Located in Beverly Crest, Los Angeles, the Sheats-Goldstein Residence is one of John Lautner’s most cinematic homes. So screen-ready, in fact, it provided the backdrop for Jackie Treehorn’s house in The Big Lebowski, as well as numerous other films, music videos, and fashion spreads, including the July 2026 issue of Wallpaper*, which saw photographer David William Baum and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes capture the Pre-Fall 2026 season’s most striking looks in the home.

Much of this is down to its unique construction; designed by Lautner in 1962, it features a geometric, cantilevered roof which dramatically traverses interior and exterior. When the home was gifted to LACMA in 2016 by businessman and basketball fan James Goldstein – who acquired the house in 1972 – the institution’s CEO, Michael Govan, praised its ‘extreme choreography’. ‘You come through [the entranceway] corridor, you hear that sound of water, you have the plant material... and then, you have this clam shell opening to the view,’ he said. ‘I think that so many buildings have been influenced by it.’

Pre-Fall 2026 fashion photographed at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, Los Angeles

More recently, Kristopher Conner and James Perry, of LA firm Conner + Perry – responsible for the renovation and upkeep of several of the city’s modernist buildings – have overseen works at the residence. Most notably, the creation of the Goldstein Entertainment Complex, which sits under a new tennis court as part of the estate and features a nightclub, offices and a spa. ‘It is an evolution of the visual language established by Lautner in the original house,’ says Kristopher Conner of the raw concrete, glass and stainless steel composition.

‘I’d always wanted to shoot at the home – I’m a big Lautner fan, and it’s such an architectural landmark of LA,’ says Jason Hughes. ‘For the clothes, we wanted them to be a juxtaposition to the building’s futuristic, angular lines. So the pieces have a feeling of romance, but still very sculptural, and sleek – dealing with this idea of shape.’

‘On the day it poured with rain – something rare in Los Angeles, and far from the sun-soaked views of the city we had imagined backdropping the shoot,’ he continues. ‘But despite this, and warnings of mudslides in the hills, the rain adds something atmospheric to these pictures – an unexpected view of a much-photographed city.’

Discover the full shoot below.

Model: Julia Bergshoeff at DNA Models. Casting: Evagria Sergeeva. Hair: Kelly Peach a WSM using Oribe. Make-up: Inge Borg at Call My Agent using Dior Forever Foundation and Dior Capture Le Sérum. Set design: Max Jezek at WSM. Local producer: Katie Binfield. On-set producer: Danielle Quigley. Photography assistants: Keith Bennett, Cés Martinez. Fashion assistants: Lucy Proctor, Mónica Garate. Production assistant: Sarah Hallal. Set assistant: Carter McNeill. Retouching: Emily Chan, Zach Liebenson. Special thanks to Kristopher Conner and James Perry, from Conner + Perry Architects, and the Sheats-Goldstein Residence, Los Angeles.

Last year in Seoul, Minjae Kim presented ten chairs that a carpenter friend had spent a year building and lacquering. The technique was traditional, the kind formally preserved in South Korea and largely absent from contemporary furniture and, for Kim – born in Seoul, based in New York – the first time he had used it in earnest. He had been making furniture for five years, and much of that time had gone into figuring out, on his own terms, what to make of his birthplace.

Kim discovered the US on an exchange in high school. After studying painting and architecture, and completing a stint of military service back home, in 2008 he travelled to Seattle to continue his studies, later moving to New York for an architecture master’s at Columbia University. He spent three years at Studio Giancarlo Valle, then started his own practice from the basement of his old apartment during the pandemic.

His debut in 2021 at LA design gallery Marta catalogued Western typologies, such as a chair adapted from Freud's personal study. These were objects that differed from his understanding of the world, and he made them his by remaking them – for example, by treating fibreglass like cloth, quilting it before coating it with resin. The following year, with his mother, the painter Myoungae Lee, he co-presented an exhibition at Matter Projects in New York: four pieces drew on her work, including a chair inspired by one of her Coexistence paintings.

Press attention after the two shows fixed on his heritage in ways Kim did not recognise in the work itself. ‘If it wasn't me making it,' he says, ‘nobody would say this has a Korean tradition.' His response was the next show, with Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami, titled ‘IYKYK' (If You're Korean You Know). Here Kim made moon jars from fibreglass rope and lights based on ceremonial robes. The Korean references were unmistakable; he has described his spirit at the time as almost punk, ‘I'll show you how to do it.'

Three years ago, an invitation arrived from non-profit cultural foundation Arumjigi to bring the IYKYK approach to a South Korean audience. It softened and matured what had been a somewhat defiant gesture, and led, in time, to the lacquered ‘Seoul' chairs. In the Marta show ‘Phantom-22', in 2025, Kim switched focus again, to LA, a city where a mountain lion, who had crossed the freeways into Griffith Park, settled and died, had become a local icon. Kim's sculpture took the cougar's name, P-22; the phantom of the exhibition’s title referenced ‘the spectres of the city… creatures, ideas, and topographies that define Los Angeles’. The production furniture was made in California, and carried Kim's touch in its cast-resin handles.

Kim has spoken of fighting a lonely fight in New York with references people around him are not likely to recognise. However, he notes that as South Korea itself has become globally visible in recent years, he has had to explain himself less and the gap has narrowed. Going home is still double-edged, he says: he stands out, he tries to blend in. ‘The identity crisis,' he says, ‘has been kind of melting away.' In September 2026, he will show with Marta at Frieze Seoul.

minjae.kim

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The independent watchmaker Konstantin Chaykin had mulled over all the options. He could make all of his proposed watch’s components thinner, but then some would not work as well as needed. He could make the case very strong to compensate – that was an idea worth pursuing. Gold wouldn’t be durable enough. A tungsten nickel alloy would work, although it alone would take two months of machining – and he would need to use the rare, non-magnetic variety typically used in the development of space technology.

He could also rearrange the movement’s architecture, effectively splitting the mainspring barrel – a mechanical watch’s power source – into two parts, and integrate parts of the movement directly into the caseback. The winding of what would remain a very delicate instrument would need to be outsourced to a separate, dedicated device. But it could be done.

And, in fact, it has been. Chaykin recently unveiled the result: the production version of his ThinKing mechanical watch, the world’s thinnest, at just 1.65mm deep. 'Making a watch that thin was a real challenge, but life would be very ordinary without it,' says Chaykin. 'Why do it? Because it’s like a magic trick: you know it’s there on your wrist, but you can’t feel it. Now we’re just waiting for the next guys to try to beat our record.'

Chaykin’s watch beat the record previously held by Bulgari, which in 2025 also released the world’s thinnest tourbillon movement, the Octo Finissimo Ultra Tourbillon (among our pick of the year's statement watches), at 1.85mm thick – again achieved by using the caseback as the movement’s manipulation. This, in turn, unseated Piaget’s Altiplano Ultimate Concept Tourbillon, at a positively chunky 2mm.

But why this arms race for an ever-more barely-there mechanical model? After all, it’s one which, arguably, has been in play since the master watchmaker Jean-Antoine Lepine reimagined the pocket watch way back in 1765, doing away with the movement’s traditional sandwich of plates and pillars for a greatly thinned-down timepiece, with Jacques-David LeCoultre, in 1907, and Audemars Piguet, in 1938, both further revolutionising movement architecture to produce, respectively, a 1.38mm-thick pocket-watch movement and a 1.64mm-thick wristwatch movement (not including the case). Since the 1950s, Vacheron Constantin, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Piaget, Audemars Piguet and, latterly, Bulgari and Richard Mille have led the competition for ever more thinness.

'For watchmakers, thinness is something of an obsession, because to achieve it you have to reimagine the components and produce them in different ways, using different materials. And for the collector who understands the technical aspects, a very thin watch is a point of difference,' explains Bulgari’s product creation executive director Fabrizio Buonamassa Stigliani. 'For me, honestly, thinness alone adds nothing to the functionality of a watch – if it’s not automatic and robust enough for everyday life then it’s more a prototype. And we’re at a place where we could make an even thinner prototype watch, but you wouldn’t be able to touch it.'

Indeed, Stigliani adds that pursuing thinness in a watch is always a matter of compromise: you take something away here, you lose something – like a useful level of power reserve, reliability or enough rigidity – there. Further problems of functionality include, he suggests, how to attach a strap or bracelet to a very thin watch, and, invariably, its aesthetic. 'Sometimes an ultra-thin watch just looks too flat, too fragile,' he says.

These various complications are why, Stigliani suggests, makers of ultra-thin watches belong to 'a club with only a few brands for members' who like to be able to 'show the market something completely new and [for whom an ultra-thin watch] is a bit of a technical show-off too. It’s a wow moment. And the record [achieved] is another form of advertising campaign.'

Perhaps, then, we’re close to peak thin – at least until some new wonder material comes along. Chaykin says he’s working on various ideas that would allow for an even thinner mechanical watch, but concedes that 'like breaking a record in sport, each new record gets harder to beat, and tends to take much longer'. And he agrees with Stigliani that breaking records is one thing, 'but making a watch that’s wearable is something else'.

But that’s not to say that more thinness – if not of the ultra kind – doesn’t have its uses. Thomas Van Straaten, founder of VPC Watch Co, for example, has recently launched its Type 39VM, recognised as the thinnest 200m automatic dive watch on the market, at 9.34mm total thickness. He argues that, beyond the cliché of a thin watch sitting nicely under a shirt cuff ('though actually that’s quite nice’, he says), thinness does make for a more comfortable watch to wear.

'The interest in thinness now isn’t a fad,' he adds, 'but fits with a growing appreciation for the ergonomics of watch design, which is also behind the greater number of smaller watches too. And thinness has to be in balance with the rest of the design. I’m not a fan of thinness for its own sake. We could have made the Type 39 thinner [albeit at some cost to water resistance] by using a printed dial instead of one with raised indices, but it just didn’t look as good. And that matters.'

konstantinchaykin.com

Despite the foggy morning marine layer at the shore, summer is upon us in Los Angeles, and that means many trips to the beach for fresh seafood and frothy margaritas. Enrique Olvera of local Downtown LA favourite Damian, and award-winning Pujol in Mexico City, has recently unveiled a new concept for Mexican mariscos and agave cocktails in Venice, San Damián. Here's what to expect.

Wallpaper* dines at San Damián, Los Angelesdamian

The mood: Airy California cantina

The former ATLA space on Abbott Kinney was taken up a notch by Mexico City-based architecture studio TALLER ADG who collaborated with brand consultant Charlotte Fischli to refresh the dining room and bar. Lush greenery pops against the airy palette of light timber, which includes tables from Artless and chairs by Mexican architect and designer Oscar Hagerman.

The petate ceiling, made from woven palm fronds, adds a touch of tropical whimsy and draws the eye to colourful pieces from Mexican artists Marcela Calderon and Perla Valtierra. Coming soon: the back patio will become a taqueria, which will no doubt also be packed on the weekends.

The food: Michelin-level Mexican seafood

The pottery and ceramics for plating were all sourced In Mexico City, Oaxaca and Michoacán and make a stunning backdrop for the Mexico-meets-California focused dishes from chef Chuy Cervantes (also of Damian DTLA).

Cervantes is a master of ceviches and tangy poached shrimp aguachile, and you will be tempted to order everything from the raw dishes, along with a smoky mezcal Paloma or Mijenta Blanco margarita. But don’t overlook the crispy tlayuda topped with chorizo de pescado; fish tacos; or a crunchy Weiser Farms potato flauta. Large format plates include pescado asado guacachile amarillo – a whole fish (usually branzino), that is served with tortillas and salsas. And remember to save room for classic churros with a rich chocolate dip. You can walk it all off later on the boardwalk.

San Damián is located at 1025 Abbot Kinney Blvd, Venice, CA 90291, United States

Every few months, a new ingredient comes to prominence, amid claims that it will cure the ills caused by modern living: matcha for sustained energy, protein for appetite control, peptides for hormone regulation, CBD for anxiety, and so on. Yet, what if the most effective all-in-one method for achieving all the above has been under our noses for thousands of years?

That was what María Cobar asked herself after she was introduced to cacao – the raw, minimally processed bean (the same that chocolate comes from) that has been prized since ancient times for its nutritional and mood-enhancing benefits.

‘The scientific name for cacao is Theobroma cacao, literally "Food of God”, because of its ability to generate physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing,’ says Cobar. ‘In Mexico, there are all these legends about how the gods stole the cacao tree because it was only meant for the gods, but it was given as a gift to humans so they could focus on the arts and be fully nourished. Now, a thousand years later, people are finally getting it.’

With her brand, María Cacao, Cobar is hoping to help as many people as possible get it by hand-crafting ceremonial strength cacao blocks and flavoured cacao pods (like chocolate candy but with cacao) in her Mexico City store. Of course, cacao has been popular in certain circles for years, with cacao ceremonies, rooted in the tradition of Aztec and Mayan traditions, practised around the world, and plenty of wellness retailers selling the product, albeit often an over-processed, questionably sourced version of the ingredient.

For Cobar, starting her own cacao business was a way to bring cacao to a wider audience, while respecting its heritage and supporting local businesses, with an all-female team working daily to craft every cacao product by hand. There is also a family of farmers working to care for and harvest the cacao trees in the Mexican state of Tabasco.

‘In Mexico we say it's vigorizante – it pumps your veins,’ says Cobar. ‘When Hernán Cortés came to Mexico, he wrote a letter to Carlos V in Spain saying, “These people drink this very strange seed that they use as currency, and just a single dose of this beverage can sustain a soldier in battle for an entire day because it's so nourishing”. Then it was taken to Europe and transformed into milk chocolate. In Mexico, cacao wasn't accessible to everyone; it was a divine food, always present in ceremonies: weddings, funerals, all kinds of rituals.'

But the beneficial qualities of cacao have largely been lost to time following the Spanish conquest of the Americas. ‘Cacao became a sweet treat that, in modern times, even became something that carried shame – it’ll give you spots, it’ll make you gain weight, it’s bad for you. [There is] this whole taboo around chocolate, when actually, at its core, it's so healthy; we just changed it into something unhealthy by processing it.’

When unprocessed, cacao is one of the most nutritionally dense foods in the world, with more antioxidants than blueberries and containing a compound that can aid weight loss, phenylethylamine (the same molecule your brain releases when you fall in love). It also contains anandamide, which activates the same receptors in the brain that produce cannabinoids for relaxation (it is known as the ‘bliss molecule’).

María Cacao just opened up its first storefront in Mexico City’s Roma Norte neighbourhood, where customers can purchase its cacao products and taste a full cacao menu in a candlelit space. The products are also now available to purchase in London thanks to Vickie Biggs, who retails the cacao blocks and flavoured cacao pods from The Dream Of, an east London holistic healing studio that is a Wallpaper* favourite. Together, Biggs and Cobar are working to get cacao retailed in more locations around the UK, and to make ‘people realise that cacao is not only for wellness obsessives’, says Cobar. ‘Hopefully, one day, [it will be] the norm to enter spaces where instead of having wine or coffee, you’re having cacao, and [we’ll see] what conversations arise from this heart-opening medicine.’

At The Dream Of, Biggs has converted many of her clients – who include Yasmin Sewell, founder of Vyrao; make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench; and Alex Brownsell, hairstylist and founder of Bleach London – to replace their morning coffee with cacao. ‘I tried María’s cacao, and I've tried hundreds [of examples], and was immediately blown away; I knew I needed it in the shop,’ says Biggs.

‘As cacao becomes more popular, and I do think it will eventually be the new matcha, there's a real responsibility around how it's sourced and who profits from it. There's been a big influx of white-owned cacao brands. For me, people with platforms must support those who are genuinely connected to where cacao is from. Maria being Mexican, having a fully female Mexican team, working closely with farmers in Tabasco – that matters enormously. The product literally comes from that place of care and connection. You can taste it.’

mariacacao.mx

Toronto isn’t short of good Japanese restaurants by any means, but Shinji is creating buzz among local foodies. Located in the base of the West Tower at Bay Adelaide Centre, a 1920s heritage building tucked beneath one of Toronto’s newest office towers in the Financial District, this modern Japanese steakhouse comes from Harlo Entertainment – the hospitality group behind local stalwarts, Mimi Chinese and Sunny’s Chinese – who asked Toronto studio Odami for a restaurant that felt Japanese without falling into cliché.

Founders Arancha González Bernardo and Michael Fohring found their answer in denim. ‘It is equally at home in workwear and high fashion, and that balance between humility and refinement became the conceptual lens through which we approached the entire project,’ says Fohring, who saw in denim’s rough, functional glamour a fitting metaphor for a steakhouse built on craft rather than spectacle.

Wallpaper* dines at Shinji, Toronto

The mood: Indigo walls, one neon surprise

An existing ramp into the dining room is now enclosed in dark-stained wood and acoustic panelling. ‘Rather than treating it simply as passive circulation, we transformed it into a critical part of the experience,’ says González Bernardo. The walls and ceiling are coated in a custom indigo limewash, layered by hand until the surface reads more like ink or dyed cloth than paint.

Overhead, navy felt baffles dampen the noise of a full room while echoing the texture of woven denim without spelling it out. The one bright interruption is saved for the washroom corridor, where pink light bleeds into view gradually – a wink at Japan’s neon-lit nightlife that’s kept apart from the dining room and appears as a surprise only when guests go looking for the washroom.

The Food: Wagyu, direct sourcing, shared plates

Executive chef and partner Jia Zou, who cut his teeth at Miku and Kasa Moto, has built a literally sizzling à la carte menu around Shinji’s central grill, where raw preparations and nigiri sit paired with a full run of Japanese wagyu from A3 to A5, sourced from Iwate, Miyazaki, Hokkaido and Kagoshima, alongside true Kobe beef brought in directly from Hyogo prefecture. For guests after a more curated progression, there’s also a chef’s choice menu and a dedicated omakase experience at the chef’s counter.

Fish, shiso flower and kinome leaf arrive from Japan several times a week to keep things close to source. Start with the A5 wagyu, ordered by the ounce, or the Shinji surf and turf – black cod and sliced wagyu in yakiniku sauce with crispy leeks – which Zou calls ‘the single bite that captures the restaurant’s dual identity most efficiently.’

Shinji, base of the West Tower, Bay Adelaide Centre, 333 Bay St, Toronto ON M5H 2R2, Canada

For Steffany Tran, the Vietnamese-American founder of New York-based studio Vy Voi, objects become storytellers. Their materials, form and construction reflect longstanding cultural traditions, which she interprets through her own voice. ‘I describe my practice as almost like using a metal detector and finding nuggets in history,' she says.

Tran, whose parents are both refugees, grew up between San José, California, and Saigon, where she spent summers visiting her family. Thanks to her cross-cultural upbringing, ‘I could weave in and out of both of those identities very cleanly,' she says. ‘That openness and tenderness to what those identities are really shaped how I am as a person and my practice as well. I'm not coming from an outsider's gaze.'

After studying industrial design in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tran moved to New York, where she worked in traditional firms including Lippincott and Smart Design. The fast pace and problem-solving briefs were not exactly aligned with her personal interest in the art of making, so she took up ceramics at a local community centre as a creative outlet. There, she focused on perfecting the loose gestural glazing found in Vietnamese pottery. Eventually, she decided to dedicate all her time to creating handmade objects inspired by Vietnamese craft, which she felt were missing from the contemporary design world. ‘It was almost an exercise in this idea of if you can't find it, build it yourself,' Tran says.

Tran's Vietnam trips began to include visits to libraries and meetings with art historians and anthropologists to build her vocabulary around Vietnamese design and craft. She was particularly interested in how contemporary studios continued age-old traditions and reflected different sensibilities compared to East Asian aesthetics. This line of inquiry led her to dó, a textured paper made from tree bark that has been produced in Vietnam for over 800 years. She met one of the few families in the country who continue to make the material, and used it to design lamps, creating oblong shapes inspired by traditional kites, as well as welcoming, rounded silhouettes. Her newest collection derives its form from folded banana leaves, a core ingredient in Vietnamese cooking.

