Stories by name

The houses photographed in design and lifestyle magazines are all kitsch. Even when they are minimal, essential, of a measured modernity, of a refined simplicity. Even when they present sets of furniture and objects, books and ornaments, works of art and plants, perfect, without flaw, without excess, without errors of taste. Since the mid-19th century,...

Visiting the French architect Jean Renaudie’s social housing blocks in Ivry sur Seine in the suburbs of Paris reminded me of one of my favourite movies, My Dinner with Andre by Louis Malle, where one of the leading characters talks about breaking free of the habits of mechanical, automatic living: ‘But, Wally, don’t you see...

Friends of mine, a couple and their daughter, Ulrike, Bernd and Luzy, invited me and some other friends to stay for some days in their country house in Herrenstein, a small village 94km north of Berlin, which they bought about two years ago and which they would fix carefully up step by step. We arrived at the house in...

Finding an apartment in New York is awful. I wonder if trying to rent a place in other cities is as unpleasant? Maybe. Could it be even worse? Perhaps. But how? If you were trying to develop a system that deprives the body of sleep, causes dormant neuroses to rise like weeds, and engenders distrust...

Los Angeles: The painter Henry Taylor was in Tokyo in the middle of March for his solo art show ‘Here and There’ at Blum & Poe, Tokyo. He arrived from Los Angeles just two days before the interview. And, of course, he was jet-lagged. We decided to move outside to get some fresh air, away...

Seoul: Hong Seung-Hye, a Seoul native born in 1959, has built a world of irony. Within that world, we find something deeply gentle yet firm, sentimental yet cold, playful yet serious, chaotic yet orderly—brazen amateurism side by side with the bold abstract spirit of modernism. Her best-known work, the ‘Organic Geometry’ series begun in 1997, endlessly...

I wrote you a letter while we were in Amsterdam. I was sitting beside you at the desk we shared below our lofted bed. I was thinking of the excitement we both had about coming here, living with each other and spending time in these new places together. I thought about the beds, couches and...

There are three choices to be made when leaving: what to take, what not to take, and what can’t be taken at all. Of course, this last one is not actually a decision. This last one refers to immovable things: parks, houses, beaches, rooms, bridges, vistas and so on. Structures and spaces are heavy in...

Every night I save the water from my daughter’s bath and carry it bucket by bucket to the backyard, where I transfer it into a watering can and do my best to soak our lawn. The lawn is dead, but I am certain that this bath water will bring it back to life eventually. As...

Poetry by Arielle Holmes Arielle is a force of nature. Like gasoline to a match, she explodes stereotypes along her path as she goes. Androgynous, yet feminine, vulnerable yet deeply badass and down to earth, Arielle is a latter-day Eve, a contemporary version of our mother: the curious one, who got a very bad rap...

I may be stating the obvious here, but in my house, as a general rule, we sleep in the bedroom, wash up in the bathroom, cook food in the kitchen and so on. As with most rules there are exceptions, of course. On special occasions we get to have cookies and juice in bed; on...