Stories by name

I was 27 when I was invited to write for issue #1 of Apartamento. I was very excited about it and my different thoughts blended into a shapeless mass. I thought of writing about my neighbour’s immense Bang & Olufsen square television from the ‘90s and carefully selected collection of Scandinavian mid-century classic objects and...

New York City: Mel Ottenberg is the proud owner of one of Manhattan’s most iconic bedrooms. The all grey, late-70s-inspired sex den has wall-to-wall carpeting over a built-in queen bed located directly in the centre of the room. His closet doors are mirrored in a smoky glass and his ceiling is lacquered ivory. A bold statement,...

Vienna: When I arrive at the home of artist Marina Faust, I’m immediately aware of my location on the Ring in the centre of Vienna. The Burggarten, with its magical Butterfly House, is across the street, the Kunsthistorische Museum is around the corner, and the souvenir shop below sells images of Empress Elisabeth on silk...

Milan: My father, Marco Glaviano, was born and raised in Palermo, Sicily. He became a successful fashion photographer in the ‘80s, working for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, developing a personal body of work that featured many of the supermodels of that period, and, it’s said, ushering in a certain aesthetic that focused on beauty and the...

Cairo: Mounir has the look of those people who know how to be fully present. His beautiful blue eyes have the joy of a child and he always blesses me with answers that contain wisdom and kindness. I remember meeting him after my first visit to his eco lodge Adrere Amellal, meaning ‘the White Mountain’ in...

New York City: Legs folded and with unwavering eye contact, Minjae Kim emits poise and calm. But if you meet his eyes longer than a moment, you see something of a fun frenzy beneath the surface. This frantic, creative energy comes out in his work, which is mostly hand-carved wooden furniture incorporating quilted fibreglass and silky...

Mexico City: I like to think about liminal moments, when radical changes appear in your life, those events that arrive all of a sudden and interrupt the normal flow of things. As Žižek says, ‘That radical intervention after which nothing remains the same’. Most of the time you don’t see these changes coming, they arrive...

I have lived in this space for about a year. I have lived everywhere in Oakland about three times over and this is by far the cheapest place I have ever lived. It’s essentially squatting since it’s an artist space. but I built walls and added a sink and made it pretty nice. I have been...

‘Sometimes I hear their guest toilet flush upstairs’. We are sat in the open-plan living room of Margaret Howell’s almost-seaside second home on the Suffolk coast, which she bought off a school inspector from Croydon in 2002. It’s one of a row of attached houses by Swiss architect Rudy Mock that were built in 1965,...

Slow and steady wins the race New York City: Matt Connors is an artist that splits his time between New York City and Los Angeles, while his work can be found in the collections of MoMA, the Walker Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art, and the Hammer. He has maintained a career that is more aligned...

Making dens, now for real London: Being one of the most genuinely interesting, talented and deserving bands of the contemporary British music scene, Mystery Jets have received, or better yet, haven’t received nearly as much press nor attention as those Myspacer-one-hit-wonders usually get nowadays… And thank the Queen they didn’t! As other bands were quickly coming...

Brazilian Sunshine on the Lower East Side New York City: Brazilian born Marcelo Krasilcic is a passionate man. He loves fun, friends, hosting parties, family, travel, Rio, New York City, interior design, open floor plans, tropical plants, abstract ceramics, colourful pillows, balance, beauty, bodies, sex, his boyfriend, his two cats, yoga, vegetarian cooking, collaborating and...

A theory of evolution I have known Mark and Garrick for many, many years. Mark is a curator, currently at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where he has been responsible for many glorious shows, most recently the wonderful concrete poetry exhibition ‘Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.’ Garrick does mysterious things, somewhere between academia, management consulting,...

Barcelona: I first met Maria Pratts in an elevator. I had come to visit one of her gazillion flatmates, the photographer Rafa Castells, in the now legendary Gran Via apartment that was shared by many of the artists shaping today’s underground scene in Barcelona. We took the elevator down together, and by the time we’d...

Bricks and mortar, blood and tears Amsterdam: When studying the work of Maurice Scheltens and Liesbeth Abbenes, their gesammt portfolio of photographic works, Maurice’s earlier photographs and Liesbeth’s tapestries, as one would do before meeting them for an interview, you could be tempted to get some preconceived notions about this Dutch couple and their very Dutch...

Molly Goddard Originally published in Apartamento Magazine Issue 18, 2016 Interview by Danielle Pender Photography by Angelo Pennetta Molly Goddard is a fashion designer whose collections remind me of the house parties I used to go to as a teenager. Parties that were full of girls with an awkward prettiness about them, their hair sweaty and matted...

