Autumn & Winter in Paris Inspiration & Events Guide 2021

The air is getting colder, the kids are back in school, and the sidewalks are strewn with leaves. It’s autumn in Paris, and we’re back with our seasonal guide! So whether you live in Paris or will just be passing through, read on for our recommendations of what do do, eat, and see as we…

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Travel like Wes Anderson on the Real Darjeeling Limited Railway

It was arguably the tea that put Darjeeling on the world map, but for me, it was really Wes Anderson… The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was the very first hill railway in India and its still in use today. By the tea and the gurkhas, the train has become a part of the identity of these…

Inside the Secret Workshop of the Louvre

In a vast warehouse at the edge of Paris, artisans are working around the clock on a clandestine operation entrusted to them by the Louvre: recreating France’s most iconic sculptures and prints for mysterious clients the world over. And unbeknownst to most of Paris, its doors are open to anyone curious enough to come knocking.…

The Legend of the Sun King’s Perfume Bath at Versailles

We’ve taken a bath in front of the Eiffel Tower, in the middle of a desert, and even seen a bath tub on wheels. But for all our apparent interest in unconventional bathing, we’d never heard about Louis XIV’s luxurious perfume bath. In a ritual so over the top– even for the French Sun King– Louis…

Forget Roadside America, Let’s Location Scout in “Weird France”

I’ve been yearning to get back across the pond for a good ol’ dose of “weird America”, but I tend to forget that my own country has some pretty odd, quirky and wonderfully nostalgic sights to see when you venture off the main road. Wes Anderson would have a field day with Atlas des Régions…

Buried Secrets of Montauk’s Menacing Military Camp that Inspired “Stranger Things”

There are places in New York and the northeastern coast of America, where a pleasurable trip to the seaside can take a turn for the peculiar. You may be wandering along a bucolic beach only to stumble across the abandoned ruins of brutalist concrete structures lying half buried in the sand, evoking the iconic end…

Seven Visionary Spaces Du Jour

The art and science of the enclosure of space is all around us, shelter-creation being traditionally its key function but oftentimes architecture is also a mouthpiece for broadcasting a message through carefully crafted iconography. So-called ‘alternative’ structures vary from intellectual triumphs of the unconventional to purely attention-seeking visual bubble gum. It’s often somewhere in the…

Inside the Beat Hotel of Paris

“I lay there on the floor, he makes love to Nanette all night, as she whimpers,” wrote Jack Kerouac, recalling the night he slept in Room 41 of a Parisian “fleabag” in the Latin Quarter that his friend and fellow poet had christened “The Beat Hotel”. Gregory Corso, the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers,…

Who Will Rescue this New York Manor Worthy of a Tim Burton Movie?

This incredible historic home has been sitting on the market for a little longer than we’re comfortable with. Fairview Manor is the sort of place that’s pretty much straight out of Tim Burton’s imagination, so it’ll take a special sort of owner to take it on. But of course, pairing quirky houses with even quirkier…

She was the Hostess of Greenwich Village a Hundred Years Ago

Marie Marchand, better known as Romany Marie was one of those eccentric characters that stood out in a town full of them. During the first part of the 20th century, her informal Greenwich Village cafés drew a society of artists, anarchists, activists, playwrights, musicians and bohemian intelligentsia. If you were looking for la vie bohème…