Table of contents for October 2016 in Wallpaper

Lorenz Ackerman Oliver Adamson Michael Ainscough Melinda Akerbrant Silvia Alba Maggie Alderson Jocelyn Allen Anna Andersson Kim Andreolli Stephen Armstrong Akash Arora Tina Asmussen Daniel Baer Alex Bagner Liz Bailey Duncan Baizley David Baker Paul Barnes Kate Barrett Shereen Basma Matt Beaman Georgina Bean Ina Becker Mikael Beckman Lee Belcher Dominic Bell Jonathan Bell Clare Beresford Zöe Beretta Jeroen Bergmans Rosa Bertoli Lulu Biazus Martin R Bourne Oliver Bourne Sandrine Boury-Heyler Michael Bowers Katie Bowman Niki Brodie Emma Brown Carolyn Bruce Tyler Brûlé Clare Buckley Sujata Burman Deborah Burnstone Angela Buttolph Malaika Byng Martin Bystedt Natalia Calvocoressi Enrique Campos Jane Campsie Jessica Cargill Thompson Enrico Caruso Marie Castagné David Castenfors Tony Chambers Kathy Chan TF Chan Chloe Chapman Chris Chapman Ariel Childs Karen Chung Tim Clark Sébastien Clivaz Nicky Coan…

FOR STOCKISTS, SEE PAGE 504 While most of the world’s tailoring brands are investing in cutting-edge technologies to innovate their suiting selections, Caruso has teamed up with fibre experts Loro Piana to harness one of the oldest natural yarn sources: the Camelus bactrianus, otherwise known as the two-humped camel. These Gobi Desert nomads, who helped define the Silk Road, in the process earning them the moniker ‘ships of the desert’, have long been recognised for the golden hues and thermostatic properties of their coats, attuned to their Mongolian environs. The Italian brand’s resulting ‘Gobigold’ yarn brings new lustre to the term ‘camel coat’, originally worn by polo players between chukkas. With thanks to Loro Piana’s spinning expertise, the rare fibre, which is sometimes mixed with Super 170’s merino wool, has…

When it came to designing the packaging for his debut fragrance, Christian Louboutin admits Thomas Heatherwick was not at the top of his list. ‘The first person I thought of was Oscar Niemeyer,’ confesses Louboutin. ‘I had always admired his work but at that point he was 102 years old. So the second person was Thomas. His work fascinates me.’ The brief was simple – to create a striking and unique set of architectural glass vessels. The three fragrances they encase (Bikini Questa Sera, a tuberose and jasmine scent; Tornade Blonde, a fresh rose fragrance with notes of violet and cassis; and Trouble in Heaven, a heady mix of iris, patchouli and tonka absolute) are the latest of Louboutin’s forays into the beauty market, which began in 2014 with a…

Auratic and avant-garde, Jean-Michel Othoniel is one of the most intriguing names on France’s contemporary art scene. From filling an abandoned boat with tears to installing glass dancers in Versailles’ Water Grove Theatre, his aesthetic transforms galleries, public spaces and historic sites alike. Now, Othoniel is preparing to preview for Wallpaper.com one of his most ambitious projects yet: Le Trésor de la Cathédrale d’Angoulême, an immersive artwork nearly a decade in the making, due to open to the public later this month. The sky is still dark when I arrive at Gare Montparnasse, where a photographer and I are to journey to Angoulême with Othoniel. With only a minute till departure, I clutch my coffee, worrying Othoniel is too late, but then there he is, crisply casual and cheerily upbeat…

Juxtaposition looms large over the boat yards around Plymouth, England. Above South Yard, the 17th-century heart of the Royal Navy’s Devonport base, 1960s concrete blocks of low-income housing peer down on two giant sheds where Princess Yachts is building two £12-15m M Class superyachts. A mile away, at the company’s Newport Street HQ, is a luxury production line of mammoth proportions – one shed alone contains five 27m and four 23m yachts under construction. Meanwhile, nearby, sits a white building, slightly larger than a domestic garage, where David King and two friends founded what was then Marine Projects Ltd 50 years ago. Princess Yachts is now Plymouth’s secondlargest employer after the Royal Navy, with more than 2,000 craftsmen on five sites producing around 220 luxury yachts each year. The company’s…

All of Venice’s well-documented icons, its patinated, weather-battered palazzi, its Unescoprotected narrow streets, bridges and historical churches, appear to have been standing there for eons. In a city so architecturally precious, where building regulations can be unsurprisingly strict, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all buildings date back centuries. Yet urban evolution is near inescapable, and one of the Grand Canal’s biggest landmarks, Fondaco dei Tedeschi, is a case in point. First erected next to the Rialto Bridge in 1228, but destroyed by fire and reconstructed twice since, this palazzo was ‘rebuilt in its current form in 1506, turned into custom offices under Napoleon, and then subject to a series of radical architectural interventions in the 1930s to accommodate the city’s central post office under the Fascist regime,’ explains Ippolito…

