What Happens After Dark at Amsterdam’s Mystery Manor

You’d have to be searching for something peculiar to stumble across the Mayer Manor. Luckily, it seems you and I are always in search of something peculiar. Originally a 15th century monastery, later occupied by a wealthy tobacco merchant of the 19th century, the four-storey mansion is tucked away behind a canal in the red…

The Secret History of the Conversation Chair

It’s taken many names, shapes and forms over the centuries – the conversation chair, the courting bench, a tête-à-tête, a chaperone chair, the vis-à-vis, gossip chair or the indiscret. Considered the pinnacle of sophistication and style during the Gilded and Victorian age, if you were entertaining the fashionable elite, one simply wasn’t running a home…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CDLXXXVII)

1. Castle Ashby Orangery Built in 1872 near Northampton, UK. Photos via here and here. Visit the Castle Ashby Gardens website here. 2. Iconic French Art Nouveau house to Reopen to Public Villa Majorelle, the famed Art Nouveau residence in Nancy, France, will soon reopen to the public. Found on Curbed. 3. Just a little Hat…

Secretly Documenting the Intimate World of 19th Century Sex Workers

No one knew that William Goldman led a double life. A model citizen and well-respected photographer in Reading, Pennsylvania at the turn of the century, he became treasurer of the State Photographers’ Association and was a valued member of numerous social organisations. It wasn’t until nearly 80 years after his death that his vast collection of…

An Abandoned Overgrown Estate is the Last of its Kind in the Heart of Paris

Wild and consumed by nature, like a scene described by Dickens in Great Expectations – an estate frozen in time, fit for the reclusive Miss Havisham herself – a “country house” in the centre of the city, surrounded by Paris’ most coveted real estate, will go up for sale this week at auction. In a…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CDLXXXVI)

1. John Holliday Perry’s Private Underwater Habitat John Holliday Perry started diving at a time that he called a few years B.C., Before Cousteau developed the aqualung. He built most of the submarines for the James Bond movie Thunderball, and kept a few for his own use on a private island in the Bahamas. At…

The Mysterious “Order of the Odd Fellows” that frankly, belongs in a Wes Anderson Movie

It’s a name that had me instantly transfixed, like something Wes Anderson had dreamt up for his next film. The Independent Order of the Odd Fellows – a secret society for … odd people? Why had I never heard of it? Never one to resist the pull of a promising rabbit hole, I would soon…

Buried in Sand for a Millennium: Africa’s Roman Ghost City

Got your archeologist’s cap on? Today we invite you to touch down in Algeria and explore Timgad, a lost Roman city on the edge of the Sahara desert that remained hidden beneath the sand for nearly a thousand years. Positively obscure compared to the international notoriety of Pompeii, this ancient city is nonetheless one of…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CDLXXXV)

1. Arco Magno, Italy Photographed by Simone Bramante. Reachable by a hike. GPS co-ordinates: 39.8549° N, 15.7921° E. 2. Moon Trees Dozens of so-called “moon trees” scattered around the country, grown from seeds that traveled with astronaut Stuart Roosa on the Apollo 14 mission in 1971… the arboreal oddities were almost lost to history. Want to know…

Spying Behind-the-Scenes from Wes Anderson’s New Film “The French Dispatch”

We all have things to look forward to in 2020, but you can forget all that, because it’s time to get borderline obsessed with Wes Anderson’s new movie. The release of The French Dispatch is imminent, so we took the liberty of digging through the interweb for behind-the-scenes clues. If you’re a true Wes fan,…