Stories by name

A home is constructed with tools and building materials. ‘Home’ is also a construct, an idea or image we make in our minds. My home is not just the structure in which I live. It is the architecture of my life; everything that makes my life possible and joyful. This means living, working, and playing...

Alpha misfits inspire me most. I love the story of a confident outcast who didn’t fit into the life they were born into. Their biological families may not have seen value in their creativity, desires, or vision. This just made them more determined to make their own place in the world—sometimes at great personal cost....

Posadas: As the rest of Spain starts flirting with autumn, the southern region of Andalusia isn’t ready to leave behind the scorching temperatures. We’re in the birthplace of flamenco, a land full of bullfighting aficionados, traditional fairs, and religious processions. In-between this rooted folklore and liturgy is where Alejandro Palomo has kept challenging assumptions defining menswear...

London: It’s been almost a year since I’ve seen Ángela in person and two since I’ve spent a lot of time in London. It feels weird, having lived there for so many years and travelled there so often. But Covid and Brexit have built a wall that physically separates us and many other people. Ángela was...

Gurugram: I was born and raised in Barking, East London, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, first generation born to my immigrant Sikh parents, who emigrated from farming villages close to Chandigarh, Punjab, to make a new life in the UK. Growing up, there were not many references for my family in mainstream media; it was easy...

Elgorriaga: I first met Álvaro in the Guggenheim cafeteria in Bilbao. He was meeting with a friend of mine, who promised I’d be very glad to know him. Álvaro was wearing an impeccable white cashmere Gucci coat from the ‘80s or ‘90s—on a rainy day. A tall, good-looking, bearded guy, his presence was incredible. I was...

New York City: Ice-pop red and blue and Halloween-orange six-inch-high tapered torsos merging into outrageously demonstrative faces, Alice Mackler’s sculpted clay portraits, with their scarred, furrowed, and lumpily textured surfaces, are alternately distorted, grotesque, totem-like, and irrefutably endearing. Blow-up-doll mouths and huge peepers, drooping boobs, all curves and contrapposto, self-possessed, and at times appearing confrontational or...

When one faces a conversation with Álvaro Siza (Matosinhos, Portugal, 1933) it’s hard to think up questions that haven’t already been formulated hundreds of times in previous interviews. His first built project, four houses in his native city, happened 68 years ago. Since then, he hasn’t stopped doing architecture projects, building whenever the right circumstances...

Siwa Oasis: I remember the first time I went to Siwa back in 1998: my son Miles was two years old and my father had been speaking to me about Mounir and his extraordinary initiative for I don’t know how long. After a day’s drive, I recall arriving in the pitch-black night with only bonfires and...

A piece of land overlooking the sea, southwest towards Corsica, and a small shelter—that’s what I bought nearly 50 years ago. Without knowing it, I was embarking on an adventure where thoughts, dreams, projects, notes, drawings, materials, students, and friends would converge on this micro-island of mine. The place was totally wild when I found it,...

New York City: In an old factory on Broadway and 12th Street, wedged between The Strand and Grace Church, you’ll find a Halloween store—the kind of store that defined a ‘90s-era NYC, one that supported hyper-specialised shops that knew their audience and could depend on it for survival. It’s a version of NY many hope...

Tucson: A lanky, rakish figure regularly seen riding around Tucson on various two-wheeled motorised machines accompanied by Jake, his faithful 15-year-old Chihuahua, Alex Streeter is a renowned jewellery designer, world traveller, and outstanding raconteur whose stories manage to beggar belief while being firmly rooted in fact. From seeing Roy Rogers at Madison Square Garden as...

Valvignères: Our last morning in Valvignères, Anders dropped us a pin; it was a while after they’d got there already, but at the time we were still schlepping around the breakfast table. Business and pleasure were starting to blur. We threw our bags in the car and eventually located the ranks of Ardèche natural winemakers...

Milan: Andrea Branzi is an architect, designer, and theorist, a giant of ‘the project’ whose work is based on research and experimentation. His is a complex anthropological vision that, from the outset, has been nourished by ideas that go far beyond the traditional discipline of design, moving between philosophy, economics, art, music, and literature, but...

Possible architectures Anne Holtrop (1977, the Netherlands) has a unique approach to architecture that has always caught our attention. His work starts from shapes, or material gestures, that don’t usually come from the world of architecture. He examines this material, trying to look at it with other eyes, as someone who can see a butterfly...