Southern weaver Johannesburg: Marguerite Stephens has been weaving tapestries for 50 years and looks fit enough to go 50 more. When we meet her at her award-winning, modular home in Diepsloot, half an hour outside Johannesburg, she is halfway through her latest commission for celebrated South African artist and long-time collaborator William Kentridge. Huge copies of...

Bringing material to life Knowing how to be patient has been one of the keys for Max Lamb finding the place of his dreams. He now lives in a workshop converted into an apartment, on a former North London industrial estate. It is an area that is obviously deprived and ethnically very diverse. The estate is...

A conversation chaired by Tag Christof Illustration by Pieter Van Eenoge Design is a verb. As such, its products and processes are shaped by culture, informed by narrative, and understood through imagery—perhaps more so than ever in an age where everything converges on social media. Or, does it? We gathered three pre-eminent thinkers for a discussion...

London: It is hard to exaggerate the impact that Fergus and Margot Henderson have had on the way we eat today, in London and the world beyond. Their approach to cooking and eating is rooted in common sense and joy, two principles that were mystifyingly rare in the 1980s British food landscape, which was then...

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa              

Not rooted and no desire to be rooted Paris: After reading his autobiography, Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond, I wandered around and did some research on Michael Lindsay-Hogg. The strong impression the book had left me with—through its fascinating story and its one-of-a-kind style—made me eager to...

London: London is woven into the fabric of Martine Rose’s collections. For once, it’s not hyperbolic to claim so; in her Autumn/Winter 2020 collection, the designer included shirts and sharply tailored jacquard jackets inscribed with the words ‘Tottenham’, ‘Croydon’, ‘Tooting Bec’, and ‘Clapham Junction’, among others—all names of places the designer has lived in over...

I moved in in the winter of 2000-2001. I have lived here since then. I have worked as a graphic designer in Berlin since 2000. I have my own studio called ITF Grafikdesign. I run the label with Tim Reuscher, who lives in Hamburg. I tend to think we do a lot of interesting things....

I met Valentine pressed up against a bin in East London at around one in the morning. Actually, that’s not quite true. It was up against a bin I first kissed Valentine. It was in a pub—the Globe and Artichoke—after a fashion show, us both wearing summer hats twinned with big gin grins, I first...

Toronto: When you spend time with the pre-eminent Canadian artist Michael Snow, you can’t help but notice how much he laughs—at himself, at something you’ve said, or at a memory that pops into his head. At 91 years old, he has lots of stories to recount. Like how he worked as a professional jazz musician in...

Shauna T. & Misha Hollenbach live in a place called SHITLAND (insert any place name here) and within/outside of this have created their own little vision of Utopia called FOREVEREVERLAND. From here comes all their joy, celebration, good times, P.A.M., Pambooks, Someday, and all their other ‘fun’ and creative pursuits/hobbies/lifestyles/‘other worldly’ experiences. And recently their...

When I was a kid, a friend of mine used to live in a golf community just south of Mexico City. We used to hang out there a lot and take his dog for walks. She was a collie and we’d call her “Attila” in a real loud voice, hoping to spook some of the...

Outside my living room window, the David Childs and Daniel Libeskind Freedom Tower has been rising, for the past year or so, to its full symbolic height of 1,776 feet. Inside my living room, a much smaller, though in my humble and, admittedly, heavily biased opinion, a much more imaginative tower rises—and falls and rises...

The inadequate spectator Austin: A native of Chicago, Michael Smith emerged in New York in the late ‘70s, performing in both non-profit art spaces like The Kitchen and Artists Space, and in small nightclubs and cabarets. Smith is one of the first artists not to be afraid to confront the forms of television entertainment. His entire...

A conversation chaired by Gianluigi RicuperatiIllustration by Olimpia Zagnoli In a world where ever-evolving technology has introduced limitless opportunities to the design industry, we’re also experiencing a resurgence in desire for craftsmanship. In anticipation of a new initiative launched by Loewe under the direction of Jonathan Anderson to reflect the importance of craftsmanship—the Loewe Foundation International Craft...

Our past is not something we can choose to leave behind. It guides our hands and sways our gaze, it is our blood and tears and bliss. Paint chip trails and ghost images are left behind in abandoned places, lived in to death and to pieces. Every life leaves an imprint. Plants shoot out roots...

My uncle Pedro left Chile at the end of the ‘60s on a Greek ship. Despite being a minor and living in a small city like Santiago, he had already lived a full life. He wasn’t interested in politics and he was indifferent to the suggestions of a socialist utopia. He devoted his time to...