Tran is currently developing a new body of work based on her latest obsession: 17th-century Vietnamese lacquer, which was commonly applied to musical instruments and furniture with decorative inlays. ‘Design has the ability to make the seemingly unknown – and sometimes as a result, overlooked – feel more familiar and distinct,' Tran says. ‘If we can understand and covet Korean moon jars, Japanese joinery or Italian glass, I think we can make space for Vietnamese lacquer art and Lao weaving, too.'

The ultimate Vy Voi project is about expanding cultural vocabulary, democratising important narratives, and affirming human experience through captivating objects. So far the results have been heartwarming. ‘One of the most fulfilling things about doing this is when people message me to say, “I loved hearing the story”,' says Tran.

vyvoi.com

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

This article appears in the August 2026, Creative America issue of Wallpaper*, available from 2 July in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

For Keith Haring, New York was a blank canvas, becoming a central piece of his artistic identity after he moved to the city in 1978. It shaped an aesthetic located at the intersection of urban art and activism, which Haring cultivated in the 1980s alongside peers Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. They led a movement that brought art into the public space, in murals or on the subway, a crucial factor for Haring in raising awareness for fraught and urgent topics such as AIDS and education about drugs.

Born in New York, it was an energy that spread around the world, taking shape in an instantly recognisable shared visual language, a fluidity celebrated now with an exhibition, ‘Keith Haring: A World in Motion’, at New York art space 60 White.

‘Haring did not simply travel the world, he entered into dialogue with it,’ says Carlo McCormick, who curated the exhibition in collaboration with Lio Malca. ‘His work pulses with the energy of New York street culture while reflecting the histories, images, and rhythms of the places he encountered. The result is a global conversation, joyful, immediate, and profoundly connected.’

Recreated in 60 White’s multistorey space is San Francisco nightclub DV8, a hedonistic playground of the 1980s-90s that featured murals painted by Haring. This kind of community element is central to Haring’s work, and is also epitomised in his chalk drawings on black paper, which became familiar sights on the New York subway, and the Sister Cities – For Tokyo painting that he created in 1985, marking the friendship between New York and Tokyo, a bold and brilliant tribute to two cities he loved.

Adds Malca: ‘Keith Haring’s work is rooted in New York, but it belongs to the world. This exhibition highlights his ability to connect people through a shared visual language that remains as immediate and powerful today as it was in the 1980s.’

‘Keith Haring: A World in Motion’ is at 60 White, sixtywhite.com

Roses for Mother began in 2018 as intimate, improvised postcards: flowers that Dominik Tarabański arranged and photographed while travelling, then sent home to his mother as a way of bringing her the world she had taught him to believe in. He could not send the flowers themselves, so a photo went in their place. The series is on view at Bergdorf Goodman, as part of Gabriella Khalil's design residency, until the end of August 2026.

Tarabański was born in 1982 in Radymno, Poland, a small town near the Ukrainian border, and studied photography in Łódź and Warsaw. After four years moving between Polish cities, he left for New York in 2012. He has what he calls a primal side: the pull to go farthest and fastest, to do a little more than is asked. Heading to New York, he says, was like going to the moon; a single three-week visit decided it for him. Fashion photography paid the bills and took him between New York, Paris and London. The still lifes he made by hand, away from the crowded sets.

Tarabański says he is pursuing ‘this intersection of synthetic and organic', which sits ‘at the foundation of everything I do'. He contorts living matter into arrangements as deliberately impossible as a Dutch flower painting, then photographs them at the fleeting point of giving way. The finished prints are large, over 2m tall, and hold the wall like sculpture. From a rubber band and a dried stem, he makes what he calls a kind of magic: ‘Nothing becomes something.' He could have worked in concrete, he says; the delicacy was deliberate, a counterweight to a world he finds increasingly harsh.

Asked about what he retains of his birthplace, Tarabański is wary of the question and the clichés it invites, but what he will own is a disposition. There is the composure he trains for each morning through a hard physical routine, so that the day's work comes to him more easily; the optimism and the sensitivity he traces to his mother; and an economy he calls ‘very Polish', the instinct of a culture ‘excellent at being efficient'. It shows (or doesn't) as a privately held ethic, the discipline of working well when nobody looks at you, and in the determination to keep a contemporary vernacular of his native Polish, unwilling to let distance wear it down. Since moving to New York, Tarabański has become a compulsive hiker, seeking out a trail wherever he travels. This, and the wildness of the elements in his work, are his reply to a city of pressure and hard surface. The same balance runs through the rest of his life, in the way Poland and New York each answer to the word ‘home'.

His latest series, Between Stems, makes pressure its subject: knotweed, orchid and lily pinned and taped under tension, a measure of how much the world can load onto a thing before it gives. The work was shown this year with LA gallery Marta at FOG Design+Art in San Francisco, alongside that of Minjae Kim. A further solo exhibition in New York, also with Marta, is planned for autumn 2026. It will draw on Little Roses, a freer parallel series of pieces that run from the hand-sized to ones taller than Tarabański is.

tarabanski.com

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

New Mexico-based artist, and Wallpaper* US400 honoree, Johnny DeFeo has an excellent motto: ‘The more seriously you take a silly idea, the more silly it can be.' His biggest, boldest and silliest idea to date has been to build a rentable house in the shape of a giant coyote head, in the desert just outside Taos. ‘It's a place to recharge and not worry about your Wi-Fi, and just have a quiet time in a place that is visually novel and beautiful,' says DeFeo. And like many great ideas, this one came to him in a dream. ‘So clichéd!' he adds.

Tour Coyote house and its quirky, mesmerising interiors

Six years ago, the artist and his girlfriend were looking to move from Denver to New Mexico, because ‘it had always been a romantic place in our minds'. Following a visit to a large, bucolic property close to Vallecitos, he had a vivid dream in which he saw five houses shaped like different animal heads surrounding a black pond. DeFeo immediately sketched out this zoomorphic camp, and while the couple didn't purchase the property, the imaginative vision lingered.

It wasn't until June 2022, when he saw an Instagram ad for an Airbnb competition, that DeFeo saw an opportunity to turn his dream into reality. The OMG! Fund was seeking proposals for ‘really weird' rental properties, and offering $100,000 each to 100 winning applicants to realise their fantastical projects. ‘I almost didn't apply because I hated the name of it so much,' DeFeo jokes. But he did and, after submitting a short written description, sketches, a budget proposal and a construction timeline, The Trickster, also known as Coyote Casita, was finally selected as a winner.

Then came the challenge of actually building it. DeFeo found a site in Arroyo Hondo and interviewed several local architects and general contractors, but none of them truly understood his vision. Eventually, he was introduced to San Antonio-based sculptor Jacob Tobar of Mas Rústico, who specialises in faux-bois concrete and has experience fabricating large-scale public art projects, and they were ‘immediately on the same page'. Intrigued by DeFeo's model and proposal, Tobar visited the site and took a few measurements, then assured him that what they would build together was going to be ‘a lot better than the model'.

‘He's my hero,' DeFeo says. ‘He came with all the know-how for making a big, concrete, crazy sculpture, getting the permits, and making it look how we wanted.' The pair set about scaling up the maquette into a 30fttall structure that would look visually striking while also comfortably accommodating paying guests. The key structural elements were calculated and constructed just as a typical house would be built, then additional concrete was slowly added and shaped over the top.

Over 30 tonnes of concrete, countless rebar lengths, and ‘gallons of sweat and blood' later, the finished building really does resemble a coyote's head. Its sharp-toothed jaws form a cavern-like entrance that DeFeo likens to the tiger-shaped Cave of Wonders in Disney's Aladdin. ‘There was something about walking into the mouth that I just thought was whimsical,' he says.

A balcony from the loft bedroom extends atop the nose, creating a perfect vantage point for watching the setting sun illuminate the distant peaks in a ‘bright fuchsia' hue. Guests can also peer at the mountains through the coyote's nostrils. While the concrete head is highly sculptural and textured, the back of the building is smoother and more orthogonal. ‘I wanted the rest of it to feel quiet, and definitely Southwest, but not in a knock-off, hackneyed way,' says DeFeo.

Inside, the house is much more akin to a traditional New Mexican adobe home, evoking the textured mud-plaster walls and rounded corners found across the region. ‘I love the softness of the architecture,' says DeFeo. ‘You don't do 90-degree angles out here.' Through the mouth-accessed arched doorway is a small foyer that leads to an enclosed, light-filled bathroom with a shower lined with stones and pebbles.

Further down the coyote's ‘throat', the polished-aggregate hallway opens into a double-height space. A small kitchenette with terrazzo counters, a walnut dining table and chairs, and comfy sofas create a snug living area. ‘It has pretty high ceilings, but it feels very cosy,' DeFeo says. The loft bedroom is spacious enough to accommodate a king-size bed and an antique storage cabinet. ‘The fact that it's nice inside makes it funnier that it's coyote-shaped,' the artist says.

DeFeo is still adding to the interior décor. He recently purchased taxidermy coyote paws, which a friend has used to create moulds to produce cast-iron drawer handles. Many of DeFeo's own paintings also adorn the walls, most of which he created specifically for the house, and which feature coyotes within the Southwest landscape. ‘I usually paint animals that are ubiquitous and that everyone has a story about seeing,' he says. ‘And the coyote felt Southwest to me.'

The Trickster is the first of the five houses dreamt up by DeFeo, who is looking for financial backing to build the remaining rabbit-, doe-, bear- and fox-shaped guest houses. He readily acknowledges that the project is not for everyone. But in this part of the country, he notes, most people leave each other to their own business. DeFeo hopes that The Trickster encourages more artists to turn their offbeat ideas into reality, no matter the scale. ‘You don't have to build a box for a house,' he says. ‘You can just make something weird.' All in the spirit of serious silliness.

johnnydefeo.com

On 12 August 2026, Mallorca will fall into the path of a total solar eclipse: the rare moment when the moon passes directly between Earth and the sun, briefly covering the solar disc and turning day towards dusk. The event will pass across parts of the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland, the Atlantic, northern Spain and the Balearic Islands, making Mallorca one of Europe’s most desirable places to watch it unfold. This round-up looks at the Mallorcan stays making the most of the eclipse – some have built full celestial programmes, with astronomers, telescopes, dinners and sea departures.

Mallorca’s total solar eclipse is best seen from these hotels

Hotel Corazón

Hotel Corazón sits off the mountain road between Sóller and Deià, in an 18th-century finca wrapped in palms, cypress and Tramuntana rock. The 17-room hotel is run by photographer Kate Bellm and Edgar Lopez, whose eye for image, garden and mood shapes everything from the room newspapers to the cactus garden. Moredesign restored the finca with local artisans, keeping the cobbled courtyard, terracotta tones and old chapel, now a spa. Rooms feature limewash, linen, stone, pink, sage and rough ceramics; the pool sits above the sea among pampas grass, rosemary and 1970s loungers. Farmer-in-residence Emma Philip sends kitchen-garden produce to chef Eliza Parchanska, who offers plant-led plates at the terrace restaurant, which Tatjana von Stein recently redesigned with carved marble tables, mustard banquettes, gingham napkins and sailor-striped cushions. For the eclipse, Corazón is keeping it stylishly low-key: the boutique is already selling bohemian Corazón Eclipse ’26 T-shirts, with the real viewing party happening on the terrace, a drink in hand, as the Tramuntana turns blue.

Hotel Corazón is located at Carretera de Deià, km. 56, 7, 07100 Sóller, Balearic Islands, Spain

Four Seasons Resort Mallorca at Formentor

Few Mallorcan hotels come with a backstory as rich as Four Seasons Resort Mallorca at Formentor. The original Hotel Formentor opened in 1929, founded by Argentinian poet and promoter Dan Diehl, and became the island’s grand northern hideaway long before the word resort lost its romance. In 2024, Four Seasons took over the 40-hectare site at the tip of the island, with Estudio Lamela remodelling the historic building and Gilles & Boissier handling the interiors. The white façade remains largely intact, while all 110 rooms and suites face the sea, with terraces looking over Formentor Bay. Inside, the palette follows the coast: pale natural tones and deep green accents feature across tadelakt walls, fabric panelling, and timber. The eclipse programme here includes a viewing from the spectacular Na Blanca summit, an elegant BBQ evening in the resort’s private vineyards beneath the Perseid meteor shower, and a yacht journey along the Formentor coastline for a front-row view of the celestial event. The property itself already has the right ingredients too: pine-shaded terraces and outdoor tables at Mel, Shima and Llum I Sal.

Four Seasons Resort Mallorca at Formentor is located at Carrer de Formentor, s/n, 07470 Mallorca, Illes Balears, Spain

Jumeirah Mallorca

Jumeirah Mallorca is perched above Port de Sóller on Mallorca’s north-west coast, with the Serra de Tramuntana behind it and the Mediterranean below. Designed by Arditecnica, with interiors by Peter Silling & Associates, the 121-room hotel is worked into the slope with planted roofs, private terraces and a round stone entrance hall that refers to the island’s talaias, the defence towers once built along the coast. Rooms split their gaze between mountain and sea, while the best views are saved for the public spaces: the 240 sq m Tramuntana Terrace, the eighth-floor infinity pool 110m above the water, five restaurants including Cap Roig and Sunset Lounge, and the Talise Spa, where a hydropool looks back to the mountains. Jumeirah is treating the eclipse as a four-day takeover. From 10 to 14 August, there will be astronomy masterclasses with Mallorca’s Astronomy Institute, solar telescopes, sunrise rituals, yacht trips, olive-grove dining and wellness sessions. On the night itself, guests can gather 100m above the sea for a lunar-inspired cocktail reception, live commentary from astronomers, and stellar gastronomy.

Jumeirah Mallorca is located at Carrer de Bèlgica, S/N, 07108 Port de Sóller, Illes Balears, Spain

Mandarin Oriental Punta Negra, Mallorca

Mandarin Oriental’s first Balearic resort takes over the former Hotel Punta Negra on Mallorca’s southwest coast, a pine-fringed headland in Calvià, close to Puerto Portals. Renovated by Estudio Lamela with HKS, the 131-room property is arranged to sit low among Aleppo pines, rocky coves and Mediterranean views: protected buildings have been restored, with their new volumes opening fan-like towards the sea, and bungalows placed by the water’s edge. Six dining venues include concepts by Nobu Matsuhisa and Dani García, while the spa, gardens, art pathway, tennis, golf and coastal yoga add the usual Mandarin Oriental flair. For the 12 August eclipse, the property is offering guests the opportunity to watch from a private yacht or traditional boat, rise above the coastline by helicopter, or join a limited 15-person hot-air balloon flight, with viewing lenses provided. On land, a 12-day Eclipse Advent Calendar brings the build-up into the resort through infusions, local sweets and bites.

Mandarin Oriental Punta Negra, Mallorca is located at Carrer Punta Negra, 12, 07181 Palmanova, Illes Balears, Spain

Nakar Hotel

A 1950s building was coaxed back to its former glory, thanks to local Palma hotelier Toni Ramis and architect Magi Marqués, who together transformed the Pension Nacar building on one of the city’s liveliest streets into the 57-room Nakar Hotel. Along with designer Marga Rotger’s touches – contemporary accents of pale oak, stone, black lacquered iron, glass and copper – a rationalist design aesthetic runs throughout. The result is a harmonious marriage of neutral colours, soothing lighting and simple planes, which together create the calm atmosphere that is Nakar’s signature. This commitment to relaxation is punctuated by the presence of a subterranean spa, where bamboo details, a shadowy palette and a heated pool, steam bath and sauna offer holistic rejuvenation. Elsewhere, a ninth-floor rooftop sundeck and infinity pool offer a privileged vantage point from which to enjoy the eclipse, while a more subdued mood can be found at CUIT Bar and Restaurant, which serves local cuisine from chef Miquel Calent.

Nakar Hotel is located Av. de Jaume III, 21, Centre, 07012 Palma, Illes Balears, Spain

Nobis Hotel Palma

Nobis Hotel Palma sits in the city’s Old Town among Gothic churches and stone squares, occupying one of the city’s oldest buildings: a 12th-century former Islamic palace, later a noble Mallorcan residence. Wingårdhs, working with Jordi Herrero Arquitectos and Eduardo Garcia Acuna Arquitecto, handled the renovation with due restraint, restoring vaulted ceilings, Gothic archways and a pair of courtyards, one fitted with a small dipping pool around an ancient fountain. The 37 rooms and suites bring Scandinavian calm to Spanish limestone walls and beamed ceilings, with wood, wool, leather, Örsjö lamps, Ogeborg carpets, Flos pendants, ceramics by Miquel Segura and tapestries by Leela Rome throughout. NOI Palma serves sharing plates beneath a textile ceiling installation; Mirall Bar brings velvet and drama to nine-metre-high stone walls; the rooftop looks towards La Seu Cathedral. For the eclipse, Nobis is taking guests out to sea. Its 12 August sailing experience leaves from Palma for around six and a half hours in the bay, with hotel-to-port transport, a professional skipper, swimming in a turquoise cove, snorkelling kit, paddle boards, dinner and drinks on board, and a champagne toast during the eclipse.

Nobis Hotel Palma is located at Carrer de les Caputxines, 9, Centre, 07003 Palma, Illes Balears, Spain

Sant Francesc Hotel Singular

Combining an historic 1880 manor house, a prime location on Plaça de Sant Francesc, and contemporary design, Sant Francesc Hotel Singular serves as a stylish base camp from which to experience Palma. Originally built as the residence of the Alomar family, the 42-room hotel is carved from a thoroughly renovated neoclassical structure where original details such as frescoes, beams and coffered ceilings abound. Working closely with the building’s current owners, the Soldevila Ferrer family, architect Tolo Cursach, interior decorator Maria Jose Cabré and landscape designer Ana Esteve successfully merged features such as a Baroque façade with present-day designs from Antonio Citterio, Jaime Hayon and Paola Navone. The Quadrat restaurant, led by chefs Àlvar Albaladejo and Carles Forteza, serves Med-inspired dishes, while a rooftop pool and terrace are ideally placed for soaking up the sun with cooling cocktails and breathtaking views of the Mallorcan capital. Another privileged rooftop view.

Sant Francesc Hotel Singular is located at Plaça de Sant Francesc, 5, Centre, 07001 Palma, Illes Balears, Spain

For many creatives, geography is less a fixed point than an inheritance, carried across borders and reimagined in new contexts. This is true for Utharaa Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary, founders of Soft-Geometry, a practice that took root in India and found a fuller expression in the US, as the two became partners in work and life.

A rich cultural potpourri is the core of their practice. ‘Palaash is from Ghaziabad, near Delhi, and I am from Kochi, Kerala; it would be hard to pick two places more diametrically opposite,' says Zacharias. Growing up, they spoke different languages, ate different food and were raised in different religions, but their friendship found common ground in design. It began in college in Delhi and continued at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, where working on projects revealed a shared aesthetic. One afternoon, they scribbled in a notebook that together they made ‘soft geometries'.

Soft Geometry: a declaration of intent

The phrase became the name of their practice, established in 2019 in San Francisco and built on intricate, imperfect and layered forms, moulded in malleable materials such as cane, wool, repurposed wood, acrylic, wax, resin, hemp, lime and concrete, with subtle callbacks to their culture. ‘The shortcut to Indian design is often to ‘apply' it, to reduce centuries of craft knowledge into an identifiably Indian-looking pattern,' says Chaudhary. ‘Instead, we attempt, with flaws, to uncover the underlying philosophies and natural behaviours that inform subcultures, rather than simply adopting the visual.'

While the studio life brought excitement, the uncertainty of US visas meant they never felt tied to any one city. The idea of ‘the studio is wherever we are' took form, and over time, they moved to Los Angeles. Inevitably, tensions of US life began to seep into their work. A pivotal show, the 2023 ‘Mirrors for Aliens' at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, emerged from the rigidity of immigrant life.

