Issue # 24
Archive stories

New York City: Jessi Reaves has no closets. She suspects her narrow, railroad-style apartment, bursting with top-floor sunlight, wasn’t always a residential building. The two doors leading out of her spare bedroom also suggest a former alternate use. All her possessions are out in the open—with nowhere to hide. Her clothes casually present themselves on metal...

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa          

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...

Montreal: Catty-corner to Carré Saint-Louis, the historic public square with a cast-iron Victorian fountain located in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood, is a 200-year-old home with west-facing windows and a bee’s nest problem. I don’t see the bees or the nest, but when I’m greeted at the front door, I’m told to rush inside. Instantly, grace. A...

Lagos: The Lagos-based fashion designer Kenneth Ize wears his heart, and his art, on his sleeve. During even the most casual of conversations, he can’t help but express his true beliefs, and this same emotional authenticity runs through his collections. Predominantly created from his bespoke hand-woven textiles based on aso oke—a traditional Yoruba fabric that translates...

Los Angeles: Swedish pop star Lykke Li has finally settled down in Los Angeles. Since releasing her long-awaited fourth album, so sad so sexy, in 2018, the 33-year-old artist has digested the trauma and triumph of the past few years. While writing so sad so sexy, Li had just given birth to her son, Dion, split...

Almost 27 years have passed since his death, and finally today we can affirm that the extraordinary work of Patrick Angus is in the process of being rediscovered and is once again proving of great interest to the contemporary public. Two retrospectives of his work have been exhibited in Stuttgart and Los Angeles, and an...

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...

A conversation chaired by Amelia Stein Drawings by Stefan Marx This is a conversation between four people about living in the present. Which means, at least for our purposes, a conversation about inevitability and possibility, anxiety and hope, the flexible and the fixed. About life and how it happens: where, in what, and with whom. Stephanie...

San Francisco: I’ve known Cecilia Chiang since before I was conscious, which is to say: this 100-year-old doyenne of Chinese cuisine has been a fixture in my life for as long as I can remember. She is family. And someone whom my mother, Alice Waters, has considered a mentor and friend for close to 50 years....

Barcelona: Unless you were very rich or very poor, my generation in Barcelona grew up surrounded by a very specific and limited number of design objects. Since Spain was a relatively poor country, design wasn’t really imported and sold until more recently. But in the ‘60s and ‘70s a few crazy young guys started companies to...

London/Pett Level: Ben Kelly is the designer who introduced high tech into Britain’s visual lexicon and pioneered industrial interiors with such commissions as Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s punk enclave on King’s Road, Seditionaries, and Manchester’s legendary nightclub, The Haçienda. In the late ‘90s, Ben and his curator wife, Clare Cumberlidge, left their warehouse loft in...

New York City: Ted Muehling is not only one of my most beloved friends, he is also one of the most gifted designers in the world today. Ask any great designer or architect worth their salt and they will concur. The respect is unanimous. As sometimes happens with extraordinary talents, Muehling is a hider—success, hype, and...

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...

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,...

New York City: In New York City, artist-run galleries have historically played the role of giving alternative modes of cultural production the space to develop; International with Monument, American Fine Arts, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and Reena Spaulings were all founded by artists. These galleries have championed unique schools of thought pushing new, sometimes unconventional, ideas and...

San Francisco: Imagine it’s 1970. Being in Los Angeles, I was aware of a certain group of guys who were doing sculpture with clay. My girlfriend Waynna brought me this book, Objects: USA. It was more or less full of typical stoneware pots, some of them masterful and some of them adventurous within the typical stoneware...

Sydney: People say Australia has no culture. That’s not actually true. It has a strong Indigenous culture and a vibrant immigration culture. It’s just that the traditions struggle to meet in a fashion that capitalises on both narratives, and we Australians come off as a bit lost. That doesn’t mean a cohesive outlook doesn’t exist; it...

Le Kram, Tunis: Rafram Chaddad was born in 1976 on the island of Djerba, Tunisia. His grandfather was head of the island’s Jewish community, one which in Tunisia as a whole has now greatly diminished, becoming almost inexistent, even in its capital, Tunis, a city once alive with Jewish culture. In 1978 the family decided to...