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…

The Ruins Of A Swinging Seventies Spa That Kept A Siberian Tiger Behind The Bar

About a half hour north of Manhattan is a curious ruin: a giant, circular concrete drum resting on a narrow concrete plinth, and wrapped with floor to ceiling windows, most of them broken. More concrete can be found in the futuristic looking ramps that swirl around the peculiar structure, giving the abandoned building a Brutalist feel…

The Curious Case of Miss Mechanical Venus

The summer of July 1932 brought an unexpected guest to Brussels, Belgium. The city had become its usual, ephemeral playground for the oddities, treasures, and inventions of the Foire du midi annual fair, but this time it was joined by the curious Dr. Spitzner and his posse of wax humans. The production of dissectible, anatomical…

15 Fabulous Frida Kahlo Moments in Rarely Seen Photographs

As a huge Frida Kahlo fan myself, I thought I’d seen just about all the best photographs of the iconic artist, but today I stumbled upon an enormous archive of personal snaps on the Casa Azul tumblr site. It may not be her estate’s official Tumblr, but it sure feels like I’ve been flicking through…

It’s about Time we Reinvented the Autochrome

Show me an Instagram filter that can do this and I’ll personally take you out to dinner so that we can become lifelong friends. Autochrome is a dead art – a secret recipe – if you will, that has been long lost to the modern world, left uncharted by 21st century technology and yet to be…

The Vault

Found Photographs of Perfect American Road Trips, Fifty Years Too Late

Trailer parks just don’t look like this anymore! What I wouldn’t give to go back 50 years and re-do the American road trip just like I picture it in my mid-century kodachrome dreams. Today I found a fabulous Flickr account full of old slides and photographs found at estate sales and garage sales by a nostalgic…

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The Forgotten LGBT Queen of Paris and Her Secret Masonic Temple

She was the kind of woman who never belonged to anyone but herself. At least, when it came to love. But for Natalie Clifford Barney, life overflowed with colour, creativity, and passion in Paris’ Left Bank during one of city’s most romantic periods. Think of her as a lesser-known Gertrude Stein, albeit one who curated…

A Photographer’s Forgotten Muse on the French Riviera

There was definitely something about Renée. When the legendary French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue met her while strolling the streets of Paris in 1930, he fell in love instantly. Tall, chic and hiding coquettishly under a wide elegant hat, he nicknamed her the ‘parasol’. Together they embarked on what Lartigue remembers as an “eternal vacation”, a dreamlike two-year holiday in the…

Where the Nazis Hung Out in Occupied Paris

Today I found a photograph of an ordinary German coffee shop circa 1941, with German signage above the windows that read “Soldatenkaffee Madeleine“. What made this photograph of a coffee shop so very unordinary, was that it was not taken in Germany, but on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris during the Nazi occupation. How many other places like…

Behind the Curtain of the 1940s Chinatown Nightclubs that Shattered Asian Stereotypes

Picture a night out in 1940s San Francisco. You’re in a glamorous nightclub with a floorshow. A sequined dancer does a pas de bourrée on her toes while her tuxedoed partner wows the crowd with multiple drop splits. Then a singer with a warm bluesy voice belts Some of These Days. Finally, a nude dancer…