At the time, the two had applied for the EB-1A green card, for ‘Aliens of extraordinary ability', in an effort to escape a 22-year waiting list for Indian workers. The idea came to them one night while washing their thali platters, when they noticed their reflections in them. Night after night, as they worked on their visa applications, they cleaned and sanded the plates, hoping the reflections would grow clearer. ‘This simple ritual gave us a way to process the emotional intensity of proving ourselves and planted the seed for ‘Mirrors for Aliens',' says Zacharias. They are now a permanent fixture in the museum's collection.

For their more recent ‘Flowers in our Hair' sconce collection, the duo drew on childhood memories and the California superbloom to create lighting inspired by petals, schoolgirl pigtails and the intimate rituals of oiling, combing and braiding hair. As their work circles home and memory, Soft-Geometry's next chapter feels closer still. With a baby on the way, life and work seem to be drawing closer with cosy family time, more objects shaped by India and ‘more softness'.

soft-geometry.com

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Mini golf, a playful yet serious pursuit, is a lesson in world-building, a challenge which nine artists in London haven’t been able to resist.

In Battersea, Miranda July, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Delaine Le Bas, Kaylene Whiskey, Saeborg, Natasha Tontey, BKTHERULA, Soda Jerk and Pat Brassington have created interactive golf artworks. The immersive works are a reaction to mini golf’s history, after it was created in the nineteenth century by Scottish women who were excluded from ‘real’ golf courses but refused to sit on the sidelines.

This subversive spirit runs throughout, in the holes which incorporate everything from surreal video to fairground games and fortune-telling.

‘I am a big advocate for mediums that invite artists to push beyond the scope of their regular creative practices, and those that ask audiences to engage with artworks differently, and so in general I think that durational or interactive projects are really interesting,’ says curator Grace Herbert.

‘Whilst digging into the history of mini golf, I was thinking about how there are so many things in our contemporary life that we don’t think about the origins of, that we take for granted, or even infantilise a little bit like mini golf, that have these incredibly rich and even rebellious histories. From here, the idea of a mini-golf and art exhibition by women and non-binary artists whose creative practices think about identity, feminism and politics in various ways emerged.’

Herbert was keen to include artists working across mediums and backgrounds in her curation, resulting in a game here interpreted by an eclectic community which includes musicians, filmmakers, performers, sculptors, activists, athletes, and quantum physicists. The results are fully immersive – these are games you want to play.

‘The brief to artists was to come up with a concept that could be integrated with the design and gameplay, rather than say making objects that would be plonked on a course as obstacles,’ Herbert adds.

’And they all really did that. Delaine Le Bas, for example, was talking about her experience as part of the Romani-Sinti community living in the UK and often feeling a square-peg in a round hole – and so we ended up 3D printing square golf balls for her work.’

The Art of Mini Golf, from RISING Melbourne and Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), is on until 26 July 2026 Battersea Arts Centre

Widely acknowledged as the most-respected photography prize out there, the Prix Pictet has focused on photography’s ability to incite conversations around sustainability since its inception in 2008.

Every other year, the prize announces a new theme, revealed at Les Rencontres d'Arles, which engages with these social and environmental considerations, triggering a cycle which ends with the winning work undertaking a global tour. Themes typically centre around one word – previous iterations have included Fire, Storm and Disorder – and now director of the Prix Pictet Michael Benson has revealed that the theme will be Jungle.

‘The world’s jungles are the great green lungs of the planet,’ says Benson. ‘These huge carbon sinks play a crucial role in regulating and helping to stabilise the planet’s climate. Yet across the globe jungles are in crisis, forests are threatened by deforestation, fires, and degradation; surface water has been lost and rivers are increasingly disconnected and polluted. The implications of any loss or degradation of these densely interconnected ecosystems extend well beyond changes in land use.’

The jury – led by chair Dutch-born British businessman Sir Tim Smit – will review portfolios of work from all around the world which respond to the theme, before deciding on a shortlist of twelve photographers, set to be announced next summer. Elsewhere, Prix Pictet will also host an exhibition at Paris Photo, to mark the Pictet Group’s new role as the official partner.

It is a collaborative relationship which speaks to this year’s theme, exploring the links between humanity and society. ‘Nothing in a jungle exists alone,’ Benson adds. ‘They are complex interconnected systems that we only vaguely understand. The jungle is a place of mystery and secrets. It is a place of legendary lost cities and civilisations of economic adventures and many broken dreams. In this way, the jungle mirrors contemporary human environments more than we might expect. Cities, digital networks and social ecosystems have their own undergrowth: layers of complexity that obscure as much as they reveal.’

prix.pictet.com

Marc Newson, Philippe Starck, Tom Dixon. These are designers whose names have appeared on furniture brands and countless design media. However, it is no exaggeration to say that Japanese design entrepreneur Teruo Kurosaki, who passed away on 23 March 2026, was the one who gave them a springboard to success on the world stage. He was the founder of the Tokyo-based furniture company Idée. His passing was accompanied by deep sadness among the many designers who’d worked with him. Here, we pay homage to the man who became the custodian of aspiring designers.

Teruo Kurosaki and Idée

Idée was founded in 1982 as a company to create original furniture working with designers from Japan and abroad, aiming to offer a lifestyle rooted in aesthetic sensibility. Over time, the company expanded beyond furniture making to become a lifestyle brand offering a wide range of products – from textiles and plants to music and food – with a mission to encourage adventures into personal interests.

Founder Kurosaki was born in 1949. In the early 1980s, while visiting his younger brother who was studying in London, he encountered antiques. As he looked at Western antiques, he became intrigued by the ideas behind objects that humans had created, wondering, 'Who made these, and with what intentions? What situation were they used in?'

This led him to begin importing Western antiques into Japan, to celebrate the intrinsic value of objects that had been passed down for generations. Kurosaki had an acute eye for aesthetics; he was probably one of the first to introduce midcentury French designer Jean Prouvé’s work to Japan in the 1980s (Prouvé specialist Galerie Patrick Seguin only opened in 1989). Jasper Morrison recalls, ‘I went to Tokyo and I remember meeting [Kurosaki] there for the first time and being impressed that he was showing products of Jean Prouvé and Serge Mouille.’

Idée was founded not only to deal in vintage items, but also with the aspiration to create living environments that would inspire Japanese people to aspire to such a lifestyle, leading to the launch of Idée’s original furniture production. For this reason, Idée had its own workshop from the start, handling production from woodworking and metalwork to electrical work. Its staff formed a community much like the guild craftsmen of the Middle Ages. Its initial furniture was based on European furniture – Thonet’s bentwood chairs or Eileen Gray’s art deco screens.

Marc Newsom and Idée

A decisive moment for Idée, and probably for the design scene in Japan, came in the mid-1980s, when Australian designer Marc Newson, fresh out of art school in Sydney came across Kurosaki. ‘I first met Teruo Kurosaki quite serendipitously. It was the result of an extraordinary (quite literal) crossing of paths in Tokyo in the 1980s when I was in my early twenties. Kurosaki fast became a wonderfully generous mentor, and my very first patron (my only, in truth). A critical part of this support came from how he set me up at Idée. Despite sharing the space with Idée’s employees, I was encouraged to work on and develop my own designs,’ Newson tells Wallpaper*.

At the time, there were many builders’ stores in Tokyo that dealt with lamp fittings, which excited Newson, who gathered components from these suppliers and assembled lighting fixtures to create the ‘Super Guppy’ lamp in Idée’s workshop.

Probably the most recognised of Newson’s designs made at Idée is the ‘Embryo’ chair. Kurosaki asked for the help of a surfing wetsuit manufacturer in Zushi, Kanagawa, using neoprene to realise the distinctive form of Newson’s design.

‘Kurosaki also helped me organise my living accommodation, at times at apartments he owned. His support was sincere and all-encompassing – that of a true friend – affording me the time and space to progress in the field. With him, Tokyo was a city where the future somehow felt present and vital. He was a man who took great pleasure in championing other designers and loved forging connections between those he admired. For me, Kurosaki simply embodied Japan,’ continues Newson.

Making Aoyama, Tokyo, the epicentre of design

‘I started a furniture business without any furniture background. So I didn’t know the rules or the business model in making furniture,’ Kurosaki once said. Maybe because of this, he was willing to risk producing adventurous designs, while other furniture company owners with history might think harder about the practicality and viability of the design.

When Idée opened a four-storey shop in Aoyama in 1995, the neighborhood began to transform into a 'Design Block'. Cassina also opened a showroom in the district in 1997, and other international furniture brands followed suit, both in Aoyama and Omotesando.

After seeing London Designers Block, Kurosaki envisioned Tokyo becoming a city of design. In 1999, he organised Tokyo Designers Block, a series of simultaneous design exhibitions held at local shops. Involving embassies from various countries, this event – which continued until 2005 – introduced to the city the work of designers from around the world, including Sweden, the UK, and France, and was likely the first initiative to proclaim to the world that Tokyo was an epicentre of design.

Kurosaki himself later exited Idée, which is now under the umbrella of Ryohinkeikaku, the firm behind Muji. However, rather than limiting itself to furniture, the Idée shop – which, as early as 1997, featured curated books, music, a florist, and even a coffee stand – significantly broadened the definition of design, and it was precisely this that allowed it to touch the lives of so many people. It could be said to have pioneered the trend, now commonplace at Milan Design Week, of technology and hospitality companies exhibiting alongside furniture brands.

Making it in the land of opportunity has often required outlandish signage and bold graphical articulation. Here we have selected a series of American objects that bear instantly recognisable design statements that have stood the test of time. Is there something distinctly American in their combination of commerce and culture, or is successful branding simply a case of mass consumption meets volume marketing?

All the examples featured here have become acknowledged showstoppers in their respective genres, adorning everything from fashion and fast food to architectural wonders and waistbands, mashing up high art and commerce in wondrous combinations along the way. These are their creative stories.

14 American logos that made contemporary graphic design history

I ❤️ NY

By its sheer ubiquity, I Love NY may be the world's most appropriated logo. Fifty years after it was introduced, it has become an all-purpose shorthand for allegiance and affection for anything, anywhere. Designed by Milton Glaser in 1976, it originally served as the graphic punchline to an ad campaign that helped rescue NYC from the brink of bankruptcy. Desperate to arrest its ballooning fiscal deficit, city officials funded the campaign to lure tourists back to the Big Apple. Doodling on the taxi ride from his home to the office, as he often did, Glaser drew a red heart paired with the letters ‘I' and ‘NY' rendered in American Typewriter, a slab serif with a 1970s flair, and worked with longtime studio assistant George Leavitt to slightly tweak it. Decades before the proliferation of emojis, some worried that the rebus-like construction would confuse people. Nevertheless, the city officials accepted the proposal, and soon made it the logo for the entire state. Copycats emerged almost immediately, but the state secured copyright, earning it tens of thousands of dollars in licensing fees each year.

The logo's widespread popularity became Glaser's calling card but also a kind of creative prison, with almost every article about him inevitably circling back to it. The 2009 National Medal of Arts honoree's many other achievements include co-founding New York magazine, designing restaurants, and producing hundreds of posters, album covers and book jackets, as well as logos for Brooklyn Brewery, DC Comics, and Italian gelato maker Sammontana. Glaser, who passed away on his 91st birthday in 2020, never lost sight of the New York logo's original purpose as a civic symbol. In the aftermath of 9/11, he appended it with the words ‘More Than Ever', added a burn mark to a corner of the heart, and gave the grieving city a ready-made banner. The same poster re-emerged in shop windows and on food carts during the pandemic. In 2023, the city felt compelled to rebrand Glaser's logo, but the flood of complaints confirmed one thing: a ferocious affection for the original. Text by Anne Quito

Read more about the design of I Love NY

New York Mets

Selected by a public competition, the design for the New York Mets logo, unveiled in 1961, was the work of illustrator Ray Gotto. Though the baseball team would play in Queens (as rivals New York Yankees were based in the Bronx), Gotto sensed that an emblem that could unite the entire city was needed, so he drew a symbolic New York skyline using a medley of landmarks from various boroughs, including the Woolworth Building, the Empire State Building and the UN HQ, while a suspension bridge anchors the composition. Originally rendered in black and pink, the palette was later revised to blue, orange and white, colours that also echo New York City's flag. In the decades since, the Mets have cycled through owners, managers, stadiums and uniforms, but Gotto's logo remains a fiercely guarded emblem. Text by Anne Quito

Read more about the design of the New York Mets logo

Tiffany & Co

The Tiffany box sits on the illustrious list of famous objects that money can't buy. ‘Charles Lewis Tiffany has one thing in stock that you cannot buy for any price; he will only give it to you. And that is one of his boxes,' read a 1906 article in the New York Sun, and the rule still stands. The box's distinctive shade of turquoise has been trademarked since 1998 and an official Pantone colour since 2001 (dubbed 1837 Blue to reflect the company's founding year). Having remained largely unchanged, in 2005, Pentagram partner Paula Scher was asked to give the brand a discreet refresh. The new identity focused on the blue box, and the shade was rolled out to include advertising, bags and the inside of the boxes. The new logo was hand-drawn to resemble a hot-stamped, letterpress typeface, signalling a combination of luxury and craft. Text by Rosa Bertoli

Read more about the design of the Tiffany & Co logo

Chateau Marmont

Chateau Marmont occupies a mythic place in Hollywood folklore: a decadent sanctuary overlooking the Sunset Strip that has been attracting artists, movie stars and musicians for almost a century. It opened originally as an apartment building in 1929, modelled loosely on the medieval Château d'Amboise in the Loire Valley, before becoming a hotel in the 1930s. When André Balazs took over in 1990, he wanted to retain as much of its historic ambience as possible, working with creative agency Pandiscio Green on a visual identity. The hotel's storied past is reflected in its timeless logo, which uses the medieval-style lettering of the Libra font (created by Dutch typographer Sjoerd Hendrik de Roos in 1938) – its hand-drawn look is perfectly in keeping with the property's French gothic, intentionally shabby aesthetic. Text by Kevin EG Perry

Read more about the design of the Chateau Marmont logo

IBM

Designed in 1956, at a time when International Business Machines was still using vacuum tubes in its vast room-filling computers, the IBM logo was the work of Paul Rand, who had honed his skills as a magazine art director before turning to corporate identity. The simple three-letter device gave the industrial monolith a coherence across a dizzying range and scale of products, capable of coping with everything from a business card to a business park entrance. Rand would modify it in 1960 and again in 1972 to create the familiar striped version.

Distinctive, bold and graphic, it was an appropriately serious signifier for the world’s largest computer maker, and is still in use today. In many respects, IBM was a pioneering design collaborator, also choosing to work with the likes of Charles and Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Eliot Noyes, George Nelson, Denys Lasdun and Eero Saarinen.

Read more about the design of the IBM logo

Snoopy

Created by Charles M Schulz, comic strip Peanuts followed the exploits of Charlie Brown and his dog Snoopy. Snoopy was the result of Schulz's observation of the relationship between children and dogs, noting the high levels of tolerance a dog has for children's games. Schulz originally drew him as an ordinary-looking black and white beagle who walked on all fours, but he later simplified him, with Snoopy developing long ears and expressive dots for eyes. The streamlined design made Snoopy both instantly recognisable and adaptable, meaning he could move easily from newspaper strips and toys to products, ad campaigns and fashion collaborations. He has appeared in collections by the likes of Chanel, Gucci and Lacoste, and on everything from sneakers to watches, including Timex, who, in 1965, became one of the first watch brands to obtain licences for the use of the Peanuts characters. Text by Hannah Silver

Read more about the origins of Snoopy

Campbell's

The Campbell's soup can was already one of the most recognisable pieces of packaging in America by the time Andy Warhol turned his attention to it in the 1960s. Adept at blurring the boundaries between commercial design and fine art, Warhol was unique in recognising the power packaging had to transcend the mundane, becoming a cultural symbol in its own right. By reproducing the soup can almost exactly, and without comment, Warhol asked viewers to consider why such an everyday item held so much significance, and whether it came from his reproduction or the effectiveness of the original package design. The work became a defining image of the Pop Art movement, presenting an entirely new vision of what contemporary art could be, as well as influencing generations of graphic designers and advertisers to come. Text by Hannah Silver

Read more about the origins of the Campbell's soup can

Hollywood

The most famous sign in the world transcended every conceivable aspiration of its originators, developers SH Woodruff and Tracy E Shoults, who, in 1923, were part of a consortium looking to promote their new real estate venture Hollywoodland. The job went to Thomas Fisk Goff of the Crescent Sign Company, who set out the name in 50ft-high blocky capital letters across the hillside above Beachwood Canyon. Visible for miles, and illuminated for its first decade, the sign was initially popular but soon started to decay. Demolition was considered at the point when it simply read ‘ollywoodland', but, in 1949, buoyed by local support, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce stepped in, reinstating the ‘H' and dropping the ‘land'. And there it has remained ever since, even threatening to outlast the industry it celebrates. Text by Jonathan Bell

Read more about the Hollywoodland sign design

MoMA

Ivan Chermayeff 's logotype for MoMA first surfaced in 1964, taking a starkly typographic approach with its effective and appropriately modern use of Franklin Gothic No.2. MoMA Gothic, a custom typeface designed by Matthew Carter, was introduced in 2004 and, five years later, Pentagram was appointed to create guidelines for the use of MoMA Gothic across the museum's entire visual output, from signage to posters and publications. The agency worked in parallel with Julia Hoffmann, MoMA's creative director for graphics and advertising, to devise ways it could be cropped, coloured and paired with content, reducing the logo down to an abstracted set of letters. Chermayeff 's original solution proved so enduring that it remains the foundation stone of the museum's visual identity more than 60 years after it was devised. Text by Jonathan Bell

Read more about the MoMA logo design

McDonald's

The first McDonald's restaurant to showcase the golden arches in physical form opened in 1953 in Phoenix, Arizona, designed by Stanley Clark Meston. Working with co-founder Richard McDonald, who suggested the idea of the arches, Meston's assistant Charles Fish rendered the forms not as simple curves but as structural parabolas. However, it was the company's head of engineering and design Jim Schindler who would translate the physical incarnations into the extended ‘M' logo, with the signature yellow and red colours providing eye-catching contrast. Today's McDonald's franchises are flat-packed structures that can be erected in 24 hours, not neon-lit Googie wonders that send midcentury buffs salivating. But on packaging, the golden arches have been served up to billions in the decades that followed their creation. Text by Jonathan Bell

Read more about the origins of the Golden Arches

Nike Swoosh

‘I don't love it, but it will grow on me.' This was the reaction of Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike, when he first saw what would become the Nike ‘swoosh', conceived by Carolyn Davidson to adorn the fledgling sports label's footwear. (Then a design student at Portland State University, she was paid $35 for the commission, though was later rewarded with shares in the company and a diamond ring bearing the motif.) Originally designed as a take on the stripe that featured on other sneakers of the time, its elongated silhouette was conceived by Davidson to express a feeling of speed and agility – as if it was being viewed dashing past. And dash it did. In 1972, one year after Davidson submitted the design, two of the top American finishers at the Boston Marathon crossed the line wearing Nike shoes marked with the swoosh. Text by Jack Moss

Read more about the story behind the Nike Swoosh

Levi's

Levi's began in San Francisco in the mid-1850s during the California gold rush when Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss identified a need for hard-wearing work clothing for miners. In 1873, he invented the ‘waist overall' (crafted from indigo selvedge denim with metal rivets, they are what we now know as the ‘original blue jean') and the year is stamped on the leather patch that appears on every pair of Levi's jeans. Known as the ‘two-horse patch' in reference to its protagonists (two horses pulling a pair of jeans in opposite directions without destroying them), the pictorial design was used because of high illiteracy levels in the American West; the idea was that people could go into stores and ask for ‘those pants with the two horses'. The brand's logo has evolved, but the two-horse patch has endured, a symbol of what remains the US' definitive fashion export. Text by Jack Moss

Read more about Levi's design origins

Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein's sans serif logo, first introduced by its namesake designer in 1968, is an exercise in simplicity and directness – a reflection of Klein's approach to fashion, which would flourish in the 1990s. And, while the logo has appeared on everything from fragrance bottles to T-shirts, it will be forever associated with the elastic waistband of the brand's underwear – a stroke of marketing genius that saw people hitch down their jeans to reveal their brand allegiance. Their ubiquity was achieved through Klein's evocative underwear ads photographed by the likes of Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts. Memorable campaign stars have included Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus, Mark Wahlberg, Kate Moss, Freddie Ljungberg, Naomi Campbell, Justin Bieber, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Jeremy Allen White and Bad Bunny. Text by Jack Moss

Read more about the origins of the Calvin Klein logo

Nirvana

In 1989, Nirvana's first record label, Sub Pop, was in need of artwork for the band's debut album Bleach. It commissioned designer Lisa Orth, who at the time was working at The Rocket, a Seattle music paper that was one of the driving forces behind the nascent grunge scene. The story goes that she simply asked her colleague Grant Alden to use whatever font had just been used on their typesetting machine. It happened to be Onyx, a blocky serif display font that gelled so well with the reversed black-and-white live image on the cover that it became the band's logo going forwards, appearing on records, T-shirts, patches and the like. The font deviates slightly from that used in the band's infamous ‘Satan Worshippin' Mother Fucker' T-shirts, which have flipped ‘N's and appear to be a little more Bodoni-adjacent. Text by Jonathan Bell

Read more about the origins of the Nirvana logo

Olalekan Jeyifous is a builder of provocative futures. For ‘Hydricosmic Litanies', a new solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center (6 August 2026 – 3 January 2027), the Brooklyn-based artist, a trained architect and a Wallpaper* US400 honoree, imagined a society in Minneapolis that evolved around the ecology of the Mississippi River, which flows through the heart of the city. Working like an archaeologist discovering and documenting this culture, Jeyifous created digital collages of the cityscape, with highways that once displaced Black neighbourhoods transforming into waterways that sustain aquaculture, travel and housing. A series of 3D-printed sculptures depict the industrial, technical and cultural artefacts that this society produced and deities that protect them.

