Might more calm rather than more horsepower be a selling point for the luxury cars of tomorrow? Range Rover has introduced an industry-first electrostatic sound system, for its SV Ultra model, with 21 speakers, plus four bass speakers and subwoofers, complete with transducers in both seats and floor. It’s the perfect set-up for a thumping in-car rave, perhaps.

But the Gaydon, UK-based carmaker has also worked with the music department of Coventry University to develop a series of ‘wellness tracks’, complete with corresponding massage programme and each with a different vibe. Need to dial down your heart rate ahead of a tough meeting? Let your car take the strain. Need to get the blood pumping ahead of, well, a tough meeting? Your SV Ultra is at hand.

A gimmick? Perhaps. But Range Rover is thinking hard about how to make the time we spend in a car pleasing beyond the increasingly ubiquitous comfortable seating and a near-silent engine. For example, it’s also offering an upscale Airwick in the form of a collection of six fragrances baked into ceramic capsules that plug into a slot in the glove compartment and which then waft the likes of Peace, Restore and Rejuvenate – as a few of the fragrances are named – around the compartment.

That system debuts in Range Rover’s forthcoming model – currently undergoing final testing - a grand tourer that retains the brand’s famed off-road capabilities. The Range Rover GT’s lower, sportier exterior is a distinct evolution of Range Rover’s traditional aesthetic, if not on the par of stable-mate Jaguar’s divisive Type 00 Concept of late 2024.

An all-electric power plant has allowed Range Rover to extend the GT’s wheelbase to create an especially capacious cabin, but, at 1.56 m high, the GT is also Range Rover’s lowest model to date. Frameless doors, a one-piece roof, a clamshell bonnet and muscular wheel arches over 22 inch wheels help the GT maintain Range Rover's signature stance.

Although the GT is Range Rover's ‘most car-like’ product to date, as managing director Martin Limpert calls it, arguably it’s the GT’s contemporary interior that is more arresting – and calming. According to Alex Watkin, Range Rover’s chief designer for interiors, the GT represented the first example of ‘a more reductive design approach’ for the brand, with the standard in-car content – cup-holders, fridge, storage space, switchgear and so on – still available but hidden away to leave broad swathes of clutter-free surfaces.

The traditional instrument cluster is replaced with a single screen - the HMI or Human Machine Interface, from which the fragrance capsules can also be controlled. The result is a car interior as seen through the lens of Bang & Olufsen or Dieter Rams.

Range Rover has also decided to forego the usual ‘luxury’ choice of leather in favour of using a stretch PV that allows for a seamless upholstery comprising much large panels not possible with animal skins. The company says this choice is also more sustainable, odourless, half the weight of leather and wear-tested over the equivalent of 10 years.

In another industry first, speakers and airbags are hidden behind low-gloss knitted fabric surfaces, also deployed as a single piece across the dash top. Together with the outsized panoramic glass roof the interior feeling aims at being akin to ‘an open-plan living room space,’ says Watkin.

The Range Rover GT will be the first all-electric Range Rover from Jaguar Land Rover’s new Electrified Modular Architecture platform, engineered for its battery and hybrid vehicles, with a hybrid version of the GT planned for an unspecified point in the future. It’ll follow on from the forthcoming Range Rover EV and Range Rover Sport EV.

Dutch architects DP6 work across a variety of scales, from university campuses to town halls, sports centres and apartment buildings. The Delft-based practice has also turned its collective experience to a small number of exquisite private residential projects, including the secluded Villa Santpoort. For their most recent residential design, a painter's studio in their home city, DP6 is once again working in an urban environment, only this time at a much smaller scale.

Tour a modern painter’s studio and home in Delft

This commission, a house refurbishment and painter’s studio, is located in the heart of the city centre and involved not just the restoration of a traditional canalside row house, but the addition of a dedicated artist’s studio in the rear garden. Making the most of a generous garden plot – ‘a green oasis in the city centre’ – DP6 have inserted a low single-storey studio at the far end. Set apart from the cityscape, surrounded by new wild planting, it feels like a rural space adrift from the urban location.

One of the key aspects of the refurbishment was the re-shaping of the house’s ground floor and the rear façade in particular. By creating a new open-plan living, dining and kitchen space at the rear of the house, along with a new glazed rear façade, the architects have set up a dialogue between the existing house and the new studio. Each façade is fully openable, so in the summer months life can flow between the structures.

The garden includes new patios and an oval pool, along with natural planting that retains existing mature trees and winds new paths and beds around them. The studio has been built from Douglas fir timber, with exposed interior structure and a canopy above the exterior terrace, looking back towards the house.

Vital northern light is harvested via a strip of roof lights at the far end of the studio space; these run the full width of the building. The studio is also self-contained, with a WC and kitchenette and plenty of storage for materials and canvasses.

The architects have made extensive use of oak for the new elements in the main house. These include the kitchen and fireplace, as well as the open tread staircase and upstairs wardrobes. The original house was listed for its historic interest, and the front façade retains its traditional appearance, giving no indication of the new world that lies within.

Launched alongside a trio of new folding phones, the Galaxy Watch Ultra2 and Galaxy Watch9 are the company’s most sophisticated smart watch offerings to date. In particular, the new Watch Ultra2 is Samsung’s play for dominance in the burgeoning smart sport watch sector, a multi-activity tracker and tracer that crams in metrics on almost every conceivable activity.

It’s joined by the Watch9, a sleeker and less overtly rugged everyday device that wants to put health habits at the forefront of your activities. Samsung describes its offerings as a ‘gateway to AI-driven health intelligence,’ and like all smartwatch ecosystems, how much you get out of all this activity tracking and data gathering is very much down how reliant you want to become on your wrist computer.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra2 is designed to be rugged and completely waterproof, with professional dive tracking available right out of the box – a dedicated dive app will come later this year, developed in conjunction with diving technology brand Mares. For now, enthusiasts can get water temperature, depth and dive duration measurements. Other app trials provided with the watch include 60 days of Strava and a two-month trial of iFIT, the online trainer programme.

Other updates include a Trail Run feature that incorporates elevation data and even ‘terrain impact’ measurements that warn against overstressing yourself. An onboard Nutrition Alert system bolster the existing Sweat Loss feature, calculating when best to take on more water.

Both Watch Ultra2 and Watch9 share a BioActive sensor to track huge quantities of health data, all of which is then processed and analysed in conjunction with your own past history and comparable data from the company’s health dataset. Billed as an advanced preventive care vision, the modern Galaxy Watch series isn’t just about movement but also hearing, heart health, cardio and sleep.

The latter requires 24/7 use, so steps have been taken to bolster the comfort and the battery life of each model. Galaxy Watch Ultra2, which is available in 47 mm only, comes with 800 mAh battery (35 per cent larger than its predecessor), along with the Snapdragon Wear Elite processor. The screen is brighter than ever before, and GPS tracking has been made more accurate. Nevertheless, the casing is still slimmer than the first Ultra watch.

Galaxy Watch 9 does away with the numbered bezel and ruggedised case, with aluminium detailing for a crisp, light fit. The battery is under half the size (390 mAh) but that should still be good enough for up to 40 hours of use (the Ultra2 offers 60 hours). Case sizes are 40mm and 44mm. Samsung has also expanded its collection of smartwatch bands for both devices, using silicone, hybrid material and classic fabric in a variety of colours.

Forgive our impetuousness. In the same week that American neo-luddites The Light Phone launched their new Light Flip, Samsung just happened to have its annual Unpacked event, stuffed full of shiny new tech to distract, divert and embed you ever deeper into the digital realm.

It’s pretty hard to divest oneself completely of the sophisticated smartphone ecosystem that has extended its tendrils deep into every facet of our lives. If you can switch to a Light Phone Flip and start again from scratch, more power to you.

But the lure of the new is strong, and Samsung’s newest suite of products join the Galaxy S26 family, this time with a focus on folding. They are the Galaxy Z Fold8, Z Fold8 Ultra, Z Flip8, a trio launched alongside the new Watch Ultra2 and Galaxy Watch9.

This new drop includes an all-new form factor, the Galaxy Z Fold8. This ultra-light foldable is slightly wider but not as tall as a regular phone, but folds out into a compact, tablet-proportioned screen with a 4:3 ratio, with a diagonal measurement of 7.6 inches when open (for comparison, Apple's iPad mini measures 8.3 inches).

It joins the small-form-factor Galaxy Z Flip8 and the flagship Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra, all of which share Samsung’s ‘Emotive Geometry’ approach to industrial design.

We spoke to Hubert Lee, Samsung’s executive vice-president and head of the mobile experience design team, about the clutch of new creations, the design language that underpins them and how Samsung’s R&D team tackles the speed of technological innovation.

Wallpaper*: Are there any precedents for the 'Emotive Geometry' approach? Something in Samsung's history or culture? Or is it a new approach made possible by new techniques?

Hubert Lee: Emotive Geometry is the next evolution of Samsung's Essential Design philosophy, which has long focused on creating products that are simple, impactful and emotionally engaging. It is not about creating an entirely new design language. Instead, we’re evolving our existing design philosophy to better express the human side of technology. As AI becomes a more natural part of everyday life, we believe design must also create a stronger sense of comfort and emotional connection.

Galaxy S26 series’ Ambient Island camera design is one of the great examples of this approach. We focused on configuring the design to ensure that the performance-driven structure designed for functionality feel intuitive and natural to the user. We adopted a gently translucent material, so it appears more visually integrated and emotionally resonant.

The Galaxy Z8 series takes that philosophy further. Because a foldable is experienced through constant physical interaction, we focused on how the device feels in everyday use, from its proportions and symmetry to the way it opens. It rests in the hand and naturally guides each interaction. Emotive Geometry is about making those moments feel intuitive, comfortable and emotionally connected to the user.

W*: How does Samsung approach the integration of AI into hardware as opposed to just software? Is this something customers want?

HL: As AI becomes more integrated into everyday life, we've learned that people don't just want more AI features, they want interactions that feel more natural and effortless. As the role of mobile phone evolves, the physical design needs to evolve alongside it. It's no longer enough for AI to exist in software alone. The product itself should also support those interactions in a way that feels effortless.

From a design perspective, our role is to ensure the physical experience complements those interactions. One example is our decision to assign AI to a dedicated physical side key. We chose to integrate the function since we believe the most advanced technology should also be the most natural to access.

For foldables, the versatile form factor unlocks new possibilities for AI – like Fold8 Ultra’s large screen optimized for multitasking side-by-side, Flip8’s FlexWindow, or Fold8’s new screen ratio perfect for one-hand grip. Our goal is not simply to offer AI features. We aim to create AI experiences that are thoughtfully integrated with each form factor, the way people use it, and the specific moments in which they interact with the device.

W*: How quickly do material innovations find their way into the marketplace in actual consumer products?

HL: At Samsung, we focus on selecting and evolving materials that are best suited to each product's identity, positioning and uses. Every material must meet our rigorous standards for quality, durability and reliability before it reaches consumers.

W*: How big is Samsung's R&D team and what areas do they focus on regarding industrial design?

HL: Our design organisation brings together teams across multiple studios around the world, united by a shared belief that meaningful design begins with understanding how people live, work and express themselves. We share a common culture built on collaboration and openness.

Designers work closely with engineering, product planning and many other teams from the earliest stages of development, combining deep user insight with technical expertise. This continuous collaboration allows us to refine every detail, creating products that feel more intuitive, comfortable and thoughtfully designed.

The Galaxy Watch series reflects this approach. We use what we call Computational Design, combining AI and advances in computing with design expertise to better understand wearability across a diverse range of users. This helps us refine details such as fit, balance and proportions with greater precision, so the watch feels comfortable from the moment it’s worn.

What do you get the tech bro, crypto sis or picky audiophile pal who has everything? How about half-a-million quid’s worth of hi-fi equipment?

That’s the approximate retail value of AMR’s Luna Series luxury audio collection: the Luna Ingenii DAC, the Luna Medii preamplifier and the Luna Procellarum monoblock power amplifier. A decade in the R&D, designed in collaboration with the Grateful Dead’s fabled sound engineer, in a limited run of 148 sets, using components that don’t – and won’t – exist anymore: this is, in a very real sense, an amp that goes all the way up to, well, 111.

And while the sound will make your ears tingle, the price might make your eyes water: £441,000. ‘Basically, we wanted to push the boundaries of what audio technology could achieve in terms of resolving sound,’ explains Miles Roberts, global sales director for Southport-based Abbingdon Music Research. ‘Some of the technology that we've got in here is based on components that we actually bought the final runs of about ten years ago.’

Roberts is talking in Fitzrovia, central London, in the uber-plush basement lounge – think Bond villain’s lair, with snacks – of Cornflake, the smart-home automation and media-room installation specialist. AMR has booked out the space to demonstrate the kit it has carefully freighted south from Merseyside in custom-built Pelican flight cases, the combined weight as hefty as the price tag, some 80kg per component.

‘What we wanted to do is achieve a representation of music which was as near to reality as you could possibly get. It's taken us the better part of ten to 12 years to do that with this system,’ continues Roberts. To help them reach their ultra-audio goal, they enlisted John Curl, an electronics engineer and audio designer renowned in music and beyond, notably for his role in co-developing The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound, the band’s legendary live-concert sound system.

‘John always wanted to make a particular amplifier that was unique in the world, which is a four-quadrant, push-pull amplifier. And we're the only company that could work with him to do that. So that's what you see before you now.’ Before me now are a pair of what look like mini-Ancient Egyptian sarcophagi. Gleaming and gold-trimmed, those are the components that make up the Luna Procellarum monoblock power amplifier. Why two?

‘Because in true music systems, you generally have what's called dual mono, or separate left-right, so there's no interference between the left and right channel. We've got a 1200-watt-output monoblock for each side, for each speaker. And there's no interference between the left and right whatsoever.’

When it comes to the high-tech audiophiliac spec, Roberts has plenty more where that came from. But to cut to the chase: what makes the system so expensive? ‘It's a combination of the cost of the components, the engineering time and the limited accessibility. These will probably become collectable items. Due to the fact that we've bought all the components to make these, we can only make 148 sets. So it's a bit like a fine whisky or a Ferrari. There's only a limited number of these that can ever be made. And that's the end.’

It is, then, likely to pique the interest of ‘high-net-worth individuals who have the yacht, the Porsche, the villa in Greece. They like the finer things in life, and they're always striving to get to perfection.’

Beyond that, the ideal client, apart from a wealthy one, is ‘someone that really appreciates music. And that music doesn't have to be classical,’ Roberts adds, and duly indulges me with a playlist of ear-treat tunes across various genres: Melody Gardot’s ‘If You Love Me’, Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Mrs Robinson’, the theme from Where Eagles Dare and, just to give the system a full work-out, Martin Garrix’s monster dance track ‘Funk’. As he says, ‘that’ll test pretty much any speaker!’

Having launched the system at June 2026’s High End Vienna trade fair (‘the international meeting place for everyone who wants to help shape the future of audio technology and experience sound at its finest’), AMR has already had ‘some serious interest from the customer base. So I don't think we'll struggle. But at the same time, there isn't someone around every corner that's going to spend half a million pounds on a hi-fi system.’

At least it’s straightforward to use – Roberts is playing the tunes to me on streaming platform Qobuz. ‘You don't have to relearn an operating system or anything like that. You can use whatever [to play your music] – Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music. Or if you were a real audiophile, you might have a big collection on hard drive. So it's accessible. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to drive it.’

But you might need to be a rocket owner to afford it.

AMR’s Luna Series is available from Q1 2027. Interested buyers should visit AMR-Audio.co.uk, @AMR_Audio

In contrast to the compressed, efficient install that's often typical of high-end residential design efforts, Jamie Bush welcomed an extended timeline when transforming a midcentury Pierre Koenig house – a 1966 home originally designed by the Southern California modernism master.

‘It was this slow, layered process, which was wonderful,’ the Los Angeles–based, New York–bred designer says. The clients, who live in Washington, DC, bought the property as ‘a hideaway in California that they could escape to, but live a very different life. They tasked us to reimagine the house as a contemporary craftsman/artisan take on this midcentury treasure,’ Bush explains.

The four-bedroom, relatively compact house sits on a bluff in coastal Rancho Palos Verdes, a neighbourhood located south of Los Angeles. While the property was structurally intact, a prior renovation that Bush describes as ‘a clean, impersonal contemporary take’ on Koenig's celebrated post-and-beam work – which includes the famed Case Study Houses #21 and #22 – called for a soulful update.

Revisiting this Pierre Koenig house's midcentury materiality

Bush took a hyper-sensitive approach to remove overly clinical interventions from the early 2000s. ‘This is a good example where Koenig would have black posts and beams and white walls, which we wanted to keep,’ he states. ‘Then there would be isolated moments of wood and colour with a lot of his buildings. It was an opportunity to bring in the crafted layer on top of this midcentury pavilion.’ As per the oft-followed West Coast impulse, exteriors and interiors would be seamlessly integrated, here in collaboration with SoCal native landscape gurus Terremoto.

Like all quality architectural rehabilitation projects that don't set out to make a time capsule, the founder of Jamie Bush + Co drew upon both intensive research and creative licence. ‘We basically did a partial restoration and reimagining of this house because they didn't want to recreate everything that was historical,’ he explains. His experience reviving other historical homes, such as John Lautner's Silvertop in collaboration with architect Barbara Bestor, informed the strategy.

So, the house's signature chevron-profiled folded-plate roof, wood surface treatments, open floor plan, and footprint were to remain. Specific features begged for proper repair, notably the red brick-clad fireplace that had been swathed in black. Bush then took the bold yet fitting step of freshly coating the front door in a reddish-persimmon hue.

His handling of millwork illustrates how Bush identified and navigated certain currents in the Palos Verdes Koenig. ‘When many of these houses were built originally, they would have one craftsman that would build the cabinetry and the panelling,’ Bush notes. The library and primary bedroom are panelled in ipe tropical hardwood that is articulated ‘in the same language’ as the building's exterior wood elements, resulting in ‘more enveloping and rich’ spaces.