Our beardy poster boy is Barnabé Fillion. A true renaissance man, the jazz player cum model, perfumer, photographer, whisky blender and olfactory artist has worn his whiskers long for 12 years. ‘When I first grew it, the only young people wearing them were hippies and freaks. But I didn’t dress like a hippie so it confused people,’ explains Fillion, whose look was embraced early on by Martin Margiela and Paul Smith. ‘All my heroes had beards – Thelonious Monk, Terry Riley – and I admired Sikhism for the beauty of the turban with a beard.’ We suspect this beard is here to stay. 20 YEARS OF FACIAL TOPIARY If, as is sometimes claimed, the volume of whiskers on a man’s face is inversely proportional to the amount of confidence he…

Anonymous Architects House in Trees, Los Angeles Los Angeles, it seems, is rediscovering its soul,’ says Simon Storey of Anonymous Architects, which featured in our Architects’ Directory 2014. He is referring to the sea change in architectural preservation in LA, but also to the new construction throughout the city, much of which is both mindful of space and elegant in its minimalist design. A case in point is the aptly titled Eel’s Nest, Storey’s much-talked-about home and studio in Echo Park, where he squeezed 960 sq ft of living space into a hemmed-in urban plot of only 780 sq ft. A native of New Zealand, Storey has always had a fascination with LA. He moved there in 2000 to attend graduate school at SCI-Arc, and immediately began reimagining the city’s…

Pale fire 1996 – 2000 Cool, calm and collectable: the early years were all about blond wood and Scandinavians Hard candy 2001 – 2005 We bent and folded the new millennium into hard-edged shapes with splashes of bright colour Flexed forms 2006 – 2010 Mixed materials, the rediscovery of craftsmanship and pushing the boundaries of form Boom boom 2006 – 2010 As sub-prime mortgages flourished, design went fizzy, superficial, tongue-in-cheek and extravagant Reality bites 2011 – 2015 As the economy crashed and burned, manufacturers ran for safety with reissues and a return to quality Hi-tech leanings 2016 – Clever manufacturing and a sculptural bent deliver faceted and geometric shapes and an industrial feel For stockists, see page 504 Join in the celebrations #Wallpaper20…

When photographer Koto Bolofo first visited London’s Commonwealth Institute in 2011, he found a forgotten architectural relic in the centre of London. Shrouded by park trees, overgrown with wild strawberry plants and home to a family of foxes, ‘it was like a dormant cathedral,’ he remembers. ‘Despite the buzz of the traffic whizzing past on Kensington High Street, you wouldn’t even know it was there. That was the strange thing.’ The visit had followed a call from his long-time friend, design entrepreneur Sophie Conran, who is also the daughter of Design Museum founder and trustee Sir Terence Conran. ‘She said, “You know the Commonwealth Institute?’’’ says Bolofo, retelling the conversation. ‘‘‘Well, my dad’s bought it and he’s going to turn it into the new Design Museum. Would you like to…

In 20 remarkable years we have come across, written about, examined and exhumed a lot of remarkable people. On the following pages are 20 of them. This, though, is not a simple ranking of power and influence. These are stories that resonate, with which we find common purpose and cause. Here are people who have sometimes stuck bloody-mindedly to a course, sometimes pivoted, re-examined and pushed in new directions, who have defied expectations and even open derision. They have shown courage under fire and grace under pressure. They have transformed – from girl group popette to one of the fashion industry’s smartest operators, for instance – and, over the last 20 years, have had a transformative influence in their field. Here are architects who build with a sense of the…

The year Wallpaper* launched, a 28-year-old Jonathan Ive was appointed as Apple’s design director. ‘Our goal is figuring out how we can bring meaning to objects,’ he told us a year later. He ticked that box. ‘Think of Apple as a product company whose primary goal is to make the very best products we can,’ he told us back in 2010. But six years is a long time in technology, and services, software, apps and interaction arguably play a far greater role in how we use our devices today. The intuitive elegance that has marked Ive’s designs is now harder to achieve. Hard but not impossible. ‘Far from being mutually exclusive, technology and craft are not at odds,’ he says. Apple knows this like no other, and that’s largely down…

Therme at Vals was completed in 1996, the same year this magazine was founded. It was clearly a good year. Two decades on, Peter Zumthor’s genre-defining spa in the Swiss canton of Graubünden remains a place of pilgrimage for architecture enthusiasts the world over. And Zumthor is now one of the world’s most sought-after architects. Peter Zumthor is not your typical internationally-operating, Pritzker Prizewinning architect, even if there is such a thing. He has no offices in London, New York or Zurich, preferring instead to base himself in the tiny Swiss hamlet of Haldenstein, where he has lived and worked for more than 40 years. At his atelier, staff are not found glued to shiny Apple Macs but gathered around physical models of buildings – working prototypes lifted up on…

Towering above his employees and most of his guests, with flowing locks and a beard as white as his linen trousers and moccasins, Brazilian mining magnate and modern-day Medici Bernardo Paz looks a little like God as he goes about his mission of building heaven on earth. In Paz’s contemporary garden of Eden, Inhotim, every detail has been designed to reset the way visitors live their lives. The sprawling utopia, an hour from his home town of Belo Horizonte and designed as a perfect marriage of art, nature and architecture, is much more than a playground for an eccentric millionaire. It’s Paz’s gift to the world – a beautiful, peaceful place from a man whose name means peace. Mines, as the inhabitants of Paz’s home state of Minas Gerais know…

