Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2026 i Wallpaper

ALEXA SONSINO Photographer An art director-turned-photographer, Sonsino started off by shooting on her iPhone, but is now experimenting with different cameras, focusing on what truly matters: what you choose to let in and what you decide to leave out of a picture. For this issue, the Paris-based creative turned her lens on the latest fashion collections (page 144). ‘It was truly special working with the Wallpaper* team – a dreamlike journey with the perfect travel companions,’ she says. LAURA MAY TODD Milan editor Although she lives in one of the world’s design capitals, Todd is always on the lookout for new creative hubs to explore. On page 090, she interviews movers and shakers in Abidjan, Taipei and Beirut. ‘While I wish I’d been able to visit all the cities, I…

School’s out CAPELLA KYOTO, KYOTO Where schoolchildren once played beneath a cherry tree, architect Kengo Kuma has built Capella Kyoto, wrapping 89 rooms and suites around that same tree, now transplanted to the courtyard’s centre. Kuma has crowned the complex, opening next spring, with a sweeping, theatrical karahafu roof, while inside, Singapore’s Brewin Design Office channels machiya townhouse architecture through paper screens along narrow lanes, and rope-twist artwork evoking Shinto spiritual markers. Two levels below the street, a waterfall frames a capacious ballroom, while the uppermost Capella Suite overlooks Kenninji Temple. Downstairs, the Japanese restaurant repurposes elements from the demolished school into mood-lit nostalgia, and the spa houses three private onsen chambers. capellahotels.com Into the wild CORMORANT AT 55TH SOUTH, TIERRA DEL FUEGO Luxury cruise line Silversea has unveiled the…

A fine hotel is conceived as both an act of passion and a commitment to make every guest’s stay one in which they can live exquisitely and celebrate lavishly. That has always been the spirit of the St. Regis Hotels and Resorts brand, ever since its first property swung open its doors on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1904. More than a century later, with more than 60 addresses across Europe, the Middle East and beyond, each St. Regis remains heavy with history; its shared timeless rituals reinterpreted through a modern, local lens. The art of gathering has long been its hallmark, inherited from the Gilded Age soirées of Caroline Astor, matriarch of America’s first high-society register and mother of St. Regis founder John Jacob Astor IV. On Christmas Eve,…

Dorte Mandrup’s Wadden Sea World Heritage Centre, the Danish architect’s second work within the Unesco-protected region, connects landscape, science and emotion in a spiral of movement on the Netherlands’ northern shores. It’s located in Lauwersoog, a little-known coastal community, just north of Groningen, with a palpable sense of rhythm. Between the brackish calm of the man-made Lauwersmeer lake and the tidal expanse of the Wadden Sea, the Dutch harbour village sits where land, water and sky blur into one another. The recently completed project consists of a sculptural timber spiral rising from the water surface. Both building and landscape, it is a place of movement, observation and return, and forms part of a family of structures, including the Wadden Sea Centre in Ribe, Denmark (completed in 2017), and the soon-to-be-finished…

01. Santo Spirito flea market One of my favourite flea markets takes place at Piazza Santo Spirito every second Sunday of the month (except during high summer). 02. Museo Marino Marini Housed in the ancient church of San Pancrazio, this museum is dedicated entirely to the work of important 20th-century sculptor Marino Marini. museomarinomarini.it 03. Trattoria Cammillo A Florence institution. Start with the fried artichokes, follow with a seasonal pasta, a main of veal or lamb, and don’t miss the contorni (vegetable side dishes). Ask for a table downstairs for the best experience. @trattoriacammillo 04. Gelateria della Passera You may have to queue, but it is absolutely worth the wait. The seasonal fruit sorbets are exceptional. Pink grapefruit, orange, banana with nutmeg, fig or almond are personal favourites. gelateriadellapassera.it 05.…

It is not an easy time to be a young fashion designer: graduate debt is rising, as are rents, and the retailers that once bought into new talent are shutting their doors or scaling down spend. In response, designers have had to become more crafty – producing less but with more intention, making pieces directly for their customers, holding runway shows in their back gardens or studios. Some have decided to eschew the runway entirely in favour of zines or lookbooks, or simply hosting parties and dressing up their friends. It’s why these new voices feel as urgent as ever, with ideas just as inventive – whether rooted in personal identity, materiality or process. Others are reviving old-world archetypes in contemporary style, or paring things back, keeping things slow and…

