No Place Like Home

Architecture is chic. Head lice isn't. But, as Deborah Gans and Matthew Jelacic have discovered, the two are more connected than you might think.

The New York architects do take on traditional assignments, but they spend the bulk of their time on fringier work: housing units for refugees and the homeless and cutting-edge desks for kids. And when your clients are on the fringe, sometimes you have to address pretty unchic issues.

While designing the desks, Gans and Jelacic learned that the preponderance of head lice meant that teachers had to keep students' coats in sealed bags -- so they gave the desks individual coat hooks. "It's gross," Jelacic says. "But there it is."

The architects' latest unfashionable enterprise is the television -- or, more specifically, trying to allow for TVs in the refugee-housing plans by providing tarps with a photovoltaic laminate. "All over the world, the one thing that everybody wants, no matter how little they have, is a television," says Jelacic. "It's amazing how consistent that is."

While Gans's and Jelacic's highest priority is to give their clients what they want and need, the architects emphasize that they're still far from indifferent to issues of style.

"In a certain way, we're arrogant, because we figure we'll just do our work so well that it won't matter whether we're chic or not," says Gans. "If we do it well enough, it will become chic."