Stories by name

The trip from Zurich to the lower Engadin takes three hours by one of those trains that could be from a Wes Anderson movie. Arriving in Sent, a tiny, picturesque village, and entering my hotel, I bump into Not. The house where he was born, as well as his studio, are a stone’s throw away…

Tbilisi: Nona Gaprindashvili—who in 1978 became the first woman to be awarded the title grandmaster rank among men by the International Chess Federation (FIDE), and who holds five World Championship titles and 11 team and nine individual gold medals at the Chess Olympics, and who was named the best Georgian Sportswoman of the 20th century, and…

Naples: Rug dealer, journalist, and book collector Nathalie de Saint Phalle grew up on the Île Saint-Louis in a house full of books. It’s here that we conduct our interview in high summer, in the eclectic chaos of an apartment where those many publications are piled high on every surface and an array of artwork covers…

Brussels: Sitting in a French restaurant in New York for lunch with Nicolas Party, we started by talking about how to deal with a cold. It’s the height of cold and flu season in New York, and Nicolas has just got back from Brussels, having stopped by San Francisco and maybe Dallas. He told me…

Arranging things Milan: In the early ’80s French born Nathalie Du Pasquier was one of the young founding members of the Milan-based Memphis collective, led by veteran Ettore Sottsass. After their groundbreaking debut in 1981, Memphis pretty much dominated the design scene for years with their postmodern, rebellious pieces. Nathalie’s pattern designs, with their mix of…

A modern Hellenist Athens: On my way to meet Nanos Valaoritis, I realised that I had lost the note with his contact details. I was in the area, but I couldn’t remember the street number; I stopped at the square nearby and walked into a bar. I saw a lady at the cashier, went over and…

Seoul: Na Kim is a very special character on the Korean art scene. She’s worked as a graphic designer at the very heart of the small-scale but prolific design studios that became an established trend in Seoul from the mid 2000s. And as an artist, she’s taken part in numerous exhibitions at major art museums…

In Chicago, on the border between Old Irving Park and Kilbourn Park, a 20-minute drive from the Loop, a rundown former textile factory, which had been dormant for the past decade, was thoughtfully rebuilt and combined with two adjoining properties. In the fall of 2018, shortly after it was completed, the newly renovated storefront windows…

The house we live in has a name, it’s called ‘Ma Mere’. It was built about 50 years ago by the owner’s father, who was Chinese. After his wedding, he built two houses: the one where our owner Miss T. lives, located in Daikanyama, which is a very comfortable area of Tokyo that became a…

Mallorca: The first time I went sailing I was eight or nine years old. It was during summer and my parents had brought me to a sailing school where I was taught how to sail a small type of dinghy called an Optimist. For the three following years I kept going sailing each summer before giving it up, until 2013 when…

An unconscious collector Tokyo: Narukiyo is originally from Fukuoka, in the south of Japan. He is the owner of a popular restaurant in Shibuya, Tokyo, discreetly hidden from the public on a back street. There is a counter bar that surrounds the kitchen and sits around 15 people. It’s always full of people enjoying themselves with…

Barcelona: At number 12 Plaza Real, to the right of the doorway, half-hidden, some little angels with sex-doll mouths remind the visitor that Ocaña lived in this house; Ocaña, the artist who scandalised the Ramblas with his costumes and stripteases while Spain was still under a dictatorship. We press the door phone for Nazario’s flat; he…

New York City: Australian musician Nick Murphy, or the artist formerly known as Chet Faker, lives in New York City’s Soho, but south—a block inching close enough to Chinatown that stoops have graffiti and there are no visible doormen. But it is, of course, luxe: the last time I was in a private apartment on…

I moved to New York in 1993, two days after graduating from high school in Connecticut. Some friends of mine had an apartment in Brooklyn Heights with a room available. I brought my parents into the city to my favourite vegan restaurant at the time, Angelica Kitchen, and mapped out how I would afford to live there with…

Los Angeles: I’m sitting with my translator, Naoki, as we drive over a hill and emerge onto a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The water glares up at us with an unforgiving blueness, and cypress trees dot the cliffside. It feels like we’ve stumbled onto an ancient Greek island. But it’s not: Palos Verdes is a…

Tokyo: When the Hillside Terrace complex was first commissioned by the Asakura family in 1967, the most prominent structure in the area was the family’s traditional Taisho-era home. This structure still stands, but today it is surrounded by the sequence of mixed-use low-rises that Fumihiko Maki designed over a 30-year period, both leading and responding to…

Winchester’s widow, Sarah, ordered the construction of a Victorian style mansion at the end of the nineteenth century in San Jose, California. In this house, with 160 rooms, 47 chimneys and three lifts, all types of fantastical inconsistencies occurred. Some of them were death traps: the finest of oak staircases arriving nowhere, carefully carved doors…