‘I'm always dusting off the fragments and figuring out who lived there, what they looked like, and what was important to them,' he says.

Meet architect-trained artist Olalekan Jeyifous

Jeyifous' worlds emerge from different parameters and narratives, but they share throughlines: communal societies, close relationships between people and natural ecosystems, and joyful Black life.

For ‘The Frozen Neighborhoods’, which appeared in MoMA's ‘Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America', he conducted a similar excavation of a society in which mobility was restricted. In ‘ACE/AAP', which won the Silver Lion award at the 2023 Venice Biennale, he depicted a world in which Pan-Africanism and decolonisation of the continent were successful, ushering in an era of renewable energy innovation and environmental restoration based on Indigenous land stewardship.

Jeyifous has become one of the leading artistic thinkers of our time. He rejects inevitable conclusions and instead sees alternative futures that invite us all to reconsider the trajectory we're on and what course-corrections might look like.

‘At a moment when so many of our social and ecological crises are also crises of imagination, Jeyifous' work offers something rare: a speculative language equal to the complexity of the world we actually inhabit,' says Taylor Jasper, the curator of ‘Hydricosmic Litanies'. ‘His practice understands that the future is sedimented in the past, shaped by what has been engineered, inherited, broken and remade. He gives us a way to think about culture as something tidal: always moving between what has been lost, what remains, and what might still be made.'

Born in Nigeria but raised in the US, Jeyifous wanted to be an architect from a young age, but was especially interested in cultural critique and using research, world-building and visualisation to provoke conversation. His thesis applied the Yoruba myth of the Abiku child (a spirit that is born to the human world only to die young and repeat the cycle because it does not want to inhabit the painful, unjust world of people, preferring to exist in the idealistic supernatural realm) to postcolonial nation-building and architecture's role in making spaces that support new systems.

Jeyifous identifies with the Abiku child's cycle-breaking. ‘I do not like what has been made of the world,' he says. ‘We could have built a world where different countries and different cultures respect each other.'

Jeyifous uses tools such as hand drawing, photo montage, collage and AI visualisations to design what he calls protopias. Distinct from utopias, which present unrealistic perfect worlds, protopias acknowledge an ongoing project. For this approach, Mabel O Wilson – chair of the African American and African diaspora studies department at Columbia University, and co-curator of ‘Reconstructions' – has called Jeyifous ‘the next Lebbeus Woods', referring to the cult figure who used visionary drawings to drive conversation about politics and ideology. ‘He's deeply committed to understanding architectural representation but using it as a language to point to the kinds of things that are going on socially and culturally,' Wilson says, noting how his work traces its lineage to Afrofuturism and hip-hop sampling.

Until 2004, Jeyifous worked as an architectural renderer. It paid the bills, but it wasn't creatively nourishing, so he decided to take a leap into art-making full-time while completing rendering projects on the side to support his work. By 2016, his public art commissions had grown larger and more frequent, and he was able to stop freelancing. He soon won a fellowship at the Socrates Sculpture Park and prestigious residencies at MacDowell in New Hampshire and the Headlands Center for the Arts in California.

After receiving a commission for a sculpture at Coachella in 2017, his practice took off. He has elevated a New York subway station with glass panels; created an installation at the threshold of the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago, in collaboration with artist Amanda Williams; and is working on a monument for Shirley Chisholm, who, in 1968, became the first Black woman to be elected to Congress.

Yoruban spirituality is at the heart of Jeyifous' world-building. It's a particular focus of ‘Ancestral Ecologies', an exhibition on show at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden until 25 October 2026. Created in collaboration with New York firm AD-WO, the installation features sculptures made from earthen tiles, recycled glass, material designed to decompose, and garlands inspired by African trade beads. Encountering these sculptures in the garden feels almost like stepping into a quiet moment within one of his verdant renderings.

‘There's a soft touch to environmental justice that he brings to the discourse that I really appreciate,' says Emanuel Admassu, co-founder of AD-WO. ‘We share a political agenda, and the way we think about liberation is not necessarily through big explosive gestures, but folks just tending to plants, folks spending time together with their family, and a lush, green environment.'

‘Hydricosmic Litanies' is on show from 6 August 2026 – 3 January 2027 at Walker Art Center. ‘

Ancestral Ecologies' is on show until 25 October 2026 at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

More on the artist at jeyifo.us

Mayfair dining rooms often arrive fully dressed. Latine is better when it changes outfit. Set in Lancashire Court, the Franco-Latin restaurant by London-based interior designer Victoria Vogel moves from a bright ground-floor crudo bar to a candlelit first-floor salon, a mural-wrapped private dining room and a basement lounge in lacquer, velvet and brass.

Wallpaper* dines at Latine Mayfair

The mood: A venue of many temperatures

The ground-floor restaurant is the brightest chapter: limewashed walls, solid wood tables, bouclé seating and a marble-fronted crudo bar, all gathered around an exposed brick rotunda and central chandelier. Decorative tiling nods to the seafood-led menu, while cream, terracotta, chocolate and pale timber give the room its soft sense of warmth.

Upstairs, La Candela brings white wainscoting, twin crystal chandeliers and terracotta accents into a candlelit salon. On the second floor, El Cielo turns private dining into a scenic room, wrapped in a hand-painted mural by Melissa Wickham beneath exposed oak beams and a sculptural bronze chandelier. Downstairs space, LACAV, drops the temperature: lacquered walls, burl walnut, velvet seating and brass lighting make it the late-night room: darker, richer, and much happier after dinner.

The food: Ceviche first, Béarnaise later

The menu opens with colourful crudos: bright, sharp and built around citrus, heat and sweetness. Sea bream tiradito comes with coconut leche de tigre; red prawn ceviche with mango and yuzu. Yet, the starters are where the Franco-Latin exchange gets better: snails baked with chimichurri butter and served with brioche; Cornish mussels with Latine marinière and fries; pão de queijo filled with Camembert, with the option to add Oscietra caviar.

Mains continue the exchange: grilled hispi cabbage with Peruvian curry sauce and Comté, wild sea bass with ají amarillo beurre blanc, bouillabaisse with ají panca rouille, and chargrilled ribeye with chimichurri Béarnaise.

Latine Mayfair is located at 10-11 Lancashire Ct, London W1S 1EY, United Kingdom

Swedish jewellery house Englebert, founded in Stockholm in 1920, is defined by a clean, minimalist style honed over four generations. Collections, including Legacy Knot, Loop and Drop Link, eschew ornamentation to cut clean, fuss-free silhouettes drawn in reassuringly heavy 18-carat gold.

Many of the brand’s classical pieces have now taken their place in the wider conversation of Swedish design, placed alongside Swedish ceramics in a photo series by Sophie Kirk in collaboration with Paul Jackson of Jackson Design.

A vast number of the Swedish and Scandinavian studio ceramics and bronze belong to Englebert’s private collection. Pieces – including a sculptural Argenta vase from the 1930s, a Tapio Wirkkala bronze and a Friberg vase – embody a rich materiality when paired alongside the jewellery.

For Oscar and Giovanna Engelbert, the series is a celebration of beautiful form across both mediums. ‘What drew us was the silhouette. The neck of a vase, the line of a link, the curve of a stone; place them together and they stop being ceramic and jewellery and become one language of form. That is what this series captures.’

It is the latest step for Engelbert in a long-standing championing of Swedish design. The brand, which began in Stockholm in the same decade Swedish designer Wilhelm Kåge joined porcelain specialist Gustavsberg, has alluded to this parallel before, including vintage Kåge ceramics in their Beverly Hills showroom.

‘There is a clear language shared between the objects and the jewellery,’ agrees Paul Jackson. ‘Both also belong to the broader continuum of Swedish ceramics and Swedish grace, where elegance was achieved through proportion and material quality rather than excess.’

Adds photographer Sophie Kirk: ‘Across the four palettes – moss green, beige, black and white – the gold and the objects read differently against each one. Their individuality made every frame a world of its own.’

engelbert1920.com

New York artist Jordan Eagles was biking along the East River three years ago when he noticed a man with a sports jersey that read 'The Mets are in our blood.' A lifelong fan of the legendary baseball team, Eagles was struck by the bodily immediacy of the emblazoned slogan.

Eagles swiftly turned to eBay to track down the shirt. As it happened, the merchandise was handed out to blood donor fans at the team’s stadium, Citi Field. After customising the top into a muscle t-shirt for his gym workouts, however, the artist realised he was deprived from truly owning the jersey for what it promotes. 'I could not earn this shirt although I was captivated by my own love of the Mets,' he tells Wallpaper*.

While the artist has been creating works with real animal blood since the 1990s, Eagles himself cannot be a blood donor, owing to being on PrEP, the medication that drastically reduces the risk of contracting HIV. The irony was not lost on the artist, and is the focus of a powerful ongoing exhibition, 'Bases Loaded', on view at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

The show features 13 of the same Mets jerseys with blood of an undetectable HIV-positive man splashed across them. The grouping of orange and grey uniforms echo the total number of defensive and offensive players on the baseball field, yet here, devoid of perspiring bodies, they become drenched in another form of corporeality. The exhibition also features nine mixed media resin sculptures shaped in the form of a home plate – the base players must touch in order to score a run.

Gay men in the US have long faced stigma around blood donation. After decades of a ban on gay and bisexual men’s choice to donate blood, the FDA eased the restriction in 2023 and began imposing questions about sexual history to any potential donor. The questionnaire, as Eagles notes, still has a bias towards anal intercourse and HIV status. PrEP users cannot donate unless they stop taking the pill for three months.

The politics of blood has long concerned Eagles who has utilised real blood of gay men in myriad forms. From soaking vintage Superman cartoons with blood at an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum to projecting close-up blood blotches at institutions such as the Getty and High Museum of Art, the artist has made the public intimate with the spine-chilling tactility of the life-giving fluid.

The show at the Brooklyn multimedia art space, however, holds a deeper personal bond for Eagles. Besides Eagles's own blood and that of the anonymous donor, some of the resin sculptures contain the blood of the artist’s father. As the figure who exposed the artist to Mets fandom and a symbol of familial blood lineage, the inclusion embodies the son’s reckoning with his own reality and his innate need to fit in. Inside a series of resin sculptures, meanwhile, the artist has suspended family photos, in which everyone wears Mets T-shirts, in blood. Other works contain needles, face masks or baseball cards blend with the densely red fluid.

'This project invites the public to think about policy but it is also more broadly about identity, belonging and what it means to be be a part of something,' Eagles says.

Besides the immediate tactility of the works on view, the slipperiness of semantics unifies them and the seemingly disparate realms of sports and sexuality. From the show’s suggestive title to baseball sayings such as 'first base,' 'innings' or 'receivers,' the linguistic flirt between the game and gay sex imbues a playfulness to the otherwise heavy subject.

'Blood in language is often used to be divisive as well, but I am also thinking about my own life and ways of belonging to a community and wanting to be a part of a team that ultimately you are not permitted to be a part of,' Eagles says.

'Jordan Eagles: Bases Loaded' is on view at Pioneer Works through 9 August 2026

Every July, as summer reaches its peak in Palermo, Sicily, and the searing daytime temperatures demand near nocturnality, Sicilians take to the streets for the Festino di Santa Rosalia (affectionately called U Fistinu). A celebration of the city's patron saint, who is credited with ending the deadly plague of 1624, the festival is Palermo's grandest annual event. At its heart is a spectacular evening procession through the city's historic centre, led by a towering triumphal float, known as a carro, carrying an effigy of Santa Rosalia.

Earlier this week, the city gathered for the 402nd edition of the centuries-old tradition, which, as locals will tell you, goes well beyond religion. It is something deeply spiritual that taps into a collective memory almost primal in its intensity. 'We all need a little madness,' reflects architect Mario Cucinella, who this year was invited to design the great carro. One of Italy's most celebrated architects, Cucinella admits the commission was daunting, particularly knowing his work would be experienced by the estimated 400,000 people gathering in the city.

Festino di Santa Rosalia chariot by Mario Cucinella

Born in Palermo in 1960 before moving with his family to the province of Piacenza, Cucinella graduated in architecture from the University of Genoa. After working alongside Renzo Piano, he founded MCA – Mario Cucinella Architects, now headquartered in Bologna and Milan. Known for its environmentally responsive architecture, the practice's work spans hospitals, schools, galleries, residential, urban masterplans and exhibition design, but this marks the studio's first venture into designing a ceremonial festival float.

Rather than creating a theatrical stage set, MCA conceived a temporary piece of architecture. 'The carro evokes Palermo, a garden city, much like Monte Pellegrino, where vegetation climbs in terraces, intertwining memory and identity,' explains Cucinella, referring to the mountain that rises above the city.

The structure is loaded with symbolism. A series of stacked timber plinths references the mountain's topography while bright blue bas relief Saladin stars and Norman knot motifs acknowledge Sicily's intertwined Arab-Norman heritage. Integrated into the timber terraces are 40 planters holding more than 150 locally sourced plants – including bay laurel, fan palm, holm oak, mastic, myrtle, wild olive, phillyrea, rosemary and frangipani – transforming the float into a vertical Mediterranean garden.

The choice of plants is particularly resonant. Born around 1130, Rosalia, the daughter of a Norman noble family, is said to have fled an arranged marriage to live as a hermit on Monte Pellegrino, where she died around 1166. Nearly five centuries later, during the plague of 1624, her remains were discovered and carried through Palermo in procession – a moment the city credits with ending the epidemic.

On MCA's carro, the planting rises through the structure before dissolving into a cloud of some 300 illuminated butterflies that spiral around the saint at its summit. Representing transformation, rebirth and collective liberation, they create a luminous halo around the figure of Santa Rosalia. In her hand, she carries a striking blue cross carved by Palermitan artist Filippo Sapienza from the timber of migrant boats that reached Sicily's shores – a poignant reminder that Palermo has long been both a place of arrival and a place of refuge.

The carro formed the centrepiece of a much broader production, art-directed by Luca Pintacuda of Odd Agency, which won the tender for the festival for the third year running alongside partner Coop Culture. Video projections transformed the city's historic façades, while drones, dance, live music and fireworks turned Palermo itself into a stage, tracing a narrative that stretched from the arrival of Arab forces in 827 AD to the city's contemporary identity.

Projects like this, Cucinella says, offer a welcome counterpoint to the years-long process of designing buildings. They allow the studio to engage with the public immediately, rather than waiting years to see their work inhabited. And while the carro is temporary by design, it's expected to be installed somewhere in the city after the Festino, giving the structure a second life beyond the procession.

Palermo's annual Festino di Santa Rosalia, between ritual and spectacle

On the evening of the Festino, that engagement was immediate indeed. As the carro began its slow journey from Palazzo dei Normanni through Palermo's historic centre, Cucinella remained almost hidden within the structure. Visible only in silhouette against its illuminated interior, he looked out over the streets below, where spectators crowd the pavements and spill from balconies overhead.

Guiding the chariot 2.5km through Palermo's historic centre is a huge logistical operation involving scores of security personnel and volunteers. At one point, Santa Rosalia becomes snagged on overhead wires, drawing a collective gasp from the crowd before a technician swiftly climbs a ladder to free her path. There is a unique intensity that elevates the celebration beyond carnival, into something closer to ritual.

At Quattro Canti, Palermo's theatrical Baroque intersection, the procession briefly comes to a halt. The mayor of Palermo, Roberto Lagalla, emerges on the carro's platform, raises his voice – 'Viva Palermo! Viva Santa Rosalia!' The crowd erupts into chant as confetti and streamers rain down overhead.

'I've never experienced anything like it,' Cucinella says afterwards, still absorbing the enormity of the spectacle he helped create. For one night, architecture became theatre, ritual and civic celebration all at once.

mcarchitects.it

In Victoria, Australia, a light-coloured brick pavilion is perched on a rare double-corner site. ‘The site itself was the main inspiration,' explains Emlyn Olaver, director of Olaver Architecture, a firm based in Australia. The result is the studio's newest project, Hanslope House.

‘Rather than treating its openness as a challenge, we explored how it could redefine suburban living by creating a home that is simultaneously open and private. The design questions the conventional suburban model of a single backyard, instead using a sequence of courtyards and gardens to create a richer relationship between house, landscape, and street.’

The reimagined dwelling was conceived to challenge conventional ideas of privacy and engagement with the street. The residence comprises two volumes connected by a corridor, which divides the garden into two courtyards. The tradition of a single backyard is replaced with multiple outdoor areas in which to seek refuge.

Step inside the brick pavilion that is Hanslope House

Says Olaver, ‘The greatest challenge was balancing openness with privacy while negotiating planning controls. With three street frontages, the house is unusually exposed, requiring careful consideration of views, orientation, and enclosure. Achieving approval for zero setbacks to the side and rear streets was a significant part of the process, ultimately allowing the project to better respond to its site and improve internal amenity.’

The front door is set back within the façade, shaded by an alcove entry, and opens into the kitchen, dining, and living spaces. Each space is divided by brick screens and offers a visual connection to the surrounding gardens. The rear pavilion accommodates further living spaces and children's areas, while the main bedroom is connected to the courtyard.

The central spine is Olivar’s favourite part of the house: 'It’s more than a corridor,’ the architect says, ‘it is the project's organising element – a quiet threshold between public and private life, inside and outside, activity and retreat. Framed by courtyards and changing light throughout the day, it embodies the central idea of the project: that movement through a home can be just as meaningful as the rooms themselves.’

Hanslope House’s materiality nods to the surrounding suburban environment; Olaver has injected a contemporary touch with lattices and terracotta gabled roofs.

It feels familiar, yet entirely new, as Olaver explains: 'We hope visitors immediately feel a sense of calm and refuge. The progression through the unfenced front garden, sheltered entry and central spine is intended to slow the pace of arrival, gradually revealing light, landscape and interconnected spaces. Rather than a single dramatic moment, the house unfolds through a sequence of experiences that feel generous, grounded, and deeply connected to the garden.’

olaver.com.au

Most fine dining rooms worry about lighting levels. Huset has to deal with the sun disappearing for months. The restaurant sits in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. At 78 degrees north, it is the world’s northernmost fine dining restaurant.

