Culture

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We look at the way in which the contemporary interior has become a site of relentless self-scrutiny. Once shaped by habit, time, and use, the home is now increasingly designed for the scroll — flattened, curated, and calibrated for visibility. From the rise of picture-perfect rooms to the quiet anxiety of living up to them, it asks what happens when interiors are made to perform, becoming stage sets instead of spaces for living.

White is never just white. From Maugham’s radical take on modernism to Jackie Kennedy’s iconic Presidential apartments, from minimalism’s ascetic emptiness to Pantone’s latest Colour of the Year, white has always carried meaning — virtue, power, taste, absurdity — and plenty of surprises. Across fashion, interiors, art, and politics, we trace its curious, contradictory life, and find that the more it pretends to be neutral, the more it reveals.

We trace the vision of collectors such as Pauline Karpidas and Edward James, whose homes defied convention. Dalí, Magritte, and Picasso mingle with sculptural furniture and leopard-print carpets, interiors conceived as gesamtkunstwerke—in which every surface, object, and gesture asserts taste unbound by trend. A meditation on eccentricity, patronage, and the poetry of living.

PEOPLE 

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In conversation with Edgar Jayet, design emerges as narrative, craft as philosophy. Every object, every interior gesture is deliberate — a dialogue with history, literature, and human scale. Spaces unfold with subtle intelligence, where beauty and thought converge, and furniture and interiors become vessels for reflection, emotion, and the enduring resonance of creation..

New York’s gallery scene has always been more than white walls — it’s been a crucible of power, myth, and seduction, from Castelli’s salons to Basquiat’s street-to-salon ascent. Our latest feature traces that lineage and explores how the theatre of the gallery still shapes cultural memory —including an interview with gallerist Patrick McGrath on the tactile power or presence in a digital age.

We spoke to Alexander May about SCALE, his exhibition at Magen H Gallery, which unfolds as part of his ongoing sculptural practice. Rooted in an intuitive handling of form, void, and material weight, May repositions twentieth-century French design within a restrained, all-white space, inviting viewers to slow down and reconsider scale, rhythm, and atmosphere.

Upon entering the burnt-brick hues of the hotel’s Neo-Greek lobby, one quickly loses all sense of the outside world, entering a richly layered mise-en-scène, a throwback to a golden age of luxury. Beguiled by its inherent charm, I met the designer, François-Joseph Graf, for a tour, after which, we discussed his influences and inspirations, the decorators he most admires, and more pressing concerns, such as where to get the best steak tartare and frog legs in Paris.

“Hotel Château Voltaire is anything but a decoration,” explains Thierry Gillier, “It is a place of today to be experienced today by people of today.” With that in mind, we spoke to Charlotte de Tonnac and Hugo Sauzay of Festen architecture, not only about their design for this 32-room five-star Paris hotel, but also their likes, dislikes and, in the case of the former, a long-harboured desire to moonlight as a dancer.

We spoke to Andrea Bokobsa, co-founder of Pied-A-Terre Paris, about his passion for art and design (in part inspired by his mother, a former designer for Baby Dior and Bonpoint) and where he hopes to take the company in coming years