He further explored material expression via walnut cabinetry and terrazzo surfaces in the kitchen and bathrooms. ‘There's a modesty and an economy, if you will, of using the same materials – maybe in different colours and in different ways – so there's like variations on the theme,’ Bush elaborates. When customising the earthy grey terrazzo mix, ‘I wanted chunky – that sort of slight primitiveness. It's not something necessarily that Koenig would use, but it felt right,’ he says. The result reads as refined Flintstones, less fictionally futuristic Jetsons.

A through-line of what he describes as ‘a modernist, natural aesthetic [with] a midcentury ethos of form and texture highlighting materiality’ emerged from this particular mix of furnishings, decor, and art that also operate as foils for the architecture's pronounced geometry. ‘It was a great challenge to heighten all the textures and the natural finishes and the wabi-sabi of the perfect imperfection in natural materials and patina of vintage pieces, and highlight it by eliminating strong colour,’ Bush observes. Nonetheless, artwork by the likes of Jonathan Ryan and Alexander Calder introduces subtle chromatic components.

Along with collectible objects of domestic and global origins ranging from George and Mira Nakashima to Sergio Rodrigues, Bush was drawn to historical and contemporary artisans and artists with California ties. Works by Florence Nolan, Peter Voulkos, Mattea Perrotta, Bradley Duncan, Casey Johnson, and Commune appear in the home's cosily scaled spaces. Outside, a large-scale, turquoise-hued installation commissioned from celebrated ceramic artist Stan Bitters animates a wall next to the pool, its reflection seen dancing on the water's surface.

To ensure that the indoor-outdoor spatial dynamic would feel ‘like one idea’, Bush called upon Los Angeles landscape firm Terremoto to transform the grounds by activating the home's two private courtyards, installing new plant life throughout, and enhancing the view corridors. Drought-tolerant, low-maintenance plantings are simultaneously environmentally preferable and practical, given that the homeowners are part-time residents.

Terremoto's plan integrated other design considerations, too. ‘Spare sculptural plantings made their way into the house as well,’ Bush says, emphasising the interplay among cacti and succulents, and the home's tactile artworks and sculptural furnishings. Steps away from the pocketing living room doors, Terremoto shaped an outdoor patio with a fire pit to function as a viewing platform for enjoying the proximity to the Pacific Ocean. The sandstone hardscape reflects ‘a palette that would respond to the interior finishes’, Bush adds.

This holistic, multidisciplinary coordination, which unfolded over multiple years, demonstrates how the design team found common ground between homage and interpretation. ‘We tried to honour and respect the original intent of these indoor-outdoor spaces,’ Bush says. ‘We think Koenig would have appreciated this level of consideration and craft if he were practising today.’

jamiebush.com

Alessandro Isola Studio has completed a sumptuous storage space for a private collection of Porsches in an undisclosed Italian location. Isola, who worked with project architect Roberto Zanlucchi to deliver the project, has shaped a monumental cabinet for cars, vertically stacked across a number of levels, with views up, down and through courtesy of glass floors.

Alessandro Isola describes the project as a ‘spatial experience that alters perception’, with a series of manoeuvres that lead the visitor through the interior to a point of dramatic reveal. Sober materials and tones are paired with splashes of rich colour, either through art, furnishings, material elements or, of course, the cars themselves.

For the most part, the space is dark and restrained, with floors and walls in black resin paired with a folded black-metal staircase. The car lift – an essential part of the space – is bracketed with glass barriers, and there are also skylights and large expanses of glazed floor that allow views down on to the top of the collection.

On the uppermost level, sliding glass doors open up onto a terrace. This space, which serves as a study and sitting area, is where the car lift terminates, and adjoining the planted roof a broad skylight provides views down into the heart of the collection, past three layers of Porsches.

‘By challenging instinctive perceptions of stability and depth, the project introduces a subtle yet persistent tension, transforming movement through the space into an active and heightened spatial experience.’

The project started life as an industrial building, with a complete overhaul transforming it into the ultimate collector’s retreat and display space. The exterior is kept deliberately plain and anonymous, and the sliding metal entrance gives no clue as to what lies within. Arranged across four levels, with a basement given over to utilities and plant, the car collection begins on the ground floor.

The rest of the building is what the architect describes as a ‘hybrid environment’ – the cars are always the stars but there is scope for hospitality as well as more private spaces.

For example, a dedicated professional kitchen is part of the programme, while a custom-designed 6m-long table sits on one of the upper floors, made from brass-finished metal with a form inspired by the classic Porsche silhouette. As part of the table support, the architects have incorporated a subtle Tangerine accent, a deliberate reference to one of Porsche's more vibrant and playful vintage colours.

The main spaces are all column-free, with structure pushed to the edge of the plan to allow for uninterrupted rows of cars. ‘Like a high-performance automobile, the building conceals significant technical complexity behind a form that appears effortless, precise, and controlled,’ says Isola.

A case in point is the highly engineered car lift, designed to fit flush with the ground floor when lowered. It can also take cars all the way to the topmost floor, alongside the bar area and wine cellar. There’s also a dedicated vinyl listening space here, along with direct access to the roof terrace with its outdoor kitchen.

Throughout the project, functional design is paired with playful, almost theatrical components. For example, in the deliberately dark and mysterious guest bathroom, the focal point is the basin, carved from a massive block of white Palissandro marble and fed by a ceiling mounted spout.

‘I visited the quarry to choose the original block, which was later cut and carved specifically for this project,’ says Isola, ‘The visible texture and natural fracture preserve the memory of its origin, connecting the finished space to the raw material from which it was created.’

Ultimately, the entire space is about creating these points of intense connection, with the Porsches themselves as the undisputed stars. ‘They’re not symbols of status, but objects of passion, engineering, and memory,’ says Isola. ‘The architecture accompanies them without competing for attention.’

AlessandroIsola.com, @Alessandro_Isola

Transport for London has revealed the latest in its ongoing series of Art on the Underground commissions for the cover of the pocket Tube map, courtesy of American artist Ellen Gallagher. Her piece, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, 2026, is the 42nd commission in the series and is an exploration of the capital’s long maritime history.

The Art on the Underground programme has been giving collectable visual impetus to the pocket Tube map – the classic ‘journey planner’ – since 2004. The maps themselves date back to pre-Harry Beck days and represent a beautiful chronicle of the evolution of the design presentation and physical reach of the underground network.

Gallagher lives and works between Rotterdam, the Netherlands and New York, building up richly layered multimedia works that draw on the natural world – particularly water – history, and mythology. Even when reduced down to the compact tube map format, Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish reveals the evidence of work and rework across the surface of the image.

The result is an abstraction that teeters on the edge of figuration, and vice versa, a miniature world of interlocking forms. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish is a reference to Pip, the ill-fated young Black cabin boy in Melville’s Moby Dick, who fell overboard and was then rescued but left traumatised. The piece ‘imagines the underwater world Pip experiences; the skeletal form of a whale lying on the seabed forms the central composition and brings together themes of marine life, transatlantic history and memory’.

London was once the focal point of the country’s role in the whaling trade, with locations like Greenland Dock receiving carcasses to transform into oil, and bones to be turned into corsets. Gallagher’s commission is a mental map of this long-forgotten and bloody trade, with the skeleton shown intertwined with strands of seaweed that evoke the famously abstracted London Tube map itself, created by Harry Beck in the 1930s.

Another layer of meaning comes courtesy of London’s hidden and covered waterways and historic wells, such as Sadler’s Wells and the River Fleet. As we travel under London, all these histories are bound up in the soil that surrounds us.

As well as gracing the cover of the pocket Tube map, Ellen Gallagher’s artwork will also be seen on posters put up around the network, part of an ongoing commissioning project that has placed art in front of billions of tube passengers over the last two decades.

Art.TFL.gov.uk, @ArtontheUnderground

London-based interdisciplinary designer and 'art engineer' Moritz Waldemeyer has unveiled a site-specific lighting installation to accompany Andrea Mastrovito's monumental Agnus Dei installation at Sagrada Família in Barcelona. Commissioned by the Junta Constructora de la Sagrada Família, Mastrovito's hand-crafted glass sculpture of a lamb is intended to bring Antoni Gaudí's vision to completion.

Throughout his career, Waldemeyer has seamlessly inhabited a space where art, engineering, technology and light intersect. His work ranges from luminous headpieces for singer Jamiroquai to responsive lighting designs that mimic the warmth of candlelight, and immersive sculptural installations that elevate the experience of light to new technological mediums. Despite working with and developing cutting-edge technology through his practice, Waldemeyer's pieces always feel like they exist at a human level, considering light not as a static tool but as something alive.

Illuminating the Sagrada Família

Mastrovito's sculpture sits within the cross crowning the Tower of Jesus Christ, 172m high, and features a symbolic glass lamb, originally envisioned by Gaudí as part of his plans for the basilica, whose construction finished this year after starting in 1882.

Waldemeyer was tasked with illuminating the light sculpture without showing obvious light sources, a blend of design, engineering and craftsmanship that encapsulates the studio's expertise. Rising to the challenge, the designer devised a concealed ultraviolet lighting technology with high-energy focused light sources that in the darkness activate the artwork's phosphorescent pigments after dark, making it glow.

This also allows the inscription verses from John 1,29, inscribed within the gilded rays surrounding the sculpture, to emerge, adding a new layer of meaning to the work. Rendered in Latin, the lettering spells out the verse 'The next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world"'.

More than a mere technical feat, the lighting project was achieved using newly developed technology inspired by automotive lighting and applied to evoke an emotional visual effect. The result, the studio explains, 'feels like pure magic: an artwork that emits a mysterious glow without any visible light source, wiring or technology. The engineering disappears entirely, leaving visitors to encounter only the Lamb and its seemingly immaterial light.'

'Projects such as the Sagrada Família demand a different way of thinking about technology,' said Waldemeyer and Nazanin Farhabod, co-founders of Studio Waldemeyer. 'Our role was not to create a lighting effect, but to make the technology disappear completely, allowing visitors to experience only the artwork itself. The most successful solution is often the one that cannot be seen.'

Also read: Lego Architecture reaches its apotheosis in this massive model of the Sagrada Família

For decades, one of architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg’s most intriguing works remained almost unknown outside of architectural circles. Sitting on a quiet stretch of Solana Beach, San Diego County, it was known only to the family who built it. Now, for the first time, the Chapman Residence has come to market (following Kellogg's Kravis Residence earlier this month), listed for $4.75 million, offering a glimpse of what happens when an ordinary tract house is transformed into a work of art.

In 1960, artists Wayne and Barbara Chapman purchased a modest suburban home. After marrying in 1969, they enlisted Kellogg to reinvent it. The transformation occupied much of the 1970s, turning an unremarkable house into something almost unrecognisable from its origins.

Kellogg worked closely with the Chapmans throughout the project. Wayne effectively acted as construction manager, recruiting friends to help source massive utility poles and thousands of board feet of rough-sawn redwood, while Barbara shaped the interiors. The result, therefore, is less a conventional architect-client relationship than a collaboratively hand-built home where, as Wayne later recalled, nearly every piece of timber bore his own fingerprints.

The roughly 3,900 sq ft, three-level residence is defined by Kellogg's signature organic architecture. Sculptural fireplaces anchor many of the interior spaces, while flowing, curvilinear forms dissolve the boxy logic of the original house. Redwood and glass dominate the material palette, complemented by hand-carved timber entrance doors. A dedicated ceramics studio was created for Wayne's practice, and arrival at the house unfolds through a sequence of Japanese-inspired gardens.

This experiential element was central to Kellogg's architectural philosophy. Drawing on Frank Lloyd Wright's principles of organic architecture, he pushed them into a more expressive, biomorphic realm. Here, structural elements evoke ribs and bones, while forms borrow from shells, plants and geological formations. Craftsmanship – in wood, stone and concrete – is inseparable from the architecture itself, and the relationship between house and garden is treated as every bit as important as the interiors.

Carved from the shell of an ordinary suburban house, with portions of the original structure retained even as its identity was completely reimagined, the Chapman Residence is unmistakably Kellogg. Yet it is equally a testament to the Chapmans, whose vision, labour and artistic sensibilities shaped every stage of its creation.

The Chapman Residence is listed with Keith York at Agents of Architecture.

A Lisbon townhouse, in the heart of the Portuguese capital, has been transformed into a calm oasis. The refresh was spearheaded by UK-based architects McLean Quinlan, who worked with the client, a couple with two children, who wanted a home centred on wellbeing.

Inside a wellness-inspired Lisbon townhouse

‘We wanted to create instant tranquillity, the moment you step through the front door,’ explains Will Mouland, associate architect and project lead at McLean Quinlan. ‘The space is enveloped by natural textures, diffused light and soft tones – I think it’s hard not to exhale deeply when you step into a space like that, particularly when it’s in contrast to the busy urban context.’

The client, the co-founder of a wellness company, asked McLean Quinlan to create an interior using natural materials and incorporate flexible family spaces; the façade must remain the same.

The firm began by reconfiguring the once uninspiring property. The residence was originally a series of subdivided homes that had been carved out of the property in the 1990s. During the process, McLean Quinlan discovered problems with the split-level floors, which left the house with echoes and bad acoustics.

Says Mouland, ‘The driving force behind the design was creating appropriately scaled spaces with an intentional flow. The aesthetic approach came from wanting to create a true oasis of calm, with an almost ethereal quality, distilled to the most limited palette of pale wood, stone, and natural plaster.’

The architectural firm settled on arranging the townhouse into a four-bedroom main house and a separate self-contained apartment above. The ground floor is centred on the client’s interest in wellness and meditation. This was achieved by creating distinct zones, including a massage room, a dedicated yoga space, and a gym.

However, it was important to step away from the functional feeling of a commercial gym, which led to the introduction of curtains and warm spotlighting for a more domestic atmosphere. There is also an additional custom cold plunge pool and an infrared sauna.

The use of Douglas fir throughout gives each room a cabin-like quality. The first floor is the main home entry and family area. A new kitchen, with a pantry, overlooks the garden, while Portuguese materials such as local tiles and lime-washed wall finishes are scattered throughout. The second floor, which is accessed by a repurposed Douglas fir staircase, accommodates family bedrooms.

‘There are so many spaces I love in this home,’ says Mouland. ‘The stairs, the wellness space, the pool changing garden room – but perhaps the space I’m most proud of is the relationship between the principal dressing room and bathroom.

'The dressing room is naturally lit, solely by borrowed light from other spaces, and yet it doesn’t feel dark. The chamfered wall to the bedroom and the glazed partition between the bathroom and dressing room, screened with the translucent linen curtains, are more successful than I anticipated.’

Stepping into this Lisbon townhouse, visitors are greeted with a moment of decompression. The light and soothing atmosphere that results from its organic materiality helps create a calming cocoon from the bustle of city life.

mcleanquinlan.com

Crystal Palace Park's dinosaur sculptures – the world's first life-sized models of prehistoric animals – are among London's quirkiest attractions. This week, the sculptures, originally created between 1852 and 1854, have been given a refresh as part of a wider regeneration of the park, which reopened to the public this month.

Led by Bromley Council and Crystal Palace Park Trust, the work supports the long-term restoration of the Grade II*-listed park, which was created after the Crystal Palace was relocated from the 1851 Great Exhibition to Sydenham.

At the heart of the scheme was the conservation of the Grade I-listed Geological Court, home to the dinosaurs. The sculptures – created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the guidance of palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen – were made when dinosaurs had only just been identified by science. Though many of them are now known to be anatomically inaccurate, they remain celebrated as a landmark of public palaeontology and a bastion of Victorian ambition.

During restorations, specialists used paint analysis, material testing and 3D printing to repair the sculptures while preserving their original materials – work that saw them removed from Historic England's Heritage At Risk Register.

Surrounding landscape work restored historic sightlines and topography, while the Upper Lake was desilted and fitted with a new recirculation system to revive its waterfalls. The Grade II-listed Italian Terrace underwent stonework repairs, the Grand Centre Walk, designed by park creator Sir Joseph Paxton, was reinstated as the park’s historic spine, and a bust of Paxton returned to its original site.

More than 7,500 tonnes of excavated soil were reused on-site, and new rain gardens and swales now help manage rainfall. Desilted lake sediment was repurposed into 500 sq m of habitat shelving, while around 58,000 sq m of wildflower meadow and 64,000 perennials have revived the park's once-famous horticultural displays.

Accessibility upgrades, a redesigned Penge Gate entrance echoing the Crystal Palace's modular architecture, a dinosaur-dig-themed play area, and a new timber Visitor Centre by Tate + Co complete the transformation.

Together, these efforts have secured the future of a uniquely Victorian vision – restoring a space where science, art and imagination first collided, and ensuring its prehistoric residents can continue to thrive for generations to come.

Artist Benjamin Slinger captures millennial nostalgia in a new body of work entitled ‘Empire’. Here, the British visual artist creates a series of wire-frame paper lamps constructed from vintage fast-food paper bags. Launching with a show in London (23-25 July at 96 Robert Street, London NW1 3QP), the series of lamps will be available from the artist's online store.

The McDonald’s and Burger King bags were collected over the past three decades, and the resulting lamps sit somewhere between sculpture, design objects and cultural artefacts.

Discover 'Empire' by Copyright Slinger

For the 'Empire' series, Slinger was inspired by the classic ‘Akari’ paper lanterns designed by Isamu Noguchi and the graphic identities of multinational fast-food corporations.

While the lanterns are functional objects, the artist’s swapping of washi paper for fast-food bags, with their corporate and consumerist graphics, is a critical reflection on brands within contemporary life – bold and demanding attention. Through the evolving bag designs, the series also documents changes in popular culture over time.

Such dives into design and socio-economic history are not unusual in Slinger’s practice, which spans sculpture, painting and writing. However, ‘Empire’ emerged from one question: ‘How can one produce a design or mass-market object as a work of art?’

Slinger has lowered the boundaries between quality design and mass consumption. The viewer is invited to consider how something of value is produced, how certain objects acquire cultural authority, and how consumerist imagery is embedded in daily life.

An initial edition of 50 lamps will be released across three sizes and more than 25 individual designs. Each lamp is stamped, numbered and signed according to its edition.