Huset, which means ‘the house’, is located in a building completed in 1951 for a mining town that needed one roof for almost everything: church, hospital, sports hall, school, post office, cinema, concert venue. The building has outlived the industry that made it necessary, but not its role in the town, remaining a gathering place, only now with a 14-course Arctic tasting menu and one of Scandinavia’s largest wine cellars.

Dubbed the heart of the town by locals, Huset now begins a new chapter following an extensive transformation by Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta, which treated the restaurant as a building of leftovers, repairs and accumulated habits. That matters in Svalbard, where materials arrive by ship, weather interrupts everything, and resourcefulness is a mindset of daily life.

Wallpaper* dines at Huset, Svalbard

The mood: no snow-globe romance

The interior is warmer than the latitude suggests. Two tones of stained oak run through the fixed joinery and bespoke furniture, picking up the mixed woods in the coffered ceiling of the former cinema hall. Öland stone appears on counters and a large dining table; red linoleum gives the floor a blunt, practical heat, while accents of stainless steel cut through the softness.

‘Creating a warm and intimate atmosphere in a place as full of contrasts as Svalbard is both demanding and incredibly exciting. In a setting where it’s either always light or always dark, it calls for a very particular approach to lighting and surfaces,’ says project manager and team lead interior at Snøhetta, Marlene Fenger Vedal.

The smartest move is the textile work. Snøhetta used three layers of transparent fabric to create panels with a moiré effect, so the walls seem to shift as the light changes. Similar panels slide along the windows in timber frames, filtering the view without turning away from it.

‘By working with what already exists, it’s possible to develop more sustainable and meaningful solutions in line with a place’s history and identity, where history is not only preserved but activated as a resource in shaping the future,’ adds Fenger Vedal.

Throughout, the furniture has a sculptural sharpness: solid Swedish pine chairs by Simmer, supplied by Verk, and round tables designed by Snøhetta, including versions with cone-shaped bases. The adjacent chambre séparée is enclosed with fabric-clad screens and centred on a three-metre custom oak table.

The Food: Permafrost, preservation, wine below ground

Head chef Alberto Lozano cooks from a place where abundance is not guaranteed. The kitchen works with trappers, fishers and foragers, using Nordic preservation techniques and whatever the fjords, tundra and seasons allow. ‘Everything starts with what we can find here,’ he says.

That restraint gives the 14-course Arctic Experience its edge, with Arctic cold cuts, such as Reindeer charcuterie, Ptarmigan pâté en croûte and Huset chees. Examples of preservation include scallops in kefir cream, petrified langoustine with collagen and black shallots, and hay combined with lacto-fermented Norwegian green tomatoes. Below it all sits the wine cellar, dating back to the 1980s, with more than 1,000 titles.

Huset Restaurant is located at SJ, Vei 300, Longyearbyen 9170, Svalbard & Jan Mayen

For Federico Stefanovich, mimicking nature literally in design misses the point: there’s much more to gain from this vital source of inspiration than just surface level floral patterns or leaf motifs. The Mexican talent – a 2025 Wallpaper* Ascending Star – goes deeper and finds clever ways to evoke the anatomical structures intrinsic to plant and animal life.

Presented by Mexico City’s Ago Projects gallery, Stefanovich's latest collection, Salina, stems from close observations of aquatic organisms – the vast morphology of shells and carapaces beneath the ocean’s surface. Stefanovich has interpreted the essential osseous qualities of these natural elements in the formation of collectible lamp and table designs.

‘Rather than reproduce these references literally, the collection reinterprets them through an abstract lens, seeking to capture the delicate balance between fragility and strength – the rigidity and organic fluidity that characterizes many forms of marine life,’ Stefanovich says. ‘Rather than looking primarily at existing design references or typologies, I tend to begin with structures, behaviours and relationships.’

For Stefanovich, sand-cast bronze is the best process and material to authentically capture the skeleton shapes that keep shells together. 'This process allows me to create intricate yet robust forms – limbs and branches – that can remain hollow and accommodate electrical components when necessary,' he adds.

On top of his interest in natural systems, the designer is also fascinated by the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary technologies. ‘Much of my work involves moving between handmade processes and digital tools, each informs the other,’ says Stefanovich. ‘Discovering new materials and exploring their possibilities is an important part of the process, as is finding ways to celebrate the traces of making rather than conceal them’.

Fibreglass was chosen for the lampshades because of the material's balance of precision and unpredictability; air bubble imperfections resemble the irregularities one might find on a shell’s surface. Shaped in 3D-printed moulds, the semi-translucent material is ideal for diffusing light. When illuminated, the complex-curve forms reveal all of their textural variations. ‘One material feels skeletal and dense, while the other appears lighter, translucent and almost organic,’ he says. ‘Together they create a tension that becomes central to the collection.'

That’s especially true in the table designs in which Stefanovich attempted to push the limits of asymmetry. 'I’m deeply interested in the engineering dimension of design. Balance, structural logic, assembly and weight distribution are often as important to me as the visual outcome,' he explains.

Stefanovich's solutions are both functional and expressive, allowing the way an object supports itself or comes together to become its identity – just as Mother Nature would have intended.

There’s a devil-may-care punk insouciance behind the origin story of Nirvana’s bold serif logo. Beloved by generations born long after Kurt Cobain’s 1994 death, the stark logotype originated from the band’s first record label, Sub Pop, in 1989 for the cover of their debut album Bleach.

The story goes that designer Lisa Orth, commissioned to design the LP, simply asked her colleague Grant Alden to use whatever font had just been used on their typesetting machine. Alden worked at The Rocket, a Seattle music paper that was one of the driving forces behind the nascent grunge scene.

The font was Onyx, a blocky serif display font that gelled so well with the reversed black and white live image on the cover (taken by Cobain’s then-girlfriend Tracy Marander) that it became their logo going forwards, appearing on records, T-shirts, patches and countless hand-made homages. Typographic detectives should note that the font deviates slightly from that used in the band’s infamous ‘Satan Worshippin’ Mother Fucker’ T-shirts, which have flipped ‘N’s and appear to be a little more Bodoni-adjacent.

Cobain’s death in 1994 ossified the logo, which was also used on the final Nirvana album, In Utero, in 1993. As his legend grew, so did the value and scope of the Cobain estate, buoyed by T-shirt sales and vinyl reissues; visit Shop.Nirvana.com to see pure commodification in action.

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The best souvenirs are rarely souvenirs at all, but something that proves useful in everyday life – like a hat. This is the premise behind Ruslan Baginskiy’s summer residence at cult-favourite beach club Scorpios Mykonos, open on the Greek island until the end of September 2026.

Ruslan Baginskiy brings Ukrainian craft to Scorpios Mykonos

The Ukrainian luxury headwear and accessories brand has dreamt up the earthy space under the art direction of its eponymous founder, a milliner and designer. Somewhere between an atelier, a gallery and a summer pop-up, it is filled with the brand’s signature styles, original workshop hat blocks, hat-making tools, and handwoven wicker pieces made bespoke for the project.

‘To me, trips are about exploring, so I wanted to create a kind of “wonder room”,’ Baginskiy tells Wallpaper*. ‘It’s a place where people can wander around a little and slow down, get lost in the details. Craft is meant to be experienced in person – to be seen, touched, and understood through its details. Just like the places we travel to, the real value for me is in the experience itself.’

Large handwoven wicker ottomans reinterpret the silhouette of classic Ruslan Baginskiy (RB) bucket hats, turning a familiar accessory into something with sculptural demeanour. Other handcrafted pieces were shipped from Ukraine, while vintage furniture from Mykonos and mainland Greece helps the installation bend into the existing Scorpios landscape. ‘We brought the real tools of hat making into the space, but at the same time turned hats into furniture you can actually sit on,’ Baginskiy says. ‘I like this play between something authentic and whimsical.’

The young milliner wanted the residence to feel like ‘a natural continuation’ of the destination, rather than a retail insertion. ‘That’s why the RB summer residence exists somewhere between an atelier, a gallery, and a friend’s beautiful summer home,’ he says.

A selection of RB summer hats and accessories, from the versatile HatBag to the quirky straw cowboy hat, can be personalised with fruit- and vegetable-inspired bag charms as well as limited-edition Scorpios medallions, turning each piece into a keepsake. ‘I love the idea that guests can leave with something that carries a memory of this beautiful place, of their time there, and of this summer,’ Baginskiy adds. ‘To me, the best souvenirs are the ones that become part of your everyday life later on.’

Scorpios Mykonos is located at Paraga, Mikonos 846 00, Greece

As seen in the August 2026 ‘Creative America at 250’ issue of Wallpaper*, we pay homage to seminal American graphics.

Few brands encapsulate notions of American freedom quite like Levi’s, the denimwear label which began in San Francisco in the mid-1850s during the height of the Californian gold rush.

It was originally founded as a wholesale dry goods company by Levi Strauss – an immigrant from Bavaria, Germany – and the entrepreneur soon identified a need for hard-wearing workwear for miners carving out the American frontier as the young country spread across the continent. In 1873, he invented the ‘waist overall’ alongside tailor Jacob Davis: crafted from indigo selvedge denim with metal rivets – placed at the ‘points of strain’ – they are what we now know as the ‘original blue jean’.

Anatomy of a Logo: Levi’s Two Horse Patch

The year 1873, when Strauss patented the design, appears stamped onto a leather patch on every pair of Levi’s jeans – part of an emblem first introduced in 1886. It is known as the ‘Two Horse Patch’ in reference to its protagonists: a duo of horses which are depicted pulling a pair of jeans in opposite two different directions without destroying them – a nod to Levi’s claims of hardiness and indestructibility (the pictorial design was used because of high levels of illiteracy in the American West; the idea was that people could go into stores and ask for ‘those pants with the two horses’).

And, though the brand’s logo has evolved – currently, a red ‘batwing’ with white typography, its shape reminiscent of the ‘Original Riveted’ banner on the 1886 logo – the ‘Two Horse Patch’ has endured, a symbol of what remains the United States’ definitive fashion export.

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Spiked hair, torn fishnets, safety pins pushed through skin and clothing: punk has often announced itself through the body. It is a fitting point of departure for ‘Unruly – The Body in Punk’, now on view at ARoS in Aarhus, which reconsiders the movement not simply as a sound or a style, but as a physical language of protest, in which the body became a charged site of rebellion.

Bringing together more than 130 works – from photography and film to collage, installation and fashion ephemera – many of them shown in Scandinavia for the first time, the exhibition draws on curator Marie Arleth Skov’s three-year postdoctoral research project. Its focus is the emergence and evolution of punk across London, Berlin, Copenhagen and Aarhus in the 1970s and 1980s, tracing how dress, gesture and performance came to function as acts of refusal. ‘It can be difficult from today’s point of view to understand just how provocative, or even threatening, punks were perceived [to be],’ Skov says. ‘The reaction was one of absolute shock. That’s why I called the exhibition “Unruly”; there were many ways the punk revolt was incorporated, but they were all unruly.’

The exhibition opens with a quote from Vivienne Westwood printed on the wall – ‘If you want change, the best thing to do is attack sex’ (1976) – before moving to Sheila Rock’s photograph, Jordan in Doorway of SEX (1977). Jordan, the general manager of Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road boutique at the time, leans against the doorway in a black leotard and sheer tights, her blonde beehive and heavy eyeliner turning her body into a statement in itself. As one of the defining faces of British punk, she sets the tone for a show in which appearance becomes both performance and provocation. ‘Her fierce attitude and the way she dressed say a lot about how punks incorporated revolt,’ Skov notes.

That same spirit shapes the exhibition’s thematic structure. Rather than unfolding as a strict chronology, ‘Unruly’ moves through a series of ideas: the DIY ethos of London punk, where second-hand clothing, homemade fashion and fanzines collapsed the hierarchy between performer and audience; the East German underground, where punk existed under Stasi surveillance and dress, dance and performance became forms of dissent; and the body as a site of gender play, fetish and self-invention. Fishnets, latex, PVC and bondage references recur throughout, as punk style challenged beauty ideals, sexual norms and the commodification of the body.

The curation, in turn, channels that same sensibility. Skov and her team wanted to avoid a ‘clichéd punk aesthetic’ and instead stay true to punk’s ethos through DIY and recycled display elements, reusing rubber curtains and mirrors from earlier exhibitions. Black walls, open metal racks and visible screws lend the show a stripped-back industrialism, sidestepping the polished neutrality that still dominates so much exhibition design.

Among the standout works is Linder’s Limiting Accessories Ltd. (1977), a mock magazine spread in which Buzzcocks frontman Howard Devoto wears a series of lingerie masks designed by the artist, pouting and gasping somewhere between desire and helplessness. The inversion is sharp: where women have so often been cast as the wearers of constraining accessories, Linder redirects that apparatus onto a male body, making masculinity itself appear staged, vulnerable and faintly absurd.

The exhibition concludes with Nina Sten-Knudsen’s film Panic Eye (1979), projected in extreme close-up, the restless eye darting back and forth across the wall. Surreal, fragmented and faintly unnerving, it is an apt final image. For Skov, punk’s relevance lies precisely in that unease. Today, she sees a renewed ‘no future’ mood shaped by climate crisis, economic rupture and war, alongside a return of conservative thinking around gender roles, precisely the kind of order the punk body was built to resist.

‘Unruly – The Body in Punk’ is on view at ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark until 13 December 2026

Although Richard and Maurice McDonald only held on to their hamburger empire for 21 years (selling out to Ray Kroc in 1961), the brothers not only laid the groundwork for global fast food but pioneered the idea of architecture as signage. The first McDonald’s restaurant to showcase the Golden Arches was their second restaurant, located in San Bernadino and designed by local architect Stanley Clark Meston, a specialist in the car-focused roadside architecture that proliferated in the 40s and 50s.

McDonald's Golden Arches

Working closely with Richard McDonald, who suggested the idea of the towering twin arches, Meston’s assistant Charles Fish rendered the forms not as simple curves but as structural parabolas, a familiar form of the era with its roots in modernist concrete engineering.

It was employee Jim Schindler who translated these architectural forms into the extended ‘M’ logotype in 1962, with the signature yellow and red colours providing eye-catching contrast. As an architectural element, the arches lasted barely a decade into Kroc’s aggressive period of restaurant building, yet as a recognisable logotype it was unmatched and simply too good to ignore. Distilled into a single letter atop a pole or on the side of a building, the arches are a throwback to a forgotten era of cinematic, aspirational roadside architecture.

Today’s McDonald’s franchises are flat-packed structures that can be thrown up in 24 hours, not neon-lit Googie wonders that send mid-century buffs salivating. But on wrappers, cups and chip packets, the golden arches have been served up billions upon billions of times in the decades that followed their creation.

Sitting among tangles of oak and Monterey pine, on the lip of a canyon in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Owl House is part art, part architecture, its rich contradictions impossible to grasp at a glance. The redwood structure looks different from every angle, emerging onto the street like a fox's den hollowed out of the brush, or perched like a massive nest from the canyon behind. Where it looms largest, however, it is also generously glazed, giving it the all-seeing gaze of its namesake. Inside, it feels exposed, enclosed and, in some places, both. Sculptural, layered and textural, it offers a series of inhabitable collages that are rigorous in their geometry, reverent toward nature, but playful nonetheless.

Discover this refreshed Mickey Muennig house in California

Designed in the early 1970s by architect Mickey Muennig, the house was restored in 2024 by landscape architect Bernard Trainor of Ground Studio. Then last year, its interiors were renovated by Wallpaper* US400 honoree Nicole Hollis' San Francisco design studio for a pair of empty nesters, who use it as a weekend retreat. Like so many things that come to define the identity of a place, the house's Californian aesthetic was created by a transplant.

Muennig, who would come to be known as ‘the man who built Big Sur', moved to California from Missouri and the Midwest. Having studied under Bruce Goff, he travelled to the nearby Esalen Institute in 1971 for a Gestalt therapy workshop and never returned home. Instead, he began to design unusual buildings, using organic forms and local materials that bridge indoors and out. On a ridge above Big Sur, Muennig embarked on private architectural experiments that embraced nature, light and views: a stone and glass teepee with a bed suspended in its conical crown surveyed the sea, while a boxy house nearby featured tiered, spiralling redwood ceilings and a living room bisected by running water.

Meanwhile, he was also designing lush coastal homes and celebrated Northern California destinations: the Baths at Esalen, the Hawthorne Gallery, and the plush Post Ranch Inn, whose guest rooms took the form of treehouses and burrows with wildflower-sown roofs. Architecture became an extension, even a totem, of the landscape, a link between human and nature. The Owl House had presaged themes that Muennig would play with in much of his later work.

Also a transplant, from the southeastern coast of Australia, Trainor became a temporary steward of the house in 2023. His restoration stabilised and protected materials ranging from the copper roof to wooden decks. ‘It was a passion project that combined art and design, and it brought together years of learning along the way,' he says. In late 2024, when a longtime client bought the house, Hollis and colleague Adele Cunningham set to work with great restraint. The result is clarifying, drawing the architecture to the fore and making room for its new residents.

Essential to Muennig's design are moments of sculptural intensity. The entrance operates as a human-scale collage featuring radial trusswork, a semicircular skylight, layered doorways, cut-away walls, and a tilted demilune clerestory window. Wooden collages by Japanese artist Kishio Suga, chosen from the couple's existing collection by consultants Mary Zlot and Sabrina Buell, resonates with the house's language of fragmentation and flow.

To their credit, Hollis' team cleared the space instead of filling it. They opted for materials that complement rather than contrast, and fewer furnishings that, no matter their age, might have always been there. ‘It's a small house, so I didn't want to overwhelm or overthink it,' says Hollis. ‘You don't want to crowd that architecture. You want it to sing.'

Hollis understood the architecture as tactile as much as it is visually extreme. Texture here serves as a unifying principle, with expressive wooden ceilings and terracotta floor tiles. ‘We thought, are the tiles too busy? They're so graphic,' Hollis recalls. ‘But then we all got used to them, and now we can't imagine the house without them.' Harmonising with the redwood and the brass of the fireplace, colourful textiles add cosiness and energy to each room.

Like texture, geometry is palpable throughout, from the hexagonal tiles to the curving walls. In the kitchen, revitalised cabinetry is faced with vertical slats in varying widths, while a globe pendant and loop-base table echo the house's porthole windows. Because the plan resembles a nautilus shell (with bedroom walls curling into cylinders that contain baths), Hollis commissioned rugs from Vaheed Taheri and brought in rounded furnishings with circular or semicircular oversize pulls.

To keep the interiors relaxed, Hollis' team either met the house's whimsy halfway with curved pieces and happy hues, or stepped back to let it play out. They didn't touch the mushroom-shaped window above the kitchen sink, or the mezzanine's pony wall, cut away in a shallow arc that Hollis describes as ‘a smile'. But they brightened the living room with a green sideboard by Matthew Raw and a red sofa by George Smith: ‘Items that one might not want to live with every day,' she says, ‘but that help create an escape from everyday life.'

Outdoors, the garden continues to be a passion project for Trainor, who wove together plant species such as banksias and persimmons to make it feel ‘as if you were walking through a painting', and designed a cedar and brass fence that gambols across the undulating terrain, echoing the language of the house. The result is not a backdrop but a blossoming that feels as whimsical and wild as the architecture it embraces.

nicolehollis.com

bernardtrainor.com

This article appears in the August 2026, Creative America issue of Wallpaper*, available from 2 July in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Felice’s newest New York restaurant opens at one of Flatiron’s most privileged corners, where Fifth Avenue meets 26th Street beside Madison Square Park. Set inside a 21-storey neo-Gothic building completed in 1912, the site gives the family-run Italian brand a dining room with unusual scale, daylight from three sides and a strong connection to the street.