To paraphrase Sinatra, 1996 was a very good year. Wallpaper* was launched, Richard Geoffroy was promoted to chef de cave at Dom Pérignon and, very appropriately, that year produced an extraordinary vintage that, two decades on, is still talked about. ‘Normally, the great wines come from the fine sunny weather. It was the wind that year,’ Geoffroy explains. ‘It drove the dehydration of the grapes and concentrated the juices to produce something baffling, energised, constrained and infinitely youthful.’ On paper, Geoffroy’s credentials are impressive enough – born into a champagnemaking family, he is a trained medical doctor and an influential oenologist. In person, he is articulate, smart, jovial, disciplined and passionate about the art of winemaking. His extraordinary niceness makes it easy to overlook the fact that Geoffroy is an…

Working with Ai Weiwei was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. Partly because we had barely a year to make a major exhibition at the RA, but mainly because he’s a profound, uncompromising and heroic individual whose humanity and humour are never far away. Outside his studio in Caochangdi – a kind of artists’ village in Beijing – the street is lined with surveillance cameras, each one festooned with a red Chinese lantern by Weiwei, the most gentle of subversions. A bike was chained to the lamppost outside the main door – and it had a fresh bunch of flowers in its basket every day until he got his passport back. For most of the time we were working together, it seemed unlikely he would be able…

FONDAZIONE PRADA CAMPUS 01. DEPOSITO GALLERY 02. CISTERNA GALLERY 03. SOUTH GALLERY 04. HAUNTED HOUSE 05. NORTH GALLERY 06. LIBRARY 07. PODIUM 08. CINEMA 09. TOWER Rare now is the fashion brand that doesn’t do art in some way, does not sponsor, show, collaborate or co-mingle with artists and galleries. It can look like a crushing embrace. But one designer has been doing it for longer and with more sophistication and commitment than any other. Miuccia Prada, who trained as a mime artist before joining the family operation, established the Fondazione Prada in 1993 and began collecting art; seriously and with serious intent. The Rem Koolhaas-designed New York Prada store, or Epicenter, which opened in 2001, was more gallery and performance space than glittering showcase for product. But Prada has…

CASE STUDIES Horological heroes of the hour Classic-car lover, contemporary art collector, wine aficionado… the character traits are perfectly in order, but Karl-Friedrich Scheufele is not quite the old-fashioned watch-brand boss he seems. Co-president of the Chopard Group and creator, 20 years ago, of its haute horlogerie strand L.U.C, it was not the success of his family business that afforded him the idea of creating a high-watchmaking business, but the mournful echoes of failure, albeit not his own. In the early 1990s, the traditional Swiss watch industry was still clawing its way back from the quartz watch crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. The Swatch Group had started the revival with high-volume, low-price exports and savvy marketing strategies for its luxury brands. Yet generations of skilled watchmakers remained unemployed, leaving…

Ganga style ANANTARA KALUTARA, SRI LANKA The blueprint for Anantara Kalutara – one of the last completed projects from Sri Lanka’s most famous architect, Geoffrey Bawa – was commissioned over two decades ago, but work on the property was stalled by the island’s civil war, Bawa’s death in 2003 and damage caused by the 2004 tsunami. Now, under the guidance of Channa Daswatte, of local firm MICD Associates and a Bawa acolyte, the resort has finally opened, featuring a series of simple Dutch Colonial-style buildings with high-ceilinged rooms and an abundance of natural ventilation. Located on the Kalu Ganga estuary, on the western shores of the country, it features thickly vegetated gardens, lotus ponds and walkways that link the beachside pool, spa and three restaurants. And with an interior that…

CHAIHUO MAKER SPACE Founded in 2011 by Seeed Studio to provide an open and collaborative environment for makers, as well as equipment such as 3D printers and laser cutters, Chaihuo Maker Space takes its name from the Chinese saying ‘The fire burns high when everybody adds wood to it’, which in western phraseology might be expressed as ‘Many hands make light work’ CITY HALL Designed by Li Mingyi and completed in 2004, Shenzhen City Hall’s distinctive wavy roof is meant to be evocative of the wingspan of the mythical roc bird, considered to be a symbol of the city WINDOW OF THE WORLD The theme park features around 130 reproductions of famous attractions, including the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal When Wallpaper* launched in 1996, Shenzhen was already celebrating…

Anniversary cover Image in collaboration with Alessandro Michele, referencing Wallpaper’s first cover. Typography and cover transformation by Thomas Heatherwick Photography: Joachim Mueller Ruchholtz Fashion: Isabelle Kountoure Interiors: Amy Heffernan She wears dress, £1,630; belt, £220; shoes, £1,110, all by Gucci. He wears top, £495; trousers, £510; loafers, £515; ring, £185, all by Gucci ‘Oota T2’ table, £1,070, by EOOS, for Walter Knoll, from Aram. ‘Palla’ chair, price on request, by Giovanni Travasa, for Bonacina 1889. ‘Alpaca’ rug, from £2,908, by The Rug Company Welcome to the 20th anniversary issue of Wallpaper* – at 508 pages, our biggest issue ever. What a change there has been over those 20 years. Back in the dark ages of 1996, ‘design’ was still largely considered a last-minute bolt-on, a perfunctory styling job. We now…

