Stories by name

Los Angeles: For most of Solange Knowles’ adult life, she has had the same loft; a quiet, serene oasis set above the 24-hour buzz of downtown Hollywood. The space is a mix of organic modernism, her own furniture designs, and Black art and vernacular objects she has collected over the years. It is the private...

Los Angeles: Are you where you once thought you’d be at the age you are now? Sydney ‘Syd’ Bennett isn’t. In her view, she’s somewhere better. Early teenage success on the basketball courts, with professional-level potential, was diverted by a wack coach and GarageBand exploration in her parents’ home, quickly leading to Syd’s musical collaboration...

New York City: The first thing you’ll notice about one of my favourite architects and friend Solveig Fernlund is her elegance. She is a willowy yet sturdy Swedish woman nearly six feet tall, who my mother, if she were still living, would have described as ‘a lovely long, tall drink of water’. And this willowy, sturdy...

Soisy-sur-École/Pescia Fiorentina: It’s difficult to decide where to begin when telling the story of the French–American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. Her life and work read like a fairy tale of her own making, starting with her artistic awakening while convalescing from a breakdown. Her impulsive drive to create carried her throughout her life, manifesting in...

London: At the musician Sabrina Fuentes’ house in London, her friend Ophelia Horton (nicknamed Opi) prepares some late breakfast sandwiches, navigating around the mould inside an old tub of olive spread. ‘Can I still use this?’ she looks to Sabrina, and again, ‘Does this need more ham?’ The inseparable pair chuckle as they wonder where the...

I was probably chosen to do this interview because I live three Parisian buildings away from Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant’s beautiful home. When I entered a courtyard that takes you back in time, about 47 seconds after I had closed my own door, there was a feeling of immediacy that Courrèges’ artistic directors only extended....

When chance turns into history Milan: When Santi Caleca first opened the door of his Milanese apartment, shared with his wife Aurora and their two kids, he uncovered a magical world to me. His is an apartment that witnessed a particular instant in the history of Italian design, its most radical and perhaps, its most exciting...

Stella’s room: Keep out! London: Stella and I first met when we started at the same secondary school four years ago, but we only really got to know each other during our third year. She lives in Kentish Town, North London, in a beautiful Victorian building made up mainly of open-plan spaces and heavy-beamed ceilings which hint...

Intimate in Tokyo Tokyo: Celebrated wardrobe stylist Sonya Park came to Tokyo via Hawaii via Seoul. Born and raised in Seoul until she moved with her family to Hawaii when she was 12, Park later picked up in Tokyo without a plan. She has since become one of the most influential people in fashion today. Her job has...

In theory, we all know that there are certain rules to follow when moving through public space. Well, at least theoretically most of us know to how to behave, and mostly we all conduct ourselves in a different way to when we have privacy. These rules help us get along with each other. More or...

This is a house in the countryside of Quinto, a small village that’s near Venice, Italy. It’s light brown with a big window on one side and a small porthole on the opposite side. There is also a trapdoor in the floor and a ladder that goes from the trapdoor to the ground below, which...

A conversation chaired by Alex Tieghi-Walker It is an uncomfortable truth that part of the thrill, or accomplishment, of shopping lies in the exercise of power by retail environments and the brands that commission them. Designer Faye Toogood, Marie Honda from COS and Richard McConkey of architectural firm Universal Design Studio gathered in a canal-side...

‘Early man had to build with readily available local materials—canes and grasses, leaves and twigs. From these pliant and insubstantial materials he had to create a relatively permanent and structurally rigid unit’. (Di Lloyd Kahn, Shelter, by Shelter Publications, California, 1973) I’m guessing that if you were ever a kid, you have built (or helped...

Watercolours by Leanne Shapton Toronto: The epigraph in Sheila Heti’s latest novel, Motherhood, is a quote from a musician in Washington Square Park: ‘There’s a hole in my life, there’s a life in my hole’. Like the musician, Heti finds the upside to the downside in life’s disappointments and curve balls and she does so...

There is a Roman term, genius loci, which means something like ‘spirit of place’. Originally it referred to a religious spirit that acted as the guardian of a place. These days it’s also used to mean the aspects of a place that make it special to people. I like both the old and new interpretations...

If I for some reason talk about my background as a dancer, people tend to react positively surprised. When I say I was into contemporary dance most people start to look confused, which usually has me adding something like ‘that means I was rolling on the floor a lot’, to give them some sort of...

We spent a whole day with the architect Sam Chermayeff (NYC, 1981). We met at his office, which is in a concrete building designed by Arno Brandlhuber, with whom he shares the space. Sam used to live upstairs. There’s a quasi-monastic mood of silent work,... Read more

Times Square on the Bowery New York City: Artist Scott Ewalt’s life-long passion for burlesque is unparalleled. It inspires his art, has guided his career, and has lead to many friendships, but it’s perhaps most apparent in the spectacular interior of his East Village apartment. In 2000, when Giuliani’s mission was to clean up Times Square, Scott’s...

Jina Khayyer in conversation with Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal, two artists who have shared their lives and worked beside one another for more than 40 years. For the first time, Adnan and Fattal give an interview together, discussing what it means to be: an artist, a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a woman, an...

Isabel left me, she said she had the bug. I thought she had an STD but she meant the acting bug, a mutual friend told me. She moved to the big city to pursue a career in the theatre. What a laugh. I wrote her an email. ‘How can you leave Ibiza AND ME to pursue...