Going home New York City: On a quiet street in lower Manhattan, Alex Wiederin, creative director and founder of Buero New York, has carved a home out of a former maze of a loft. The airy, plush space exhibits the type of domestic atmosphere reserved for the trans-Atlantic, New York-by-way-of-Europe creative types seen often in New...

Joshua Tree, California: The artist Andrea Zittel lives in the desert in Joshua Tree, California, with a trio of dogs (Maggie Peppercorn, Mona Winona, Owlette), a pair of cats (Mood Cloud, Stripy Tiger Wolf), assorted fish, a burgeoning family of rescue tortoises, and her son, Emmett. She started out, in 2000, with a five-acre parcel...

Barcelona: Life starts with food. When we are born, everything is blood and milk, he says. Nourishment is a crucial part of the growing process, but for the Spanish artist Antoni Miralda, food is a lot more than just mere fuel. His work talks about the symbology of a piece of meat, a loaf of bread,...

Paula’s Ibiza Ibiza: Last summer in Ibiza, while in the house of my friend Grillo Demo, I set my eyes on the colourful fabric of his kitchen curtains. ‘Ah, that’s from Paula’s’, he said. By pulling some strings I came to meet Armin. He lives in an old farmhouse in the mountains of Santa Inés. Access...

Milan: Alessandro Mendini is the idiosyncratic, devilish, prismatic Marcel Proust of design—a living legend who’s played a crucial role in so many important adventures of Italian and international design, including the Alchimia and Memphis movements. Memphis was not only one of the most influential design experiences of all time, but an entrepreneurial adventure, a communication...

In Berlin Berlin: Few people live out the maxim ‘the personal is political’ as completely as AA Bronson, whose art, life, and politics have always merged into one. Fearless, and transgressive best describe General Idea, the ground-breaking collective formed in 1969 by Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal. Together they brought the then unspoken topics of...

I’ve always had a soft spot for the words Charles Dickens wrote in 1859: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.’ And so now might be the time for a humble forewarning, as my version of ‘A Tale of...

I work and sleep in Cambridge, England for what has come to be about six months of the year, but I don’t live there. It is becoming increasingly unclear where it is that I do live, however, and I find the question distressing enough to have left the ‘lives in’ section of my Facebook profile...

It felt odd getting the assignment to write for Apartamento about Mati Klarwein, the man who once said, ‘The world is my apartment, and its cultures, the furniture’. Which is a pretty cool way to say he never had an apartment. Or even the bare intention of owning one. For most of his life, Mati...

A train is rolling by outside. It’s very quiet here after dark. I’m lying on tatami mats, with the window open in a old wooden house in East Tokyo. Out there in the dark, small houses made from old wood and corrugated iron crowd around, and in the distance, the apartment blocks, built with deep...

A true love Milan: If the birth and subsequent explosion of Italian design in the second half of the last century is the stuff of history; if in that period, in only a few short years, the hand of the designer (they called themselves architects then) began, in tandem with industrial production, to cut a clear...

I sit on the terrace and look out over the roofs of Bosa in Sardinia. On the floor I see the purple leaves of the Bougainvillea, and apart from their soft rustling, it’s very quiet. It’s always very quiet in Italy during the ‘siesta’ time. I’ve known this house for half of my life. It...

Browsing through Marlene Acayaba’s book Residências em São Paulo: 1947-1975, we came across quite a surprise on the closing pages. The book centres on classic works by the Paulist School from the second half of the 20th century and explores their own interpretation of the Modern Movement in relation to concrete. At the end we...

The Anthroposophic colony in Dornach/Switzerland Driving from the Swiss town of Basel to the small neighbouring city of Dornach is a strange experience. You leave the speedy Swiss metropolis and dive into a strangely quiet and meditative surrounding, with people dressed in pastel colours, smiling at every stranger. They live in a kind of colony consisting...

Buying a piece of furniture is a commitment that goes beyond the simple idea of decorating your own place. That’s why we asked New York based editor Ken Miller to sit down at the Tribeca gallery Mondo Cane, with its owner, antiques dealer and blogger Patrick Parrish, interior and furniture designer Rafael de Cardenas and Phillips de Pury’s Director...