Since LVMH appointed Jonathan Anderson as creative director at Loewe in 2014, the plaudits have landed thick and fast, as the thirtysomething from Magherafelt in Northern Ireland has taken the once-staid Spanish luxury brand and given it an infusion of cool. Having reinvented its men’s and women’s fashion lines and begun to revamp its retail spaces, he has now turned his attention to perfume – potentially the biggest earner of them all. Anderson’s concept for Loewe 001 is clear enough. ‘The name indicates a new start for the brand,’ he says. ‘Loewe has done perfumes since 1947, but this is the first time perfume and fashion have been combined.’ Indeed, up to now Parfums Loewe has been a separate company, with its own separate website, and it’s easy to guess…

Fascinated by the discovery that, after a certain amount of use, traditional Yixing clay teapots become so seasoned that tea can be brewed just by pouring boiling water into an empty pot, new LA-based brand UNCMMN, founded by Funi Ding and Stacy Zou (pictured right), set about creating a series of modern tableware using the highly porous clay that is particular to this region in China. Zou and Ding, who grew up in LA and Shanghai respectively, plan to launch one new collection annually based on a different location in the world and an uncommon material found there. In their first collection (pictured inset), produced by local artisans in Yixing, the pieces include a teapot with a delicate spout and angular handles that recall the structure of bamboo branches, while…

At first glance, you’d struggle to spot many similarities between Sir Kenneth Grange and Bethan Laura Wood. He’s the classically styled godfather of British modernism, renowned for designing some of the most iconic industrial products of the past 50 years; she’s a vivacious princess of 21st-century pop design, typically seen in multicoloured makeup and clothes that complement her experimental furniture, products and set designs. But one thing the pair do have in common is a fondness for unusual footwear. ‘Kenneth always has really good shoes,’ says Wood, resplendent in a pair of iridescent brogues. Not to be outdone, Grange has dug out a pair of red and yellow boots with padded wings that he bought at the Mr Freedom store on the King’s Road in the 1960s. ‘These are from…

For years, Asbury Park, down the New Jersey shore, has mostly been known as one thing: a pre-eminent music destination for legendary bands. Be it The Ramones, The Clash, Bon Jovi or, most notably, Bruce Springsteen (whose debut album is titled Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ), many bastions of rock culture have played here since the 1960s. With its soulful seaside boardwalk, vibrant nightlife, Jazz Age heritage and 1920s architecture peppering its periphery, the city was a picture-perfect piece of good ol’ Americana – that is, until the late 1970s. By 1984, Asbury Park had been in a long decline. Grab-happy developers bought huge chunks of land designated for redevelopment but were then stalled by economic recession, leaving areas untouched for almost 30 years. In 2009, the real estate firm…

No.I The ‘broken’ suit Ermenegildo Zegna Couture Stefano Pilati’s legacy at Ermenegildo Zegna Couture remains tightly bound to the ‘broken’ suit, his pairing of clashing patterns or fabrications that build a truly modern tailoring look. For stockists throughout, see page 504 No. The 2.55 bag Chanel Karl Lagerfeld’s relentless appetite for the new and the next sees him reinvent the house’s 2.55 bag (named after its date of creation, February 1955) with unrestrained wit, as witnessed here by A/W16’s 2.55 Hanger edition. No. 3 The moccasin Tod’s No shoe has transcended dress codes like Tod’s Gommino. The unisex moccasin, with its trademark sole of 133 rubber pebbles, has been a modern wardrobe staple since the 1970s. No. 4 The hourglass silhouette Dolce & Gabbana Harking back to the Hollywood heyday…

Set back from Melrose Avenue and rising up like a Mediterranean villa on steroids, Restoration Hardware’s vast Los Angeles gallery possesses the ambition of a Hollywood tentpole production. Unveiled in 2014, the store features a grand double staircase leading to a 929 sq m public rooftop park complete with an olive grove, towering hedges, water fountains and fire pits. Restoration Hardware’s California flagship anchors what’s becoming known as Melrose High Street, a six-block tract extending from the César Pelli-designed Pacific Design Center to La Cienega Boulevard. The man behind the strip’s radical revitalisation is Ben Soleimani, the scion of a vaunted Iranian family that has dealt in museum-quality carpets and tapestries for four generations. ‘Not that long ago, this area was extremely sparse and not the kind of place where…

Glimpses of a ghostly, monochrome world are what mark out Daniel Arsham. The New York-based artist, and co-founder of experimental design and architecture practice Snarkitecture, has long been moulding his own blend of art, performance and architecture in a hypnotic greyscale palette, which has never veered off-course – that is, until now. This month, Arsham’s first solo exhibition takes place at the New York branch of Galerie Perrotin, which has represented him for the past 11 years. The exhibition brings together ten sculptural works, as well as an immersive, large-scale installation that takes over the gallery’s entire basement floor – and for the first time is in colour. ‘For the last few years, I have been working with these fictional archaeological objects from our present that have been recreated in…

In an architecture world that is so often dominated by a search for purity and minimalism, ‘collage’ feels almost like a dirty word, but this hasn’t stopped Konstantinos Pantazis and Marianna Rentzou of Athensbased practice Point Supreme Architects (Architects’ Directory 2015) from masterfully uniting seemingly disparate elements into a coherent whole that brims with personality. ‘Collage in architecture gets bad press, because it often happens for its own sake – for fun. We take architecture much more seriously’, says Pantazis. ‘We hope that our work does not get associated principally with either collage, or colour; an easy misconception. We prioritise the sensorial above all and use collage as a way to create different experiences. So the spatial narrative is much more essential than the collage.’ Nowhere is this more evident…