Wallpaper* dines at Felice Flaitron, New York

The mood: go big and come home

Since opening on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 2007, Felice has grown to fourteen locations across New York, Connecticut and Florida. Designed by local studio Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture, Felice Flatiron is arguably the brand’s most architecturally ambitious opening to date. The room boasts 18ft ceilings, windows on three sides and a Fifth Avenue presence that changes with the light. Afternoon sun cuts across amber banquettes, pale tablecloths and warm timber.

‘We wanted the space to feel instantly familiar but elevated in every detail, Tuscany in its materials, New York in its energy,’ says Enrico Bonetti, co-founder of Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture.

The design works through proportion, material and cathedral-like drama: custom Italian oak millwork crafted in Florence, Chianti terracotta sourced from Tuscany, deep red blinds, leather seating, soft pendant lamps and a 30ft illuminated wine wall. At the centre is Felice’s largest bar to date, wrapped in Grigio Versilia marble and engineered to be the restaurant’s social anchor.

The food: all-day entertainment

The menu stays close to Felice’s Tuscan roots: seasonal ingredients, regional recipes, signature pastas and dishes made for sharing. New to Flatiron is the Il Toscano Plate, with rotating salumi, pecorino, olives and crostini, alongside a tableside tiramisu cart and an interactive amaro station.

Wine remains central. The by-the-glass list champions small producers, with Italian bottles joined by selections from Spain, California and elsewhere. A ‘Back to Natural’ section brings in low-intervention wines, while the cocktail programme leans full dolce vita: Dirty Martini Spritz, aperitivo drinks, and a nightcap menu running from Amaro Shakerato to Affogato Martini.

Felice Flatiron is located at 220 5th Ave, New York, NY 10001, United States

As seen in the August 2026 ‘Creative America at 250’ issue of Wallpaper*, we pay homage to seminal American graphics.

Calvin Klein’s sans-serif logo, first introduced by its namesake designer in 1968, is an exercise in simplicity and directness – a reflection of Klein’s approach to fashion, which would flourish in the 1990s (alongside designers like Helmut Lang and Miuccia Prada, his work would herald the new minimalism of the era).

And, while the logo has appeared on everything from fragrance bottles to T-shirts, it will be forever associated with the elastic waistband of the brand’s underwear – a genius stroke of marketing that saw men and women hitch down their jeans to reveal their brand allegiance. Under Klein, underwear became a status symbol – and with it, big business.

Their ubiquity was achieved through Klein’s evocative underwear campaigns, the first of which appeared on a Times Square billboard in 1982, featuring a colossal Bruce Weber-shot image of Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus clad in nothing but a pair of Calvin Klein white Y-fronts.

In 1992, it would be the turn of ‘Marky Mark’ Wahlberg and a young Kate Moss, who propelled the branded waistband to international fame with a Herb Ritts-shot campaign, controversial for the latter’s crotch grab and fierce feud between its young starlets (Klein said the pair ‘couldn’t stand each other’; Moss would later say that the high-profile shoot led to a mental breakdown).

Since then, the Calvin Klein waistline has been passed around Hollywood and beyond: memorable campaigns have featured everyone from footballer Freddie Ljungberg and model Naomi Campbell to Justin Bieber, Jeremy Allen White, and Bad Bunny.

And, more recently, the Italian designer Veronica Leoni – creative director of Calvin Klein Collection, the runway arm of the brand – reimagined the iconic waistband as part of her S/S 2026 collection, abstracted across the bridge of a pair of sunglasses, or woven into a ‘tweed’ dress. ‘It’s like an acknowledgement that Calvin Klein belongs, in a way, to everyone,’ she said at the time.

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The first thing you see as you enter Vibeke Tandberg’s new show is her face, twice. A monitor shows Merge (1998), a 16mm film in which the photographer has double-exposed herself onto herself. It’s a simple effect, but this low-res doubling is a synecdoche of Tandberg’s body of work: there is no one single self.

Questions of identity and performativity run throughout ‘They Live’, a new exhibition at Bergen’s Kode in Tandberg’s native Norway. The show tracks Tandberg’s career, from her early photo projects in the 1990s to more recent plaster works and videos shown for the first time. A key figure from the Nordic wave of young artists in the 1990s, Tandberg was an early advocate for digital photography and photo manipulation. For Living Together (1996), Tandberg used then-new photo editing tools to create a photo series in which she appears as her own twin. In Faces (1998), she merged her face with other people’s, creating androgynous, fictional portraits. The results are unsettling, not because they enter uncanny-valley territory, but rather because they seem hyperrealistic. There’s a clear through-line between these 30-year-old works and today’s debate around authenticity and truth in imagery.

Tandberg herself appears many times throughout ‘They Live’, but she insists that these are not self-portraits. 'That’s a loaded term,' she told me. 'It feels like a self-portrait is done because you want to tell people something about your inner self. It's confiding in the viewer something more psychological than I have ever been interested in. For me, it’s always been more conceptual.'

Tandberg, who started life in the theatre before training to be a photographer, has always enjoyed dress-up. She came to national attention with the Bride series (1993), in which she appears as an idealised newlywed alongside 11 different men. The photographs were published as wedding announcements in local newspapers on the same day, 24 July. The project established Tandberg’s main interests: performativity, playfulness, but also a desire to provoke and critique patriarchal norms.

In 2003, Tandberg bought her most important accessory. She purchased a latex mask and the character of ‘old man’ was born. He appears in much of Tandberg’s subsequent work. Old Man Going Up and Down a Staircase (2003) shows Tandberg, pregnant with twins at the time, performing the role of the aged man, heaving himself up and down a flight of stairs. 'It was such a relief to get rid of my own face,' Tandberg says. 'I was grateful to work within a mask, hiding myself.'

Soon, however, she let other people perform the role. 'It could be anyone in that mask,' she says. 'I didn't really need it to be myself anymore.' The mask is worn by the ballet dancer Maria Kochetkova in Old Man Dancing (2021) and by an assistant in Post Americana (2026), a new film for the exhibition where the old man is a dying cowboy.

The most interesting moments of ‘They Live’, however, star Tandberg’s face – and these are not confined to photography. Echo’s Bones (2021), named after a Beckett short story and realised during the Covid pandemic, contains 87 plaster busts of Tandberg: they lie on the floor, distorted and brutalised – like a graveyard of mutilated selves. As with Bride, Echo’s Bones sees Tandberg using herself to play with conceptual, if unsettling, ideas. Echo’s Bones looks like a society that’s died, but it’s also the same death mask over and over.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue contains several essays that situate Tandberg in an intellectual framework; her work is interpreted through Foucault, Butler, and Deleuze, among others. The exhibition itself, however, only has introductory wall text. We are left to interpret the works ourselves – but not before feeling something first. Tandberg’s oeuvre is well suited to theoretical discussion, but audiences shouldn’t let ideas stand in the way of emotional engagement. After all, Tandberg’s entire career, from the camp to the macabre, is rooted in play.

‘They Live’ is at Kode Bergen Art Museum until 12 September 2026

kodebergen.no

You may have heard of Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), but how much do you know about her art? Her multidisciplinary practice encompassed sculpture, film, performance, photography, painting and drawing, but she is best known for her ‘silueta’, or ‘earth-body', works, in which she outlined her body in nature.

More than 120 of Mendieta’s works are now on view in a new retrospective at Tate Modern in London (15 July 2026 – 17 January 2027), including a nude woman’s form in a tomb covered with sprigs of small white flowers, the flaming form of a body on a sandy landscape, and the shape of a body in a shoreline, being slowly eroded by the tide. The exhibition takes us through Mendieta’s practice, from her teenage years up until around 1984, exploring her whole body of work.

'Tate's involvement with Ana Mendieta really started in the 2000s; we acquired works as early as 2009, so this is not really something new for Tate. But in 2020, when I joined [the gallery] to be in charge of moving image, the first acquisition I worked on with my colleague Mike Wellen, who is the co-curator of this show, was an acquisition of six films by Mendieta, so our representation of the artist really grew tremendously from 2020,’ explains the exhibition’s co-curator Valentine Umansky.

Tate has the largest holding of any museum of Mendieta’s films and this is the biggest-ever UK exhibition of the artist’s work. Many of the works on display have never been shown in the country before.

Mendieta was exiled from Cuba, where she had had an affluent childhood (until her father became a political prisoner), to the United States at the age of 12; there, she lived in foster care with her sister. She went on to study art at the University of Iowa, gaining her MA in 1972, and even in the very early stages of her career she experimented and pushed boundaries by working with themes of violence, gender and ecology. In creating and recording ephemeral works, she explored core themes of death, energy, gender, nature, transformation and spirituality, the last through references to the religion Santeria.

In an early work, Moffitt Building Piece, 1973, she staged the aftermath of an accident on a public pavement and recorded the public’s reaction to it in a series of photographs. This is shown in the exhibition alongside a film work that shows the artist painting the words ‘She Got Love’ in red on a white wooden door. Her work, although it sits in the canon of its time, today feels urgent and radical, partly due to Mendieta’s great gift for image-making and the fact that her subject matter resonates in the current moment.

‘One thing that might be most important is that our awareness of ecology has fundamentally shifted [since Mendieta’s time] and so I had a feeling that younger audiences [and others] in the UK would be very sensitive to some of the topics raised in her works that maybe were not read in this way in the 1970s or 1980s – particularly, her desire and drive to blend [with] or dissolve in nature, and also her care for what we would now call a sustainable mindset,’ Umansky explains.

This is echoed in the restaging of a number of ephemeral works by Mendieta, realised for the exhibition in collaboration with her niece and the head of her estate, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta.

Where no instructions were left for realising these works, Raquel collaborated with the curators at Tate to recreate them as closely as possible in a gallery setting, in some cases for the first time since they were conceived.

Yemaya Gifts, 1982, was originally created for Museo Barrio, an important place for Latin American and Caribbean artists; it has been recreated in sand and mushroom corals for the first time for the Tate Modern exhibition.

For a work in the Untitled: Silueta, 1978, series, a part of the Old Westbury forest at New York College has been recreated using found timber and found and foraged soil, moss and stones.

‘We worked very closely with Raquel Cecilia Mendieta,’ Umansky adds. ‘She had done a series of restagings, but this one [from the Untitled: Silueta, 1978, series] was the first [restaging of that particular work], so it's always an experiment.’

These restagings act as an essential bridge between the documentation film and photography and what must have been the very powerful immediacy of Mendieta’s performances. They also speak to the theme of rebirth that recurs throughout her work.

Much of Mendieta’s work was essentially ephemeral, although very well documented. The exhibition includes sections that reference symbolic locations important to the artist’s work, such as The Grove and The River, while a section called The Repertoire looks at repeated patterns, materials and motifs in her work.

Previous discussion of Mendieta has often centred on the circumstances of her death in 1985 (her husband, artist Carl Andre, was charged then acquitted of her murder after she plummeted from his apartment), but here, we get a deep dive into her legacy as an artist and the impact of her work.

Among the films we see in the exhibition is Sweating Blood, 1973, and Blood Feathers, 1974, where Mendieta covered herself with blood and feathers, transforming herself into a kind of bird, and Grass Breathing, 1974, where she created a kind of pulsing grassy site. There is also the series she made with writer and poet Morty Sklar, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972, where she took his facial hair to create a beard on herself. Alongside are works that sit gently in nature, to be later washed away, or where the artist blended her body with the landscape. She was experimenting with gender, identity, physical presence, a love of natural spaces and the ambiguities therein.

There are also many drawings and paintings, previously unseen in London, and a work titled Parachute, made with children that Mendieta taught while working as a primary school teacher.

This show goes some way to replacing myth about Mendieta with fact. It also places the artist alongside the likes of Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo (also the subjects of Tate Modern exhibitions this summer, Emin until 30 August, Kahlo until 3 January 2027), who have similarly been the focus of much mythmaking, and demonstrates that however much we might know about Mendieta’s life, there is more to learn from her art.

Umansky reflects that the show forms ‘part of the work that the artist’s estate has been doing very meticulously over the last ten years to correct some of the factual errors that were written around [her] work. This is a process that allows for better definition of the works so that they're seen as [if] brand new and in the best possible light.’

‘Ana Mendieta’ at Tate Modern, London, 15 July 2026 to 17 January 2027, tate.org.uk

Hermès originally opened its doors in 1837 as a harness workshop in Paris, rapidly establishing itself as an authority in the crafting of leather saddles and bridles. Founder Thierry Hermès created pieces for the nobles of the era, demonstrating a commitment to craftsmanship that expanded and developed over the decades.

These equestrian roots have always been central to Hermès, and are reinterpreted now in the new high jewellery collection from the creative director of Hermès Jewellery, Pierre Hardy. ‘Into the Horsescape’ encompasses a collection of pieces where the horse is suggested, rather than represented.

‘I implicitly tell Hermès’ story, its relationship with time and materials, before drawing on the imagination to transform them into an adornment,’ says Hardy, of why he felt it necessary to eschew a literal representation of the horse. ‘We take mundane items and turn them into something sublime, whether by creating pieces inspired by boots and lassoes, or by finishing a blacksmith’s nail in gold and diamond; transforming it into a sun that illuminates one’s face. This collection journeys between the abstract and the narrative, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary.’ (The new Hermès ‘Clou de Forge’ bag takes a similar approach.)

Throughout, equestrian symbols are given a high-jewellery spin. The curves of a lasso are spelt out in baguette diamonds that twist their way around the neck, while an 18th-century miniature saddle is worked into a satin-like black titanium bracelet that sits delicately on the wrist. The arch of a horse’s hoof is finished in gleaming black jade on a minimalist necklace and ring, while the iron nails used to attach horseshoes to a horse’s hooves become raw spikes of a diamond necklace.

‘It’s the broader view that moves me: one’s silhouette, one’s movement, the way one exists within a space, one’s style,’ Hardy adds. ‘Style comes from taking ownership of a garment or a piece of jewellery; from a way of being, rather than through an effect.’

hermes.com

Club de Mar Mallorca has never been just another marina. Founded in 1972, as Palma was becoming an international sailing destination, it helped draw large yachts from the French Riviera and place the city on the Mediterranean nautical map. After a five-and-a-half-year redevelopment, the club has reopened with whimsical interiors by Madrid-based designer Marta de la Rica.

Sail into Club de Mar in Mallorca

Her brief was to honour the club’s past without turning it into a museum of maritime nostalgia. ‘I wanted to create a unity of purpose through colour, material and shape,’ says de la Rica. She looked to vintage Riva runabouts – their high-varnish hulls, lacquered surfaces and easy glamour – as well as the club’s own 1970s origins, ‘an era that expressed luxury in a very sensorial and relaxed way’.

High-gloss lacquered wood runs through the bars, counters and wall panels, with slats, softened corners and rounded edges giving the rooms a nautical language without anchors on the wall. Light catches the varnish, chrome and glass, warming the interiors as it moves through the space.

The palette borrows from nautical flags, with red, blue and yellow drawn from the International Code of Signals. Stripes appear across upholstery and textiles, while sculptural furniture, rounded geometries, burgundy conical lamps and oval bars give the club a strong visual identity. Much of it was custom-designed, with nautical antiques from the club archive placed throughout: boat models, barometers, anchors and diving helmets. ‘Antiques bring soul and history to a space,’ says de la Rica.

Looking towards Palma’s Old Town and cathedral, the terrace feels afloat. ‘When you’re on the terrace looking out towards the Old Town and the cathedral, it feels as though you’re on a boat,’ says de la Rica. For her, the sea is present ‘not through thematic elements, but through materials, proportions and light’. The result is glossy, graphic and rooted in place: a 1970s-tinged yacht club interior that knows exactly where it belongs.

Club de Mar is located at Muelle Pelaires, 07015 Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain

Ivan Chermayeff’s MoMA logotype first surfaced in 1964, making effective and appropriately modern use of Franklin Gothic No. 2 to create a starkly typography approach.

Chermayeff, son of the modernist architect Serge Chermayeff, worked across graphic design, branding, writing, and design theory, creating logos for Barneys New York, Chase Bank, New York University and many other American institutions. A custom typeface by Matthew Carter, MoMA Gothic, was introduced in 2004 and five years later Pentagram were appointed to create guidelines for the use of MoMA Gothic across the museum’s entire visual output, from signage to posters and publications.

The agency worked in parallel with Julia Hoffmann, MoMA’s Creative Director for Graphics and Advertising, to devise ways it could be cropped, coloured and paired with content, reducing the logo down to an abstracted set of letters. It’s a visual shorthand for high art, cementing the connection between bold graphical simplicity and intellectual rigour, whilst also flexible enough to accommodate the visual splash of Pop or the sober tones of minimalism.

Chermayeff’s original solution proved so enduring that it remains the foundation stone of the museum’s visual identity over sixty years after it was devised. Today, it is used everywhere from the 53^rd Street façade to MoMA’s website and across its range of merchandise, all without missing a beat.

Mayfair has no shortage of polished dining rooms, but Miko Mei Fair has arrived to turn up the heat. On the ground floor of MiMi Mei Fair’s Georgian townhouse, the 50-cover Thai restaurant is the latest opening from Samyukta Nair, the restaurateur behind London hotspots Jamavar, Bombay Bustle, MiMi Mei Fair and Nipotina. Led by chef Soonthorn Apaipat of Koyn Thai, it pairs townhouse glamour with cooking rooted in fire, balance and sharing.

Wallpaper* dines at Miko Mei Fair

The mood: MiMi’s more eccentric sibling

Miko Mei Feir delivers a darker, more intimate mood than the usual Mayfair new opening: candlelight, glossy wood, patterned banquettes. The interiors keep the townhouse framework and dial up the colour: teal and timber panelling, red leather booths, brass accents and tropical wallcoverings, with gold-leaf lotus details adding a subtle Thai nod. The Peacock Room, set behind folding timber screens, adds a private dining room for eight, while hand-painted chinoiserie wallpaper ties it back to MiMi Mei Fair upstairs.

The food: Robata smoke meets Thai balance

Chef Apaipat moves across Thailand – Isaan heat, Southern coconut richness, Central Thai balance – with Koyn Thai’s robata-style grill guiding the kitchen. The headline dish is the Apple Wood Fire Peking Duck Penang Curry, adding MiMi Mei Fair’s signature duck into one of Thailand’s best-loved curries. Elsewhere, there are spring rolls with tofu and spring onion, prawns pla ra, and toasted rice beef tenderloin. Don’t miss Sabai Sabai, the signature cocktail, which mixes Mekong rum, kaffir lime, Thai basil and soda. For no-alcohol drinkers, Akoya comprises cucumber, Thai basil, lychee, lime and sparkling jasmine tea.

Miko Mei Fair is located at 55 Curzon Street, London W1J 8PG, United Kingdom

Handcrafted in her studio in Taos, New Mexico, Anna Sheffield's newest works are difficult to categorise. They feel both ancient and contemporary: pieces whose function is not immediately obvious, but whose presence is difficult to ignore.

Sheffield calls them simply ‘objects'. The word gives them space to exist between categories. They are sculptures that participate in daily life. A vessel might hold a feather collected during a walk. A bell might mark the transition between one moment and another. A carved form might rest in the palm of a hand, inviting a few seconds of reflection. ‘The greatest luxury is to have anything in your life that makes you feel like you're slowing down and actually being present,' Sheffield says.

She jokingly describes the pieces as ‘witchy Carl Auböck', referencing the 20thcentury Austrian designer whose objects transformed everyday tools into moments of pleasure and attention. A bowl, bell or letter opener remained useful, but function was only the beginning. Auböck understood that objects could carry qualities more difficult to measure: humour, personality, memory and the small rituals created through use.

This relationship between material, meaning and daily life has shaped Sheffield's work for more than two decades. Before becoming one of the defining voices in contemporary fine jewellery, she studied sculpture in San Francisco. Jewellery unexpectedly became the place where her sculptural training, material knowledge, and personal sensibility became a livelihood. After moving to New York in 2002, she launched her ‘Bing Bang' line, translating those instincts into accessible pieces: tiny sculptural symbols, charms and declarations designed to be collected and layered. The response was meteoric, becoming what Sheffield describes as a ‘Barneys fashion moment', with the line finding audiences from New York to Tokyo and leading to collaborations with Marc Jacobs and Target.