At the start of November I left a dark apartment in Berlin, storing a lifetime’s accumulation of clutter in the cellar of an artists’ studio complex, and moved to an industrial neighbourhood of Osaka. The stark, bright, steep-staired box in which I now sit is virtually empty, and that emptiness is, to be honest, exactly...

Spherical, and elongated. Bruised. A mixture of colours: black, white, purple, green, yellow or red depending on the variety. Smooth and shiny skin and, on the inside, white or green with a thick, sponge-like texture and soft small seeds. Its taste is delicate with a touch of bitterness. AUBERGINE MARMALADE Ingredients 600g aubergines, 400g brown...

Displace all things Tokyo: Atsuki Kikuchi was born in Japan in 1974. He is a graphic designer, art director, and curator who works in Tokyo. He lives with his wife Izumi Shiokawa, a successful illustrator, in a Western-style home in a West Tokyo suburb. Western-style means high ceilings, two bathrooms and a lot of space where,...

Biebrza National Park in north-eastern Poland is a land predominantly known for its marshes and forests. Late May is the busiest period here, because that’s when the bird watchers come, all wanting to catch that rare glimpse of a White-backed Woodpecker, a Greater Spotted Eagle or an Eagle Owl. Travelling through the park by car,...

Barcelona: Amèlia Riera lived right in the centre of Barcelona, in a majestic building in Plaça de Catalunya that used to house well-off families, but nowadays is used as office space for several international companies. Despite the bustle of the offices that went on to occupy every floor, Amèlia’s apartment, with its enormous rooms, high...

It is said that there are magnetic cores of the earth, and similarly, in every story there also appears to be a vital centre. Houses, corners, a bench, the fifth floor of an office building, a bar, the road back home, a boat, a table in a café… Anonymous corners of a street, places you...

In the early ‘70s, Oscar Tusquets Blanca (Barcelona, 1941) and Lluís Clotet (Barcelona, 1941), two complex personalities who were then part of Studio Per, took on the task of designing and building a home on the Italian island of Pantelleria, situated 100km southwest of Sicily. In response to our request, Tusquets agreed to meet us...

Austin: Andy Coolquitt started working on his house in Austin when he was in graduate school at the University of Texas. Thirty years later, it’s still very much a work in progress. But life, as we all know, is nothing if not a work in progress. And as an artist, you could say that life...

This is the story of a family place. Something which the Chilean architect Smiljan Radic has built along with his wife, the sculptor Marcela Correa. It began as a half-hectare plot, which has expanded to one of over five hectares, and now hosts an oak forest and is blanketed almost entirely by golden brown leaves....

On life & cookbooks London: When I started researching for my imminent interview with Anissa Helou, it seemed obvious that the story would be mainly about cooking. After all, she’s an expert on Middle Eastern and Northern African food, one who has written several well awarded books on the subjects. As well as that I knew...

A conversation chaired by Madeleine Willis Food, as a product, is tied to identity, status, notions of luxury and hedonism. It’s also a basic human need and deeply implicated in the environmental concerns shaping our future. In celebration it can bring us together, but as an everyday, concrete expression of our cultural values, we’re fragmented...

Tudor village in a warehouse New York City: On the outskirts of Brooklyn you find a world of enormous factory buildings, which some old timers refer to as the East Williamsburg Industrial Park. There is a handful of companies here still in operation but most buildings have far out lived their original use. The streets...

New York City: At the Apartamento headquarters, Dominique Nabokov’s images have been a source of reference forever. Her photographs of empty living rooms, devoid of the usual trappings of an interior photograph, have become the stuff of legends around here. Her Paris Living Rooms and New York Living Rooms have no flowers added by the stylist,...

The discreet Language of Living Rooms Annette Merrild photographed the living rooms of numerous middle-class apartments in Hamburg, New York, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Warsaw, Manchester, Tallinn, Istanbul and Lyon. She also penned some travel diary texts. The result: The Room Project, a work that draws upon our curiosity for others’ houses and that primal need to...

In April 2008, we set off for Tangier. The initial plan was to stay there for one year. I knew nothing about the city, but Ramdane had a good feeling that we would be happy there. One evening in June, together with Noor, I visited the family home, already being built, for the first time....

One greyish, delicately plain, and nuanced Wednesday afternoon, Mieke and I sit in what I believe to be Antwerp-based artist Guy Rombouts’ studio. Or kitchen, or dining room, or living room—it’s a bit unclear. It’s a broad space on the ground floor of two stately, early 20th-century town houses that were once joined, buildings that...