MOLECULAR – 1994 Experimental chef Ferran Adrià led Spanish restaurant El Bulli in a new direction, inventing what’s now known as molecular cuisine. Heston Blumenthal and the US’s Grant Achatz joined him in using fogs, foams and chemistry to reconfigure food. FOR STOCKISTS, SEE PAGE 504 In the mid-1990s, Nobu and its exotic fusion of flavours was the height of gastronomy. Eating local, seasonal foods was still an ideal with seemingly little ambition, foraging went hand in hand with meditation and moon cups, and fermentation was the result of bad housekeeping. How quickly things have changed. We’ve since seen a number of food movements, veering from futuristic molecular and deconstructivist cooking to the gastronomic upscaling of humble foods. Chefs have become our heroes and our holiday snaps now chiefly chronicle…

An eclectic collection of contemporary photography represents a long-term cultural commitment for German fashion house windsor. (yes, that lower case w and full stop are all part of the branding). Works by the likes of Terry Richardson, Richard Prince, Claude Closky and Sylvie Fleury are exhibited in carefully curated rotation in its stores across Europe, reflecting and informing the brand’s aesthetic – a modern encapsulation of the here and now, a vision of style that is unobtrusively correct. For this shoot in London, the Wallpaper* team chose key A/W collection items of clean-cut, zeitgeisty, urban tailoring from windsor., photographing them beside startlingly forensic images of lips and eyes by US photographer Sam Samore. Appropriating techniques used by detectives, Samore’s work is an exploration of contemporary notions of privacy and myth.…

Bulgari The rectangular form of baguette-cut diamonds presents the gemsetter with a graphic tool, here adding depth to Bulgari’s white-diamond spirals and figurative definition to the ‘Serpenti’ brooch. ‘The Magnificent Inspirations’ brooch (far left) in platinum with 60 round brilliant- (29.28ct) and tapered baguette-cut diamonds (7.02ct); the ‘Magnificent Inspirations Serpenti’ brooch (top) in white gold, with baguette- and tapered cut diamonds (6.92ct) and standout square- (2.01ct) and pear-cut diamonds, both by Bulgari De Beers Baguette-cut diamond spokes form an abstract framework for De Beers’ diamond medallion. Brooch (bottom), detachable from the ‘Elizabeth Tower’ necklace, in white gold with 356 diamonds in four cuts – round, princess, baguette, pear – including the central round brilliant (3.03ct), by De Beers. Harry Winston A spray of knife-set diamonds forms this meditation on two…

Some of the largest architecture projects in the world are taking shape in a ground-floor atelier tucked away in London’s King’s Cross. Thomas Heatherwick set up his studio in 1994 after studying at Manchester Polytechnic and the RCA, and over the years he gradually scaled up its output, creating everything from furniture and installations through to buses, bridges, art museums and whole city blocks. Heatherwick now works alongside around 200 designers, 130 of whom have architectural training. The studio output is focused on big buildings. These include one of the largest mixed-use projects in China, a key component of a vast US private development, a California office for a tech colossus, and a new bridge for London, all of which are at various stages of planning and construction. Despite this…

Most people steal things from hotels. Few try to steal an entire hotel. But that’s what happened to Ian Schrager. Just weeks after he opened the Edition in Waikiki, the owner of the building turned up in the middle of the night, changed the locks on the front doors and told the staff they worked for him now, not Schrager’s company. The episode neatly, if rather dramatically, sums up the man who has transformed hotels. Over the past 30 years, Schrager has reinvented hotels and then reinvented them some more, and each time he has done so, his rivals, big and small, have stolen his ideas wholesale. At Morgans, the Royalton, the Paramount and the Hudson in New York and, along the way, the Delano in Miami, the Clift in…

It is now the norm for fashion designers to dabble in other forms. Hedi Slimane, Rick Owens, Karl Lagerfeld and JW Anderson are all serious, serial dabblers. This is the age of the new polymath, the cross-disciplinary curator, the imperial taste-maker. But there is one designer who has gone much further; who, over the last 20 years, has relocated fashion, pulled it out of its self-referential loops and plugged it into a larger, more powerful network of ideas and influences. Raf Simons originally trained in industrial and furniture design in Genk, Belgium, the country where he was born and raised and where his eponymous menswear line is based. After interning with Walter Van Beirendonck and then watching a Martin Margiela show in Paris, which Simons has described as nothing short…

By the early 1990s, Kazuyo Sejima already had experience at Toyo Ito’s office, her own studio and a Young Architect of the Year award from the Japan Institute of Architects under her belt. But it was after setting up SANAA (with Ryue Nishizawa) in 1995 that her career really took off, upscaling to major cultural commissions which transformed her into an international go-to choice for mesmerisingly barely-there, ethereal architecture. Her signature style of strong shapes and clean lines that at the same time appear flowing and delicate has helped define 21stcentury Japanese architecture. It is all about the experience for Sejima, although priorities have shifted somewhat since her early days in practice. ‘Our designs are not driven by what you can do with architecture itself, but by an interest in…