In 2009, Sheffield started a collection under her own name, embracing the traditions of fine jewellery while bringing her own sensibility. Her rings honoured classic forms, but introduced unexpected stones, unusual colours and combinations that reflected a sculptor's attention to material, composition and emotional resonance. Jewellery offered a powerful education in the emotional life of objects. »

A ring arrives with centuries of human behaviour already attached: promises, commitments, inheritance and memory. Eventually, Sheffield began questioning whether that same emotional power could exist within the quieter rituals of daily life.

However, after years of building a brand and a recognisable language within jewellery, Sheffield began to question where she fitted in creatively. ‘I'm not an artist anymore,' she remembers saying. ‘I'm a designer. I'm a brand. I'm a marketer. I'm an entrepreneur.'

During the pandemic, an artist residency at Pocoapoco in Oaxaca allowed Sheffield to confront these issues, returning her to sculpting and the physical process of making. Around the same time, her centre of gravity shifted from New York City to Taos, bringing her back to New Mexico, where she grew up, and to the landscape that had long shaped her understanding of materials. ‘New Mexico has always been my true north,' she says. Taos offered her a different kind of knowledge. The region has long attracted artists, creative types and experimental thinkers drawn by the possibility of living outside conventional systems of value. Its vast landscape and distance from traditional centres of culture created space for different ways of making, thinking and being. For Sheffield, it nurtured another part of the same imagination: the slower, stranger, more intuitive relationship with materials that had been the foundation of her creative life. The surrounding desert contains many elements that have appeared throughout her career: quartz, turquoise, copper and volcanic stone. The move was not a rejection of one life for another. It was a place where different parts of herself could finally exist together.

The works that emerged could only have been made after everything that came before. They carry the precision of jewellery but follow a different logic: one shaped by earth, intuition and the slow accumulation of meaning. Stones no longer wait to be set into rings. Metals no longer need to announce their value. Materials that once marked life's largest ceremonies are invited into quieter, daily exchanges. Sheffield speaks about the works with a mixture of seriousness and play. After years creating objects for the ceremonies we inherit, she is now exploring the rituals we create for ourselves.

The artist that Sheffield thought she had left behind was never separate from the designer, marketer and entrepreneur she became. They were different expressions of the same imagination, shaped by different landscapes. New York taught her how to build worlds around objects. Taos returned her attention to the mysteries that made those objects matter in the first place. The diamond and the obsidian were never opposites. They were different forms of the same alchemy: earth transformed by the human desire to give it meaning.

annasheffield.com

This article appears in the August 2026, Creative America issue of Wallpaper*, available from 2 July in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The world’s most famous sign transcended every conceivable aspiration of its originators, developers SH Woodruff and Tracy E Shoults. The pair were part of a consortium looking to promote their new real estate venture, Hollywoodland. The year was 1923 and the job went to Thomas Fisk Goff of the Crescent Sign Company, who set out the name in 50ft-tall blocky capital letters stalking across the hillside above Beachwood Canyon.

Visible for miles, and brightly illuminated for its first decade, the sign found local favour but soon started to decay. The final act of British starlet Peg Entwistle added tragedy to the site when she jumped off the ‘H’ in September 1932. She became a posthumous symbol of the darker side of Tinseltown.

In 1944, the city took ownership and even considered demolition – at this point, the sign simply read ‘ollywoodland’. Buoyed by local support and with a canny eye to the future, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce stepped in to save it, agreeing to reinstate the ‘H’ and drop the ‘land’.

As a result, the Hollywood sign became a globally recognised visual shortcut for a neighbourhood that was originally incorporated back in 1903. The original wooden and steel structure was completely overhauled and replaced in 1978, following a $250,000 fundraising campaign led by Hugh Hefner. Each letter was given a sponsor, including Andy Williams for the ‘W’ and Alice Cooper for one of the ‘O’s (given in memory of Groucho Marx). And there it’s remained ever since, frequently trespassed upon, occasionally vandalised, and even threatening to outlast the industry it celebrates.

hollywoodsign.org

A version of this article appears in the Wallpaper* August 2026 Creative America issue, available from 4 July, in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

For decades, luxury yacht interiors have followed their own peculiar visual language: glossy timber, formal salons and a succession of disconnected rooms that could just as easily belong to a five-star hotel as a vessel at sea. Architect Enrico Bonetti always found that strange. 'The interiors were inexplicable,' he says. 'You'd move from one room to another and everything would suddenly change for no apparent reason.'

That dissatisfaction became the starting point for one of the most influential yacht designs of recent years. It started nine years ago, when Italian shipbuilder Benetti approached Bonetti's New York-based architecture practice, Bonetti/Kozerski, to rethink the interiors of its new Oasis series. Rather than turning to another yacht specialist, the Italian builder deliberately sought architects from outside the industry, with no yacht experience, hoping a fresh perspective might challenge long-established boat-design assumptions.

Step inside the Benetti Oasis yacht by Bonetti/Kozerski and Kelly Behun

Working alongside British yacht designer RWD, Bonetti questioned almost every convention. Why should the main salon follow the same layout every other yacht had adopted? Why should stepping inside feel like entering an entirely different world from the deck outside?

Instead, the studio approached the yacht as it would a house, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior so that the space feels like a continuous narrative rather than a series of disjointed statements. The teak decking continues seamlessly through the living spaces, large expanses of glazing dissolve the distinction between inside and out, and glossy white lacquer (made by a piano factory) reflects changing skies and water back into the interior. Bonetti says a client once told him, ‘When you step out of bed and put your feet on the teak floor, you already feel close to the water.’

Many of the ideas now seem obvious, but they represented a significant departure for an industry set in its ways. The Oasis 40M, launched in 2020, became one of Benetti's best-selling models, spawning a smaller 34m version and, more recently, the Oasis 42M. More than 50 have now been built, with the studio continuing to customise many of them for individual owners.

One of the latest examples, with interiors designed by New York-based interior designer Kelly Behun – featured in the Wallpaper* US400 for 2026 – pushes the residential sensibility even further. For the owner, who was simultaneously commissioning Kelly Behun to design a holiday home in Comporta, Portugal, the interiors of the yacht became an extension of that domestic project.

‘The brief was surprisingly similar to what it would be for any home,’ Behun explains. ‘To create spaces that feel elegant, comfortable, welcoming and distinctly personal.’

Designing for the sea inevitably introduces constraints unfamiliar to residential designers. Every material must satisfy marine regulations, weight is carefully controlled and every millimetre is scrutinised. Rather than limiting creativity, Behun argues those restrictions sharpen it. Furniture proportions, layered natural materials and tactile textures – such as timber, stone, leather and linen – were all carefully considered to create spaces that feel lived-in rather than overtly luxurious.

‘Let’s face it. When you're on a boat, you're often moving, often in the sun, often barefoot,’ she says. ‘A space that feels too studied or formal works against all of that.’

The result is an interior that feels relaxed and residential: warm timber panelling, subtle lighting and softly curved furniture replace the glossy finishes and theatrical spotlights that once defined the category. ‘There's an ease built into the material choices that mirrors the ease we were seeking,’ she says.

For Behun, that reflects a wider shift across luxury design. Yacht owners are increasingly looking to residential interiors, hospitality and fashion for inspiration rather than following an established nautical formula. ‘People are moving away from environments that simply communicate status,’ she says, ‘towards spaces that feel personal, layered and emotionally resonant.’

Bonetti believes the same evolution is happening across yacht design more broadly. What was once considered radical has rapidly become the new norm. Looking across today's launches, he sees many of the same principles his studio first fought to introduce almost a decade ago. 'Back then there were two main options: the old, very opulent designs, or complete white boxes filled with showroom furniture. Now you see a lot of yachts that look very similar to what we’re doing.'

For Bonetti and Behun, it seems, the best way to redesign a yacht is to stop thinking like a yacht designer altogether.

Chef and restaurateur Jackson Boxer has form when it comes to opening beloved local restaurants: Brunswick House has been going strong in Vauxhall since 2010, while in 2025, Dove replaced Boxer’s Notting Hill restaurant Orasay, on the same site, with something more approachably laid-back (not least with its off-menu cheeseburger, rationed to ten per service).

For his latest venture, the chef heads to Clerkenwell with Vesper, its name the Roman word for the planet Venus, as it appears at sunset: the time to enjoy one of the restaurant’s bracingly cold cocktails, ideally at a bistro table on the pavement as the Exmouth Market passeggiata slides by, with the promise of a Gorgonzola and dry-aged beef burger to follow.

Wallpaper* dines at Vesper, London

The mood: Built to last

Designer Jermaine Gallacher, a longtime friend of Boxer’s, approached Vesper with the simple brief of creating somewhere he would wish to be a regular himself. ‘I wanted to give Jackson a restaurant that would stand the test of time,’ he says, ‘something classic and refined.’

The result occupies a double-fronted corner space with timber-framed floor-to-ceiling windows, a bar by the entrance and a candlelit dining room beyond. Gallacher found his design cues in unlikely places – an ancient studded door spotted on a trip to Italy became the inspiration for the bar, while a photo of a pair of carved lips in an old book about 1980s New York restaurants informed the stonework.

The team of London artisans Gallacher collaborated with were closer to home: architectural stone carver Tom Pullen hand-carved the limestone panels according to Gallacher’s drawings, artist Lawrence Andrew Chalk made the studded zinc bar and curved cloakroom door, while the steel and brass sconces, candlesticks and cast-pewter door handle come courtesy of sculptor Will Jack. ‘I think what’s so magical about really good restaurants is that they are the sum of all parts,’ Gallacher says. ‘It’s not just about the food or the interior or the people that frequent them. It’s all of those things and more. Things made with love are honest, true and never date.’

The food: Comfortably ambitious

Boxer is far too canny an operator not to give his customers what they want, which here means including an edit of the Dove greatest hits: not just that beef-rib burger, but a spin on the fermented potato pizzette, here topped with stracciatella, mortadella and mostarda.

But Vesper goes beyond merely transplanting the Dove menu from Notting Hill to east London. Take the chuck-eye steak Diane with grilled maitake mushrooms and baked saffron rice, which promotes a neglected cut of beef to star billing. It’s the sort of clever update on a retro British classic that has made Boxer one of the UK’s most in-demand chefs (he’s also a consultant chef at Cowley Manor). But if you prefer your classics more straightforward, order the half-roast chicken with bread sauce to share.

And if you’re here just to drink: a bowl of homemade salt-and-vinegar crisps with trout roe and French onion smoked cream is the poshest version of chips and dips to snack on with a citrus-spritzed martini.

Vesper is located at 8-10 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QA, United Kingdom

Few contemporary architects understand the power of atmosphere quite like Smiljan Radić Clarke. Over the past three decades, the Chilean has built a body of work defined by austere, elemental forms made from raw materials such as concrete, timber, stone and glass.

While he resists the idea of a fixed architectural language, his projects share an unmistakable sensibility. They often appear rough-hewn or deliberately incomplete; while grounded, they can also be quite futuristic; and there is frequently a deep tie to the land.

Who is Smiljan Radić Clarke?

Radić Clarke first garnered international attention in 2014 for his Serpentine Pavilion – the prestigious annual commission in London. Otherwise, he’s spent almost the entirety of his career building a diverse body of work in his native land. Born in Santiago in 1965 to a family of English and Croatian heritage, he graduated from the city’s Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1989, and founded his eponymous architectural practice in 1995.

His early work focused mainly on residential projects in Pacific or Andean resort towns. Then, he expanded into larger-scale cultural and public buildings, which often challenge perceptions of weight, light, and enclosure.

Winning the 2026 Pritzker Prize

Radić Clarke won the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize for what the jury described as his 'radical originality.' Suddenly, Chile held something rather unusual: the near-complete body of a laureate’s work. Unlike many past winners whose buildings are scattered globally, Radić Clarke’s portfolio remains overwhelmingly rooted within his small homeland, which hugs the west coast of South America.

In fact, visitors can explore most of his permanent works by taking an architectural pilgrimage between Santiago and the coastal city of Concepción, six hours south by car.

Chile tour through 6 key Smiljan Radić Clarke buildings

If you head out to Chile to explore the country's striking landscapes and exciting architectural scene, here are some key Radić Clarke buildings to look out for along the way.

Restaurant Mestizo

Where: Bicentenario Park, Santiago

When: 2006

One of Radić’ Clarke’s earlier public works is this partially submerged restaurant embedded into the northern edge of Santiago’s Bicentenario Park, in the high-end Vitacura neighbourhood. Its low-slung concrete pavilion offers welcome shade in a city famed for 300-plus days of annual sunshine. The pavilion also perfectly frames views of the Santiago skyline at dusk, while giant weight-bearing stones (sourced from a quarry in nearby Pirque) provide roof support. Diners come here for nouveau Chilean cuisine and frothy pisco sours.

Chile Before Chile

Where: Plaza de Armas, Santiago

Completed: 2013

The Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art enlisted Radić Clarke for an adaptive reuse project to extend the gallery space of its 200-year-old building (a formal Royal Customs house located off Santiago’s downtown Plaza de Armas). To keep the main structure intact, he inserted a minimalist 450-square-metre subterranean showroom made of concrete and clad in Amazonian wood. The eight-meter-high exhibition hall sits directly beneath the historic museum building and has the look of a dark vault. Lit mostly by a skylight on one end, it houses a permanent display of Indigenous artefacts found in present-day Chile, including pre-Incan textiles, Diaguitas pottery and Mapuche chemamüll totems.

NAVE

Where: Barrio Yungay, Santiago

Completed: 2015

Radić Clarke similarly worked within the confines of an existing building – in this case, an earthquake-damaged 20th-century residential property – to create NAVE, a cultural hub and artist residency in the historic Barrio Yungay neighbourhood. Set behind the old façade is a black box performance venue, rehearsal rooms, and workshop spaces. A long staircase leads up to a rooftop terrace with a whimsical canary-yellow circus tent, adding an additional al fresco event space in complete contrast to the dark setting below.

Viña Vik

Where: Cachapoal Valley

Completed: 2013

Two hours south of Santiago in a remote corner of the Cachapoal Valley is Radić Clarke’s most monumental project, Viña Vik, a collaboration with Norwegian billionaire Alexander Vik and his American wife Carrie. This state-of-the-art winery – which topped 2025’s list of The World’s 50 Best Vineyards – is completely embedded into Cachapoal’s rolling topography, stretching out laterally so as to be almost invisible on the horizon. 'I have always tried to build settings where others might discover emergent ideas,' Radić Clarke told the Pritzker jury of his design process. Guests enter the winery via a central causeway flanked on either side by a reflecting pool dotted with sculptural rock installations – almost like spilled marbles. The water isn’t just aesthetically pleasing; it actually cools the wine barrels in the tasting room below.

Teatro Regional del Biobío

Where: central Concepción

Completed: 2018

Continuing south and then west for another 4.5 hours, you reach the coastal city of Concepción, where Radić Clarke designed the six-storey Teatro Regional del Biobío, Chile’s largest regional theatre. While Viña Vik has an almost overwhelming sense of heaviness and weight, Teatro Regional del Biobío plays instead with transparency and light. The riverside cultural centre is wrapped in a translucent polycarbonate membrane mounted like a soft fabric over a steel frame, allowing it to glow at night, almost like a paper lantern. Radić Clarke said he wanted to break down the formality of traditional theatres, giving this one the sense of fragility that’s so often depicted on the stage. Inside is not only a 1,200-seat performance space, but also a 250-seat chamber hall and generous rehearsal rooms.

Centro Cívico Boca Sur

Where: San Pedro de la Paz, Concepción

Completed: 2017

A short drive away in the working-class suburb of San Pedro de la Paz sits one of Radić Clarke’s most ambitious social projects: a flexible civic centre – shaped through community consultation – combining a fire station, library, sports courts, playgrounds, market space and elevated walkways within a single public landscape. The project became a test of whether architecture alone can help repair fractured civic life in a vulnerable community. While its results have been mixed, the local municipality remains hopeful; it revamped and re-inaugurated the space in 2025.

pritzkerprize.com

Two tapestries designed by William Kentridge open one of the early galleries at Palazzo Mora, woven by the Johannesburg-based Stephens Tapestry Studio in hand-spun, hand-dyed mohair in centuries old tradition. They form part of the Porter Series of tapestries that Kentridge has made in collaboration with the studio and respond to the theme of migration and ‘portage’ – or to bear one’s cargo between seas and rivers. We see silhouettes and figures heavy with artefacts, crossing continents, as depicted by maps from nineteenth-century atlases. The images are restless, in motion, forever migrating.

They set the tone for the eighth edition of Personal Structures. The exhibition, organised biennially by the European Cultural Centre Italy, which runs alongside but independent of the Venice Biennale, and has taken ‘Confluences’ as its theme.

A few canals from the Arsenale and Giardini, where national pavilions arrive heavy with the politics of the moment, the Marinaressa Gardens, and palazzos Mora and Bembo offer something quieter. Personal Structures has, since its founding in 2002 by the artist René Rietmeyer, sought to be an open platform for established, mid-career and emerging artists, and it allows each curatorial circle to set its own pitch. This year sees more than 150 artists from over 30 countries gathered across the three venues.

‘With Confluences, different languages and perspectives come together, not to become the same, but rather to create something new,’ says Sara Danieli, who heads art at ECC Italy. The metaphor sits well in a city built on water, where for centuries east and west arrived in the same harbour and made something out of the encounter.

And it is this theme of movement and migration, of belonging or indeed not – be it physically or otherwise – that naturally dominates much of the exhibitions here. We see this at the entrance to Palazzo Mora, where the artist J. Oscar Molina’s ‘Cartographies of the Displaced’ lines the courtyard representing the El Salvador pavilion for the first time at the Biennale. Curated by Alejandra Cabezas, the sculptures look up uneasy to the sky and read as a meditation on exile, and the struggle to ever truly belong to a place or a time.

Upstairs Mora gives shelter to the Palestine Museum US, with a moving display of embroidered panels depicting images of the recent war. Organised by the museum director Faisal Saleh and forming part of the larger ‘Palestine History Tapestry’ project, the series sees work by sixty women in refugee camps across Lebanon and the West Bank who were commissioned to translate a series of photographs using the traditional embroidery technique, tatreez. Each piece is eighty centimetres by fifty and contains fifty-five thousand stitches. The panels hover between image and texture, and the labour held in each stitch slows the eye in a way photographs rarely do.

The mood lifts at Palazzo Bembo, where the top floor of this charming and peculiar building, with views over the Rialto Bridge and the Grand Canal, has been taken over by the Japanese curatorial platform B-OWND. ‘Relational Logic – Beyond Dualism, a World Reconnected’ invites the viewer to look at art beyond grids and boundaries, through the Japanese concept of ‘en’, the word for the connections that bind people, places and moments. Behind it sits the Buddhist idea of ‘ku’, or emptiness, which holds that all things are interdependent and arise temporarily through their relationships with others and the environment. There is an animist sensibility threaded through the rooms as well, one that recognises spirit in all things and sees humans and nature as part of a single, inseparable whole.

The exhibition unfolds from space to space, where seven artists work across art, craft and manga, and a separate room is given over to public tea ceremonies and meditation. The tea utensils on view, the flower vases and bowls, are tools for daily use, and have been objects of devotion for Japanese collectors for five or six hundred years. Ken Ishigami, the curator, quotes Sen no Rikyū, the sixteenth-century master regarded as the father of the Japanese tea ceremony: “The most beautiful thing in imperfection is perfection.”

At the centre of one room is ‘The Way of Interbeing’, a delicate, immersive site-specific bamboo installation by Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, the fourth-generation Osaka bamboo artist whose family has practised the craft for more than a century. Some four thousand strands of recycled tiger bamboo are woven together and held in place by tension alone. It reads like a single architectural gesture, past and future and west and east braided into one space. A final room, a collaboration with Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage, brings lithographs and lenticular prints from Hirohiko Araki’s ‘JoJo's Bizarre Adventure’, the fifth part of which is set across Italy and passes through Venice.