‘Empire’ is on show from 23–25 July 2026 at 96 Robert Street, London NW1 3QP, slingercopyright.com

Range Rover has announced its third all-electric model and this time it’s a pure EV from the outset, a car that also marks Range Rover’s debut in a brand new sector. Welcome to the Range Rover GT, a crossover luxury electric GT that shares the new EMA platform with the forthcoming Jaguar Type 01.

Whilst the Jaguar’s form factor – for all its controversies – represents a continuation of the lithe, low-slung sporting ethos that has defined the brand for decades, the RR GT is a definite departure. Debuting as EV-only, with potential for a hybrid-electric version further down the line, the GT will be built at Range Rover’s Halewood factory. A full reveal won’t happen until later this year, implying that production could start in late 2027 or early 2028.

What else do we know? The low, curved roofline is very much atypical for a Range Rover. Up until now, the company has eschewed any sector other than the standard SUV, reasoning that it offers up multiple use cases, from executive luxury to off-road tool, in the same form factor.

From a superficial reading of the stance and ground clearance, the GT can’t possibly offer the breadth of ability of a ‘regular’ Range Rover; perhaps this is a tacit acknowledgement that only a small fraction of the company’s customer base ever tackles anything more challenging than a high curb.

Instead, the focus is on long-distance travel and luxury – both things that Range Rover (not to mention Jaguar) already do rather well. To that end, the company has laid bare the cabin design to give aspiring customers a good idea of what to expect. This is very much a minimal space, sharing, dare we say it, some of the architectural elements of the Type 00 Concept.

That includes a large centre console between the front seats, a stripped-down dash with a very horizontal emphasis and technology that is largely hidden away, rather than placed in plain sight (discounting the large landscape touch screen).

The rear cabin continues this architectural focus, with vertical blade-like trim elements marking the junctions between doors and dash. Woven textiles are prioritised, as are simple graphics and minimal physical controls.

The latter might seem controversial at a time when almost all premium car makers are reintroducing a more analogue approach back into their interiors following customer feedback.

However, as Range Rover says, ‘every [interior] element has been considered to create a sanctuary of calm, with a focus on reduced visual and acoustic noise and natural conversational access to more vehicle functions than ever before’, implying that the company believes minimalism is still a strong driver in the luxury sector.

There’s no word on tech specs or range just yet, beyond the fact that this will be the most ‘car-like’ Range Rover ever built, bringing together ‘effortless EV performance, first-class long-haul refinement and all-terrain capability’.

The flowing camouflage wrap seen here cloaks any new design detail that might also debut with the car and could influence the rest of the range. Likely rivals include the Mercedes-Maybach GLS and Bentley's upcoming Torcal EV, with a corresponding uplift in the price point.

Almost a decade ago, JLR applied for the trademark ‘Road Rover’, a hint that development of a low, more dynamically focused model has been in the works for many years. The name dates back to the 1950s, when Land Rover was considering a less agricultural machine for a wider customer base, a project that eventually led to the launch of the first Range Rover in 1970. Subsequent industry upheaval – pandemics, EV regulatory shifts, Jaguar’s brand overhaul, the massive JLR cyber-attack – have all conspired to push back the debut of what is now known as the Range Rover GT.

For now, all we know for certain is that proportion, function and form are getting a grand shake-up for the first time in Range Rover’s history.

RangeRover.com, @RangeRover

With its colourful ceiling mural and steel countertops, artisanal ice cream bar The Dreamery, in Islington, north London, has gained popularity for its decadent scoops paired with crisp wines. Now, the whimsical bar welcomes a takeover by Spanish maison Loewe Perfumes.

The collaboration marks the launch of the new Loewe Pistachio scented candle. The green-fleshed nuts have long been popular in the culinary realm – not least as an ice cream flavour – but have been in exceptionally high demand in recent years, particularly since the rise of pistachio-filled Dubai chocolate.

Celebrate pistachio at the Loewe Ice Cream Bar

Translating pistachio into a fragrance that balances freshness and warmth, Loewe’s candle might be the most indulgent iteration of the flavour. Crafted in Spain using natural wax, the candle is packaged in Loewe’s signature grooved vessel. Its smooth pale green housing is a perfect pistachio hue – a shade you’ll also find painted across the façade of The Dreamery in its new incarnation as The Loewe Ice Cream Bar pop-up (running until 30 July 2026).

Set within a repurposed 19th-century building, The Dreamery was launched in 2024 by Alex Young and George De Vos – the duo behind natural wine bars Goodbye Horses and Stable Wines – and serves flavours from blueberry and ricotta to croissant and custard. Now, visitors can enjoy a limited-edition pistachio flavour during the Loewe Perfumes takeover.

There’s seating for 20 within The Dreamery’s whimsical interior, which retains its existing look – dominated by British artist Lucy Stein’s folklore-inspired ceiling mural, painted on a grid of backlit, Japanese unryu rice-paper panels.

Loewe Perfume's bespoke pistachio ice cream will be served exclusively for the duration of the partnership, until 30 July 2026, at The Dreamery 20a Halliford St, London N1 3HD. Open daily, 12-10pm

Drumhalla House in County Donegal, Ireland, has been an established event venue for decades, having originally opened back in 1990, and today it is a familiar and integral part of the community. Once arranged as three separate houses, the entire structure has, over the years, been reimagined as a single space, covering 626 sq m.

Tour Drumhalla House, its new portico and architectural features

Now, the venue has been expanded and overhauled, thanks to a 140 sq m extension created by Pasparakis Friel Architects. The rural studio, based nearby in Rathmullan, was tasked with creating a stronger connection between the historic house, its impressive grounds, and the landscape beyond.

The most obvious architectural intervention is a new timber post and beam colonnade that flanks the garden façade. Another colonnade structure serves as a new portico, a covered entrance beyond which is a grand reception area that serves as an orientation point for the various parts of the venue.

According to the architects, ‘the portico acts as a transitional space between the outdoors and the interior. From here, the house unfolds as a sequence of interconnected rooms designed for gathering and celebration: the drawing room alive with conversation, the bar softly illuminated in the evening, and the games room offering a more playful, animated retreat.’

The garden room is a more substantial intervention, a place for receptions and gatherings, beyond which is a dedicated wedding hall. The ground floor plan also accommodates important secluded spaces like a dressing room. Throughout the project, Pasparakis Friel has created a clear distinction between old and new, never relying on pastiche but also restoring and amplifying original features to create character and drama.

This is best seen in the colour and material strategy, which switches between light tones for daytime-focused spaces like the Dressing Room and Drawing Room. These are contrasted with areas intended for use during the evening (like the Library and Games Room), where the palette becomes richer and deeper and more intimate.

Likewise, the new architectural interventions are sympathetically inserted into the historic fabric, with the addition of new glazed openings that are in keeping with the rhythm and pace of the façade design as well as alignments to distant views. ‘These additions amplify the theatre inherent in social gatherings, enhancing the drama of arrival, encounter, and celebration,’ say the architects.

The refurbishment also extended to Drumhalla’s first-floor accommodation, where bedrooms have been given individual identities inspired by an overall sense of the Donegal landscape. Themes include Highlands, Coast, and Sky, tying in with the studio’s sense of place, driven by its rural location and interaction with local materials, crafts and artists.

‘Whether restoring a historic building or designing a new home, we create spaces that feel grounded, thoughtful, and enduring,’ Pasparakis Friel writes. ‘Our architecture is quiet but purposeful – tactile, responsive, and attuned to landscape and life.’ At Drumhalla House, these values are deployed to create a richly inviting space for the community and other visitors.

PasparakisFriel.com
DrumhallaHouse.ie

As already noted, 2026 marks a quarter century since Aston Martin debuted its Vanquish model. Over three generations, Vanquish has been the flag-bearer for the brand’s front-engined, V12-powered silhouette ethos, a role it continues with the current model, in both coupe and Volante convertible form.

Now there’s to be a limited run edition to mark those 25 years, with 25 examples of each variant produced to an exacting specification put together by the company’s bespoke department, Q by Aston Martin.

Vanquish 25 is the kind of limited edition that only a select group of car collectors would look to acquire, usually with the aspiration that scarcity will equal added value at some point down the line. If they can resist the urge to stash the car in the automotive equivalent of bubble wrap, then they’ll also be acquiring one of the great modern sports cars.

Vanquish 25 shares the mechanical attributes of the ‘regular’ car – a 5.2-litre Twin-Turbo V12 putting out 835PS and capable of hitting 62mph from rest in 3.3 seconds. The Vanquish also has a top speed of a scarcely credible 214mph yet cloaks this power and performance in an incredibly elegant body shape that’s one of the marque’s most effective designs for years.

The stats might not have changed, but the details are certainly different. One of the inspirations behind the new bespoke livery, details and finish is the original Aston Martin Vanquish, produced from 2001 to 2007. Silver is the dominant colour on the exterior, along with three different interior trims - Oxford Tan (shown here), Onyx Black, and Phantom Grey. Customers can also opt for the 2+2 or 2+0 seating configuration, the latter providing more space for luggage.

The paintwork is finished in Q Skye Silver with special Q Commission metal foil detailing on the car’s side sills and shield vanes. Unique badging and slightly fettled wheel shapes and bespoke Aston Martin script foil detailing are the unique elements to look out for, while inside there’s a new set of trim patterns and laser-etched inlays. The start button has been rendered with a bright red top and in the coupe model the headlining is trimmed in black Alcantara.

These might seem like subtle uplifts but to the collector – and those who feel a close connection with Vanquishes old and new – they’re enough to give this grandest of grand tourers an attention-attracting makeover.

‘Anyone familiar with this iconic British brand knows the provenance of the name ‘Vanquish’ in our modern history,’ says Vittorio Gabba, Head of Q at Aston Martin, ‘Vanquish 25 builds on the extraordinary achievements of the modern, third-generation Vanquish with a carefully curated package of exterior and interior features that subtly celebrate this important milestone in our history.’

The model will be shown first at California’s Monterey Car Week, a prime spot for collectors and enthusiasts, old money and new.

Aston Martin Vanquish 25, for more information visit AstonMartin.com, @AstonMartin

When Central City Plaza, a shopping centre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, first opened in 1973, it was a vibrant hub for Black life. Designed by the state’s first licensed African American architect Alonzo Robinson Jr. in the optimistic New Formalist style, the complex housed Black-owned businesses that included a bowling alley, attorneys' offices and a restaurant that dished up soul food and cordon bleu.

Over the decades, Central City Plaza fell into disrepair and neglect, and, even after a public awareness campaign halted the demolition of one its buildings, the campus’s future was uncertain. Today, however, thanks to a grant from the Getty Foundation and The National Trust for Historic Preservation, Central City Plaza – in addition to four other historically-significant sites designed by Black architects and designers – has the opportunity to rewrite its next chapter.

The program, Conserving Black Modernism, was established in 2022 by the Getty in partnership with The National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to protect modern sites that are integral to Black history, many of which are overlooked and under threat. Sites are identified through an application process, with winners receiving $150,000 to conduct repairs, hire staff or undertake preservation planning. Since the program was launched, more than $4.85 million in funding has been distributed.

‘Conserving Black Modernism has helped communities in nearly every region of the US protect the work of Black architects and has helped broaden the very definition of modernist architecture,’ Joan Weinstein, the Getty Foundation’s director, said in a statement. ‘Teaming up with the National Trust over the past five years has allowed us to take actionable steps to preserve underrepresented sites that embody Black excellence in design, activism and resilience.’

This cycle's winners include Central City Plaza; the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanities Center at Texas Southern University in Houston.; The Park-Johnson Hall at Fisk University in Nashville; portions of Boston’s Southwest Corridor; and St. Mark AME Zion Church in Indiana.

The National Trust Action Fund, meanwhile, is distributing an additional $2.26 million to 22 more locations around the country, including a seed barn in rural Alabama that will serve as the future home of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, and barracks at Camp Naco in Arizona that housed the Black army regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

Read on to learn more about the grantees.

Central City Plaza – Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Central City Plaza was completed by architect Alonzo Robinson Jr in 1973. Robinson was Wisconsin’s first licensed architect and designed the complex in the New Formalist style, a rarity for Milwaukee. The plaza includes three buildings defined by arcades, concrete panels and sweeping porticos or ‘wings.’ The Salvation Army took over several structures in the early 1980s, and now runs a homeless shelter on the site. According to the Getty and the National Trust, the grant will fund a strategic report that will guide restoration and allow the Salvation Army to expand its services.

Martin Luther King Jr. Humanities Center at Texas Southern University – Houston

This building contains the School of Communications at Texas Southern University, one of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). The modernist building was completed by architect John Saunders Chase Jr. in 1969, just a year after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The building, which features a sweeping roof and a central volume that appears as a series of stacked discs, is said to evoke King’s legacy. Chase Jr. went on to be a founding member of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), a group that has advocated for equity in the architectural profession. The grant will fund a report on the building that will identify key preservation priorities and delve into the building’s history.

The Park-Johnson Hall at Fisk University – Nashville

New York- and Philadelphia- practice McKissack & McKissack is the oldest Black-owned architecture firm in the US. In 1954, founding partner Moses McKissack III designed this campus building for Fisk University, an HBCU in Nashville. The low-slung three-story building is defined by a red brick facade and modernist proportions, and contains classrooms, administrative spaces and a lecture hall. The grant money will help develop a preservation and management plan for the structure, and help document McKissack & McKissack’s work on the greater Fisk campus.

Southwest Corridor – Boston

After activists halted the construction of a 12-lane highway that would cut through Boston, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority built a four-mile park that contained a public train line in addition to a 52-acre park. The work, most notably the postmodern Ruggles Station, was led by Stull & Lee, Inc., a Black-led Boston-based architecture firm. The Getty funds will help document the site through 3D modeling, photography and more.

St. Mark AME Zion Church – East Chicago, Indiana

Designed by Wendell Campbell (who, along with John Saunders Chase Jr, was a founder of NOMA), this striking modernist church in East Chicago, Indiana was designed to evoke praying hands. The structure features a dramatic origami-like roof, triangular ribbon windows and an airy, column-free sanctuary. The grant funding will help the church create a preservation plan supporting ongoing maintenance and rehabilitation needs.

The foosball table – aka table football or baby-foot – isn’t typically associated with luxury or design, conjuring images of dingy pubs and bachelor basements instead. Irish luxury furniture house Orior has set out to change that with a high-end foosball table for the discerning games enthusiast. There's no tacky plastic in sight, no garish green – just a beautiful, handcrafted piece that's as functional as it is striking. It will be available to purchase via Orior's website.

The table's solid wood frame is bold and blocky, anchoring the piece in a warm, rich walnut. The playing field is the real showstopper: 'Irish Green' and 'Orior Crema' marble contrast with the wood – a refined reinterpretation of the Crayola-green felt found on a typical table.

The clean, architectural silhouette carries through in the satin steel-lined interior walls, which lend a industrial counterpoint to the marble and walnut, and in the satin steel rods that run through the frame, capped with solid cast bronze handles. The players are carved from oak and finished with leather detailing and lacquer, while the goals are wrapped in leather. These materials elevate the table into a piece that functions equally as a game and a collectible design object.

There's a story behind the launch – timed to coincide with the recent Fifa World Cup final: Orior's company leaders met as teammates on the Savannah College of Art and Design football team, where a shared love of the sport sparked friendships that would go on to shape the next chapter of the business. The foosball table stands as a tribute to Orior's origins.

We get on very well with the Light Phone III, a beautifully engineered touchscreen phone that wasn’t afraid to act a little dumb. The III eschewed the app-flashed frenzy of the modern home screen in favour of minimal text and even more minimal functionality; using the device means cutting a lot from your life, from social media to online banking, WhatsApp and much, much more.

That, however, is very much the point. At a time of growing evidence about the nefarious tricks of the algorithmic trade – let alone the damage wrought by feeds that run amok in an age of deliberate misinformation.

Now Light is back, shining its focus on a new sector. Welcome to the Light Phone Flip, the company’s fourth device and its first-ever flip phone. As we’ve often observed, the contemporary flip phone sits within a weird evolutionary niche. On the one hand, there’s the folding screen models typified by Motorola’s razr series or the Samsung Z Flip7 or the Honor Magic V Flip2.

None of these clever pieces of tech does anything to solve the attention issue. To really dig into the disavowal of modern mobile culture, you need to switch to something like HMD’s 2660 Flip 4G, a self-proclaimed dose of digital detox.

Light thinks differently, taking inspiration from each corner and finding itself with an original offering as a result. Founded by Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, the company has quietly garnered more and more interest as our collective attention spans implode through abuse.

Step one was to make the Light Phone Flip more affordable (the III, with its solid metal case, is $699, soon rising to $899 due to chip shortages). The Flip can be yours for $300, with a contract offering of $39/month for 24 months. The company functions as a virtual operator in the US, UK and Canada, another way of making the device cheaper.

As a result, the company is cultivating an active developer community, with a freshy open-sourced operating system and a burgeoning list of apps developed to add specific layers of functionality. As with many esoteric electronic devices, getting under the hood is half the fun for users, many of whom pride themselves on their tech savviness and don’t find any rewards in the padlocked walled gardens owned by Apple and Google.

Step two is to grow the Light community. One of the instigating events behind the design of the Light Phone Flip was the founders’ experience of The Luddite Club, a joking-not-joking organisation originally founded by a group of Brooklyn teens angry at the corporate overreach into mental health and community via the pervasive and intrusive dominance of the smartphone.

Light Phone III was already making inroads in the community, but the flip format still retained a certain cachet – close the phone, close off all digital communication.

It’s been 20 years since the original Motorola Razr made flip phones into fashion objects. Kai Tang just happened to be a member of the original design team behind the Razr, so effectively the form factor has come full circle. Light Phone Flip doubles down on what Hollier calls the ‘symbolic closure’ of the phone, with a hefty reinforced hinge and a deliberate lack of external screens (save for a single notification light).

‘We felt there was a huge opportunity [for a flip phone] with our OS and eco-system,’ says Hollier. ‘We’re uniquely positioned with our experience.’ Decrying the flimsy, often toy-like nature of many contemporary flips, Light has charged itself with shaping a solid device that offers more without feeling like less.