250 MILLION MILES of daily driving are guided by the Google Maps service, which extends to 200 countries. 2,348,257* apps are available in the Google Play store – 65 billion were downloaded by users in 2015, a number that earned developers around $7 billion over a 12-month period. 150 world cities now host Google offices – together they contain 185 cafes serving up 125,000 free meals a day. 1 in 3 of all mobile searches relate to location. 15 DATA CENTRES handle Google’s traffic, eight in the US, plus Chile, Taiwan, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, Singapore and the Netherlands. 15% of all Google searches are seeking out new information the company has never served up before. Around half of all searches originate in the USA and more than half of all…

When it comes to supporting the arts, few patrons have made as big a name for themselves as the Miami-based real-estate developer Jorge M Pérez. Founder of the Related Group, part of the property powerhouse behind ambitious urban development projects such as New York’s Hudson Yards, Pérez has not only played a huge part in shaping the modern Miami skyline, but also left his mark on its cultural landscape as well. In 2013, Pérez’s name became a talking point during the relocation of the Miami Art Museum to a swanky, waterfront home designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Along with its expanded, $220m building, the museum also unveiled a new name: the Pérez Art Museum Miami, an acknowledgement of the $40m donation from the billionaire. Although the naming was unorthodox,…

Modesty almost forbids, but only almost. In fact, space doesn’t allow a complete list of our many advances and upshifts, our constant refinements and occasional reinventions over the last 20 years. Here’s just a few to be going on with: establishing the Handmade exhibition as the showcase of contemporary craft and design; creating the perfect pocketsized travel guide; civilising e-commerce with the W* Store; curating a long-running series of artist-designed covers and backpage artist’s recipes; the encouragement and advancement of wave after wave of young designers and architects; and, of course, smuggling more dubious double entendres onto our covers than any magazine ever.…

The ancient Romans were mad for their spas, and built thermal retreats all through Europe, invariably in wildly picturesque spots. We daresay they would have approved of Lisbon-based architect Luís Rebelo de Andrade’s work on their steamy outpost in the rocky hamlet of Longroiva in north-east Portugal – an area that insiders prize for its varied scenic attractions, bijoux vineyards and incomparable tableaux of ancient walled towns, walking trails and, of course, hot springs. Next to the base of the hilly town, the 44-room Longroiva offers a wonderful contrast of architectural moods, thanks largely to Rebelo de Andrade’s thoughtful masterplan. The architect’s starting point was the existing threestorey, late-19th-century pile, which had been converted into a thermal spa around 15 years ago. The spa had done a steady but unspectacular…

The challenge was not nearly as daunting as it might sound: to find design and innovation in a district of Shenzhen once known as the counterfeit capital of the world. Stretching about a kilometre and a half in central Shenzhen, Huaqiangbei has been the heart of the city’s electronics industry since the first factories set up there in the early 1980s. Now home to thousands of dealers, stacked and jam-packed in a labyrinthine sprawl, the area continues to churn out dodgy shanzhai (imitation) Apple and Samsung smartphones, alongside all the components you’d need for assembling one yourself. But Huaqiangbei is also looking increasingly like a hotbed for innovation, both big and small. When you come here for the first time, your eyes open wide,’ says Henk Werner, the Dutch co-founder…

A Agnona Tel: 44.20 7493 6464 (UK) agnona.com Ahrend Tel: 44.20 7566 7466 (UK) ahrend.com Alan Cristea Gallery Tel: 44.20 7439 1866 (UK) alancristea.com Alpi Tel: 39.054 6945 411 (Italy) alpiwood.com Amara amara.com Amrapali Tel: 44.20 7584 4433 (UK) amrapalijewels.com Amtico Tel: 44.121 514 7373 (UK) amtico.com Aoomi Studio Tel: 44.7487 816518 (UK) aoomistudio.com Aram Tel: 44.20 7557 7557 (UK) aram.co.uk Arighi Bianchi arighibianchi.co.uk Armani Casa Tel: 44.20 7079 1930 (UK) armanicasa.com Arte arte-international.com Atrium Tel: 44.20 7681 9933 (UK) atrium.ltd.uk B B&B Italia Tel: 44.20 7591 8111 (UK) bebitalia.com Bally Tel: 44.20 7499 0057 (UK) bally.co.uk Baxter Tel: 44.20 7629 0045 (UK) baxterlondon.net Berluti Tel: 44.20 7437 1740 (UK) berluti.com Bette Tel: 49.52 50 110 (Germany) bette.de Bonacina Tel: 39.031 699 800 (Italy) bonacina1889.it Boss Tel: 44.20 7734 7919…

Wallpaper’s hot pick of the latest global goings-on MASSIMO LISTRI HOTSHOT SHOT TAKER Wallpaper* subscriber since 1996 Volume control at Listri’s Florence home, photographed by Massimo Listri So how do you keep yours? Stacked or shelved in date order? Proudly displayed or in a nukeproof vault? Italian photographer Massimo Listri, who keeps his beautifully bound, is one of the long-term loyalists (for more, see page 311) that have been collecting Wallpaper* since we first launched 20 years ago. We like to think that, over those two decades, we have made a difference. Continue reading to find out how.…

After seasons of impractical minis, the designer bag is heading back to a size range that can actually ‘handle’ our packed lives. Saint Laurent’s new shoulder star, the Large Envelope, is an evolution of its cult, chain-strapped Envelope Monogram. Featuring a graphic combination of three quilted patterns and a threaded gold strap, this marine blue, matelassé suede beauty also goes across-body to redistribute heavier lifting. And it looks like the days of carrying dual accoutrements to share the load may finally be drawing to a close as oversized bags were spotted on the Paris catwalks of Balenciaga, Loewe and Sonia Rykiel.…

