A Brief Compendium, or an Ode, if you will, to Celebrate Balconies

As the world stays home, we would like to opt for a new euphemism for life in quarantine: Nesting. Last week, we dove into the plushy world of retro conversation pits. Today, we’re pivoting to the glory of the balconies – which have become the world’s incidental stages at this strange time. They’re teaching us…

Oh, Disney, You Never Should Have Fired Kay Nielsen

Kay Nielsen knew his way around a fantasy. The Danish illustrator was raised in a “tense atmosphere of art” (his words) during the Golden Era of Illustration – a time when folks one-upped each another with books bearing golden spines and marbled end papers; elaborately illustrated copies of Grimm’s Fairytales, The Wizard of Oz, and Oscar…

How to Save the French Brasserie

I‘m gastronomically-challenged when it comes to the French brasserie. The truth is, I really have no idea if the food is any good because I’m too busy side-eyeing the floor tiles, the typefaces, ogling at the glass ceiling and imagining the entire scene exactly as it was 50 or 100 years ago. Walk into any…

The Paris Dandy Bringing Back Art Nouveau with a Bang

You know Pierre Marie, even if you don’t think you do. You know the arabesque curves of his tiles, the vegetal motifs reminiscent of Guimard and Rousseau. You know the feel of his rattan and tapestry creations as if they came from your great aunt’s attic. You know his universe, because it’s one in which…

Escape to Sarah Bernhardt’s Seaside Fortress

This weekend, let’s escape to the seaside paradise of Morbihan, France, to peak inside the 19th century fortress that belonged to the eccentric, inimitable Sarah Bernhardt. As an actor, she was truly one of the first global superstars, and it was her flair for blurring the lines between performance and reality that made her an…

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…

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Forgotten Art Deco Marvels of a Lost 1920s Copacabana Magazine

Little information has survived about Brazil’s Para Todos magazine. I couldn’t actually find what date or why it ever went out of print. I do know that it was created in 1918 with a focus on movie stars, and in 1922 until 1930, it came under the direction of José Carlos, a cartoonist, illustrator and major talent in Brazilian Art…

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Why Paris’ Greatest Art Nouveau Metro Stop Is No More

No one does nostalgia better than Parisians, who just seem to have a real knack for sprinkling eccentric, liveable history into their everyday routine. Case in point? Those luscious Art Nouveau metro stops, or “dragonflies” as they were dubbed by locals at the time of their construction in the 1900s. The green, arabesque forms were…

Where Has This Amazing Comic Book Art Been All My Life?

I won’t pretend to be a comic book connoisseur. My brother and I collected Tintin books for our father to read to us before bedtime and well, that’s about as far as it went for my foray into the graphic arts world. But now I’m wondering, if I had spent a little more time at the comic…

Uncovering the Ghost of an Iconic Department Store, the “Bloomingdales” of Paris

For ten years, one of the world’s most iconic and historic department stores sat empty along the banks of the Seine in Paris; an imposing ghostly shell of former retail splendour, a giant sleeping elephant in the room occupying prime real estate in the heart of the city. When I heard that renovation works were…