Hollier calls Light’s Flip a ‘cousin’ to the III. The basic functionality and OS are the same, with a slightly lighter feature set. There’s no NFC sensor or forward-facing selfie camera, for example, nor is the screen touch operated. Instead, there’s a traditional number pad and D-pad controller, with old-school T9 text input. In short, it really prioritises phone calls above all else.

‘Gen Z feel like they were robbed by big tech,’ Hollier explains. ‘Even III feels a bit too much like a smartphone. They tell us that AI is seeping into every aspect of their lives and they hate it.’ (No prizes at all to HMD for recently launching four ‘dumb phones’ with dedicated AI assistant buttons.)

Hence the ongoing quest for the deliberate friction created by earlier device generations, from CD players and wired headphones to digital cameras. It’s this anti-AI generation that has driven Light to pursue the flip format. ‘We were convinced by our young users, people who have never had smartphones, avoiding all the drama of social media,’ says Tang.

Light Phone Flip users won’t be cutting themselves off completely from the world. The latest version of Light’s custom Android OS, LightOS, provides navigation, messaging, photo management, note-taking and a media player (the phone reintroduces the beloved 3.5-inch headphone jacket).

‘When you close the phone it’s all matte,’ Tang says. ‘There’s nothing other than the speaker grille and a notification light.’ In short, it’s not continually trying to lure you back into rambling back and forth conversation or a doomscrolling session.

In a nod to youth and fashion, the Flip is available in six colours, yellow, red, grey, dark blue, pink and white. Made from plastic, with a replaceable battery, Light Phone Flip is more accessible in every way. ‘We cut no corners with III,’ Hollier admits. This new phone has been engineered to reach a wider, younger audience.

This is all the better for expanding the community. ‘Over the last five years, we’ve had so many users who are also developers,’ Hollier says. ‘We realised that these people are aligned with us. It reminds me of the early days of the internet.’

As mentioned earlier, this community is building new tools, emboldened by the open source OS, further embedding Light Phone into a movement for change. ‘The open source mentality really aligns with our approach,’ Tang acknowledges. ‘It helps eliminate the nagging attention economy of every single modern app.’

Accompanying the launch of the Flip is a biweekly newsletter, Flip Your Life, that taps into the community spirit and helps those who want to make the (perhaps daunting) journey away from a social media world.

‘When we originally launched, people didn’t get it,’ Hollier says. ‘Now, they do. But they say, “I wish I could [switch to Light], but….’ So we want to help them.’

‘It’s a process, not a one-time thing,’ Tang acknowledges. ‘Quitting addiction is not an easy process.’

The backlash against an always-online society is slow but steady. Light has made an excellent tool that’s sure to help hurry things along.

Light Phone Flip, details at TheLightPhone.com, @TheLightPhone

Design Within Reach has expanded its product offering with a new collection of rugs by designer Little Wing Lee of Studio & Projects.

The ‘Semita’ rug collection merges tactility with function – neatly packaged together to create collectable design objects. The two rugs – one round, one rectangular – are handcrafted in India, with wool from New Zealand. Little Wing Lee, an honoree in the Wallpaper* US400, sees a rug as a central piece to a room, more so than a piece of art.

‘A rug helps ground a room and set the scene for the other elements – furniture, lighting, plants, art,’ she explains. ‘A thing that sets a rug apart from, say, a painting is the tactile quality, your physical interaction with its softening quality. In truth, a beautiful rug can be on a floor or vertically hung, to introduce colour, texture, and pattern.’

The ‘Semita’ rug is inspired by traditional kilims, the flat, hand-woven textile rugs originating from regions like Turkey and North Africa. Lee also looked to her family home for inspiration, reminiscing about a striped rug. The result is a spiral motif nodding to constructivist painting and broken geometry.

The word semita primarily means a 'footpath' or 'narrow pathway' in Latin. The design's scattered lines and angles create a maze-like quality, a pattern that you can trace with your eyes or fingers.

Says Lee, ‘When designing a rug, I start with the pattern and colour. The next layer of design involves construction and materials. Playing with pile height and how the fibres reflect light are tools to control and enhance elements of the design. A beautiful rug will successfully balance all these elements.’

Lee’s compositions balance graphic qualities with organic shapes, while also playing with light and texture. The collaboration highlights craftsmanship and function, and sits neatly within DWR’s collection of artful objects.

dwr.com studioandprojects.co

MVRDV has won the Shift International Architecture Competition with its proposal ‘Rotterdam Rocks!’. Shift, a social enterprise designed to enable large-scale societal change through art and architecture, launched the international competition last year, calling for designs for a ‘Shift Embassy’ – a major cultural destination in Rotterdam that aims to inspire visitors to help realise large-scale ecological and societal change. The competition asked for sustainable concepts for a future landmark which vie to be the next 'Wonder of the World'.

Discover MVRDV's biotopia 'Rotterdam Rocks!'

MVRDV’s proposal showcased a stacked landscape of living rocks that turn architecture into an urban ecosystem, a futuristic take on eco-brutalism that merges nature and public life. This ambition is captured in the studio’s idea of a ‘Biotopia’: a future world where architecture grows like trees, and streets are illuminated by bioluminescent light. The rocky green landmark acts like a living organism, with pockmarked skin to accommodate nature, and will be largely accessible to the public, allowing visitors to explore viewpoints, exhibition areas, and dining areas.

The €240-million purpose-driven destination will join other newly opened buildings in Rotterdam, including the Netherlands Fotomuseum and MVRDV’s Portlantis, a museum dedicated to the city's port. The Shift Embassy will span 25,000 to 30,000 sq m and will include a 200-room hotel, an observation deck, a conference and meeting centre, and a sustainable food court.

Seven stacked 'rocks' are arranged around two key pathways through the building; one for the exhibition experience and another for the project’s hospitality functions. A third exterior route twists up the sides of the 'rocks', leading to a publicly accessible viewing terrace, while the top of the building features a rooftop terrace for visitors to The Elysium: an immersive art space. The building’s façade will be covered with indents to provide a surface for soil, water, plants and animals.

‘Our first step in approaching this design was to expand the brief – we need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to create inclusive spaces for people, trees, plants, water, air, and animal habitats, balancing the need for new built space with new landscapes to compensate for our ecological impact,’ says MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. ‘Our design integrates these human and natural spaces, playing with porosity to keep the project compact while maximising its ecological value.’

The Shift International Architecture Competition was launched in January 2025. Eighty teams submitted proposals, which were whittled down to the five finalists, including architecture and design studios Ecosistema Urbano, Heatherwick Studio, Mecanoo, MVRDV, and Office for Political Innovation ( discover the Shift entries here), who have continued developing their designs since November 2025.

Describing the winning concept, the jury said: ‘MVRDV’s proposal is a remarkably bold, powerful statement that we expect will capture visitors' imagination and encourage them to come back again and again. Rotterdam Rocks departs from how sustainability is traditionally communicated, bringing together joy, discovery, and surprise into a new architectural language. We anticipate this building and its program will invite people to rethink their everyday behaviour and encourage new ways of living sustainably together.’

MVRDV entered a short pre-design phase in June to further test and improve its design. The refined version is now being unveiled for the first time, ahead of a local participation process in autumn 2026.

Shift’s longer-term ambition for the landmark project is to create a network of similar structures across six continents, each designed to help create a better and more sustainable way of future living.

shift.world
mvrdv.com

Emirates is coming for one of economy travel’s great indignities: the collapsing head. The Dubai-based airline has begun installing the U-Dream Headrest across its fleet, a multi-way adjustable leather headrest designed to support the neck and head properly during sleep, rather than leaving passengers to wrestle with travel pillows, tray tables and the shoulder of a stranger.

Emirates introduces world’s first U-Dream headrest

The airline says it is the first in the world to introduce the headrest, which is being fitted to Economy Class seats across all Emirates A350s, most Airbus A380s and Boeing 777s, and will arrive pre-installed on the 270 Boeing 777X aircraft it has on order. Three A350s are already flying with the new addition, with the rest of the A350 fleet due to be completed by the end of the year. Retrofitted A380s and 777s will follow from 2027.

The U-Dream forms part of Emirates’ Z400 seat by Safran Seats. Padded in leather, it has flexible side wings that fold inward to cradle the head and neck, helping passengers keep a stable sleeping position without slumping forwards or sideways. It also moves vertically and tilts, so it can be adjusted for different heights and body types. Emirates says the design has been independently tested to meet European Union Aviation Safety Agency standards, while cabin crew are trained to help passengers use it.

Tim Clark, president of Emirates Airline, called the headrest a significant improvement for long-haul economy passengers. ‘No more neck pillows needed,’ he said, adding that the design brings a level of ergonomic support usually associated with premium cabins.

The launch fits into Emirates’ wider push to make economy feel more considered. Its long-haul cabins already include widebody aircraft only, mood lighting, generous screens, complimentary meals, amenity kits, family services and ice, the airline’s entertainment system with more than 6,500 channels. Starlink is also being introduced across the fleet, allowing passengers to stream and browse at altitude.

emirates.com

Aries’ ‘No Problemo’ slogan – emblazoned on the London-based label’s sweaters, T-shirts and caps – has become so ubiquitous in streetwear circles that in 2024 it became its own entity, remaining under the control of creative director Sofia Prantera but operating as its own independent sub-label. (Prantera founded Aries in 2012 alongside Fergus Purcell, the lauded graphic designer who also created the ‘No Problemo’ logo, alongside the Palace ‘Penrose’ triangle.)

The initial launch, in early 2024, was titled ‘Area 001’ – a nod to one of the brand’s inspirations, extraterrestrial life (namely, the more kitschy graphics you might find around the likes of Area 54 in the United States, with a cartoon alien head appearing in the brand’s logo and as a motif on its clothing). ‘Drawing on ideas of extraterrestrial life, hidden knowledge, and outsider perspectives, the brand uses these references as metaphors for belonging, curiosity, inclusivity and exploration,’ Prantera described at the time.

Now, these references inform its first collaboration with American footwear behemoth Converse, launching tomorrow (21 July 2026). Taking the Chuck 70 as its canvas – a contemporary version of the original Converse Chuck Taylor, which dates back to the 1930s – the collaboration comprises a low and a high-top style, the former in white, the latter in black. In a nod to the collection’s inspirations – ‘1970s science fiction, UFO folklore and coming-of-age cinema’ – the low top features a luminous green stripe around the classic rubber sole, while both pairs have ‘Believe’ alongside a psychedelic swirl on the shoe’s tread.

No Problemo cites the films Stand by Me, The Outsiders and Back to the Future for the collaborative sneakers, which also feature both Converse and No Problemo branding, including a version of the Converse All Star Patch with an alien’s head at its centre. The shape of the alien logo is replicated in the shape of custom metal eyelets, while laces are imprinted with ‘I Want to Believe’, a nod to the poster in Fox Mulder’s basement office in The X-Files.

An accompanying campaign is photographed at ‘Hackney Henge’, the name for a stone circle in the east London borough created by artist Paula Haughney in 1990 to replicate Stonehenge in Wiltshire (its actual name is ‘Nature’s Throne’, and was part of an urban renewal scheme of the Lee Valley during the 1990s). ‘A couple are abducted while wearing improvised tinfoil hats and gowns as a tongue-in-cheek reference to one of conspiracy culture's most recognisable symbols,’ reads the synopsis. ‘It’s a fitting metaphor for No Problemo's fascination with outsider narratives, hidden knowledge and alternative ways of seeing the world.’

No Problemo x Converse launches July 21, 2026.

noproblemo.world

Breitling has announced three limited-edition timepieces that celebrate its partnership with Aston Martin, the first watches since the two companies announced their collaboration back in February 2026.

Available in three finishes, the watch has a sufficiently epic name, the Top Time B01 Chronograph 41 Tribute to Aston Martin DB5. It does, of course, reference the bellwether of all things Aston Martin, the 1963 DB5 grand tourer that has become one of the most iconic and recognisable car designs of all time. It would almost be unnatural if Breitling were to kick off such a partnership without acknowledging this car.

According to Georges Kern, CEO of House of Brands, the umbrella company that oversees Breitling along with the brands Universal Genève and Gallet, ‘the Aston Martin DB5 is one of those rare designs that never fades. It still feels as relevant today as it did in the 1960s. With this Top Time, we capture that sense of timeless style.’

The trio of watches make direct reference to the forms and materials introduced in the DB5, a rich palette of leather, wood and metal that continues to the benchmark for luxury sporting automotive interiors. The watch itself is also period correct, described by Breitling as its own ‘unconventional chronograph, created for a new, youthful, speed-driven audience’.

Happily, there’s another direct Aston connect, one that drives straight through the most prominent cultural waypoint of all, James Bond. In 1965’s Thunderball, a Breitling Top Time ref 2002 was worn by Sean Connery. This was the second on-screen appearance of Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 (first seen the year before in Goldfinger) and the first time that a watch took a starring role as a MacGuffin in the series (Q had equipped it with a Geiger counter).

In the hands of Breitling’s team, this special edition of the Top Time B01 Chronograph 41 might not be able to detect radiation, but it has been given a level of detail and elegance that befits the Smiths dials and leather-clad ambience of a DB5.

Elements like the cushion-shaped case, grooved corners, and mushroom pushers are all deliberate evocations of the 1960s chronograph; automotive gauges were also the direct reference for the form of the two ‘squircle’ subdials.

The leather strap pairs especially well with the wooden inner ring, adding a level of grain and detail that’s rarely found on a watch face. ‘This chronograph blends form with true function,’ says Pablo Widmer, Breitling’s head of product design. ‘As with the Aston Martin DB5, its beauty lies in its lines, materials, and finishings.’

Three distinct editions are available. The stainless steel finish, with silver dial, is limited to 1,022 pieces and represents the closest match to the original 1960s Top Time ref. 2002. There is also a 315-piece edition of a steel and platinum finished watch, with black lacquered dial.

Finally, Breitling is making just 250 individually numbered examples of an 18ct red gold edition, complete with dial cut from natural onyx stone (a first for Breitling).

The new editions use the Breitling Manufacture Caliber 01 chronograph movement with 70-hour power reserve that supports extended wear. The movement is clearly visible through the open sapphire-crystal caseback, finished with a dedicated Aston Martin–engraved rotor in rhodium-plated or 18ct red gold (depending on the edition).

‘These editions represent something truly distinct from anything we’ve created before,’ says Aston Martin’s CCO Marek Reichman. ‘The collaboration with Breitling brought together two brands with a shared appreciation for timeless design, craftsmanship, and innovation, allowing us to exchange ideas in a way that felt both natural and ambitious. The result is a watch that feels contemporary today, yet timeless for generations to come.’

Breitling Top Time B01 Chronograph 41 Tribute to Aston Martin DB5 is available with a sunray silver dial (£8,650), sunray brushed black lacquered dial (£14,400) and an 18ct rose gold and onyx dial (£35,100)
Breitling.com, @Breitling, AstonMartin.com, @AstonMartin

This 1970s apartment in Kifisia, in the leafy northern suburbs of Athens, sits among Beverly Hills-sized mansions and Michelin restaurants, and is itself located within a piece of cutting-edge 20th-century architecture. Rising above the capital’s ubiquitous graffiti-covered walls, the residential complex features a pair of twin towers that cantilever from central pillars like concrete umbrellas. In one of these is the newly remodelled home by Georgios Apostolopoulos Architects, as innovative as the building itself.

‘The apartment is part of the Stroggyli Polykatoikia (‘Round Apartment Building’) designed by architect Nikos Despotidis and built between 1973–1974,’ says Apostolopoulos of the pioneering building. ‘Despotidis explored new typologies of collective living, combining expressive form with rational construction. The concrete frame, continuous balconies and carefully choreographed circulation created a strong architectural identity – one that offered both structural freedom and spatial generosity.’

To complement this unusual site, Apostolopoulos reimagined the original one-bedroom apartment by completely reconfiguring traditional domestic boundaries. The process began with subtraction: all partitions were removed to reveal the apartment’s spatial potential and expose the existing structure.

The original layout comprised two long, narrow corridors leading separately to the bedroom at one end and the kitchen at the other, with the bathroom at the centre of the plan, and the living spaces confined to a small, elongated space with limited natural light. ‘Overall, the apartment felt fragmented, the bedroom was overly enclosed, the rooms were small, and daylight struggled to penetrate the interior,’ explains the architect. ‘Each function existed in isolation, reinforcing a sense of separation rather than continuity.’

The client’s challenging brief required fitting a kitchen, living and dining areas, plus two bedrooms, one bathroom and one toilet into this compact floor plan. For the architect, the answer lied in questioning the conventional role of room-making, resulting in a home conceived as ‘a continuous interior where light and movement flow without interruption’.

‘The client wanted to have a calm space within a busy part of the town and next to a busy road – a ‘cave like’ space that would accommodate all the functions that he needed,’ says Apostolopoulos. ‘To achieve this, we had to rethink how an apartment can be inhabited, questioning whether privacy is needed at all. This meant pushing the boundaries of conventional domestic layouts and exploring a more fluid, adaptable way of living.’

‘This idea required a high level of precision,’ says Apostolopoulos, which was only made possible by turning joinery into a key architectural element. ‘Danelis, the joiners we collaborated with, played a crucial role in realising this vision. Their craftsmanship made it possible to execute the movable elements and create the flexibility that we wanted,’ he continues. ‘The complexity increased further because all the air conditioning is hidden within the joinery, something that required careful co-ordination between design and construction.’

Equally key was the client’s willingness to agree to an unconventional concept with flexible, flowing spaces. The new floorplan includes a main bedroom that feels like a natural extension of the living area, with wardrobes acting as ‘layered filters’. On the other side of the apartment is a versatile space that can be used as a dining room, guest room or study thanks to an entire wall of joinery hiding a fold-down bed, integrated desk and storage.

‘When the joinery is closed, it reads as almost the room doesn’t exist, allowing the apartment to feel open and uninterrupted,’ says Apostolopoulos. ‘When needed, sliding doors create a private space, and the dropdown desk and fold-down bed allow it to shift effortlessly between a workspace and a bedroom. It is a room that appears only when required – and disappears when not required.’

