We entered the water in full armour and were asked to demonstrate that, if our mask flooded underwater, we were able to clear it—a perfectly reasonable requirement for staying alive in a high-pressure environment. To do it, you look down, pressing the top of the mask with your hand, take a deep breath through the regulator, then forcefully exhale through your nose while raising your head. That creates enough pressure to push the water down and out through the bottom seal of the mask. If you want to do it successfully, you need to keep your cool and pretend you are practising tai chi underwater.

I tried the first time, panicked, and clumsily shot back to the surface. I tried a second time, then a third; on the fourth, I became so desperate to tick off the exercise that I burst into tears, which fortunately disappeared in the heavily chlorinated water. I hoped no one had seen it, but since couldn’t slow down the group’s progress, I was asked to complete the course another time. Ocean life is not for me, I thought, crying into the instant coffee I was given to wipe my tears away.

When I got home, gloomy and defeated, I realised that my problem was much more common than I'd suspected. It isn’t natural, after all, to be so deep underwater, relying on scuba gear to survive. And yet for centuries, people have found the ocean depths fascinating, trying to get there, photograph them, paint them.

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If I want to dive in December, I need to retake the course soon. Every piece of advice I found online on how to stay chill with water in your nose made me I’m not the only one! hopeful. Kam, my boyfriend, has me keep my face in a bowl of water with a snorkel in my mouth, which feels a bit like learning to ride a bike while sitting astride a bench and pedalling in the air. It makes me laugh, and I realised I don’t need to feel defeated just because I tried and it didn’t work out.

I’ll take a piece of advice he gives me from time to time: life only makes sense if you walk through it lightly. He says I never listen, but I do. To make something good come out of this experience, I decided to read more about the link between deep-sea exploration and art and design, and make myself even more excited about why I want to dive in the first place. Which is to get to know the world! I read about atolls when I was a geography-obsessed kid, and I remember thinking back then: it’s so far away, I’ll never be able to get there.

Consider it the second part of an article I published some time ago about how artists imagined space before anyone had been there. Along with space, the deep sea is one of those places that, for the longest time, could only be imagined, until we figured out how to keep ourselves alive down there. You need the mask-clearing skill for that!

Underwater world

I recently watched Sir David Attenborough’s documentary about the Great Barrier Reef, located off the coast of Australia. I’d never thought about it this way, but the ocean floor looks just like the land above water: if you drained the oceans, you’d see mountain ranges, volcanoes, vast plains and deep canyons. It’s a landscape. In these terms, the longest mountain range on the planet isn’t the one you can hike on dry land, but the Mid-Ocean Ridge that stretches for more than 64,000 kilometres beneath the sea.

For most of its history, the deep sea was left to its own devices, imagined as a mythological place populated by gods and monsters. Whatever you don’t know and have no representation of it, you imagine as a dangerous, impenetrable unknown.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, with the progress of science, more and more people became interested in deep-water exploration. Two theories clashed: one held that there was a whole separate world underwater, no matter the depth, while the other, supported by Edward Forbes, hypothesised that below roughly 550 metres the deep sea was completely lifeless, a void. In 1844, French zoologist Henri Milne-Edwards became one of the first scientific divers to descend into the unknown off the coast of Sicily, wearing a large helmet supplied manually with air by a fire-brigade pump mounted on the deck of a boat.

The cultural momentum was gaining pace, and it spilled into literature, which could imagine more, and faster, than science ever could. In 1870, Jules Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, a science-fiction novel in which a marine biologist and his companions are thrown overboard trying to hunt a sea monster that turns out to be an advanced submarine called the Nautilus, and commanded by the enigmatic Captain Nemo.

In December 1872, HMS Challenger set off from Portsmouth, England, beginning a deep-sea expedition that produced a fifty-volume report containing around 3,000 lithographs and plates of creatures brought up from the freezing, high-pressure depths of the ocean. Hauled onto the deck, in that hostile environment, they appeared either too bloated or too collapsed, and that rather grim glimpse of the depths influenced the public perception of the deep sea for decades.

In 1893 Louis Boutan took the first photograph while underwater, but as you can imagine, it didn’t do the justice to the colourful spectacle of the sea.

That’s what painters are for.

Underwater art

After his trip to the Red Sea in 1862, Austrian illustrator Eugen von Ransonnet-Villez became so enchanted by the underwater world that he sailed for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) two years later, becoming known as the first artist who created paintings directly underwater. To make that possible, he designed his own diving bell out of iron and glass, with his legs sticking out so he could propel himself when needed.