The young architect, Nestor Piriz (ARR architecture), has been working for 5 years on everything that constructing a house-studio for himself and his family implies. The project, still in the construction phase, is located in Les Planes (Barcelona) in a forest environment. It is a ramp in the form of a lasso, which surrounds and...

Three midsummers ago  Lina Zedig, fashion designer for Via Snella and partner Marcus Åhrén invited us to Suntorp, an 17th century farm that has been their family’s summer house since the 30’s. Lina’s grandfather bought the farm and redesigned it to make it suitable for entertaining and socialising. He constructed a bar/disco where the old barn was,...

Rotterdam: Rotterdam is a rough industrial city. Yesterday was cloudy, and it looked grey and flat; the light made all the buildings look exactly the same. As well as the best architecture, they have some of the ugliest buildings in the world, and the fog doesn’t make it better. I thought, ‘How can anybody live...

An increasing number of olfactive signatures are created in order to identify brands and businesses in all areas. What to think of a totally perfumed society? We asked trend forecaster Li Edelkoort to sit down with French researcher and affect everything Jean Abou and NY based designer of odours Ramdane Touhami, under the glass roof...

The geometry of family Zurich: Last time I was standing on the balcony of a flat in a neighbouring high-rise building I did actually hear lightning. A kind of hissing sound, followed by good old thunder that you hear downstairs, as well. Artist Shirana Shahbazi has been hearing that for 14 years, living on the uppermost floor...

Some years ago Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore moved from New York City to a rambling old place in Northampton, MA.—an unlikely epicentre for the noise music scene. I remembered their old loft where I would browse through Thurston’s record collection in sheer amazement. As we drove up there late this past winter, in the front of...

Paris: ‘Fucking amazing’ kept deceitfully coming from people around, referring whether to some future project description forced to be made up and spat, some Fancy tune I would deliberately drop in default provocation or a 15” long sunbeam. For hell’s sake it was about time to dispel this lame curse; I had to rescue myself from...

Private and public space in music A conversation chaired by Ekhi Lopetegi Music has always been considered the art of time. Some philosophers have also thought that it’s the most sublime form of art because, by itself, it expresses no words or images; it is pure sound. But it’s also true that since ancient times music...

When I was packing to go from London to São Paulo, my Peggy Noland sequined ‘Rainbow Unitard’ was falling out of a box, onto the floor… the sun was hitting it hard, as if it was the only thing that was supposed to be shining in the room. I looked at it and all my...

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa Cookery by Ricard Martínez            

A conversation chaired by Dean Kissick The mainstream discourse around gender and sexuality has come on in leaps and bounds this decade, even if there’s still a long way to go. For this conversation, we met to talk about how sexual fantasy, sexual difference, and fluid identity, whether as guiding ideas or lived experiences, inform...

Tokyo: I first travelled to Japan 13 years ago. One of my only connections was a friend of a friend who was a b-boy from Tokyo; we hung out every day for a week, neither of us speaking a word of the other’s language. As a result, a lot of time was spent drawing pictures, trying...

Salvador and I met more than 10 years ago. We were both students, although he was also a teacher’s assistant, being as he is, a little older than me. He lived close to the university, in a neighbourhood where theses are bound and photocopiers are everywhere. Amidst small vegetarian restaurants with holistic activities, students drink...

New York City: The work of designer/artist Serban Ionescu conjures a weird fusion of funny and creepy. Serban’s pieces are nominally furniture, but they seem crouched, animated, full of some strange life. He often names them like you might name a pet, and they’re imbued with a coiled, kinetic charge. The chairs are his trademark: they...

Dogs the pony show Los Angeles: Launched in 2004, Band of Outsiders made preppy cool. They tapped into a trend at just the right time when the hipster look started to become more polished and clean cut. I never knew much about the story behind the Los Angeles brand, nor much about the man, Scott Sternberg,...

My story about life with objects starts with a Malcolm McLaren 12” maxi-single Madame Butterfly (1984), recently found in a record shop somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, Canada. The single in question could be replaced by any given meaningful piece of music—or something else worth surrounding oneself with—this one will play in the background, as...

It was April 1998 I was on a trip to Paris from Tokyo I discovered a garage in an apartment’s courtyard There was only a big shutter Not very good conditions to live in but I quickly and deeply fell in love I’m not interested in a common French apartment in a touristic area This...

If there is anyone who has successfully gone to Ikea to pick up just one thing, I’d love to meet that person. In my own experience, it is impossible to go to Ikea and come out with just one thing, unless that one thing is, like, a kitchen. It is entirely possible, on the other...

Gruyères is a medieval town with a present population of roughly 2,000 and an annual visitor count of over a million. It sits atop a small, freestanding mountain in the valley of the Sarine River, north of the Alps, in the canton of Fribourg. From the generous parking lot, steep steps lead to cobbled roads...

There is something about stairs. Some of them we want to run up rapidly, whilst others we just want to dance down. In our everyday walks through life, they inspire and influence our behaviours and beings. Their distinct design brings forth subtle emotions hidden under layers of unawareness. Stairs are everywhere, all the time. Looking...

My house is repulsive. If you saw it, you wouldn’t believe that any well-minded human being could inhabit a place so vile. The floors are lined with rotting garbage. Most of the windows are either smashed or covered in graffiti. There’s no heating or hot water. The whole place smells like a combination of wet...