7 Things You May Not Know About Hearst Castle

They said it was where California met the world. Where Egyptian antiquities mingled with cast sculptures by Bernini, and the gaze of medieval eyes met those of Hollywood’s elite. Today, we’re traveling into the nooks and crannies of La Cuesta Encantada – The Enchanted Hill. 1. Its Architect Was a Woman Where to begin with…

Adored by Many, but Loved by Chanel: A Forgotten Parisian It Girl

Proust, turned her into a fictional princess and Ravel turned her into music. Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec couldn’t stop painting her. Picasso was a confidante, Serge Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes, a best friend, and Coco Chanel – her “soul sister”; possibly her lover too. Belle Epoque Paris bloomed with opulence and a languid, if not…

The Most Famous Band You’ve Never Heard Of

Whether you know it or not, you have definitely heard them play. Popular music of the 1960s was dominated by young bands like The Beach Boys, The Mamas & the Papas and The Monkees – bands that didn’t play their own records. Sometimes, the only members of famous bands to appear on their own records…

Was Inflatable Furniture Really All that Bad?

As we dream of sipping an ice cold margarita on a floaty pool mattress, far from the stuffiness of our cubicles, a certain nostalgia comes to mind: the age of 1960s, blow up “living.” Through furniture, rooms, even a car, the inflatable life brought a welcome touch of relaxation and sheer goofiness to a design…

I Found a Belle Epoque Theatre Hiding inside a Paris Shoe Store

I‘ve been spending some time lately getting to know the quartier of Barbès a little better. Had I ever listened to those funny people on the television who declared this neighbourhood a Paris “No Go Zone”, I would never have discovered one of the most surreal secrets in Paris. If you ever find yourself in the area, you must stop in at the…

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That Rock and Roll Baptist Preacher Who Turned out to Be an Artistic Genius

They just don’t make ’em like the Reverend anymore. The Elvis-loving, banjo plucking, gecko-wearing Howard Finster was one of the 21st century’s most inimitable, yet misunderstood Outsider Artists— a mere novelty for art critics, who wrote him off as a mad preacher with a paintbrush, and a man to be avoided by prying neighbours in…

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The Art of Power Clashing

“Power clashing” is an art not easily learned, but Alexander Gorlizki lives, breathes, and paints it in his art. The intricate, bright prints and designs look like they’ve been sourced from an ancient Islamic library and combined with vintage Bollywood pop culture. We see both Eastern and Western influencers – dare we say there might…

The World’s First Solar Powered Train is a 70-Year-Old Vintage Charmer

You might have expected Japan’s next bullet train or even the Eurostar to have figured out solar-powered rail travel first, but instead, on a disused old railway track along the sandy coast of New South Wales, Australia, a little 1940s “engine that could” has become the world’s first solar-powered train. Chugging up and down Byron…

Where has the Dystopian Wonderland of Taxandria been Hiding all Our Lives?

Our dreams have always remained an ineffable, un-shareable experience – the kind of thing we can describe, but never quite convey to the fullest. Then, we saw Taxandria. The 1994 film by Belgium’s Raoul Servais is the closest we’ve felt to stepping inside a world that feels just as slippery, strange, and intuitive as our…

House of a 1920s Lady Gaga

“Eccentricity exists particularly in the English, and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.“. ― Dame Edith Sitwell of Renishaw Hall Renishaw Hall may look like a very traditional English estate, but for the last four centuries it has been the ancestral…