At the centre of it all, replacing the old bathroom, is the new kitchen – ‘a social device treated less as a room and more as an inhabited object’. Anchoring the space is a large kitchen island overlooking the refurbished original fireplace, which is located between two floor-to-ceiling windows framing the balcony.

‘I was interested in the idea of concentrating all the kitchen functions into a single piece placed at the centre of the plan. Positioned this way, it allowed the kitchen to become the main socialising element, a place where cooking, conversation, drinking can happen. It also connects seamlessly with the living and dining.’

Slim-frame windows bring maximum light into the interiors, reinforcing the sense of continuity between spaces, while the simple, monochromatic palette – including microcement finishes across floors, walls and doors – allows Despotidis’ original structure to shine through.

georgiosapostolopoulos.com

The Modernist Society takes a detour from its usual publishing habits with a new monograph, The Architecture of Connection, featuring the work of painter Jen Orpin. We’re in the realm of unseen and overlooked infrastructure, with Orpin’s eye – and careful framing – capturing over 200 images of the bridges that span Britain’s motorways.

The choice of subject is certainly up the street of The Modernist’s usual patrons, not least because British motorway architecture is a very cohesive collection of post-war, proto-brutal and strictly functional structures. But Orpin has other motivations. Prior to embarking on the series, she had taken regularly journeys to visit her late father.

‘My dad passed away in December 2015 after three months in intensive care,’ she explains. ‘During that time, I travelled weekly between Manchester and Surrey. I became so familiar with each stretch of road and junction; with the bridges I passed under becoming landmarks. The journeys gave me time for reflection and became spaces where memory, grief, and nostalgia intertwined.’

This perspective gives a fresh layer of meaning to these structures; after all, who hasn’t marked a journey or a familiar route with landmarks such as these? These bridges might be seen as an unlikely subject for a landscape painter, but following her loss, the project consumed Orpin’s practice for eight years.

‘I was drawn to these liminal, overlooked places and concrete structures as both physical and symbolic forms: connecting places, people, and moments in time. They have become metaphors for transition, loss, and connection,’ Orpin says.

The Architecture of Connection brings the entire series together in a monograph for the first time, together with some of the artist’s writings about the work. The primary routes she took were the M1 and M6 motorways, along which one will find some of the most distinctive examples of motorway architecture.

The book was designed by the legendary Malcolm Garrett, renowned for his graphic design work across the British music industry. ‘Here was an unashamed celebration of a contemporary architecture often decried or ignored, yet rapidly becoming a timeless representation of the modern age,’ Garrett says. ‘Like Jen, I admired the elegance not hitherto associated with such functional structures. These images, both painterly and photographic, were of transient moments made effortlessly permanent through what they chose to include or exclude.’

Aficionados of motorway infrastructure – and there are plenty out there – will recognise many of these landmarks, including the Pennine Tower above Forton Services in Lancashire, the M6 bridge that (still) bears the logo of 80s band The Pies, or the Chalfont Viaduct, an Edwardian structure above the M25 that’s also a familiar graffiti site.

‘Jen’s paintings have a stillness and precision, echoed in Malcolm's design which gives them exactly the space they deserve,’ says Jack Hale, who co-founded The Modernist Society with Eddy Rhead and Maureen Ward in 2008. ‘it was a genuine pleasure to work with Jen and Malcolm on this book.’

The Architecture of Connection, Jen Orpin, £45. The first 100 orders will also receive a free limited-edition print produced by Klein Editions, The-Modernist.org, @TheModernist, JenOrpinPaintings.com, @JenOrpinPainter

Range Rover continues to edge itself upmarket, emphasising the company’s ability to customise in order to meet the most exacting client requirements. In addition to its Bespoke division, the company also has a Classic division, establish to cater to the growing number of customers who want to keep venerable machines on the road or simply source a beautiful restoration. Based in Coventry, it has its own dedicated team of engineers able to enhance and update earlier models.

Range Rover is obviously not alone in this endeavour. Third party companies have been eyeing up the original Series 1 Range Rover, with its iconic proportions and modernist edges. From the Lunaz EV conversion to the Twisted TRCC and Vinile’s Range Rover Classic, there’s plenty of competition.

Perhaps that’s why Range Rover has upped the ante with this delectable ‘Matched Pair’, a twin pack of bespoke craftsmanship that brings together a fully restored 1993 Range Rover Classic with a contemporary Range Rover SV Ultra. The former underwent a 2,000-hour restoration and has been trimmed and painted to be a complementary pair.

Both cars are finished in Titan Silver, with an interior trimmed in Ultrafabrics, an animal-free supplier used by Range Rover. This is the first time this material has been used in the Classic programme; both cars feature the SV Ultra duo-tone Orchid White and Cinder Grey colourway.

Other matching trim elements include the laser crafted seat patterns and mosaic perforations across each interior, and duo-tone steering wheel finishes. The door trims are also bespoke items, with brushed aluminium handles and colour-matched speaker covers.

The Classic model has been treated to Satin Platinum Atlas 16” wheels complete with diamond turned contrast rims, somewhat smaller than the 23” wheels found on the contemporary SV Ultra.

The 1993 car was originally an American market County Edition. In addition to the re-trimming and interior finishes, the Range Rover Classic has been fully mechanically uprated and rebuilt – from the 3.9-litre V8 through to the transmission, suspension, steering and braking systems.

The ensemble, which will be on display at the 2026 Monterey Car Week ahead of being offered through RM Sotheby's The Monterey Auction in August 2026, showcases the company’s ability to custom match specific colour and trim elements, regardless of the age of the vehicle in question.’

According to Dominic Elms, Director of Land Rover Classic, the project ‘shows how it is possible to create a truly individualised Range Rover with our bespoke service, whether it’s a custom colour palette, interior trim or personalised details.’

Things have been quiet on the Range Rover front in recent years but behind the scenes there’s frantic activity as new generation models and technologies cue up. Right now, the family consists of the flagship Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, Range Rover Velar and Range Rover Evoque. The company is also on the cusp of launching all-electric versions of the Range Rover and, in a surprise move, the Range Rover Sport.

Range Rover Bespoke, Range Rover Classic, Jaguar Land Rover Classic, @RangeRover

Aficionados, innovators and the comfortably moneyed but innately curious will get an early chance to get their hands on the new Ferrari Luce, courtesy of this summer’s RM Sotheby’s Auction at Monterey Car Week. Ferrari is presenting the first production Luce off the line, Chassis 0, for auction at the auctioneer's August sale, conjuring up a unique specification for this special car.

This unique first edition of the Luce was overseen by Ferrari’s Tailor Made programme, a service that is open to every customer across all Ferrari models. Luce will be no different, and the specification of this one-off car is but a small dip in the ocean in terms of what can be achieved.

We haven’t been living under a rock for the past few months so feel duty bound to point out that the Luce wasn’t exactly heralded by fanfares from the Ferraristi. Despite a cohesive, creative and hugely involved design process, courtesy of Jony Ive, Marc Newson and the rest of the team at LoveFrom, a vocal coterie of enraged keyboard warriors found plenty to object to, from concept, form and detail all the way down to the idea of an electrified Ferrari.

Perhaps Chassis 0 won’t change any minds, but it’s worth noting that this configuration is pretty stunning, bringing a fresh angle to the Luce’s controversial forms. A white Ferrari is inevitably rather Crockett and Tubbs, but on the Luce it looks nothing short of sensational. The paintwork is a unique Madreperla Semi-Gloss finish with the interior finished in Perla Le Mans metallic leather in Perla with Grigio Corvara secondary elements.

That white-on-white finish really accentuates the simplicity of car’s silhouette, with the monochrome details taken to the extreme with special wheels, bespoke brake calipers with even the Ferrari logo using an optical white background.

The paintwork contains a unique pigment that accentuates iridescent reflections – Ferrari describe them as ‘evolving from green to violet depending on the intensity and angle of the light.’ It also emphasises the distinction between the aerodynamic bodywork and the glazed passenger shell.

Inside, the exceptional interior is finished in white Le Mans metallic leather, another unique Ferrari development that high quality Swiss hides and a finish that brings more light into the already spacious car. On the ‘regular’ Luce, the secondary interior elements are usually finished in black, but on Chassis 0, the team at Tailor Made have used Grigio Corvara.

The whole package is finished off with a dedicated plaque to honour its unique status as the first production chassis of the Luce production programme.

The car is being sold without reserve, although RM Sotheby’s is suggesting that the value of this unique machine is somewhere in excess of $1.1m, a healthy mark-up over the c$645,000 US list price. Ferrari will be donating all proceeds of the sale to ‘benefit future educational initiatives’ through The Ferrari Foundation.

Ferrari Luce Chassis 0, offered without reserve, RMSothebys.com, Tailormade.Ferrari.com, Ferrari.com, @Ferrari.com

In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Make way for the pedalò, where 'form follows fun'

Carlo Ratti on the pedalò

You hire them by the hour. There are never any discounts, and they look back at you with the swagger of someone who knows you'll struggle to stop once you've had a taste. It is, after all, the most democratic entity on the Italian coast: the pedalò.

It is July, and it shows. The beach hums in the afternoon heat. Children pack sandcastles with hands sticky from ice lollies. Along the shoreline, the fleet of pedalò waits patiently for its next crew.

Despite its humble status today, its lineage is illustrious. Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebooks a craft driven by pedal-powered paddles. He, in turn, it seems, had taken his cue from the Badalone, Filippo Brunelleschi’s vessel designed to carry heavy blocks of marble up the Arno for the dome of Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore.

It was such an inventive project that it earned, in 1421, an ‘exclusive privilege’, considered by many the first industrial patent in history. Its fate, however, was less glorious: the Badalone sank on one of its early voyages.

One had to wait, then, until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the modern pedalò to appear. Those were the years when the spread of the bicycle made pedals seem to turn up everywhere: on land and even at sea.

The word pedalò comes from the French pédaler: once again, the French beat the Italians to the marketing. The primacy of invention, though, may still lie in the Peninsula. In 1913, at Gargnano on Lake Garda, the blacksmith Angelo Terzi built the Terziscafo: a five-metre-long larch craft, driven by the pedals of a bicycle. The outbreak of the First World War, however, cut its development short: Terzi was called up by the Alpini battalion, the prototype was left first abandoned and finally sold to a fisherman.

Since then, the engine has stayed practically identical. What has changed, instead, is everything around it: an entire floating menagerie of pedalòs with a slide, a sunshade, cup holders or a sundeck; then swans, unicorns, flamingos, dragons, giant ducks. A catalogue of improbable creatures that, in the summer haze, slide into afternoon hallucinations.

It is exactly the opposite of what Pier Luigi Nervi had imagined. For the great Italian civil engineer, technique would gradually lead design towards ‘true’ forms, ever more optimal. As with racing cars. Or aeroplanes, all much alike because governed by the same laws of aerodynamics.

In other words, he believed in one of the many interpretations of the famous maxim: ‘form follows function.’ The pedalò, by contrast, is its reverse: once the technical issues are resolved, imagination can go back to power.

And perhaps this is the secret of its longevity. For generations, it has accompanied Italian summers without changing function, while constantly changing form. The masks parade by - swan, unicorn, flamingo or duck - but the playful experience stays the same. One could say: ‘form follows fun.’

About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti

Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: “Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?” Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.

Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: “Objects should keep us company.” Especially during this scorching summer.

carlorattiassociati.com

Our Legacy has had an address on London’s Silver Place, a narrow alleyway in the city’s Soho neighbourhood, since 2014. Then, it marked the first outpost of the Swedish brand outside of its native country, and the choice of Soho, known for its after-dark denizens and hedonistic impulses, felt fitting: since Jockum Hallin, Cristopher Nying and Richardos Klarén founded the label in 2005, it has melded Scandinavian restraint with a countercultural energy.

Which is why, when it came to Our Legacy’s expansion – sales surpassed $50 million in 2025 and gained minority investment from Luxury Ventures, the investment arm of French luxury conglomerate LVMH – the brand chose full-scale renovation over a change of address. Opening this week, its new London flagship will occupy two connected storefronts, taking over 1-2 Silver Place.

Inside Our Legacy’s renovated London flagship

‘Expanding the story was something we needed for practical reasons, both to improve logistics and to create more room for a broader selection from our main collection,’ Cristopher Nying, creative director and co-founder, tells Wallpaper*. ‘We’ve always loved being on this street, and moving to a much larger space elsewhere didn’t feel right. Keeping the store intimate and close to our customers in London has always been important to us.’

Working with the Stockholm-based architectural agency Profan – Our Legacy’s longtime collaborator, founded by Anton Bogårdh, Disa Braunerhielm and Maximilian Olsson – the team have sought to capture the juxtaposition of rigour and rebelliousness that define the label. On the one hand, the space is what Nying describes as ‘clean and almost clinical, with a subtle laboratory-like feel’, as seen in planes of stainless steel and mirrors, undulating fibreglass and strip lighting, as one might find in an industrial setting.

On the other, there are elements designed to wear and take on a patina with time: namely, sets of curtains made by Stockholm-based Japanese textile artist Akane Moriyama, crafted from silk covered with beeswax, which will naturally ‘crease, age and evolve’. Elsewhere, birch and pine, used for flooring and staircases, were also chosen to degrade with wear (often, Our Legacy’s clothing is treated to appear already lived-in, with tears, frayed edges and pulled seams recurring motifs in the brand’s collections).

Artworks appear throughout the space, interrupting the otherwise minimal interiors: hidden deep within the store is Swedish artist Tobias Bradford’s ‘Nosedive’, a sculpture that depicts a bird nosediving into a metal fan, while a series of fan zines – many of them out of print – have been curated for the space, including those by BlackMass Publishing and the Swedish publication Jazz är farligt.

‘The store’s art and design reinforce the creative references that inform the brand, bringing elements of Sweden to the UK, and vice versa,’ says Nying, who also commissioned German photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg to capture ‘nocturnal London’ in a new series which will be distributed as postcards to celebrate the store’s opening.

It is an important opening for Our Legacy in its continued expansion from niche label to global fashion player: the brand now has five dedicated retail stores and, as of 2025, over 350 worldwide stockists. ‘[The renovated store] reflects our commitment to continually investing in ourselves and refining how we execute our vision,’ Oliver Saunders, the brand’s commercial director, tells Wallpaper*. ‘London has been our second home for the past 12 years, and the UK remains one of our most important markets.’

‘Over that time, we’ve built a strong community around the store, and expanding the space is both a reinvestment in that community and a way of reinforcing our presence in a city that has played such an important role for Our Legacy,’ he continues. ‘It’s a celebration of everything we’ve built over the past 12 years, while creating a space for the next chapter.’

Our Legacy London, 1-2 Silver Place, London W1F, is open now.

ourlegacy.com

There are few weeks in London’s calendar when the city feels quite as alive as it does during London Design Festival. Every September, museums, galleries and streets become the centre of conversation, where architects, designers and makers invite us to look differently at the spaces we move through every day.

The first programme announced for London Design Festival 2026, which returns from 12 to 20 September, looks at both the origins of design and its future direction. This year, both craft and artificial intelligence sit alongside one another as historic techniques are revisited through contemporary collaborations, exploring themes of migration, ecology, and cultural exchange across many confirmed projects.

London Design Festival 2026: programme announced

A bamboo pavilion with a bigger story to tell

Among the first commissions announced is The Pangolin Shield, the festival’s inaugural Landmark Project by the Anglo-Indian studio Studio Saar and structural engineers Atelier One. Installed on the Strand, the pavilion takes its cue from the pangolin, the shy, armour-plated mammal whose overlapping scales serve as the starting point for a structure made of bamboo and woven shields traditionally used by farming communities in north-eastern India.

While the pavilion could easily be appreciated for its impressive engineering, the aim is to encourage visitors to engage with it on a deeper level. It invites reflection on colonial histories, the movement of people and ideas, and the stories that materials carry as they journey across the Indian Ocean. Traditionally, the bamboo canopy serves both as shelter and as a space for contemplation, urging those on London’s busiest streets to slow down and be viewed.

Made looks back to the Barbican

Renowned for its iconic brutalist architecture, the Barbican has profoundly influenced London’s design imagination. Its impact is evident in contemporary interiors, furniture design, and even the conversations surrounding urban living.

This autumn, Made revisits that legacy with a new collection developed by designer Miriam Howitt, drawing on archival research into the estate and its original interiors. Furniture, lighting and textiles draw on the Barbican’s distinctive interiors. To accompany this, an installation at the festival explores how one of Britain’s most recognisable architectural landmarks continues to shape ideas of home decades after it first opened.

The V&A begins with an awakening

The V&A has become the spiritual home of the London Design Festival, and its annual commission often captures the mood of each edition. This year, Awakenings, curated by Carrie Chan and Kristian Volsing, looks at how design can reshape our relationship with the world around us.

Spread throughout the museum, the programme brings together designers including Aziza Kadyri, Eunjo Lee and Henry Svendsen, alongside new commissions exploring sound, identity, artificial intelligence and the natural world. There is a sense of curiosity running through the exhibition, as well as a sense that technology is no longer treated as something separate from craft. Instead, both are becoming part of the same conversation.

The Design Museum turns its attention to people behind the practice

The Design Museum’s programme spans fashion, furniture and contemporary design culture. A major ongoing retrospective celebrates NIGO, charting the Japanese designer’s influence across streetwear and luxury fashion. London-based designer, educator and cultural change-maker, Simone Brewster’s Platform installation continues her exploration of sculptural furniture and material histories, layered with references from 'palaeolithic fertility deities to African diasporic traditions'.

Away from the galleries, conversations take centre stage too. Brewster joins Jasmi Hussein, Emefa Cole and Hettie Judah for a discussion exploring design and motherhood, shifting the focus away from finished work, towards the lives and experiences that shape creative work.

Japanese craft meets contemporary design

This year, Craft x Tech Tokai Project continues its tradition of collaboration between Japanese artisans and international designers. The exhibition highlights the fusion of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary design, featuring media such as ceramics, washi paper, lacquer, textiles, and woodworking.

