15 49.0138 8.38624 both 0 bullet 0 4000 1 0 horizontal https://www.messynessychic.com 300 4000

Category / Editor’s Picks

House Hunting like a Russian Millionaire is seriously Entertaining Stuff

I can’t believe I never googled Russian real estate before! We all know our friends from the former Soviet Union have a special kind of taste when it comes to interior design, but with a limitless decorating budget, it just gets even better. I decided to window shop with Sotheby’s Realty, which has a colourful…

An Insider’s Guide to the Unknown Kingdoms

One of my first ever published articles back when I was writing for a local magazine in London, was about a street in Notting Hill called Freston Road, which declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1977. Frestonia, essentially a community of squatters who had come together to secede from the UK after the local council threatened to evict them, had their…

Take a Step Back in Time into these Flower Power Fashion Comic Books

Today I went in search of mindless distractions from reality. Perhaps you did the same. I went to my happy place and took a deep dive into the archives and photo pools of Flickr. There, I found these 1960s hippie-mod fashion pages from various romance comic books of the 60s and 70s. Some of them have empowering…

Backstage Fakery at Universal City in 1963

Universal Pictures was founded by a German immigrant, Carl Laemmle, who opened his first cinema in Chicago in 1906. In the early days, other studio chiefs laughed at Carl’s haphazard Universal City and nicknamed it “Laemmle’s Folly”. But the ambitious film pioneer would become responsible for creating the “star system”, rather than just using anonymous actors in films, and…

Alaska’s Eskimo Ghost Village on Stilts

For thousands of years, a community of Inupiat Eskimos lived, survived and thrived in one of the harshest environments in the world. This is King Island and these are the improbable cliff-hanging houses of Ukivok that a displaced community still calls home more than 50 years after its abandonment. (c) NOAA Photo Library In 1959, the…

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

1. The Ruins of this Ancient Roman Library The library was completed in 135 AD and was built to house 12,000 scrolls and to honor the Roman Senator Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, whose tomb is below the entrance. Photos found via Travel Junkies and Flickr 1, 2, 3 2. This Building in Macau Found on…

Shopping at Cuba’s Ration Supermarkets

You might be ready to light up that Cuban cigar thanks to Obama or fill up your Instagram account with voguish snapshots from a Havana vacation, but even with the historic opening of diplomatic relations with the US, how will life in Cuba really change for Cubans? To get a real idea of the transition that lies ahead for Cubans emerging from their…

Marilyn Monroe’s Diet Plan, Lipsticks and her Most Intimate Belongings are Up for Auction

You only have to glance at the range of items in the upcoming sale of the largest collection of Marilyn Monroe ephemera ever offered at auction, to see that her fingerprint can still transform the most prosaic of objects more than 50 years after her tragic death. While it wouldn’t be a true Marilyn Monroe auction without her most iconic dresses, diamonds…

Descend into a Tomb of Imprisoned Vehicles Frozen in Time

Nobody likes a visit to the car pound. It probably as one of my least favourite places to be on earth, but you wouldn’t have a hard time convincing me to pay a visit to this particular car pound, hidden 150ft below a piazza in the city of Naples, sealed off after WWII and forgotten about for more than…

Exactly what Your Next Dinner Party Needs: Nuclear Reactor Porcelain Plates

To save your next dinner party (and its guests) from the curse of politically-correct small talk, set the table–and your ambiance– with a radioactive sense of irony. I’ve gone a little gaga for this collection of hand-painted porcelain plates which replace folkloric windmills and country farms with hand-painted nuclear reactors and power plants… Created by a German…

NEWER POSTS 1 … 162 163 164 … 190 OLDER POSTS