kalen Kaminski (of Upstate) and Leah Ring (Another Human) discussing their recent forays into glasswork. The next day Brett Miller (Jack Rabbit Studio) and Christopher Norman ponder contemporary woodworking — a big trend this year. And on June 5 Mike Ruiz-Serra (Serra Studio) and Hannah Bigeleisen share the thrills of experimenting with paper pulp. Sightunseen.com

Ravaged Beauty for Your Home

A new wall covering creates an instant look of disaster.

Shuttered businesses, job losses and relationships under duress — the world may seem to be falling apart as a result of the coronavirus. Turns out there’s a wallpaper for that.

The artist Daniel Arsham, a co-founder of the design studio Snarkitecture, has collaborated with Calico Wallpaper on a trompe l’oeil wall covering that will make a room look like it is crumbing away.

“Erosions” is based on a mural Mr. Arsham and Calico created for a gallery show in 2018. To achieve it, the artist made castings of eroded surfaces; then the company used a scanning process to digitize the works. Gallery goers loved the one-off piece, and now Calico is printing the design on clay-coated paper for use in residences.

While the wall covering appears to depict wreckage, it may have a hopeful message: The faux gouges contain crystals, “which we associate with growth,” said Mr. Arsham, speaking from his weekend house on Long Island where he has hunkered down with his wife and children.

“There’s an ambiguity,” he added. “Are things falling apart or are they growing to some kind of completion?” calicowallpaper.com. $28 a square foot.

Pull Up a Seat, and a Frequency

A prototype chair may have a future in telecommunications.

When the conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll carried a low chair with a pole back and outstretched arms to Hudson River Park in New York for a photo shoot recently, a passer-by asked, “Is it a piece of sculpture?”

In fact, her Tower Chair is a provocation — about control of digital air space; it is also the prototype for a design she said she believed could one day be put into production, yielding seats that double as hot spots.

The chair, part of a broader inquiry named Public Utility 2.0, evolved from a commissioned work for a contemporary art exhibition in 2013. With that project, Ms. Carroll — whose art touches on technology and public policy — sought to educate people about the idle radio frequencies of old television channels and how they could be put to use connecting underserved communities.

“It’s public space,” she said, speaking of the invisible but mapped properties, which can host a variety of transmissions. “It should be utilized for the public good.”

Her three-leg chair, fittingly, has a form that evokes telephone towers, which support wiring for remote communications. It is made of solid wood and slicked with rubber paint applied in an auto body shop.

But when the chair is put into production, Ms. Carroll, the founder of MEC, studios, envisions hollow parts that could house wiring for receiving and transmitting signals. Thus equipped, a seat could become a piece of portable infrastructure enabling someone in a Wi-Fi desert to log on while lounging.

Light in the Middle of the Tunnel

Can a lamp help relieve the gloom of the pandemic?

If the lockdown has you bored with your décor, maybe your lamps just aren’t working hard enough. The Space Table Lamp, designed by Ward Wijnant, functions as a fun-house mirror, reflecting and distorting its surroundings — and that’s when it’s off. When the thing is on, it flashes disco lights. Is it a lamp? A piece of kinetic sculpture? “It’s something in between,” said Mr. Wijnant, speaking by phone from his home in the Netherlands.

Stainless-steel clips hold together the arched pieces of plexiglass that make the lamp’s sides. Those silvery panels turn translucent when the light is switched on, revealing the bulbs within.

The Space Table Lamp belongs in that strange universe of objects — like mood rings and lava lamps — whose fascination lies in the way they change based on our interaction with them. In these terrible times, the design is “a release of joy,” Mr. Wijnant said.

It is not, however, a functional lamp that sheds light the way ordinary fixtures do. Don’t expect to read a book by it. $1,569, moooi.com

Getting Into Hot Water

A tabletop collection grows out of a cuppa.

Four years ago, Michael McManus and Matthew Grant were post-college housemates in London when they began kicking around the idea of renting a studio and making something with their hands. Mr. McManus had studied fine art, Mr. Grant had a degree in architecture, and both were intrigued with the possibilities of forms based on the ancient art of origami.

Now they have a collection of vases, coasters and planters that embody the tension between the fragility of folded paper and the solidity of functional objects. Their wares also incorporate a surprising ingredient: the soggy remains of tea bags.

A commitment to making sustainable products led the partners to explore adding food waste to the nontoxic gypsum-based binder they use to cast their designs. They tried crushed eggshells, coffee grounds and fruit peelings before hitting on something in abundance in their country of tea drinkers.

“One of the reasons we settled on tea is that it has an aesthetic quality we like,” Mr. McManus said. “The natural pigments come through.”

Chamomile yields off-white, peppermint blue-green and rooibos ochre.

The partners collect tea bags from cafes, dry the leaves in a dehydrator, then crush them before adding to the binder. The process informed the name of their endeavor: Dust London.

“A lot of what we are experimenting with,” Mr. Grant said, “is taking a material that had been used and breaking it down and finding a way to reuse it and make it beautiful again.”