In 2010, entrepreneurs Nicolas Roope and Michael-George Hemus launched Plumen, an energy-efficient light bulb with design credentials. Six years later, Plumen has become a full lighting company, and the bulbs are now the illumination of choice for hospitality establishments from Bratislava to Jakarta. The company’s first bulb is part of permanent collections at MoMA, the V&A and Cooper Hewitt, and was nominated as design of the year by London’s Design Museum in 2011. After launching the second bulb in 2014, the pair are now ready to unveil the Plumen 003, a slight departure from the more rational designs of 001 and 002 and a more poetic, slightly nostalgic approach to the light bulb. The debut bulb was made in collaboration with designer Sam Wilkinson, and Bertrand Clerc worked on 002.…

For the first time in over three centuries of trading, London store Fortnum & Mason is hosting a museum-worthy exhibition, a showcase of modern and contemporary British art, mined from the collection of ebullient collector Frank Cohen. Sometimes dubbed the ‘Saatchi of the north’ or the ‘Manchester Medici’, Cohen’s colourful press cuttings have sometimes obscured the fact that his is one of the preeminent collections of British art. For over 30 years he has worked with Robert Upstone, a former senior curator at the Tate, to select key works by a range of artists from Howard Hodgkin to Tracey Emin. Now the pair have made a selection of his works to scatter around the store: in the basement dining area sits a piece by the Chapman Brothers, in the fifth…

A world of oenophile wonders and spirit-raising accoutrements At first sight, one could be forgiven for thinking Stählemühle is an ancient company doing things in ancient ways. Its fruit brandies are made on a small farm near Lake Constance in south Germany, using the same techniques that would have been used 2,000 years ago. But visit the farm and it becomes obvious that this is a more contemporary operation: redesigned by Philipp Mainzer in 2011, the distillery blends traditional architecture with stark concrete, wood and Scandinavian furnishings. The man behind Stählemühle is Christoph Keller, a former art-book publisher who moved to the area in 2004 from Frankfurt, to escape the city and work as a freelance art consultant. His newly acquired farm came with a distilling licence, which inspired him…

1. HECTOR ANDRES POVEDA MORALES Chiquinquira, Colombia What does design mean to you? Design is simply everything around us; it is what makes something unique; it is passion. How important is design in your life? I’m an artist so design is very important. I believe that by combining functionality and aesthetics, I can find the sweet spot between making my life easier and nicer. Where do you want to be in 20 years’ time? In my dream house in the mountains, where I’ll be doing landscape photography and managing my own marketing and advertisement company. 2. AMELIA WALL London, UK What does design mean to you? Design is an inexhaustible energy that makes up my world. It also means opportunity. Are you more interested in objects or experiences? As a…

From the street, it might take visitors to Yves Béhar and Sabrina Buell’s San Francisco home a moment to find the front door. A seemingly unbroken stretch of black anodised aluminum – which looks flat from afar, but up close exposes a unique CNC-machined pattern of nicks and notches – spans the ground-level facade, disguising both a garage and the aforementioned entrance. Each fits flush within the mottled expanse; a pair of portals, hiding in plain sight. This interplay between raw materials and careful craftsmanship, the clearly visible and the cleverly, strategically obscured, is one that is repeated throughout their three-level home in San Francisco – itself a domestic dream-turned-reality that has been, in many ways, decades in the making. Béhar – a de facto design superstar who established himself…

Perfumer and frequent flyer Timothy Han rolls with the new Bugaboo Boxer For Timothy Han (pictured), a new perfume is more than just technical alchemy. It’s about creating an experience, mapping an olfactory journey. ‘We launch our fragrances in art galleries,’ he explains, sitting in London’s Flowers gallery, which hosted the debut of his 2015, Kerouac-inspired On The Road edition. ‘We design a sensory dinner where our chef creates a menu around the stories the perfume is based on.’ Born in Canada, Han studied in London and Paris, and worked in fashion designer John Galliano’s atelier, before moving into fragrance. He founded Timothy Han / Edition in 2014. He isn’t your typical perfumer. ‘There’s a traditional hierarchy of how a perfume should work – first, you smell the top note…

Victoria Beckham’s transformation from pop celebrity and tabloid icon to the force behind a covetable fashion line is an extraordinary one. Indeed, when the Spice Girls burst onto the cultural landscape in 1996, it would have seemed unlikely that 20 years later she would be presiding over a label now fêted for its sleek, restrained lines. But to hear Victoria Beckham tell it, she didn’t have ‘any grand expectations’ when making the transition from music to fashion. ‘I was just focused on creating clothes that I felt proud of and passionate about,’ says Beckham of launching her eponymous line in 2008. ‘The fact that the brand has since taken off in the way it has has been very humbling.’ Now, the label boasts its own handsome flagship store on London’s…

