Issue # 7
Archive stories

Barcelona: We’re talking about creativity in times of crisis. Participating in the conversation are: Fernando Amat, owner of the Vinçon stores and interior designer, the entrepreneur of illumination, Xavier Marset, and Jordi Tió, the talented architect of the Casa Camper hotels in Barcelona and Berlin. The trio meet in the terrace of the Casa Camper hotel in Barcelona....

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...

The Sourceress London: Zoe Bedeaux always makes her presence known. She’s conspicuous, boisterous and funny but also wise, considerate and always, always curious. When she first began working as a stylist in the 1990s, London was the most happening place on earth. The Face and i-D were the only magazines that mattered and, following the lead...

Design mom Helsinki: Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi is my favourite Finnish designer and Issey Miyake’s fashion mom. One of the most influential characters in the local post-war design scene, Vuokko has made a significant contribution to the field both in Finland and abroad. She introduced minimalist cuts and voluminous prints in her work for Marimekko in the 1950s,...

Play to achieve Milan: During her childhood in the Swedish countryside, drawing was Liselotte Watkins’ escape from everyday life. Her artistic talent brought her from Texas college studies to Chelsea, New York, and a growing obsession with the city’s more fashionable and eccentric historical characters. Thanks to hard work, social skills and a pinch of luck,...

Bringing the fantasy into reality Los Angeles: Kenny Scharf is an artist who has worked with objects, interiors and kitsch for his whole career even if he’s best known for his paintings. He made TVs, cars, telephones, a crib for his daughter, pillows, boomboxes, a piano, a mixer and exhibited some of them in the Customized...

Sound, noise & music Buenos Aires: At the beginning of the ‘90s Juana Molina was a famous comedian in Argentina, but during her pregnancy she realised she was denying her true vocation as a musician. She immediately abandoned television, and started her slow journey, which laid the foundations for the current international recognition of her hypnotic...

Technicolor two bedroom New York City: Writer Bruce Benderson is puffing away on an e-cigarette, his new favourite accessory. He’s just proudly made me what he considers to be scientifically the perfect cup of coffee with a new press he recently acquired. Coffee is followed by many bottles of Prosecco. Bruce is a great host. He...

A true love Milan: If the birth and subsequent explosion of Italian design in the second half of the last century is the stuff of history; if in that period, in only a few short years, the hand of the designer (they called themselves architects then) began, in tandem with industrial production, to cut a clear...

            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 Apartamento it’s a duty, involving serious research, lengthy shopping trips,...

One of the many joys of staying in JB’s house is having access to his library, a lifetime’s collection of ideas, interests and thoughts arranged over a wall of bookcases. In his collection, I found a copy of The Art of Rosanjin. Rosanjin Kitaoji was a highly eccentric Japanese potter famed as much for his...

tutti frutti – interview It’s not hard to wash a salad! When Michelle Obama was photographed on the White House lawn, digging into her brand-new organic garden, it was Alice Waters who felt the triumph. Waters, who has been seen as everything from the mother of American cooking to the creator of California cuisine, has been...

Jim Haynes once invented a verb to describe what he does. The verb is ‘to fuller’. Fullering, according to Jim, means to spend your time and energy joyfully. And the first payment for fullering is the happiness that comes from doing what you’re doing. Jim Haynes himself is a bona fide fullerer, and, as befits...

Music had Judy and Liza, Hollywood has Debbie and Carrie, fashion now apparently has Madonna and Lola and television had the Gilmore Girls. Food has Gloria Pinette and Anaïs Melero, mom and daughter food styling powerhouse duo. Based in San Juan, Gloria has been working in the industry for the past 35 years. She’s worked...

The clothes on our bodies are sweaty and we wear them to bed. Waking up fully clothed with more sweat forming into beads under the cotton fabric; the sun is hot, coming through a partially open window (we opened it last night at 4am in case we needed to escape during the night). It feels...

If I were offered a choice of decades to travel back in time to, I’d choose the late 1960s. No doubt this is because of my grandma’s home where I always feel like I’ve caught a glimpse of that intoxicating decade. It’s a refuge of family, with rooms that house the history of several generations....

There’s no point in trying to sugar coat it. These days my apartment is a total mess. Not the sort of cool, cultivated, creative mess that you see in magazines: the kind that broadcasts the cool, cultivated, creative existence of the people that live there. Just your average, run of the mill, messy mess. Toothbrush...

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...

It all started like four years ago at one of those Parisian dinners. People, girls in particular, were talking about eBay, explaining how excited they were about buying vintage St Laurent blouses or modernist furniture on the website. ‘You’ve never been on eBay?’ Sylvie asked me. ‘No, never.’ I replied. OMG, they all were so astonished...

At the start of November I left a dark apartment in Berlin, storing a lifetime’s accumulation of clutter in the cellar of an artists’ studio complex, and moved to an industrial neighbourhood of Osaka. The stark, bright, steep-staired box in which I now sit is virtually empty, and that emptiness is, to be honest, exactly...

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...

For too many people, being happy at home is pretty much an abstract idea, something they can’t know or imagine, until it appears on some taste maker’s must-have list, or in a magazine, or reposted on Tumblr. A home sweet home is not curated or produced by acquiring a perfect arrangement of chairs, lamps and...

A few nights ago, I dreamt that Ola Rindal pushed me into the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. In the dream we were walking along the canal together, on our way to meet his wife Madoka, and out of nowhere (possibly because I was complaining about how hot Parisian summers can be), he shoved me into...

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...

My house is more than a house, it’s my temple, my place to think, to hide, to create, to love. I’m always travelling, now I’m in Mexico, tomorrow I’ll be in Spain, and then Argentina. But when I come home, I always feel like I’m recharging a part of me. I meet me again, I...

I once dated a girl who was 8 years my junior. A twenty something nymphet who was ripe in the art of seduction. An art student. Although she was not terribly book-smart, she was curious enough to listen to my literary diatribes with wide eyes and a dirty mind. I was fascinated by the way...

There’s a specific combination of sounds. The sieve shaking over a metal bowl. The quick repetitive beats of a whisk. Dishes in the sink. The cat meowing, then lapping up leftover ingredients. And the smells. Maple syrup heating up on the stove. The stifled sizzle as the batter is poured, and the subsequent wafts of...