Eugen soon discovered, like many divers after him, that being underwater distorts your sense of sight. Water is about eight hundred denser than air, and that additional density causes light to refract. As the direction of light changes, objects in front of you appear magnified by around a third, making everything underwater looks closer than it really is. The deeper you dive, the less colourful this world becomes, as water absorbs different wavelengths of light.

Many artists would follow in Ransonnet-Villez’s footsteps, including the underwater painter Zarh Pritchard. Around 1904, Pritchard became known for descending beneath the surface in a diving suit and painting on oil-soaked leather with waterproof oils for about half an hour at time.

Art Nouveau

From the early 1860s, German scientist Ernst Haeckel observed thousands of microscopic marine organisms under the microscope. Their fabulous geometric forms awed him, and he went on to create dramatised watercolours and sketches of what he observed, published under the title Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904). Haeckel was also the man who described the radiolarians hauled up by the HMS Challenger. His work went on to inspire creatives of his time, prompting French architect René Binet to design the monumental gate for the 1900 Paris World's Fair, explicitly drawing on Haeckel’s work. The two men never met, but they exchanged letters. Art Nouveau was already underway by then, but Haeckel’s work handed it a new vocabulary, almost custom-made for the movement. The influence spread further, inspiring designers such as Émile Gallé and architects like Antoni Gaudí to create vases and buildings that drew openly on the marine forms.

Else Bostelmann’s deep ocean paintings

By the 1930s, many had already ventured underwater, but no one could descend beyond the length of the longest rope. Around the same time, American biologist William Beebe laid out his plans in The New York Times to descend deeper than anyone had ever been. Otis Barton, an engineer who also had ambitions to explore the deep sea, read the article and reached out to Beebe to discuss a vehicle for the descent. What they eventually designed was called the Bathysphere: a spherical vessel, considered the best possible shape for withstanding high pressure. It was equipped with oxygen cylinders fitted inside the sphere.

Beebe and Barton started their dives in Bermuda in 1930, and in August 1934 they set a human deep-sea record, descending 923 metres (3,028 feet) into the ocean. What’s perhaps even more interesting is that they collaborated with the painter Else Bostelmann. Barton did take a camera down, but his photographs came out useless, so to share their discoveries they relied on an artist who translated the movements and struggles of the extraordinary creatures they encountered in the deep sea into a painting. Bostelmann painted on shore, based on descriptions relayed through a telephone line and written down by research assistant Gloria Hollister. When Beebe emerged from the vessel, he immediately worked with Bostelmann as she translated his descriptions into watercolour, gouache and pencil.

To understand the underwater world and the way light spreads in water, Bostelmann descended in a diving suit and a heavy helmet into the shallow water herself, sitting on a chair on the ocean floor, 6-7 metres (20-35 feet) down, with her canvas attached to an iron music stand weighted with lead and her brushes tied to the stand as she painted the fish around her with oil. She could do it because oils do not mix with seawater, retaining their consistency underwater.

It stirs the imagination to think that the first paintings of a never-before-seen part of the ocean depths were made by a woman painting a place she had never seen, entirely from someone else’s descriptions. If that’s not the pinnacle of storytelling on Beebe and Barton’s part, then I don’t know what is.

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Dee x

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I could bathe in nature all day, every day. Just this morning, I took Bianca for a long walk in Greenwich Park, one of my favourite parks in London, hilly and decently royal. We walked through a tunnel of pungent sweet chestnuts, heavy with their fluffy yellow catkins, and I thought they made the park feel festive and almost soundproofed.

In fact, memories of time spent in nature are among the most vivid I have. I remember the garden behind the pre-war German villa we shared with Mrs Janka and her family until I was nine. She was a self-assured gardener, tending to her patch diligently but never being too precious about how the flowers were sown. She grew faintly pink phloxes in her half. We would lean over the rickety fence and pick their little star-shaped flowers, sucking what we thought to be milk from their tips. Cosmoses with dill-like foliage grew among them, and farther back, in our part of the garden, stood a wall of fleshy ivy. In summer, the garden seemed too abundant to fit inside itself.

When I started writing on Substack, I was surprised to find that the notes readers seemed to connect with most were about nature, too. It makes perfect sense to me now, but at the time I would have bet on modernist houses, and they did perform well, though only when nature was clearly the main character. People talked as much about the severe beauty of the New Mexico desert pouring into Georgia O’Keeffe’s houses and the forests enveloping Rudolf Schindler’s houses, as they did about the buildings themselves. More recently, Claude Lalanne’s Ginkgo chair elicited much the same response.