Airbnb confounds for many reasons, though the most obvious one is that its success is based on a business model that ignores one of the first lessons we learn at our mother’s knee: don’t talk to strangers. We can only imagine what the first few investor meetings in 2008 must have been like. And yet, fast forward nine years and the website – essentially a match-making service between home-owners and visitors looking for an alternative to hotel rooms – has already hosted 123 million nights. It’s also in the midst of seeking additional funding, valuing the company at $30bn – making it the second highest-valued start-up in the US behind Uber. And like Uber, Airbnb has become a poster-child for the sharing economy, that nebulous but extremely valuable intersection between…

GUCCI AS WALLPAPER* COVER STAR Alessandro Michele’s Gucci is a harbinger of change in the fashion industry. In barely 18 months, his work has perceptibly moved goalposts and his impact is hard to overstate, certainly when it comes to recent fashion. Indeed, you’d have to dive back to the 1990s to find anything similar. Ironically, if you do so, you’ll find it was once again at Gucci that the status quo shifted, under the tenure of Tom Ford. Exactly 20 years apart, both used the Italian leather goods behemoth to ring in the changes, to provoke, challenge and ultimately seduce. Both have proved, within the space of mere seasons, to be the dominant fashion stories of their respective periods. Michele and Ford’s visions for Gucci, on the surface, are polar…

There was a time when Japanese food meant exactly the same thing wherever you were, whatever the occasion and budget: sashimi, teppanyaki, sushi, teriyaki and tempura. In the 1990s, however, Nobuyuki Matsuhisa changed all that when he launched his deliriously inventive spin on classic Japanese tropes layered with nuanced South American influences, Peruvian specifically – yellowtail sashimi jalapeño and tempura eel, for instance. From the start, a strong stylish streak has run through all of Matsuhisa’s projects. When the first Nobu opened in New York in 1994, he tapped David Rockwell for the interiors. ‘I explained to David the importance of the flow of the kitchen and the connection between the kitchen and the sushi bar. He understood both what I wanted and my style of cooking, and was able…

In 1996, Elon Musk – and we realise how quaint this now sounds – did his first million dollar deal. The software company he started in 1995 with $28,000 of his father’s money picked up a $3 million investment and his remarkable career, from software to space via PayPal and sustainable propulsion, was off. Along the way he has destroyed decades of received wisdom and borrowed business practices and, despite all that, his smartest rivals still think the world of him. As CCO of Aston Martin, Marek Reichman knows a thing or two about building beautiful, cutting-edge cars. It’s thanks to Elon Musk, he says, ‘that our industry is now engaged in a radical rethink of how we create and deliver transportation’. If starting a car company is hard, building…

Designed by Milan-based architect Andrea Tognon, the reworked Jil Sander store in Berlin is a delicately crafted interior that introduces a fresh concept for the company’s retail outlets. Tognon ensured his proposal highlighted the brand’s knack for purity, clean lines and simple geometries. ‘Jil Sander for us is about research to the core, to the essence of ideas and forms,’ says Tognon. ‘In the project we questioned today’s ideal relationship between man and nature as an equilibrium of opposition, working around the juxtaposition of natural and artificial, geometric and organic, simple and not.’ Keeping the interior crisp and decluttered, the architect balanced rich, traditional materials, such as marble, stone and bronze, with synthetic products that point to the future, such as resin. It is furnished entirely with bespoke pieces that…

Eastern promise HOSHINOYA TOKYO, JAPAN As one of Japan’s most innovative hotel groups, a pioneer of eco-tourism and of the contemporary onsen, it comes as little surprise that Hoshino Resorts has now turned its attention to a modern reworking of that upscale Japanese institution, the ryokan. Its latest offering is the Hoshinoya Tokyo hotel. Set among the straight-laced skyscrapers in the city’s financial district, the property – at just 17 storeys – might not be one of the loftier hotels in Tokyo, but what it lacks in height it makes up for in clever design choices, courtesy of local outfit Azuma Architect & Associates. The elegant black-latticed facade – inspired by an ancient kimono motif – is indicative of the understated luxury that lies inside. Fourteen of the floors are…

Quinoa coconut bircher muesli Serves 4 160g cooked quinoa 100g oats 2 tbs chia seeds 300ml coconut water 120ml coconut milk juice of ½ lime 1 mango, peeled and cubed 100g blueberries 2 tbs pumpkin seeds coconut sugar syrup or agave syrup, to serve Put the quinoa, oats and chia seeds in a bowl and mix well. Add the coconut water and milk and lime juice, and stir well. Cover and leave to soak overnight. Stir half the mango and half the blueberries into the soaked muesli. Serve topped with the remaining fruit, pumpkin seeds and a drizzle of syrup. Vesper martini Makes 1 cocktail Fill a cocktail shaker or stirring glass with ice, then add 60ml gin, 20ml vodka, and 10ml Lillet Blanc. Stir well, strain into a martini…

In 1996, when Wallpaper* was born, a teenage Daniel Arsham was, he recalls, busy ‘listening to hip hop and taking a lot of photos on a Pentax K1000’. Two decades on, his witty experiments with structures encompass architecture, art and performance spaces. He is co-founder of the art/architecture studio Snarkitecture, while his works in sculpture and in set design for leading contemporary dancers have been shown around the world. ‘I’ve exhibited and worked in Japan for years,’ he says. ‘My wife is half Japanese. It’s my favourite place on earth. One of my favourite dishes from Japan is cold soba. The summers there can be quite hot and this dish is served cold. I like to make it even colder.’ After rinsing cooked soba noodles in cold water and placing…