Table of contents for September 2025 in ELLE DECOR

Luxury watch sizes have been trending downward for a few years. As the pendulum swings from 45mm statement wrist artillery to a quieter place of slightness and discretion, Omega has released a 30mm Seamaster Aqua Terra. Rather than a scale-down of a classic, this represents a full mechanical rethink, complete with a new caliber and redesigned proportions that make this an ideal women’s timepiece. Since its introduction in 2002 the Aqua Terra has been Omega’s chameleon, alternately sporty and polished, and in this diminutive size, it’s got a kind of jewel-box precision. The case is thinner, the curves a little softer, its presence completely intact. Omega went under the hood to pull off the change, creating a movement to suit the downsized frame, visible through the transparent caseback. There are…

SIMON DOONAN: The word that screeched out of my brain when I first looked at this project was ecclesiastical. The house looks like a bishopric—and I don’t mean to be obscene. MILES REDD: I was not thinking of that at all. I was thinking the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the French countryside at [their estate] the Mill—that was the ethos behind this. DAVID KAIHOI: The Mill was sort of a French pile—white stucco walls, lots of bright color. MR: And red wall-to-wall carpet, and then kind of a mad chintz, and then a needlepoint rug. It was all black with bows, and they’re always in black tie on top of it. SD: I can see the duchess, the ultimate dandy married to the ultimate dandy, mincing around and…

I have always been slightly terrified of what I call Design with a capital D, mostly because it’s something I have never felt qualified to do. The term was coined by my editor at T magazine, the wonderful, late Pilar Viladas, who definitely knew about it. Peter Mikic does that sort of interior really beautifully, I think. His rooms are high design but still playful, and they look and feel like rooms you’re going to have a good time in. Mikic recently published a house in Ibiza: all whites and stone and wood, a lot of named-looking pieces and open air. I wanted to be transported there immediately. His room at the Wow House in London this year was literally a ray of sunshine after an enfilade of tasteful tonals.…

Over more than eight decades, the Glascock Building in Marfa, Texas, wore many hats. Built in 1907, it was first a boarding house with a grocery on the ground floor. Then it became a uniform shop. In 1990 it caught Donald Judd’s attention. The artist had risen to the top of New York’s art world before abandoning it in 1971 for a remote ranch in the West Texas desert. Marfa became his creative hub. Airplane hangars were repurposed as exhibition spaces for his sculptures. An old Safeway was turned into his art studio. Judd bought the 5,000-square-foot Glascock Building to house his growing architecture practice. He furnished the space, which still had the original tin ceilings and long-leaf pine floors, with spare plywood furniture of his own design. “It was…

One day in 2018, Alexander “Sandy” Rower, the grandson of the artist and sculptor Alexander Calder and president of the Calder Foundation, received a call from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The leadership of the Barnes—which had successfully moved its 4,000-artwork collection a decade earlier from Merion, Pennsylvania, to a new building on Benjamin Franklin Parkway—was keen to bring a Calder museum to Calder’s hometown. “I said, ‘I really appreciate the call, but I don’t want to make a museum,’” Rower recalls. “‘I’d like to make a sanctuary.’” After a few months of back and forth with the Barnes team, things began to click. Joseph Neubauer, then the chair of the Barnes board, “really understood what I was saying,” Rower says. The Swiss-based firm Herzog & de Meuron was selected…

A 17,000-square-foot triplex in Bangkok, a palace in Qatar, and a “farmhouse” in Delhi that looks more like a mini-Versailles than an agricultural holding. These are just a few of the projects Jean-Louis Deniot has taken on since the French interior designer set up his own firm in 2002. He’s currently putting the finishing touches on the Cambridge House Hotel on London’s Piccadilly, and he has residences on the drawing board in Athens, Hong Kong, and Paris. One city, however, has remained a sort of professional holy grail: New York. “It’s not easy to make your mark there,” Deniot says. “You really have to buckle down and persevere.” He has kept a pied-à-terre in Manhattan for the past 20 years, and he has received several residential commissions, including a grand…

“It’s always been Peter, since I was a child,” says Delphine Arnault, chairman and CEO of Christian Dior Couture. She is speaking of Peter Marino, the black-biker-leather-clad architect who has almost single-handedly redefined luxury retail since he began working with the French fashion house decades ago. Arnault was just 10 years old when she first visited 30 Avenue Montaigne, the brand’s Paris flagship, which had been Mr. Dior’s own couture salon. In the 1990s Marino was tapped to rejuvenate the space for the first time. His ability to walk elegance to the edge of daring immediately made a mark; on his watch, mere walls might feature silver-leafed leather, peacock feathers, or museum-worthy art. Now Arnault and Marino have collaborated on a new store on 57th Street in New York, which…

In the 1980s Catherine Deneuve bought an 18th-century château in Normandy complete with a working moat. One might assume the very private French actress wanted to keep the world at bay, but the moat was purely decorative; for more than 30 years the château was her welcoming retreat. She hosted family and friends—Yves Saint Laurent among them, his dresses filling her closets—while her grandchildren played in the gardens. From the outside, the Château de Primard embodied the refinement of the Directoire style. Inside, Deneuve mixed antiques with velvet, bright silk curtains, and perfectly worn rugs in generous rooms that were flooded with light from tall windows overlooking the Eure River. In 2018 the Fontenille Collection, a boutique hospitality group, purchased the estate. Founders Guillaume Foucher and Frédéric Biousse brought in…