Through the trees Mae Rim: Although his production studio Kick the Machine keeps its offices in Bangkok, Apichatpong Weerasethakul lives in rural Mae Rim, Thailand, a half-hour drive from the quaint but vibrant northern city of Chiang Mai. Apichatpong—‘Joe’ to his friends—has steadily earned a level of international acclaim for his unusual, seductive films, including Tropical...

Archival material courtesy of The Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura In the 1960s Ricardo Bofill set up the Taller de Arquitectura (Architecture Workshop) by bringing together a multidisciplinary group of architects, engineers, sociologists and philosophers to create the basis for what would become his career. After several residential projects, the Taller de Arquitectura set out...

In 1970, a writer working for the popular culture magazine Zygote visited the ‘Loft’, an experiment in alternative urban living in New York City. The article he would go on to write describes a group of 27 men and women (presumably all were adults; there is no mention of any children, although he does refer...

tutti frutti – interview It’s not hard to wash a salad! When Michelle Obama was photographed on the White House lawn, digging into her brand-new organic garden, it was Alice Waters who felt the triumph. Waters, who has been seen as everything from the mother of American cooking to the creator of California cuisine, has been...

Placed into abyss New York/Paris: Études is a Paris and New York-based think tank composed of Jérémie Egry, Aurélien Arbet, and the numerous others that gravitate around the project. As a creative studio, they have been designing and producing a menswear collection and publishing artist books since 2012. A clear conceptual methodology unites all their different...

My house is more than a house, it’s my temple, my place to think, to hide, to create, to love. I’m always travelling, now I’m in Mexico, tomorrow I’ll be in Spain, and then Argentina. But when I come home, I always feel like I’m recharging a part of me. I meet me again, I...

Loving the living room Manker: Imagine a big, stylish lounge with warm-hued walls covered with large-scale paintings, pedestals with sculptures, sleek armchairs and sofas. I could have been talking about any elegant living room, but this is actually the work of the German artist Anton Henning. Discovering his installations, for which much thanks goes to a...

‘What year is that?’, a man in an adjacent car asked through his window and into mine. Before the lights changed I answered, ‘2011,’ and then pulled off. In traffic, the neighbours are always changing, which provides plenty of people watching and some unexpected conversations. People in L.A. spend as much thought and energy choosing...

Minneapolis: The artist Alec Soth is profoundly interesting. The human being Alec Soth is perhaps even more so. He recently shared with me the reasoning behind his propensity to occasionally wear comically bright yellow sneakers: ‘On days when I don’t want people to look at my face, I put these on so they look at...

Images from the archive of Dante Bini On the afternoon of July 14, 1964, a young reporter was driving from Bologna to Crespellano to cover a beauty contest. On his way home around midnight, he saw a UFO-like grey mass nearly six metres high on the side of the road. He had no idea what...

Annabelle reminds me of a contemporary version of Doris Day, in a romantic comedy. Her apartment; small and cheery in its decor, is a nook in the sky. It’s like a small boat that’s been cast optimistically out to sea: the vantage point is just a sliver of a view of the Hudson river, sandwiched...

On Telegraph Hill we would spend hours over the eccentricities of their home. Childlike, I would eagerly climb the spiral metal staircase that brought me to the second floor. What spectacle waited for me evoked such curiosity that I often find myself, years later, referencing that familiar feeling of awe. We all have those particular locations...

A few years ago we found our home abroad. A place on a hill in the south of Mallorca. A simple architectural block, pure and essential. The perfect retreat with a magic view into the valley. Only sky above. We love to spend the summer there. Always July and August, the time when our kids have...

Los Angeles: Passionate, lively, comedic, and deep. Those are the words that I would use to describe the beautiful actress turned director, Rose McGowan. Rose lives atop the Mount Olympus canyon in a modernist gem that she shares with her fiancé, Cyrcle, artist Davey Detail, and their two small dogs Happy and Sasquatch. Happy, a...

Film stills by Anri Sala Books, magazines, newspapers and other forms of printed matter often become part of a space and truly represent the personality of the individual or group that inhabits it. To furnish something could be described as the act of providing something, most likely a space, with a necessity. It emphasizes the...