Featuring designers such as Bethan Laura Wood, David Caon, and Philippe Malouin, who engage with artisans whose techniques have been refined and passed down through generations, showcasing the exciting possibilities born from this rich exchange of ideas.

New conversations between Asia and London

Elsewhere, MixZ continues its exploration of cultural exchange between Asia and the UK through a pair of exhibitions taking place at the V&A and the Old Selfridges Hotel.

One of the exhibitions will highlight the ancient beauty of Dehua porcelain, while the other delves into the future with immersive technologies and artificial intelligence. Throughout both presentations, the focus is on collaboration as community, underscoring the idea that true innovation seldom occurs in a vacuum. Instead, it flourishes through the shared knowledge, materials, and ideas that flow between different cultures.

Lego Art is one of the more ambitious arms of the Danish toymaker’s empire of creativity. Past recreations of classic works range from Leonardo da Vinci to Claude Monet, Keith Haring to Robert Indiana.

The latest artist to get the brick-built treatment is Austrian master Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). In modern times, Klimt is firmly established as one of the big tickets of contemporary art collecting, but back in the day, his richly sensual and seductive artworks found favour in the gilded age of early 20th-century Vienna.

It’s to this epochal period that Lego has turned, recreating one of the artist’s very best-known works, The Kiss, painted between 1907 and 1908. The original, which measures nearly 2m square, hangs in Vienna’s Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, where it is one of the museum’s star attractions.

Although the Lego Kiss can’t match up to Klimt’s expansive scale, there is still a wealth of detail and a veritable bushel-load of bricks that have gone into the set; 4,000 pieces, to be precise. Measuring in at 60cm by 54cm, Lego’s design team, led by master model designer Milan Madge, has used numerous quirky build techniques to replicate the artist's style.

This has involved creating a multi-layered surface, a dense scattering of single and double-stud pieces, along with smooth and textured parts. In addition to a number of specially decorated Lego elements, there are also imaginative reuses, such as the coiled whip used in everything from Lego Botanical bouquets to a number of Indiana Jones sets (naturally).

The entire project was developed in close collaboration with Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, with Stephanie Auer, the museum’s curator of 19th- and 20th-century art, describing the process as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime experience'. 'Together with Milan Madge, we had extensive discussions about Gustav Klimt’s symbolism, ornamentation, and artistic techniques, as well as how these could be represented using Lego bricks,’ she explains.

Madge describes the process as a ‘unique creative challenge.’ ‘By combining golden Lego elements with specially decorated pieces, we were able to recreate the artwork’s distinctive shades and textures in a building experience that celebrates its extraordinary beauty,’ he continues.

The build process provides a vivid insight into the composition and textural make-up of the original painting. And thanks to inbuilt picture fasteners, once completed, Lego’s take on The Kiss is all set for display.

Lego Art Gustav Klimt - The Kiss, set number 31221, £269.99, Lego.com, Belvedere.at

Also read: Lego Architecture reaches its apotheosis in this massive model of the Sagrada Família

Thank heavens for the digital realm. Long-running driving-focused console and PC games have offered manufacturers a spectacular virtual showroom, a place to assemble their heritage fleet, current models and desirable rarities with precision digital modelling, sparkling paintwork, and cinematic lighting. Everyone is happy.

From Gran Turismo, now in its seventh version with over 500 officially licensed models, to Fortnite (which has had official in-game appearances from Lamborghini, Jeep, Porsche and many more) and all points in between, there’s considerably more chance that young and future consumers will get their first introduction to an auto brand via their games controllers, rather than a traditional ad or movie tie-in, let alone a showroom.

Not content with its considerable presence in Gran Turismo, Forza, Fortnite, and even PUBG: Battlegrounds, Aston Martin is now making a play for a different kind of virtual landscape. This is the all-digital Aston Martin Dreadnought, a futuristic SUV created as a playable item in the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.

First up, the design. In both name and appearance, the Dreadnought is an aggressive beast. The car has been modelled as if were packing a V12, making it as noisy as it is visually loud. Activision's incredibly popular combat game (over half a billion units shifted across its various franchises, formats and iterations) is mostly about blowing stuff up, so a lot of the carefully considered touches on this virtual super-SUV might go unnoticed as you’re trying hard not to die.

Nevertheless, Aston Martin’s design team has gone all out in its attempt to create a driving environment that’s materially rich, highly textured and – in this case – both rugged but also luxuriously functional. Freed from the tiresome restrictions of legislation, customer clinics and even the laws of physics, the Dreadnought is a pure design exercise.

The Dreadnought’s imperious front end features the ultimate abstraction of the classic Aston grill. Along the flanks, the deep sculpted wheel arches and window graphics carry trace memories of Aston’s road cars while the rear end has a hint of the brutish Valour Supercar, with signature rear light designs that first emerged on the track-only Vulcan from 2015.

Still, as a thought experiment, it shows how far Aston Martin can push its brand, way beyond the upscale super-SUV territory it joined with the DBX and into the realm of Range Rover, Rivian, Hummer et al. There's certainly a dose of the Warthog vehicle designed for Microsoft's Halo series in there and do we also detect a hint of Virgil Abloh’s monumental Project Maybach? There’s also a visual and technological link to endurance rallying, one of the most brutal and unforgiving of all motorsports, and a space hitherto unexplored by luxury brands like Aston.

Finally, the aesthetic approach ties into a fresh wave of angularity emerging from Aston Martin design, for so long the preserve of swooping, flowing curves and muscled bulges. With all that said, there’s no evidence to suggest that this is anything more than the design team playfully pushing pixels around to spread the Aston Martin wings and expand its aesthetic associations.

Aston has clearly lobbied hard to ensure the in-game Dreadnought experience is a superior one, with covetable levels of speed and armour. You also get Chiltern Green paintwork, herringbone weave carbon fibre bodywork, metallic gold gear lever and switchgear and Oxford Tan leather dashboard and door panel – not that players will have much time to scrutinise the details.

Describing the model as a 'deliberately extreme creation [that] combines Aston Martin’s high-performance, luxury DNA with the virtual landscape of Call of Duty,’ Aston Martin is making a bold play for a different level of cultural relevance.

‘The team have hugely enjoyed the not inconsiderable challenge of redefining what an Aston Martin can be when the only limit is imagination,’ says Marek Reichman, Aston Martin Chief Creative Officer, adding that Dreadnought was designed and conceived with real-world applications in mind – ‘navigating the streets of New York, powering through the monsoon-soaked roads of Mumbai, and performing with complete authenticity in every environment.’

According to Stefano Saporetti, Aston Martin’s Director of Brand Diversification, the collaboration is about ‘exploring new dimensions of luxury.’ ‘Expanding Aston Martin’s footprint into the gaming world allows us to engage with a new generation on their own terms,’ Saporetti explains, ‘The Dreadnought isn't just a digital vehicle; it’s a strategic gateway for a younger, global audience to experience our ultra-luxury DNA. By pushing the boundaries of virtual engineering, we are ensuring that the spirit of Aston Martin resonates powerfully with the luxury consumers of tomorrow.’

Whether the all-out militaristic imagery plays well in a world where all-out militarism is an uncomfortable fact of daily geo-politics is another matter.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 will be published by Activision on Friday, October 23, 2026, CallofDuty.com, AstonMartin.com

Plans have been revealed for London's BT Tower to be transformed into a hotel by London-based studio Orms Architecture. The consultation, which took place on Monday (13 July 2026), included details of the planned overhaul of the 177m-tall tower, such as the extension of the tower’s podium buildings, a swimming pool, and a public square.

The proposal also revealed the project's construction schedule – and it is sooner than you’d think. After the second consultation in July is finalised, along with planning consent granted from Camden Council in September this year, construction will begin in 2029, with the building set to open in 2033.

The future of the BT Tower in London

The American hotel chain MCR is behind the transformation of the former telecommunications tower, having acquired the building for a cool £270 million from the BT Group in 2024.

The proposal includes a restoration of the former 1930s telephone exchange, the Howland building, into hotel rooms. Plans also show the addition of a second staircase and four rooms positioned around the original concrete core of the tower, using this main body as the hotel's framework.

Additionally, the 1960s façade of the main ground-floor building will be renovated to accommodate shop fronts and other retail uses. Although there is no mention of bringing back the revolving restaurant, the public will have access to a revolving observation deck at the top of the tower.

There will also be a chance to swim at the tower, with plans for a rooftop swimming pool inspired by MCR's (and Wallpaper* Travel Guide favourite) TWA Hotel in New York. While it is available to hotel guests, the public will also be able to book a slot to use the heated, infinity-edge pool.

In consultation documents, Orms stated: ‘While maintaining the overall structure, we will remove unsightly modern additions to the 1960s exterior on the ground floor. We will then introduce retail on the ground floor and add a modest pavilion structure on the roof.’

The final part of Orms’ plan is to create a public square accessible from Howland Street and Maple Street. However, it remains uncertain what will be in store within levels 24 to 30.

Since the tower's completion in 1964, the building has undergone many iterations. Originally commissioned by the General Post Office to provide telecoms, it also housed a revolving restaurant, which closed in 1971 after a bomb exploded.

After its renaming to the British Telecom Tower in the early 1980s, the tower was closed to the public altogether from 1981. Since then, BT Tower has seen a 360-degree lighting display installed, in the early 2000s, but Orms’ plans for the tower are the most expansive to date.

You can read more about the consultation here

Fashion designer Jil Sander made her first foray into furniture design in 2025. Collaborating with the German furniture designer Thonet, she brought her minimalist yet innovative approach to reinterpretations of classic Bauhaus designs by Mart Stam, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Now, she has added two new designs to the resulting JS Thonet collection: the ‘S 411’ lounge chair and the ‘S 1070’ table. Both pieces, rooted in technical developments, offer contemporary takes on classic designs and are available in ‘Serious’ and ‘Nordic’ editions, comprising more sober and lighter colours and finishes, respectively.

The lounge chair takes its framework from a Thonet factory design that dates back to 1932. Its distinct, S-shaped tubular frame combines an elegant cantilevered form with sprung upholstery and is paired with a matching footstool for comfort.

In her design approach, Sander sees herself as closely aligned with the Bauhaus philosophy of elevating everyday objects by marrying functionalism with minimalist aesthetics, but also with Marcel Breuer in particular. ‘It was important to Breuer to combine industrial techniques and components with attractive, high-quality traditional materials such as leather, wood, and tubular steel. He strove to reconcile avant-garde aesthetics with an appreciation for comfort. This approach showed foresight and makes all the difference in the market today.’

She adds, 'The chair appears to defy gravity, in a spirit of constructivism, as if floating freely in space,' she says. 'I wanted to achieve this weightlessness without the glitz of chrome, grounding the “S 411”.'

The JS Thonet collection’s new ‘S 1070’ tables, meanwhile, are an interpretation of a Glen Oliver Löw design from 2004, which itself nodded to Bauhaus designs – in particular, Marcel Breuer’s 1920s ‘B 9’ nesting tables.

Sander has taken the clean-lined piece and added her own finishes and colours, her glossy tabletop nodding to the finish on a Steinway grand piano. ‘To me, colours are like musical notes that can speak to each other and resonate by association,’ she says.

Sander’s purist aesthetic echoes throughout the collection, as Thonet’s creative director Norbert Ruf notes: ‘Jil Sander’s designs have always represented laid-back, elegant luxury and her clothes are worn with pleasure year after year. [She] wants to use her products to convey a sense of value.’

thonet.de

Also in the JS Thonet collection

It turns out that portability is the key to happy living with a projector. The old days of having a hefty machine hard-wired into the ceiling to approximate a cinematic screening room have long been usurped by compact, powerful devices that are happy to be moved from room to room depending on the occasion.

XGIMI is boosting its projector portfolio with two new products, following on from last year’s ultra-compact Vibe One. The new Elfin Flip 4K and Elfin Flip Laser replace the Elfin Flip Plus, with the former bringing 4K projection for the first time and both units incorporating a new RGB Triple Laser system offering triple the brightness of their predecessor.

Both projectors share an ultra-compact form language, with an exterior armature that protects the lens when not in use and serves as a frame and stand – or even carrying handle for the 1.55kg unit – to keep it steady when in use. The projector can be rotated through 150 degrees using this frame so ceiling projection is definitely on the table.

Onboard technology includes a Harmon Kardon speaker with Dolby Audio support and inbuilt Google TV. The 4K model is the one to choose for gaming performance – it pairs a brightness of 1,600 ISO Lumens with a contrast ratio of 20,000:1 (eg, the brightest point is around 20,000 times brighter than the darkest black) – the earlier Flip Plus managed a CR of 4,000:1.

There’s also on onboard optical zoom to help with picture set-up and the projectors have a sensor that can adapt the colour balance depending on the shade of paint on your wall. This works hand in hand with XGIMI’s Intelligent Screen Adapt (ISA) technology that provides auto keystone and focus modes. Connectivity includes Bluetooth 5.2, USB and HDMI for casting from laptops and phones.

At just 24.5cm wide, the compact unit can create a projection between 40 and 200 inches, making it an excellent choice for inside or out. Finally, there’s XGIMI’s own quirky WALL app, which transforms the projection into a wall-sized screensaver with a variety of ambient and exotic places to have running in the background.

XGIMI Elfin Flip Laser, £689, and XGIMI Elfin Flip 4K, £869, also available at uk.xgimi.com

All credit to We Are Rewind for taking the cult of the cassette to new and unexpected places. Not content with being amongst the first manufacturers to get back into the format back in 2022, the French company has continued to keep the compact cassette in the hearts and minds of analogue fetishists with a slew of limited editions, including the colourful Edith WE-001 and the Curtis GB-001 boombox.

Now there’s yet another edition of the WE-001, only this time the company has tapped into the motherlode of sonic creativity by teaming up with none other than Pink Floyd. This collaboration steps right back into the 1970s with graphics inspired by The Dark Side of the Moon, the 1973 album that has already been honoured with its own turntable courtesy of Pro-Ject Audio Systems as well as countless reissues (and even a Pentagram-designed box set).

Pink Floyd completists will now have to dig deep once more, because accompanying the Pink Floyd X We Are Rewind cassette player is an exclusive new release of the album on tape – the only way you can get the 50th anniversary remaster in this format, to be precise. Back in the day, Dark Side sold impressively well on cassette, making up a substantial chunk of the album’s 50 million sales.

This edition of the WE-001 has all the goodness of the regular model – Bluetooth 5.1 as well as a wired headphone jack, built-in rechargeable battery, recording ability via line-in and an (optional) belt clip.

But aren’t the icons of audiophile quality space rock a little above the wow and flutter of the analogue cassette deck? According to Pink Floyd’s venerable drummer Nick Mason, definitely not. ‘I still have enormous affection for the cassette,’ Mason says, ‘It really was a major breakthrough – not only with the Sony Walkman but with some of the more up-market recorders. I still have my Nakamichi on the shelf and look forward to testing it with the new The Dark Side of the Moon cassette.’

For We Are Rewind’s founder and CEO Romain Boudruche, the tie-in is a perfect one. ‘To call The Dark Side of the Moon a classic album is an understatement. In many ways, it set the tone for what an album experience should be as a continuous piece of sonic art but also used state-of-the-art production techniques and sounds which make it a true musical experience,’ Boudruche says. ‘We're happy that We Are Rewind can play a part in helping preserve the physical album experience.’

In this age of retro-tech and intentional disruption, the last word goes to Mason. ‘Am I correct in assuming that the next major issue will be The Dark Side of the Moon in a large package consisting of the album divided up into 78 RPM discs?’ he asks. Our money is on a wax cylinder edition for the album’s centenary.

We Are Rewind X Pink Floyd WE-001, €179 / £159 / $199, WeAreRewind.com, @WeAreRewind

A Blakely Island cabin was designed for immersive forest living among the mature trees of the San Juan Islands archipelago on the Salish Sea. This corner of Washington state is rich in nature, with the particular site nestled between a glacial erratic rock and Douglas fir trees. Within this leafy setting, Wittman Estes has designed a private retreat drawing on the most basic of architectural escapes, in the tradition of Thoreau’s Walden Cabin and Le Corbusier’s 1952 Cabanon.

Tour this Blakely Island cabin in Washington state

Led by architect Matt Wittman and landscape designer Jody Estes, the Seattle-based architecture practice was well placed to tackle the challenge of this commission, a tiny 400 sq ft guest house deep in the woods and offering sweeping views of foliage and water. The raised volume sits on stilts to minimise disturbance to its natural site.

The bijou structure measures a mere 16ft x 20ft. The boxy volume contains a small kitchen, one Murphy bed, one bath, and an open loft area with two bunk beds. The interior is a simple and flowing single space, guiding the eye outwards towards the magnificent vistas.

Made primarily out of timber inside and out (a Western red cedar main body is accessed by a suspended metal walkway), the interiors feel cosy and warm. Between the hardwood decking that continues the forest's material palette indoors and the large glazed openings (including a generous corner-bathroom window), there's synergy between indoors and outdoors.

The Blakely Island cabin was constructed using modular elements and off-site fabrication. The entire house was prefabricated at the contractor’s yard in Everett before being moved, in parts, and reassembled on-site.

'Local materials and small spaces distil living down to a simple essence; in the words of Thoreau, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life",' the architects explain.

wittman-estes.com

It’s been a busy few years for Selldorf Architects, the award-winning New York practice helmed by US400 architect Annabelle Selldorf, with museum projects including The Frick, The National Gallery and The Louvre in the books or on the boards.

The Clark Art Institute, a renowned museum and research institute located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is also set to receive the Selldorf treatment, via a new 15,000 sq ft wing, slated to open in 2028.

The addition will include 12 dedicated galleries to house more than 300 works of art donated by Aso O. Tavitian, a self-made entrepreneur who amassed a formidable collection of European art between 2004 up until his death in 2020. Tavitian also allowed for a $45 million gift to fund construction and support his collection’s curation and care.