A story about a house London: In 1984 Mark Lebon bought a parking lot. It was expensive for what it was. He was 26 years old and the plot of land was afforded by the strange weight of an inheritance. His mother had died and his first son, Tyrone, was turning four. Working as a photographer,...

Use beyond function Tokyo: Choosing to meet Nakako Hayashi on the train platform was not a good idea, but we did it anyway.  Nakako makes Here and There Magazine and today is taking me to see artist/designer Midori Araki. For now she has to wait on a concrete platform between endless express trains while I run late....

Mexico City: In the southernmost section of the Colonia Roma lives Michael Nyman. This neighbourhood has undergone a very profound transformation, perhaps becoming the best example of gentrification in Mexico City, but it’s still surprising to find such an unexpected character roaming a still-traditional environment, spending time amid second-hand bookstores, tortillerías, and restaurants that offer biodynamic...

Paris: Both Tim and I were excited to go to the 13th arrondissement, an area of Paris too often considered a no man’s land, except for the streets and boulevards that make up Chinatown.Tim has actually spent a few years in the neighbourhood, and most of my family members have lived there at one point or...

Spending summer holidays on the Italian coast, devoting my time mostly to cooking after a hectic spring at work with my new design practice, I got absorbed into Cedric Price’s writings whom I found out to be into food, too. Comparing food and architecture, Price is not the only important designer with culinary references. Wasn’t it...

The first thing Murray Moss says to us, as we take off our shoes in the foyer of his striking apartment, nestled near the top of Olympic Towers in Midtown, is that he is not a collector. As we vehemently protest, he insists that this is most certainly the case and shows us a large group of...

In a pickle Archival imagery courtesy of !WOWOW! London: The first time I saw Matthew Stone he was performing an unruly, mad dance, whirling around and around the stage at a party in a chilly warehouse in Peckham, South London, and I had no idea who he was. The first time I met him was...

Paris: A keen sense of reality, no frills, nothing ostentatious. The décor is stripped. The furniture was found on the street. The wallpaper from the old owners has stayed on the wall and perhaps other things have stuck around as well. A photograph of William S. Burroughs borders a poster of The Cramps, PJ Harvey, or...

Hove: Maureen Paley knows how to make an impression. The American-born gallerist, one of the first to open an exhibition space in London’s scruffy East End (Interim Art, est. 1984 in Bethnal Green), understands the power of personality. Her Herald Street gallery (eponymous since 2004) is an extension of her precise, witty, engaging style: formidably...

          A tribute to Ettore Sottsass Special thanks to Marmoles Sant Esteve We’ve all enjoyed the childish game of making a stack out of seemingly inappropriate materials, and though it might be more for kids, it’s nevertheless a lot of fun. For most of us it’s an occasional pastime, but for...

When my family and I moved to Brisbane in 1999, we moved into a suburb called Indooroopilly, which is an Aboriginal name for ‘meeting point’. The house we moved into was a Queenslander, which is a form of architecture typically found in the Australian state of Queensland. Our Queenslander was a simple wooden structure with...

Sad to leave New York City: When people ask me how long I’ve lived in NYC, I never know what to say. I first fell in love with the city in 1975, when as a 15-year-old, New York represented a great opportunity and ‘a sea of possibilities’ to me. I needed the freedom to be whoever...

Angelika Unverhau has a collection of 221,357 ballpoint pens from 146 different countries. Niek Vermeulen owns 5,468 airline sickness bags from 1,065 different airlines. The largest collection of toy penguins belongs to Birgit Berends, a German lady who owns 5,098 different items. I have a collection of a single mineral. And I couldn’t be more...

‘Household name’ is something of an apt description for Martha Stewart. Right now, you can buy saucepans, file folders, dog collars, craft paint, pillowcases, and the very same Italian-roast espresso beans that she uses in her one-shot cappuccino every morning—all designed according to her famously exacting taste. At a time when people struggle to balance...

Masha Orlov, the adorably eccentric, Russian, Queens-born, fashion stylist lives in a Trump building with a glamorous Hudson river/New Jersey skyline view, on the romantic upper west side! A third of the furniture and decoration in Masha’s eclectically mix matched apartment belongs to her step-father, a Russian born painter, who visits regularly to retrieve mail, and to teach Masha to paint. It’s...

A conversation chaired by Gianluigi Ricuperati In a world where ever-evolving technology has introduced limitless opportunities to the design industry, we’re also experiencing a resurgence in desire for craftsmanship. In anticipation of a new initiative launched by Loewe under the direction of Jonathan Anderson to reflect the importance of craftsmanship—the Loewe Foundation International Craft Prize—we invited...