I AM WRAPPED in quilted jackets and wearing boots exclusively now, just as the trees are half empty of their leaves. The fallen ones are strewn everywhere and can't help but be drawn to pasta dishes and saving brioche bread recipes that I will never make. Darkness falling at 4:30pm takes getting used to, even if it happens every year, but we passed a house with a Christmas tree up already, all lit up with fairy lights, so that's one way to deal with it ...
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IF YOU ARE LOOKING to truly get away from everything, look no further than Captains Rest, possibly one of the most remote Airbnbs in Australia—an 80-year-old heritage listed absolute waterfront cottage in Lettes Bay Village, just outside of Strahan, Tasmania, with its own jetty at the front to be precise. Lettes Bay Village itself is a heritage shack community—busy in the summer and quiet in the winter ...
A LITTLE LATE with this week's links (for the first time in a very long time), as have been busy with new projects and new content for TIG, including the Talking Points series. We've also been getting things ready at The Shop for the holiday season and organising things in general, for autumn always seems like the perfect time for such things ...
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE sipping drinks at sunset kind of weekends, the clouds tinged pink at the edges and a hazy light falling on the countryside and hills in the distance, causing P to remark that you could mistake it for Tuscany. I have been melancholic, of course, because I always feel this way when the days get shorter and the leaves begin to fall, but it's also kind of cosy and very romantic, our late nights now spent by the fireplace ...
SUMMER RETURNED for two glorious days last week, so like all self-respecting Brits, we dropped everything to enjoy the late-summer sun while it was still here. We spent both days on long bicycle rides to places we'd never been before, including hiking to the most photographed tree in the county (it was even in a famous film once). We had drinks on pub terraces in the middle of nowhere and got sunburned and ate truffle oil garlic bread pizzas and basically had the most wonderful time ...
A SCHOOL FRIEND once remarked that I was good at seasons, and when I thought about it, I realised that she was right. I actually really do love to capture the feeling and moods of the changing seasons, the excitement that comes with arrival of the first snowdrops in winter, just as the days start to get longer, the way the sun's rays deepen in colour at sunset. And at the other end of the spectrum, when summer fades into autumn, we realise with the changing leaves and cosy evenings with their flickering firelight, that endings can be beautiful too. We learn, every autumn what it is to let go...
I have been watching the late Anthony Bourdain's series, Parts Unknown, during my one-hour cardio sessions on the exercise bike every day. I am very particular when it comes to this part of my workout, preferring not to follow live or digital classes, but rather, to ride along to something entertaining on Netflix. It is for this reason that I ended up watching The Crown and The Queen's Gambit, but this series is by far the best. I've started from the very beginning, at Season 1, which first aired in 2013, and includes Myanmar, Colombia and Libya—episodes which were interesting, fascinating, heartwarming, at times gruesome, but always enlightening.
WE ARE BACK with the second instalment of our new series, Talking Points, and in this edition, we’ll be looking at the relationship between the body and mind; the notion of Mass Fame, and the concept of temporal neutrality.
THIS WEEKEND WE were glued to the news, trying to find more information about the missing van-life blogger Gabby Petito and the generally strange circumstances surrounding the entire case. Coincidentally, we had been talking about the whole #vanlife phenomenon which has swept social media the past few years, because P had been watching videos of tiny homes and the algorithm began throwing converted vans across his path ...
I try to read as many books as possible when I’m not working (currently it’s David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature), but a lot of the time, all I have time for are work-related articles. Many are a little on the dry side, but every once in a while, come across new topics or ideas that are really interesting or even enlightening.
I READ AN article this weekend about the things you can do to increase your chances of living to 100 and felt smug that I was already doing many of them (Strength training? Check. Dark chocolate? Yes. A Mediterranean Diet? Of course.). The ones that I wasn't doing, I started immediately, buying a box of green tea and ordering a high bar to install in the door frame outside our upstairs home gym ...
I SEEM TO HAVE become fond of Esty once again, after not really finding anything there for years, and then, all of a sudden, ordering handmade soaps and avocado oil face creams, art and photo frames and even gold jewellery. There is also a soft hand-knit mohair sweater from Greece currently in my cart, as well as a beautiful wicker chandelier, and a small oil painting ...
AT THIS MOMENT, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are all down and have been for a few hours now. It's such a big deal that it made the six o'clock news. I deleted WhatsApp a long time ago, when Facebook changed the privacy rules, but we do use Facebook for TIG and Instagram as well, although to a much lesser extent the past few weeks. It feels strangely peaceful without them and it's made me wonder what life would be like if all three of them just vanished forever ...
YOU MAY HAVE noticed a certain modular sofa set all over social media the past year and a half in the homes of celebrities and influencers alike, and you may even have known that it was the Camaleonda sofa, originally designed by Mario Bellini over fifty years ago, but did you know that it has become so popular in contemporary times that it was reissued in 2020? The Camaleonda currently has such a following, that four of the homes we featured recently here at TIG all included it: here, here, here, and here. In this instalment of Design History, we will be taking a closer look at the über-trendy Camaleonda, beginning with its designer, Mario Bellini.
Recently, P introduced me to Raindrop, a web extension that organises everything into tidy folders. In it, there is a folder where I keep TIG article ideas and that's where I remembered the home of English designer (and son of the late Terence Conran), Jasper Conran's, home in Bridport, a market town in Dorset, England ...