‘Before Aso Tavidian's untimely passing, we had a discussion with him about who would be the ideal architect of the wing. Annabelle Selldorf was the person that he wanted, and the person that we wanted,’ said museum director Esther Bell during a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

The architects, who had renovated the Clark’s Manton Research Center a decade ago, faced a challenging task: how to unite a 1970s red granite gallery wing with the Clark's original marble building, a 1950s neoclassical design by Daniel Perry. (Tadao Ando also has two structures on the 140-acre campus). Previously, the buildings had been connected in a ‘shall we say, inelegant way,’ via a bridge, Annabelle Selldorf said. ‘It never felt like it was a gracious transition between one and the other.’

‘They’re personalities,’ the architect added, ‘So, what is one to do but to create a companion?’

That architectural 'companion' was revealed Wednesday for the first time. The insertion is Selldorf's brand of quiet elegance, appearing as a simple rectilinear volume nestled between two existing buildings. The facade, however, is a pixelated array of Calacatta Malva marble, whose rich indigo veining helps create a visual transition between the all-white ‘50s building and the speckled red-and-blue granite one from the '70s. The move, ‘creates a kind of mosaic but also brings together colouration and a sympathy in two directions,’ Selldorf explained.

The gallery interiors will be similarly straight-forward, with white oak flooring and bronze-framed windows, all the better to show off a new landscape, designed by Reed Hildebrand, and Tavitian’s treasures, which include four centuries of arresting Renaissance, Netherlandish, Baroque and 18th-century French artworks by Anthony van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Elizabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun and more. The works are the subject of an exhibition, now on view at the Clark through February 2027.

‘There's simply nothing more fun and interesting than to work with the curators, get to know the art, look at it first on small images on the computer, and then see the real thing,' Selldorf said. 'I think we're going to make really extraordinarily beautiful spaces for galleries in these 12 rooms.'

Since Margaret Howell began her eponymous label in 1970, the designer has always favoured the timeless over ephemeral trends. ‘Consistency in authenticity’ is the brand’s tagline, and its continuing success, over half a century on, is a testament to Howell’s eye for creating a wardrobe that is built to last.

She applies this same philosophy to her collaborations, which have seen her unite with other companies with a similar ethos: she has worked with heritage outerwear brand Barbour, Japanese sportswear label Mizuno, and even Anglepoise, creating a version of its Type 75 task lamp, one of the most enduring British design objects of our century.

Introducing the Dr Martens X MHL 1461 shoe

A new collaboration, through her MHL line – a functional, workwear-inspired offshoot utilising tougher fabrications – sees Howell reimagine another design classic, Dr Martens’ 1461 shoe. First introduced in 1961, one year after the advent of its signature heavy boot, the 1461 was originally conceived as a hard-wearing work shoe (subsequently, it has been adopted by both fashion and subculture).

‘A Dr Martens lace-up shoe is timeless,’ asserts Howell. ‘It is also durable, well-made and suitable for a person of any age – much like our MHL collection.’

As such, Howell’s version of the 1461 is one of minimal intervention; instead of fully reimagining the style, she has added a padded heel collar and tab, unwaxed cotton laces, and a double-stitched toe cap. These subtle details, says Howell, were drawn from other work shoes she discovered in the Dr Martens archive.

Another focus is the construction, which takes place at the brand’s Made in England factory in Northamptonshire, the spiritual home of shoe manufacturing in the United Kingdom. Each pair is made from chrome-free leather from Leeds tannery CF Stead, grained and oiled to give richness to the brown and black leather (the shoe is available in two colourways). Softer to the touch than the classic 1461, Howell’s version is designed to patina and age over time.

‘[This collaboration] started with a deep respect for the way that Margaret and [her] team approach design,’ says Michael Ford, head of brand concepts and partnerships, Dr Martens. ‘With a respect for the past, but retold for today – which is the approach we have taken into this project – starting with our Iconic 1461 and reinterpreting it with details pulled directly out of our archive.’

Dr Martens x MHL 1461 shoe is available from 16 July 2026, at Margaret Howell’s website and stores, drmartens.com, as well as selected retailers, including END (below).

Although both open- and hard-topped versions of the new 849 Testarossa were announced together last September, Ferrari has staggered the launches, with the Spider following a few months after Ferrari allowed the media to put the hard-top through its paces on Seville’s Monteblanco circuit.

Whilst a track is more in keeping with the Testarossa’s racing heritage, the Spider variant was launched in Tenerife, a very different set of circumstances that help emphasise the sonic boost one gets from dropping the top. Before we take to the road, a word about aesthetics.

Sandwiched between the Testarossa driving launches was an unprecedented event for Ferrari, the launch of its first EV. Inside and out, the Ferrari Luce turned out to be purpose-built for global controversy. Not from us – we loved it – but from the kind of person who believes Ferrari should only build cars that look like the 849 Testarossa Spider.

Horses for courses, naturally, but if you can honestly look at these images of the 849, and then back at the Luce and conclude that the latter is in some way aesthetically inferior, then we have very different definitions of successful automotive design. It’s true that in photographs the sober elegance of the Luce doesn't always stick the landing – it's very angle dependant.

In contrast, the aggressively idiosyncratic drama of the Testarossa is more like a Frankenstein's monster of this and that, devoted primarily to the twin gods of aerodynamics and thermodynamics, with aesthetics trailing a distant third.

Aerodynamics can be weirdly messy and counterintuitive, and Ferrari has leant hard into its idiosyncrasies. The vertical slash behind the cockpit still discombobulates, as does the prominent air intake just behind the door shut line; it’s clearly hyper-functional, required to suck air into the twin-turbo V8, but it falls short of the aesthetics of pitlane practicality.

According to Ferrari, this element creates ‘the pinched effect of a corset’, their words, not ours, but it adds an unnecessary verticality to a horizontal form. It is, as always, form that follows function, although drama has been allowed to elbow its way into the chat.

As Adam Hay-Nicholls previously noted, the Testarossa’s design ‘has a Lego quality. I had my reservations when I first saw renderings, but in the flesh, I’m won over. Certainly, it’s the most extroverted cavallino we’ve seen in years. It’s so brash you might confuse it with a Lamborghini. The 849’s immediate predecessor, the SF90, was quite nerdy and inelegant. Contrastingly, its replacement is a jock in catwalk couture.'

Kudos, therefore, to the Ferrari brand machine for realising its inherent elasticity. With the Luce, Ferrari has shown that it can accommodate so much more than just pin-up poster fantasies.

Back to the here and now and we’re very much in the land of automotive romance. The Testarossa has just landed in Tenerife and the island has not seen anything like it. The silvery press cars flash around the volcanic landscapes, rocky coasts, and semi-tropical plains looking to all the world like a fleet of UAPs.

It is undeniably dramatic, but also awkward and fussy. Created alongside the hard-top, it shares an identical silhouette, with a compact folding roof mechanism that stows flat on the rear deck. With the top down and rear wind-protector raised, there’s minimal buffeting but maximal noise.

As a hybrid, you have the choice as to whether or not that sonic signature is imposed on passers-by; it’s pretty easy to select EV mode and glide silently past unseeing crowds. With the cylinders firing, there’s definitely more pointing and waving; could EVs be damaging the egos of the super-rich with their stealthy ways? It’s not as if lack of power is an issue. In total, there’s 1050hp on tap, 830hp of which comes via the V8. Three electric motors put out 220hp between them, literally electrifying the performance and making silent running a possibility.

This is a flagship, so it makes sense that stats are impressive, power outputs are high and superlatives come thick and fast. The largest turbocharger ever used on a Ferrari. The most powerful Spider model Ferrari has ever made. The most powerful V8 Ferrari has ever made. There’s a lot of engine pornography here, more than enough to offset the angry men put out by the Luce’s lack of combustion (although the glass engine cover gives only a disappointingly distant glimpse of the mechanisms). If you have the space and conditions to try it out, then zero to 100km/h can be achieved in 2.25 seconds.

Other componentry is similarly impressive, from three new specially developed tyres (courtesy of partnerships with Pirelli, Bridgestone and Michelin) to the twin aerodynamic winglets at the rear, and Ferrari’s hugely sophisticated dynamics, suspension and power management systems. All of this is conveyed in an info-dump presentation film, narrated by a voice that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1970s school science programme. At the end of it all, we have absorbed a substantial amount of information and feel renewed respect for Ferrari’s unstinting attention to detail.

One person’s detail is another’s massive complexity, and to the uninitiated, the 849 Spider’s cockpit is quite daunting. Ferrari has returned to physical steering wheel buttons after a disastrous foray into capacitive switching and most everything to do with the car’s drive and suspension systems can be accessed from the wheel. With the best will in the world, it’s not an ergonomic walk in the park, although familiarity will eventually blunt some of the more esoteric angles. This is where the Luce definitely has the edge.

The Spider’s roof adds some weight – around 90kg – but doesn’t make an appreciable difference to the car’s performance. The roof has impressive stats of its own; it can drop or rise in just 14 seconds at speeds of up to 45km/h. Behind it, the two winglets evoke the visual drama of the 1970s-era Sport Prototype models like the 512M and 512S. Customers who feel the car is not sufficiently distinctive can opt for the Assetto Fiorano specification which amps up the aero, strips out some weight and punches up the cost.

Tenerife is an island of two halves, bisected by steep, steep gradients and thick bands of cloud that bracket its varied different elevations. Spectacular but busy coastal roads and the occasional highway contrast with quieter, twistier fare at higher altitudes, where cloud cover gives way to baking sun. It’s a place to enjoy the Testarossa Spider’s breadth of ability, from silent cruise through seaside towns to flooring it up the mountain roads.

There’s an intoxicating balance between the perfectly weighted steering and the responsiveness of the throttle, with the click of paddle shifters only cementing the harmonious relationship between driver and machine. On a public road, the limits are very distant, but the 849 has a surefootedness and verve that can transform all types of motion into some kind of pleasure.

Whatever Ferrari might think, and however hard its committed team of engineers works to hone and fettle the driving experience, a car like this is ultimately about the drama. In that respect, taking the roof off is the simplest way to amp up the brand’s key attributes, ie, the sound created by the V8 and the attention garnered.

As a result, Ferrari typically expects more customers to opt for a Spider, with identical looks, feel and performance but more options when it comes to enjoying the car. But let’s not forget the impracticalities, like the tiny luggage space, or the visual and aural aggression that isn’t necessarily what you want to convey 100 per cent of the time.

The 849 Testarossa Spider certainly scratches the itch for those beset by the cult of the brand, whether valued customer or mere civilian. For the vast majority of people, Ferrari’s sturm und drang is inevitably experienced as a vicarious pleasure, via an expat playboy noisily riding the lower gears as he races between pelican crossings in Knightsbridge, perhaps, or a lucky journalist rumbling through a remote mountain village.

For these fans, a Ferrari is considered to be a rare but thrilling part of the public infrastructure, a sonic and visual presence that gives pleasure without ownership. Trickle-down economics might be a phantom construct, but trickle-down joy is another thing altogether. Perhaps that’s the intangible Ferrari quality people feel might be missing from the Luce. The Testarossa has it in spades.

Ferrari 849 Testarossa Spider, from £442,467, Ferrari.com, @Ferrari

After eight years under the leadership of architect Stefano Boeri, the Triennale di Milano today inaugurated a new president. Vincenzo Trione, a professor of art and media history at Milan's IULM University, a columnist for Corriere della Sera and a curator of modern and contemporary art, used his first press conference to lay out his vision for what he described as a 'deeply Italian' next four years.

'We are living in an age in which it is perhaps more important to ask questions than to offer answers,' Trione announced during the presentation of his four-year programme. 'We have sought to create an institution that endeavours to ask questions and regards all our activities as possible and open-ended answers.

'We will begin with a major question – a decisive question of our time. From this question will stem the exhibitions, the public programme and a series of initiatives. Every year, an installation that will serve as a manifesto for that year's Triennale will be placed at the entrance to the Palazzo dell'Arte, becoming, in a sense, our programmatic statement and our artistic manifesto.'

Beyond the exhibitions, Trione outlined a wide-ranging public programme that will accompany each exhibition, comprising lectures by leading thinkers alongside seminars and conferences. The first will be hosted by Franco-Tunisian sociologist Asma Mhalla and will focus on resistance in times of crisis.

Strengthening Triennale’s educational mission

As a longtime academic, Trione also emphasised the institution's educational mission and its relationship with universities and research institutions, including the revival of the Triennale's Centro Studi (Study Centre), originally founded by Giuseppe Pagano and Piero Bottoni in the 1940s. He also announced plans to establish three-year degree and PhD programmes offering advanced training in curatorial studies, architecture, design and fashion.

Alongside the new cultural programme, Trione also unveiled a new Scientific Committee, led by architect and designer Michele De Lucchi, who will also serve as the Triennale's creative director and curator of the Museo del Design Italiano. Joining him are Manuela Lucà-Dazio, formerly managing director of the Venice Biennale and currently executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Foundation, who will oversee architecture; and Andrea Villani, currently curator of the Ministry of Culture's Digital Heritage Gateway Platform and formerly curator of the Museum of Civilizations in Rome, who will lead contemporary art.

Sharing a brief remark during the announcement, De Lucchi hinted at some of the themes his tenure as curator of the Museo del Design Italiano would explore. 'I've always held on to this idea that Italian design is shaped by wonderful entrepreneurs and architects,' he said. 'But the area where we perhaps need to focus more attention is on the artisans, because I must say that in Italy there are still artisans who have disappeared in many other countries around the world. This culture of Italian craftsmanship, this culture of manufacturing, is a truly very special one.'

In his concluding remarks, Trione made a point of noting that although De Lucchi, Villani and Lucà-Dazio each bring extensive international experience, he considers them all 'deeply Italian'.

'I believe that at a time when there has been a blatant preference for foreign figures in the selection of curators and commissioners, this small cultural signal is worth highlighting,' he said. It was an interesting choice of words for Italy's foremost design institution in its most cosmopolitan city, at a time when Milan's growing international profile has increasingly set it apart from the country at large.

While the 2027 programme will be announced this autumn, visitors can look forward to an upcoming retrospective on modernist sculptor Costantino Nivola, which will open in November 2026, as well as a tribute to the American singer and poet Patti Smith, staged in collaboration with Fondation Cartier, also slated for November.

triennale.org

If your summer has been a warm one, relief is at hand – La Maison du Chocolat has launched a new collection of ice creams and frozen chocolates, the perfect way to cool down and refresh those taste buds at the same time.

Melt into La Maison du Chocolat's summer collection

Since its founding in 1977, at 225 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, the chocolate house has flirted with an almost couture-style approach to its craft, elevating the concept of what chocolate can be. This continues today, with the Parisian chocolate house unveiling an array of summer sorbets, smooth ice creams, and frozen bars in an assortment of flavours.

Succumb to vanilla marbled with chocolate caramel, pistachio, or zingy raspberry. Or devour artisanal ice cream sticks in pistachio, dark chocolate, vanilla, and hazelnut praline, or raspberry and passionfruit.

If you're a chocolate lover and have lost a bar or two to the sweltering sun, then Nicolas Cloiseau has developed a solution. The head chocolatier at La Maison du Chocolat has reinvented ganache for chocolate to be enjoyed fresh or frozen. The frozen chocolates come in three flavours: lemon and elderberry, vanilla from Madagascar and Papua, and caramel and fleur de sel.

La Maison du Chocolat’s new collection could be summer’s most stylish edible treats. No surprise, given founder Robert Linxe’s connection to couture; he has previously said: ‘I was deeply drawn to couture, my uncle was a tailor, and I had an eye for it. We were fortunate to meet extraordinary people: the Chanels, the Diors, the Balmains. I would study the colours of the dresses. I only loved truly beautiful things. It wasn’t out of envy, just for the delicacy. You mustn’t look at average houses. You must always aim very high.’

lamaisonduchocolat.com

Beach cars are back in fashion and it’s not hard to see why. The stripped-back aesthetic of seaside-centric automobiles is the perfect intersection of nautical style and custom design. Castagna Milano’s custom Topolino Spiaggina, Fiat’s own Topolino Vilebrequin (recently updated for 2026), the closely related Citroën Ami Buggy, the revived electric Moke, the restomodded Fiat 500 Jolly Spiaggina Icon-e or even the Renault 4 JP4x4 Concept are all vying for the attention of smart seaside sets around the world.

Now there’s another addition to the pile. This is the Crayford Mini Mojito Mk2, a hand-built beach car available as both ICE and EV variants. The Mojito is a restomod, starting with a base spirit of genuine British Leyland Mini, seasoned with a variety of options and potentially endless customisation. In the UK, that originality has the added bonus of not requiring an MOT or road tax, as well as access to specialist classic car insurance.

The original Mini bodyshell is opened up by the removal of the doors and the addition of a sliding sunroof. Marine-grade weatherproof upholstery is added, along with sustainable teak flooring and a choice of four body colours – White Sand, Beach Yellow, or Surf Blue. We spoke to Kent Thirley, executive director of Crayford Automobiles – a company that has been modifying Minis since 1963 – about the design and spirit of the new Mk2.

Wallpaper*: What are the mechanical upgrades to the car made as part of the conversion?

Kent Thirley: There are no mechanical upgrades apart from retuning the Mini’s engine for low-end torque instead of top-end performance and installing Mini Cooper-spec disc brakes to ensure safe stopping capability in modern traffic conditions and an enhanced driving experience.

But, as the Mojito Mk2 is a hand-built car, clients have the option to either order a base car with upgrades already on it, or have upgrades retrofitted at the Crayford Automobiles factory.

W*: Is there any particular era or version of the original Mini that suits the conversion best?

KT: No. It depends entirely on the customer preference or what base cars we have in stock for immediate delivery at a specific time.

W*: Talk us through the various options available to buyers who want a really bespoke product

KT: There is no specific options list. As a low-volume custom coachbuilt car that’s delivered directly to the customer by the factory, virtually anything can be done – as long as the quality and safety of the base car are not compromised.

W*: Who do you think are the key buyers and target audience for this car?

KT: We expect our latest Mini Mojito to appeal to various buyers. This could include yacht owners, hotel groups, estate owners, or car collectors. However, as we are aiming to keep the entry price very attainable, this will likely open the possibility of ownership to many more people that want to own and drive something completely unique.

W*: Given the precedents from Fiat and Renault, were there any beach style Mini conversions back in the day?

