Interior and design magazines have a lot to answer for when it comes to deconstructing our current notion of home. The tyranny of …
Terry Waite, A Patient Man
Terry Waite was held hostage for 5 years in Lebanon in the late 1980s, after having gone there as the Church of England’s envoy to …
Do we exist?
Do you and I exist? The easiest way to answer would be to defer to the great minds that have been wrestling with this question for …
Meet the Maker: Sakiyama Takayuki
Look deep into the material structure of this clay vessel and you can feel the unforgiving hardness of the fired stoneware Shigaraki clay …
Meet the Maker: Tony Marsh
Some of these pots are almost more hole than pot. Tony Marsh’s perforated vessels drift through light and hover in a way quite unexpected for a …
Meet the Maker: Samy Rio
The young French designer is making a name for himself as a master of unlikely material combinations. Samy Rio might have only …
Coffee Origins
Coffee is one of the world’s most valuable traded natural commodities, second only to oil. The prized bean is believed to have originally evolved …
Ceramic Revolution
Like disciples of any new industry, speciality coffee converts are a resilient bunch. We’re prepared to endure growing pains a trends arise …
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Charlie Kaufman film is fresh, original and has a romantic depth that makes this one of the most complete film going experiences I have had …
Loyly Sauna, Helsinki
Finland is so famously flat that Norway launched an online campaign last year to give its neighbour one of its many peaks. But what …
The Good Life
In different cultures and times, the question of what it means to live well has challenged some of the world’s greatest minds. Aristotle …
The Notion of Provenance
Where was it made? And who by? The rampant rise of globalisation has made these questions both more difficult to answer and more …
The Simple Life
A three hour hike through dense forests in northwest Spain, will lead you to an eco village called Matavenero in an isolated …
Casa Bonay Hotel Barcelona
Barcelona’s hotel sector in particular has failed to offer a faithful representation of local life. In 2015 the city registered 8.3million …
Anne Marie Laureys
Anne Marie Laureys likens the outer clay walls of her vessels to skin. She has a powerful sense of the physicality and the sensuality of clay, of …
Way Out West
The legends of the Old West are written in gold. In the Rocky Mountains of southwest Colorado, ancient mines currow the land like …
Ken Mihara
When Ken Mihara c signed up to join a pottery club, he had no idea that this decision would change the course of his life. The ceramic …
Northern Irelands Giant’s Causeway
I once a recall a friend saying she walked every Christmas in the footsteps of giants. Rough, blackened, hexagonal footsteps that …
The Number Zero
There probably aren’t many pages in the annals of human achievement dedicated to donkey traders. But perhaps there should be: without …
A Separation
A Separation, one of my top 10 films, deals with more issues than you can think of: family relationship across three generations, …
Vagelos Centre
Most medical schools are fit only for cadavers. Diller Scofidio and Renfro has injected a sense of life into the typology with a tower …
Crossness Pumping Station
It is invigorating when you encounter design. Not some temporary pavilion grasping at a purpose beyond burnishing its designer …
Kunstmuseum
Having seen off Chipperfield, Hadid and OMA in a 2009 competition, Christ & Gauntbein has unveiled a controlled exercise …
The Starlight Room
This tiny starlit cabin sees glamping reach new heights. Mounted on a pair of skis on top of the Dolmites, some two kilometres …
Belize: Central America
There are time in life when you need to get away. And then there are times when you need to get really, really far away. Belize is …
The Land of Heart’s Desire
Most of us carry without our hearts a list of places to visit. And what a lot of people don’t know is that my list has always begun …
