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…

Victorian Mansion For Sale, Perfect for Wes Anderson’s remake of the Addams Family

Meet the Victorian gem that rolled right out of our dreams, and into the little city of Abilene, Kansas. The yellow brick mansion – boasting two dozen rooms and five storeys – is the ultimate Addams-Family-meets-Wes-Anderson fantasy. The “Lebold Mansion,” est. 1880, is already renovated – such a rare case for these beauties, which often…

Discovering Hollywood’s Secret “Palm Springs” of Arizona

While everyone and their mother went to Palm Springs during Hollywood’s Golden Age, the real stars snuck away to Scottsdale, Arizona. Basking under the Sonoran Desert sun in America’s Southwest, Scottsdale has long been a hushed hideaway for Hollywood weekend runaways ever since its first hotels quietly rose up from the desert like a mirage…

Meet Mrs. Madge Gill: The Outsider Artist Who Painted through the Spirit World

“Mediumistic Art.” It’s something we’d never heard of, until we uncovered the mysterious world of Mrs. Madge Gill. One of history’s most important outsider artists, Madge tended to her garden, her husband, and her children in what appeared to be the quiet life of a London housewife. But one day, she felt a stirring to…

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…

How to Soak Up New York City in Scorsese’s ‘The Irishman’ Style

The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s latest ode to the Italian-American East Coast, and the unflinching mobsters who held its purse strings in the 1970s. It’s also an utter delight for the New Yorker at heart: Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino take us on a slow burning trip down memory lane to find…

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…

52 Years Later, the Biggest Global Cult Is Still Off the Hook

On a Monday afternoon in 1971, Jeremy Spencer – Fleetwood Mac’s then-lead guitarist – popped out of the band’s Los Angeles hotel to grab some groceries. It was the last time they saw him, reported Rolling Stone, before Spencer disappeared without a trace. No note was left. No baggage taken. When management found him three…

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…