KT: Not that we are aware of, other than a few ‘experimental’ cars made by Morris. But these prototypes were never sold to the public.

W*: What's the deal with Crayford these days? What else does the company do and is it still connected to the convertible specialists?

KT: The Mojito is the only Mini conversion currently being delivered by Crayford Automobiles. But there are other head-turning designs being worked on and we carry out ‘official’ restorations of original Crayford models – something that is helping to keep the proud Crayford name alive.

Crayford Mini Mojito Mk2, from £29,950, CrayfordAutomobiles.com, @CrayfordAutomobiles

Who would think a fridge could be cute and collectable? Well, Rocco’s smart fridge got that bit more exciting thanks to a limited-edition collaboration with Gohar World. The viral mini fridge company (which teamed up with New York’s renowned Kat’z Deli on a limited edition in 2025) has revealed a new version in a sleek piano-black finish, chosen to merge into any setting as a piece of furniture.

Rocco, which specialises in high-tech, temperature-controlled drinks fridges, aims to make ‘every day a mini celebration’. This makes it a perfect partner for sisters Laila and Nadia Gohar – founders of Gohar World – known for their whimsical tabletop settings and design pieces crafted for entertaining.

Gohar World's mini fridge for Rocco

The special version of The Rocco Fridge is finished in Mirror Black, a first of its kind for the brand. To achieve its ultra-reflective surface, each fridge undergoes an automotive finishing process, including premium lacquer, ceramic coating, three-stage polishing, and a final wax.

If you’re familiar with the Gohar universe, you’ll know the sisters are not afraid to have fun. And in true Gohar World form, the collaboration extends beyond the fridge. Each appliance includes a pair of champagne coupes, designed exclusively by Gohar World and Rocco.

‘As a rule, I always keep a bottle of chilled champagne at home ready for any unexpected guests,’ says the former Wallpaper* guest editor, Laila Gohar.

The Mirror Black Super Smart Fridge is $2,295, including two exclusive Gohar World & Rocco Champagne Coupes. Available in very limited quantities beginning 14 July 2026 at roccofridge.com

Like many potential disruptive technologies, Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft were predicted, theorised, prototyped and over-hyped long before any practical solutions had even taken to the air. Emerging in parallel with concurrent disruptors like AI-driven autonomy, the eVTOL market is awash with potential players yet full-scale public services always seem to be a few years away.

Archer Aviation is one of the frontrunners in the race for this as-yet uncertain prize. Founded in 2018 by Brett Adock and Adam Goldstein, it is headquartered in San Jose, California, and its Midnight aircraft is currently undergoing flight tests on the route to imminent certification. Unveiled back in 2022, Midnight has 12 propellers, six to each wing.

The forward-facing props can tilt for vertical lift, whilst the rear ones are fixed to provide forward thrust. The design has the baked-in redundancy deemed essential for electric aircraft, with an expected operational range of 20 to 50 miles. Priced at $5m and built in a production plant in Atlanta, Georgia, Midnight can carry a pilot and four passengers and their luggage. The company also has an engineering hub in Bristol, UK.

Wallpaper* spoke to CEO Adam Goldstein and Julien Montousse, the company’s VP of design and innovation, about the Midnight and its projected use cases, routes and the expected debut date. One of Archer’s primary drivers has been design, not just in the corporate branding and presentation, but in the physical form of the aircraft itself. Montousse, a former senior director of design at Mazda North America, trained at France’s Strate, École de Design.

Wallpaper*: It’s clearly a very exciting time to be in aviation. What was the driving force behind Archer’s approach?

Adam Goldstein: Everything started with using multiple electric engines to fly a new type of aircraft. These are vertical take-off and landing aircraft. When you switch from combustion to these electric vehicles, you get advantages that you couldn’t get in the old world. It starts with safety. Helicopters, for example, have lots of single points of failure – instead, we have multiple levels of redundancy. You also get a lower noise profile and a better cost profile – there are both civil and defence applications for that.

W*: What’s Archer’s current timeline?

AG: On the civil side, we’re building the core aircraft and going through the certification process. eVTOL has resulted in a new category at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) called powered lift – it’s the first new category in 60 years. All that took a while to get going and we’re now in the testing phase. Our goal is to be flying aircraft as soon as we can. The FAA’s job is to pick a safe aircraft – their job is to tell us when we’re ready.

On the defence side, there is a different timeline. We have a partnership with a company called Anduril, which is building a new autonomous vertical-lift platform.

W*: Will the Midnight be autonomous?

AG: No, but the military and civil applications build on top of each other, so you need to gain all the experience, gain the hours, gain the credibility, gain the data, and then ultimately transfer that over. So whether it’s the framework on how to do it, whether it’s the actual hardware – the flight control computers, sensor suites, etc – or the software that you’re running. All that stuff gets proven out on the defence side and gives you enough ability to push over to the civil side, so they work really nicely together.

W*: Powered lift is a new category and that means all sorts of things that are new for the consumer, from safety to the way the technology is expressed and perceived. How do you translate that into industrial design that evokes confidence and clarity and explains everything it has to do?

AG: Electric engines scale down but remain very efficient. You no longer have to have one big rotor like a helicopter, instead you can have multiple sets of engines. The questions were how many engines should you have and where do you put them? You need enough redundancy so that a failure doesn’t crash the vehicle.

With two to four engines it’s very hard to stay balanced. Eight is safer, then ten, 12, etc. But if you have too many, it’s very hard to figure out where to put them, because when you’re flying, anything that’s sticking out just becomes draggy and hurts performance. You have this balance between performance and trying to make it look good.

We wanted a vehicle that created an emotional reaction, like a car. We want to bring the golden age of flying back – where people are excited to fly, they want to be in this vehicle, they want to touch the vehicle, take a picture of it. It’s a balance of performance and emotion.

Julien Montousse: The goal is to build an inspiring aircraft. Most modern airliners don’t invite connection – you might connect with the brand that operates them, but not the aircraft itself. We have four passengers and one pilot, and that intimacy requires some personal connection.

W*: Compared to the equivalent cabin size of a small passenger jet or other helicopter, what advantages does the platform and the technology give you?

JM: Weight is everything. We can’t allow any non-essential functions. The seats have to weigh just 20lb – they’re pared to the bone. And this creates this new type of design aesthetic that is much more athletic versus the opulence of a traditional private jet.

W*: How does this quest for lightness inform materials?

JM: We work with engineering to understand the load paths of the seats. By carving all the negative material away, we’re building a space frame-type structure. If you look at the seat for example, the seat only has like a quarter inch of cushion thickness. It’s extremely thin.

We’re also exploring circular design, taking some of the waste created by aviation and re-using it. For example, we collect carbon fibre offcuts and utilise [the material] as a kind of forged carbon to build parts of the cabin with. Bringing a circular design vision into a lightweight aircraft is something that no one has really done.

W*: Which elements are you most proud of being able to rethink them, taking those criteria into account?

JM: When you look at the Archer from far away, we wanted to build an identity. No plane has an identity today. We worked really hard to shape the lighting elements on the front, for example. A bird of prey was probably the most inspiring gesture that we embedded into the wing of the aircraft – it doesn’t look passive. We also wanted to show that the aircraft would fly beautifully just by looking at it.

W*: And in terms of the interior?

JM: The contouring of the seat makes you feel like you are connected with the aircraft, a kind of monocoque bucket seat that’s contoured to hold you securely. We’ve also designed a different kind of landing gear that allows for the aircraft to sit lower to the ground, which means that you can have that very fluid ingress and egress.

Other elements include a small display on the cabin, meaning that when you approach the aircraft, your name is displayed, your destination is displayed, and how much time you have until the door closes.

W*: What are the likely initial applications?

AG: You live in London, so you’ll know that Heathrow can be brutal to get to from the city. There is such stress associated with that, especially if there is traffic. I think that’s a really good route that we would like to start with. It’s our goal to target the high-end ride-share market… There are amazing routes all over the world; every city has two to three core routes that will always be busy seven days a week. Then there are also other missions like helping hospitals transport time-sensitive things like patients or organs.

W*: How does the operating cost compare to an equivalent-size helicopter?

AG: It’s substantially lower maintenance, with no piston or combustion engines. You don’t have to X-ray the gearbox to check for faults, for example. An electric engine is very simple. And because you fly much faster, you can do many more trips compared to something like an Uber.

Midnight has been designed around existing helicopter infrastructure, so we can fit within everything from the perspective of wingspan, weight and rotor downwash. As for charging, the goal would be to top off the battery every time you land.

W*: And what about timescale?

AG: We were selected as the exclusive air taxi provider for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. That’s still our goal for launch.

Archer.com, @FlyArcher

The new home for the Fonds Bustamante, the Eglise Saint-Croix, a deconsecrated 12th-century church in Arles, has been many things: a stop on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route, a private home, a spa, and now an art foundation for French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante.

Tour the Fonds Bustamante’s new home

At 74, Bustamante has a career spanning photography, painting and sculpture. He represented France at the São Paulo Biennale in 1994 and the Venice Biennale in 2003, and was director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris for four years. He has long been thinking about this project, including an aborted effort eight years ago to create it in his hometown of Toulouse (at the last minute, the city commandeered the building for a football club). When the church came up for sale in Arles, he jumped at it.

Arles presents a unique challenge, as it is home to a number of excellent art foundations as well as the annual Rencontres d'Arles photography festival. 'We have to do a good job,' says the tall, silver-maned Bustamante. 'Because we're going to be judged. People will say, “What have they brought that's new?"'

To renovate the church, he hired architect Charles Zana, whose work on the CAB foundation in Saint-Paul de Vence he admired. Zana gutted the building and did the job in only 18 months, keeping the building's historical integrity while adding a contemporary feel.

And though his intervention is subtle, he says it was a major undertaking: 'There were many scars from the past.' As to the exercise of turning a church into an art space, Zana found it natural. 'It's easier to make an art foundation in a place of worship than a nightclub. There's a silence that's similar in both places, and even a way of walking, whether looking at art or stained glass.'

The entrance is now a monumental door in bronze-coloured metal, with moucharabieh-like latticework. Inside, Zana kept traces of the stone walls and arches that had survived the years. He references the building's ecclesiastical past with a long nave-like axis on the ground floor, leading to a stairway at the end. Exposed white corrugated aluminium on the ceilings emphasises the architect's hand while reminding visitors that this was once an open space.

The exhibition rooms, spread over three floors, are in neutral shades of stone and concrete. Zana used warmer tones in the dramatically lit stairwell, with terrazzo stairs crafted by local artisans, and terracotta paint on the walls, colours which remind him of the nearby Camargue. Bustamante added a strip of enamelled lava tiles to the building's façade, choosing yellow in a nod to Vincent Van Gogh, the city's most famous former resident.

Bustamante means for the foundation to ensure his own legacy and also to support that of his peers, notably European artists from the 1980s onward. 'I lived through a very important time, between avant-gardistes and the end of the avant-garde,' he says. 'I don't want the artists of that tradition to be forgotten, and I think that today, memories are very short.'

To help with that task, he created a supervisory board and scientific committee of important figures from the art world. The inaugural exhibition, titled 'En Miroirs', features his work in dialogue with artists he's exhibited or worked with over the past 40 years, all friends or former students.

In the nave, PSSST GOD is a series of monochrome paintings by Gerhard Merz, a German painter born in 1947. Bustamante says, 'With monochrome, we arrive at the end of painting. He is no longer dealing with art history; he is dealing with God.' The first floor features a stunning double-height gallery, where the Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias created a large cast aluminium and glass sculpture especially for the space. It sits near a sculpture by Franz West and a photograph of an upside-down tree by Rodney Graham.

Another gallery includes an abstract painting by a former student, Alice Anderson, made while she danced a performance with a microwave oven. It hangs beside Bustamante's 1977 photograph of a house being built in Spain, what he calls a 'photographic painting', showing the world under construction at a certain moment in time.

On the top floor, an apartment with a spectacular view will be an artist's residence, as Bustamante plans for the foundation to be active year-round with exhibitions, masterclasses and symposiums. And the street-level café with its cobblestoned terrace is sure to be a hit with locals.

fondsbustamante.com

zana.fr

The classic A-frame cabin is given a new lease of life as a yoga retreat by Bruce Engel of BE_Design. This simple East Hampton structure is a studio space for a variety of wellness practices, located on a site in Springs, New York. Engel, an architect who practices between New York and Kigali, Rwanda, has taken the iconic form of the A-frame structure and enhanced it with a straightforward material palette and careful attention to detail.

Tour this miniature yoga retreat in East Hampton

The steeply pitched roof intersects with two cantilevered niches, pushing out from the roof plane to expand the available space inside this modest 600-square-foot structure. Described by the architects as resembling ‘a small temple among the trees,’ the Woods Retreat makes a very intentional connection between earth and sky – an embodiment of ‘the yogic integration of the grounded and celestial self.’

The structure is clad in sustainably-sourced Accoya, with a traditional charred finish akin to the Japanese practice of Shou Sugi Ban. The blackened geometric form makes a graphic contrast to the verticality of the surrounding trees, as well as being an inversion of the warm yellow cedar and plywood interior panels.

In addition to hosting meditation sessions, kundalini yoga, sauna and ice bathing rituals, the Retreat was commissioned by a teacher who wanted a ‘deeply restorative environment that supports breathwork, stillness, and embodied practice.’ Even the shape of the space has been considered, with the tall interior providing excellent acoustics for gong ceremonies.

In addition to the main space and a separate sauna, the two cushioned niches provide platform space for relaxation and contemplation, with huge picture windows providing views out to the trees.

The interior is clad in cedar and plywood, with the striking, oversized grain adding a sense of textured solidity to the interlocking floors, walls and ceiling planes.

The space is designed to be multi-functional, depending on the classes, and can be easily converted into an overnight retreat for longer courses. The architecture encourages wellness practices to spread out into the surrounding forest.

The covered front porch serves as a transition between nature and architecture, and there’s also a discrete rear porch and terrace with a connection to the outdoor shower, sauna, and ice bath. According to Engel, the sequence of heat, ice, fresh air, and forest ‘creates a multisensory experience for body and mind.’

Engel’s community-minded approach to architecture stems from several years working in East Africa, not just Rwanda but also Tanzania, Kenya, and Ghana, in addition to residential projects in New York.

Woods Retreat combines his love of vernacular forms, local materials and labour, as well as the importance of architecture as a generator of mood, place and purpose.

BruceEngelDesign.com

A Somerset retreat set within a quiet hamlet among rolling countryside, just a short drive south of Bath, this renovation project is the work of Daytrip, an interior design and architecture studio founded by Iwan Halstead and Emily Furniss Potter.

Based in Hackney, East London, the pair is known for their timeless yet distinctive projects, many of which draw on both contemporary and classic influences. For example, their Cloisters office in London blends Stuart-era features with modern designs, while a Highbury residence brings minimalist curves to a Victorian house.

Discover the leafy embrace of this Somerset retreat

For this Somerset scheme, the pair had to work with a much more recent building, Springfield Farm. Completed in the 1990s by architect Max Aitken, it is defined by its tiered form and weather-stained grey timber cladding that allowed it to recede softly into its setting.

Daytrip turned it into an idyllic 250 sq m second home by adding warmth to the interiors, which are now filled with bespoke pieces and Scandinavian classics, and by connecting the residence to a new garden and 12m-long swimming pool surrounded by wildflower meadows.

‘We are always interested in understanding what is already there and how we can build upon it rather than overwrite it,’ explains Halstead. ‘The house had a strong spatial logic and generous proportions, but it certainly felt like it had been designed by an architect in the 1990s – slightly cold and technical in places.

‘It lacked the warmth and emotional depth that we often try to bring to our interiors. Our approach was to introduce tactile layering through materials such as wide oak flooring, dark cherry timber, travertine and bronze finishes, bringing richness and softness while respecting the original architecture.'

Construction went smoothly until a fire damaged the house just before completion, and made Daytrip revisit and remake portions of their scheme. ‘In hindsight, that process reinforced the resilience of the design and gave us an opportunity to refine details even further,’ says Halstead.

Designed for entertaining, the flowing living spaces open directly onto the terraces and gardens, with large glazed doors left open in the summer. In contrast, midcentury-inspired wood veneers and deep shearling seating from Dagmar, as well as glass and brass wall lights by Max Ingrand, create a cocooning space for the long winter evenings.

Natural stone, bronze details, textured rugs and linen upholstery complete a material palette designed to bring a sense of tranquillity. ‘The challenge was less about correcting the architecture and more about deepening its relationship to the landscape – creating spaces that felt open, calm and atmospheric, with strong visual connections to their surroundings,’ says Halstead.

The living space, which opens directly onto the landscape, has ‘a wonderful quietness to it’, says the architect. ‘It transforms with the movement of sunlight throughout the day, and the views across the meadows are breathtaking. I enjoy the generosity of the room – the long timber steps lead down into the lounge, where a grand piano and sprawling sofas create a sense of ease and informality. The dark cherry timber wall panelling helps wrap the space and tie it together, while the travertine fireplace anchors the room.’

Daytrip collaborates closely with artists, designers, and makers to create spaces that feel timeless and distinctive, and this is apparent in this project too. Unique artworks dotted around the house, the majority of which are by East London artists represented by Partnership Editions, including Katarina Lalic and Mary West.

‘One of the most important aspects of the project was the layering of art, objects and collectable furniture,’ says Halstead. ‘The large sculptural bronze chandelier by Joe Armitage in the stairwell became a real focal point. At 3m in height, it represents a new direction in his design language – monumental yet delicate, with incredible presence and charm.’

Of course, the scenery framed by the large windows can also easily steal the show. The garden landscaping was designed around the swimming pool, which is placed so that it can be seen from all the key living spaces, and contrasts with the wildflower meadows.

‘We worked with landscape designer Pollyanna Wilkinson to develop the tiered stepping and planting that envelops the perimeter of the house, creating a natural journey down to the pool terrace and orchard,’ says Halstead. ‘A restrained planting language was chosen to flourish throughout the year, with grasses, Nepeta, Gaura and soft perennial species that feel both naturalistic and rooted in the English countryside.’

daytrip.studio