João Gilberto’s ‘É Luxo Só’, arranged by Stan Getz, floats through the gallery of the Brazilian photographer Sandra Cattaneo Adorno, a previous ECC Award winner who returns with ‘Fragments of Light’. Thirteen silver-inked monochromes hang against vermillion walls, and a central photomosaic of the Santa Monica pier reassembles itself as we move around it. The works tilt towards the light streaming through the vast palazzo windows, like sunflowers opening to the sun, says the artist.

Elsewhere in Palazzo Bembo, another Special Project, ‘Unison’, brings together work by the Vienna-based artist Rita Sabo. Curated by Dr Tayfun Belgin, the installation weaves fifteen cultures into a single polyphonic field, layered as painting, sculpture, scent and sound, so the visitor moves through the rooms by all the senses at once. Sabo’s abstract forms delve into the subconscious; her practice fuses traditions and religions and symbol-systems, setting up a vibrating field of marks that resists linear timelines, fixed narratives and singular cultural attributions. Her richly textured work pushes past the linear and the obvious, for something altogether more subtle and hidden.

More sits across the three venues than a single visit can hold, and it is tempting, in an exhibition of this scale, to seek a single argument. Personal Structures actively resists the impulse, and that is its strength.

I’m reminded of something William Kentridge said last year at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, when asked whether he had any hope in a world that for many of us feels increasingly dark and difficult to digest. ‘I have both hope and pessimism, both running together. I think to have only one or the other is to blind yourself to part of the world, and say everything can only be a disaster. It blinds you to many things that are happening. And to say everything’s for the best blinds you to disasters that are very, very present.’ It is the holding of both that makes his work resonate so widely, and the same holding makes ‘Confluences’ feel coherent.

‘Personal Structures – Confluences’ is on view at Palazzo Bembo, Palazzo Mora and the Marinaressa Gardens, Venice, until 22 November 2026. Admission is free.

personalstructures.com

Like many of the palazzi in the city, Orient Express Venezia has two entrances: one on the street, one on the water. The latter is the only way to do it. As your boat glides through Cannaregio's canals, medieval façades rise straight from the water, their reflections broken by the steady choreography of gondolas and vaporetti. A doorman appears at the blush-pink façade of Palazzo Donà Giovannelli, home of the hotel, opening a portal into a world of frescoed ceilings, ornate stucco and Murano chandeliers.

Wallpaper* checks into Orient Express Venezia, Venice

What’s on your doorstep?

Cannaregio isn't the Venice of postcards. It lacks the grandeur of San Marco and, yes, there's a Claire's Accessories around the corner. This is a neighbourhood where Venetians actually live – where laundry hangs over the canals. It's home to the Jewish Ghetto, founded in 1516, the Gothic church of Madonna dell'Orto. But besides, when the address in question is the 15th-century Palazzo Donà Giovannelli, quibbling over postcode hardly feels apposite.

Who is behind the design?

Built in 1436 during the height of the Venetian Republic, the palazzo passed through some of Venice's great noble families before becoming one of its leading cultural salons. In the mid-19th century, architect Giovanni Battista Meduna introduced the neo-Gothic interiors – the octagonal staircase and the lavish reception rooms are some of the palace's most breathtaking features.

‘The restoration was a labour of love requiring rare interventions, from drying the palazzo’s foundations and building a dam around the façade walls, to the removal and treatment of each stone on the walls and floors. Over nearly a decade, hundreds of artisans worked across fresco restoration, sculpture, gilding and woodwork,’ explains Lebanese architect and designer Aline Asmar d'Amman, who is behind the latest chapter of the building, it’s transformation into Orient Express Venezia.

She resisted turning the hotel into a museum piece: original frescoes meet mirrored walls, and silk, velvet and embossed leather run into patinated plaster, carved timber and time-worn stone. ‘Beyond a monument to history, I see Orient Express Venezia as a living story, where the past shapes the future,’ she says. ‘It was important for me to honour the palazzo’s history while reimagining it for the present.’

The palette is clever. Asmar d'Amman drew on Venice's ‘lost colours’ – the rich reds, ochres, blues and greens that once animated the city before centuries of salt air and sunlight softened them to powdery hues. The designer embraces the spectrum that remains: baby tones woven through upholstery, curtains and finishes. This finds its fullest expression in the public rooms – the sorbet-hued Salone Vittoria and the Sala della Cultura, crowned by a lapis lazuli ceiling, are the undeniable stars of the renovation.

The room to book

They're rivalled only by the six Signature Suites, the largest of which span 145 square metres and incorporate incredible original details, including 19th-century frescoes depicting mythical winged figures and vast marble fireplaces. Tall windows frame canal views, while antique-inspired furnishings and rich textiles capture the essence of Palazzo Donà Giovannelli at its most romantic. ‘I wanted guests to be touched by the grace of [the palazzo’s] undying youth, while also experiencing a sense of cinematic progression,’ says Asmar d'Amman. ‘It becomes a great discovery, where one moves through layers of history.’

‘I love the act of re-using what once belonged to a glorious past, with an infinite interplay between old soul and contemporary interior architecture,’ she continues. The Cherubini Suite, for example, is home to a 1958 Carlo Scarpa chandelier as well as a vintage Murano chess table, weaving together distinct threads of Venice's architectural and artisanal heritage.

The guestrooms, by comparison, dial things down. Finished in coffee tones, pale timber and fretwork inspired by the Ca' d'Oro, the Grand Canal palace also designed by Meduna, they're elegant, if a little overshadowed by the spectacle outside.

Staying for drinks and dinner?

Dining is split between relaxed Venetian cooking at all-day La Casati and the more ambitious Heinz Beck Venezia. La Casati takes inspiration from the persona of Marchesa Luisa Casati, who would famously take her pet leopard for walks in Piazza San Marco, serving seasonal dishes from cicchetti to marinated beef with artichokes and creamed cod ravioli.

At Heinz Beck Venezia, the three-Michelin-starred chef brings his ingredient-led approach to lagoon produce in the palace's restored orangerie. Before or after dinner, cocktails are served at Wagon Bar, an art deco space that subtly references the golden age of rail travel in a nod to the Orient Express name. ‘A loving tension reigns between the Orient Express world, marked by the glamour of the 1930s, and a reinterpretation of Venetian living. It embraces the duality of legacy and reinvention,’ says Asmar d'Amman.

Where to switch off

Perhaps the greatest luxury at Orient Express Venezia is its rare tranquillity in the city's tourist centre. The hotel's walled garden – almost unheard of in this part of Venice – is a pocket of calm restored with fountains, antique gates and lantern-lit pathways.

The spa follows the same philosophy, borrowing from Roman, Venetian and Ottoman bathing traditions to create a lagoon-inspired sanctuary.

The verdict

Orient Express Venezia’s location should not be mistaken for compromise – few addresses in the city can rival Palazzo Donà Giovannelli’s scale and atmosphere. The romance of Venice is palpable here, with contemporary interventions executed so deftly that you barely notice them.

This is the latest instalment of The Inside Story, Wallpaper’s series spotlighting intriguing, innovative and industry-leading interior design.

At the top of Regent's Park Road, where Primrose Hill's terraces begin their steep climb, a tall, narrow townhouse manages to feel both serious and unserious, sophisticated yet lighthearted.

Home to a couple and their dog, the three-storey house had a specific brief – one that isn't requested enough in a world of extreme curation in high-end design: the ability to not feel ‘overly interior designed’. Finding an interior designer to execute this wasn't necessarily easy, but in 2021 the couple came across Studio Iro's breezy, under-curated work in a magazine feature.

The architectural bones were already in place, courtesy of Chassay & Last, who opened the rear of the house into a double-height volume, slotted a mezzanine above the kitchen, and installed a stone, blackened-steel and glass staircase, drawn together with a shadow-gap detail sharp enough to cut.

Recreate the mood

Onto this, Studio Iro refined the layouts and specified finishes in a way that never feels over-engineered. Central to achieving this are the colour threads running through the house: a blue leopard-print carpet in the hallway sets the indigo undertone found throughout the property, echoed in a deep navy in the bedroom, lavender-grey stone in one bathroom and ridged dark-blue glazed tiles below ground. A burnt-orange sofa and terracotta accents on the top floor provide the contrast.

Texture plays an equally important role in lending sophistication. Clay Works limewash brings a soft, chalky quality to the primary bedroom and bathroom, while limewashed wood, stone and microcement create a tactile backdrop throughout. On the lower ground floor, microcement flows from the open-plan interior out into the garden, pairing with blackened-steel kitchen cabinetry and exposed brick for a calm, industrial feel.

Where the house does allow itself a flourish, it's a considered one: a kitchen island developed with Adam Blencowe, and a custom chest of drawers, vanity console and rug for the primary bedroom. The kitchen, built with Roundhouse, sets a Caesarstone worktop against blue-painted timber joinery; De La Espada dining chairs gather around a table the clients already owned.

That instinct – to add rather than replace – runs through the whole project. The clients' collection of modernist furniture, some of it decades old, wasn't cleared out to make way for something new. Instead, Studio Iro folded it back in, setting it alongside contemporary pieces in kindred materials.

The refusal to over-assert gives this house its authority. Studio Iro's real skill here isn't visible in any single room – it's in everything left alone, and every decision not to push further than necessary.

As seen in the August 2026 ‘Creative America at 250’ issue of Wallpaper*, we pay homage to seminal American design classics.

‘Well, I don’t love it, but it will grow on me.’ This was the reaction of Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike, when he first saw what would become the Nike ‘Swoosh’ – a tick-shaped emblem conceived by Carolyn Davidson to adorn the fledgling sportswear label’s footwear.

Davidson, who was then a design student at Portland State University, was paid $35 for the commission, billing the company $2 per hour for 17.5 hours of work. So the story goes, Knight was visiting the university when he overheard Davidson telling a friend she needed money for an oil painting class; over the coming months, she would create graphs and spreadsheets for the young label, before being drafted to create a logo similar to the stripes on other sporting brands’ footwear (Onitsuka Tiger, which was based in Japan and created running shoes, was one early competitor).

Its signature elongated silhouette, which Davidson tested by holding tissue paper cut into early iterations of the design against the brand’s prototype shoes, was conceived to express a feeling of speed and agility – as if it was being viewed dashing past at speed. (Other commentators have posited its shape also evokes the wings of the ancient Greek goddess Nike, from whom the brand takes its name.)

And dash it did. In 1972, one year after Davidson submitted the original design, two of the top American finishers at the Boston Marathon crossed the line wearing Nike shoes marked with the design, and the Swoosh – which has appeared in various iterations, some with the italicised Nike logo attached – has been on the feet of countless champions on track, field, stadium and court ever since, an emblem of achievement which traverses both professional and amateur sport.

Davidson, who was eventually rewarded for her work with stocks in the company and a diamond ring engraved with the Swoosh motif, says she has enjoyed a life ‘under the radar’. ‘When I see the Swoosh on TV, and I turn on a game, and both teams are in Nike, I just get a good feeling,’ she said in 2011, which marked the emblem’s 40th anniversary. ‘Or if I turn a corner and run into a billboard, or if I watch the Olympics – I mean, it's just a good feeling inside.’

Now, the logo is one of the most recognised in the world, adorning not just footwear but a multitude of apparel, and reimagined over the past five decades – including a version bearing Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ tagline, another masterful piece of marketing. Nike’s various collaborators have also played with the Swoosh: most memorably, the late American multi-hyphenate designer Virgil Abloh, himself an expert in branding.

The Off-White and Louis Vuitton creative directed created a childlike, hand-drawn version of the motif, which was printed onto T-shirts (‘Logo’ was written above it, in Abloh’s typically irreverent style), while his various footwear collaborations with Nike featured the Swoosh impossibly blown up or attached using Frankenstinian stitching (a demonstration of his three per cent rule, which argued seminal design classics could be shifted completely in meaning with just the tiniest of changes).

‘It did grow on me,’ Knight would later admit. ‘What we wanted it to stand for was speed, which it did and still does. But now it means much more than that.’

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

An often overlooked genre, outdoor showers are on the rise. Versatile and practical, they elevate outdoor spaces and offer both a pause from the heat and a practical solution to cool off in the Summer. A must-have poolside tool, we also like the idea of an outdoor shower as an indulgent, refreshing addition to a garden space.

We look at five recent outdoor shower designs that we'd like to have in our backyard right now.

Five outdoor showers we love

FormaLibera by Pierattelli Architetture for IB Rubinetterie

FormaLibera is a modular and customisable outdoor shower system by Pierattelli Architetture for IB Rubinetterie that is both a minimal design and an ultra-accessorised functional object. The idea, the architects explains, comes from showering in unconventional outdoor settings, from a field to a remote beach. From this, a first concept featured a portable version that comes with a dedicated kit and case to be easily transported and used anywhere. Evolving into a freestanding or wall-mounted shower system, FormaLibera is defined by accessory bars, soap holders and multi-purpose supports.

weareib.it

Pool by Roca

One of the leading bathrooms and faucets companies globally, Spanish brand Roca is expanding its offering outside the washroom and into outdoor spaces with Pool, a new shower that combines a minimal design with the company's expertise. The elegant, sleek outdoor shower is designed with versatility in mind, imagined for both residential environment as well as hospitality and wellness spaces. The minimalist silhouette is available in both wall-mounted and freestanding and a palette that will bring a joyful touch of colour to your garden.

roca.com

FFQT by Formafantasma for QuadroDesign

For their outdoor shower for Italian bathroom specialist QuadroDesign, Formafantasma decided not to reinvent the wheel, and instead to play on the genre's most intuitive iteration. 'Sometimes a design is effective when it is at its most subtle state, what stands out, are the services it provides,' say the designers, perfectly describing their concept. The outdoor shower is simply a stainless steel support onto which a standard hose can be installed: an ingenious way to make the most with a simple gesture.

quadrodesign.it

Bold by Natalino Malasorti for Cea Design

Cea Design's Bold by Natalino Malasorti is the result of extensive technological research to create a freestanding outdoor shower that is both minimal and powerful. The elegant stainless steel body is resistant to corrosion and the adjustable showerhead allows for options that include a rain jet or aerated rain jet, wider or closer.

ceadesign.it

Outdoor Shower by Cristina

This outdoor shower by Italian bathroom brand Cristina was conceived to be an unobtrusive, discreet presence in an outdoor setting. Its sinuous minimalist design is characterised by a freestanding design paired steel for durability and withstanding being exposed to all climates. Products like this outdoor shower affirm the brand's mission to offer 'solutions designed not to revolutionize, but to evolve what already exists sustainably and consciously.'

cristinarubinetterie.com

Ancient mountains and blue sea. Warm local stone. Marble sculpted by island artisans. Raw concrete. Monolithic abstractions. And a traditional Greek keli – a small rural shelter for shepherds and farmers.

These key elements shape this Tinos House, a contemporary residence that deeply harmonises with its rugged mountainside setting overlooking the sea, on wind-swept Tinos, a small Greek island in the Cyclades.

Tour this Tinos House on a rugged Greek mountainside

Designed by Athens-based architect Kelly Spanou, the house is angular and compact yet open in atmosphere. It flows across two light-flooded levels, with one bedroom and walls of glass framing views across the natural landscape and the blues of the Aegean.

The seed of the house was an original keli – one of hundreds of small dry-stone structures that have dotted the elemental landscape of Tinos for centuries, traditionally built for storage and shelter from intense sun and strong winds.

The dynamism of the ancient island landscape was a driving force in the house, commissioned by a Greek and French-Lebanese couple based overseas. Boundaries between inside and out are softened by a material palette which is tactile and natural, raw and elemental (in stone, concrete, marble, wood) – with open interiors anchored by a monolithic structure on the ground floor, serving both as kitchen island and sculptural abstraction.

The couple were drawn to creating a home on Tinos, due to its rich local culture, year-round sense of community in villages and the beauty of its landscape – in particular, the powerful contrast between ancient mountains and the blue waters of the Aegean Sea.

As Spanou tells Wallpaper*: 'One of the most memorable things the client told me was that he wanted to feel small in relation to the space. Not in an overwhelming way, but in a way that would constantly remind him of the landscape and the views around the house.'

Highlighting the intensity of the landscape, she adds: 'The island is shaped by powerful natural forces: relentless winds, rugged mountains, a rocky landscape and sudden mists. Some of these phenomena link back to mythology, crafting a landscape that feels very tactile and elemental.'

The house is rooted in a traditional keli thought to be over a century old, which was previously altered by former owners in the years before the project began – with Spanou’s design consciously retaining traces of its past.

'No one had previously lived there as a permanent residence,' says Spanou, a former associate lecturer at Royal College of Art. 'One of our first decisions was to remove as much plasterboard and as many unnecessary wall linings as possible, in order to reveal the original stonework wherever it survived.'

She adds: 'One of the challenges of the existing building was its geometry. Nothing in the plan was orthogonal; there was not a single 90-degree corner. Rather than correcting this condition, the design embraces it and uses it as a starting point for the spatial organisation to encourage a continuous flow through the house.'

Materials mirror the elemental drama of its setting, with a simple earthy palette rooted in a mix of stone, concrete and wood. Reclaimed marble was also incorporated into the design, sculpted with skill by local Tinos artisans.

Interiors juxtapose layers of textures and materials: there are expanses of raw-edged concrete in the form of clean-lined internal staircases, floors and walls, alongside local stones in earthy tones and organic forms, touches of marble and custom-built cabinetry in light steamed beech.

'Reclaimed marble was sourced from marble yards in Tinos and Athens and reworked in collaboration with local craftspeople to create sinks, countertops, and floor elements,' adds Spanou, who worked on the house with design collaborator Penny Alevizou. 'Beyond its material qualities, the marble establishes a direct connection with the island's long tradition of craftsmanship and stone carving.'

And centre stage is the house’s scene-stealing monolithic structure, sculptural and raw-edged. Resting on a sharp concrete box is a strong horizontal stone and concrete counter, complete with a sunken marble sink, its smooth, upper surface giving way to an underside which is deeply irregular and textured, echoing the elemental atmosphere of the surrounding mountains.

'Through its material palette of stone, concrete, and marble, the monolithic volume acquires a strong sensorial quality, reinforcing its role not only as a functional element but also as a physical and sculptural presence within the home,' says Spanou.

'We wanted to avoid a sense of “perfection” and instead make it appear almost unfinished by embracing the roughness of the materials. At the same time, it had to be a carefully designed functional object that could effectively accommodate both cooking and dining activities.'

The line between architecture and nature is softened further by its external landscaping elements – from the curved pathways and stairs mirroring the mountain contours to the swimming pool, which is discreetly cut into concrete.

For Spanou, threaded through all these architectural details and material ingredients is a sensory connection to the setting: “The focus was not on refinement or perfection, but on allowing materials to express their natural character, texture, and imperfections, creating an atmosphere that feels authentic and deeply connected to the landscape of Tinos.”

kellyspanou.com

Wimbledon is, of course, defined by the tennis – or is it? What fascinated me most was everything that surrounds it. Over generations, the championships have developed a visual language of their own, built through colour, ritual, uniforms, architecture and an extraordinary attention to detail.

Discover the vibrant design codes of Wimbledon

Working almost exclusively with tight frames, I focused on colour, geometry and repetition. This year's brilliant sunshine became an important part of the story, casting hard shadows across the grounds and reducing many scenes to graphic compositions of green, white and purple. The tennis itself often became secondary to the systems that support it.

Every element feels intentional. One particular standout was the London Fire Brigade, who act as stewards and security throughout the fortnight. Professional, impeccably presented and genuinely welcoming, they quietly contribute to the uniquely British character of Wimbledon, where traditions and systems have been refined over generations.

Then there are the strawberries. They are one of those enduring Wimbledon rituals that have become almost mythological, with queues for them sometimes longer than those for the courts themselves. Alongside the uniforms, scoreboards, pristine grass courts, straw hats, Pimm's and the iconic all-white dress code, they form part of a visual language that is unmistakably Wimbledon.