Interior designer Charlie Ferrer had just three criteria when searching for a new home in New York City: a West Village address, a pre-war building and a working fireplace. Turns out that this combination is not easy to find within a reasonable budget. But, as luck would have it, a former client’s son moved out of a one-bedroom, double-exposure apartment on Christopher Street, in a 1931 Bing & Bing condominium building that sits practically on top of the landmarked Stonewall Inn. It ticked all the boxes, and Ferrer wasted no time moving in. The location is ‘a dynamic little intersection of energies,’ he says, and far livelier than Chelsea, where his two previous NYC apartments were situated. Each address encapsulated a moment in his gradual stylistic shift – the transition…

There has always been something undeniably seductive about long-distance train travel: the promise of adventure in far-off lands, and a pace slow enough to contemplate what you might find when you get there. Yet few trains conjure up glamour and intrigue quite like the Orient Express, which has been transporting travellers in style since 1883. The Accor-owned brand has now embarked on a new journey: the opening of its first hotel in Rome. Located on the Piazza della Minerva, just steps from the Pantheon, the hotel is housed in the former Palazzo Fonseca. Transformed into a hotel in 1811 by a wealthy French family, it quickly became one of Rome’s most fashionable addresses; a favoured stop-off for Grand Tour writers including Stendhal, George Sand and Herman Melville. Its new incarnation,…

When the LA-based Thai architect Kulapat Yantrasast first toured the 1980s warehouse that would become Thailand’s first international contemporary art museum, he was struck by how unremarkable it was. ‘It was just a long concrete structure,’ he recalls. ‘There was nothing particularly unique about it.’ But his client, Purat ‘Chang’ Osathanugrah saw something else. Once part of Bangkok’s industrial backbone, the building sits near the city’s largest port, between the Rama IV and Sukhumvit 40 arterial roads. What makes Bangkok endlessly fascinating, Osathanugrah says, ‘is its layering of the old and the new – the hustle and bustle, the tuk-tuks and street vendors weaving between gleaming towers and quiet temples. We love that mix of grit and grace [of the old warehouse]: the raw structure paired with nostalgic Thai-Chinese window…

Yoonjeong Lee The work of Korean designer Yoonjeong Lee focuses on contemplating the mundane to reveal and elevate hidden details that are not often obvious to the viewer. ‘Rather than seeking specific inspiration, my work centres on the ordinary,’ she says. ‘This includes objects that are small, quiet or disappearing, elements that are overlooked or forgotten.’ Lee majored in metal art and design at Hongik University in Seoul, with her graduation piece exploring the humble nail as a thing of beauty. Nails are now a recurring theme in her work, either existing as objects on their own or shown in frames and cases as jewellery objects (‘I find great delight in the process of creating independent value for these subjects,’ she says), cast as organic elements with irregular edges, keeping…

Transparent, fluid, light, fragmented, connected: a tumbling flow of eight vast cubical volumes appears to hover above a green park, sunlight and wind filtering freely through mesh façades. However, perhaps even more remarkable than this new structure’s monumental scale, weightless presence and abstraction of form is its function: it’s an art museum – and it’s also a library. The idea of mixing two established institutions to create a paradigm-shifting new cultural concept lies at the heart of Taichung Green Museumbrary in Taiwan, designed by Japanese architects SANAA. A spatial dialogue connecting books and art, the hybrid ‘museumbrary’, which opens in December, dissolves conventional boundaries and softly integrates Taichung Art Museum with Taichung Public Library. SANAA’s largest cultural project to date, it spans eight cubed volumes gently raised off the ground,…

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On the dawn of our 30th anniversary year, we find ourselves looking forwards more than backwards. We have always been concerned with the future; design is catalysed by the optimism to imagine and build new realities, whether that’s a universal power adaptor or a new model for the welfare state. We are very proud of our past, but it’s the prospect of the unknown that excites us. Such is the power of a threshold. In space as in life, it offers an opportunity to shed your baggage, take a deep breath and step forward into your wind machine. In place of the mawkish dictum that every second is history, we subscribe to the belief that every second is a new beginning, if only you know how to seize it. It…