Claude Lalanne’s natural world

My sense of belonging to the natural world is stronger than to any country or ideology, yet I’d never thought about natural ornament at home, not in any deliberate way. I’ve always preferred the real thing to the motif, and some years ago I even purged our flat of almost everything botanical that wasn’t alive or freshly cut. Reading about Claude Lalanne, I realised I’d mistaken a dislike of a few generic floral cushions for a settled taste.

For most of human history, ornament drew directly from the natural world. Before the era of machines, people spent far more of their lives among plants and animals than among manufactured things, so their forms found their way indoors almost without thinking. From Roman lion-paw furniture to the flowers and vines of Rococo, nature remained the primary source of ornament. As the industrial world took hold, Art Nouveau answered it by turning back to nature with fresh intensity, filling homes with dragonflies, water lilies and curling stems.

Then came the age of the machine, and with it modernism. Adolf Loos argued in Ornament and Crime (1913) that decoration belonged to an earlier stage of civilisation, but it was the devastation of two world wars that gave clarity and function a new moral weight.

Not that ornament vanished. Even as the Bauhaus stripped it away, Art Deco kept it, but in a disciplined, geometrised form. Two opposite answers to the same century ran side by side: one abolishing the motif, the other perfecting it.

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By the time Claude and her husband François-Xavier Lalanne began making a name for themselves in the 1960s, both Art Nouveau and Art Deco had long gone out of fashion, and the post-war Parisian art scene was dominated by abstraction. In many ways, Les Lalanne lived deliberately out of step with the prevailing taste, gravitating instead towards the Surrealist circle and its appetite for the fantastic.

Yet Claude’s own strangeness came from staying remarkably close to the plant itself. Ornament has often translated leaves and flowers into motifs, gradually distancing them from the particular plants they came from. I, for one, struggle to get excited about a floral cushion when I can’t even hazard a guess at what species it’s meant to depict. Why would I have it on my couch? Claude preserved enough of the original form that her work never entirely stopped feeling botanical. In that sense, she restored a more direct relationship between design and the natural world as one of its oldest sources.

The method

And there was a good reason for that. A keen gardener since childhood, Claude cultivated an enchanted garden at her home in Ury on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, which served, quite literally, as the physical source of her ideas. “I never stop walking in the garden, looking at what is there and using what I grow”, she said.

She found her artistic language early and changed it remarkably little over the following fifty years.

For smaller objects, she often used galvanoplasty, a nineteenth-century technique she learnt from the American sculptor Jimmy Metcalf. Leaves, seedpods and branches gathered from her garden were coated in copper, preserving every vein and imperfection before being cast in bronze. She wasn't interested in idealising plants, but in preserving what made each one unmistakably itself.

Larger pieces, such as the Ginkgo chair, were modelled more freely. Claude enlarged and sculpted the leaves by hand before casting them in gilt bronze, carefully restoring their delicate veining through chasing and patination. At first glance, it looks carved from wood, but it is cast in gilt bronze. The result feels less like a chair decorated with leaves than a chair that has grown from them.

Objects to live with

Les Lalanne disliked the partition between fine art and daily life. François-Xavier put it plainly: "the supreme art is the art of living”. Claude was happy to call herself a craftswoman and made what came to be called "objects to live with", a phrase that sounds modest now but unsettled the categories in the late 1950s, when a sculpture you could sit on, or eat with, struck many as a category error. She said: "the words artist and artisan have the same roots. Why should one be more important than the other? There is no hierarchy". Her work ranged from sculpture to jewellery, sculptural furniture and dining pieces, all serving the same goal of making everyday life stranger and more poetic.

The irony is that Les Lalanne’s success grew so great that the objects they meant to be lived with are now out of reach for most admirers. Curious to see who might be working in a similar spirit today, I came across the British artisan Jess Wheeler, whose bronze leaves preserve something of the natural world’s strange beauty.

The piece above started life as a rhubarb grown in Jess's own garden before being cast in bronze. It’s a lamp!

The fig-leaf lamp below caught my eye too. Figs always remind me of summers at children’s camps in Croatia, where we’d eat them straight from the tree until we couldn’t manage another one. It makes me laugh that I now buy them six at a time in a plastic punnet.

I also like the chandelier, the floor lamp and the wall light, all “inspired by clematis flowers hungrily climbing trellises in English gardens”. They feel more interpretive than Claude's work but the hand-forged blackened steel has a lovely delicacy to it. I’m particularly taken by the shadow the floor lamp casts on the wall behind it.

Finally, I love these sculptural door handles by Richard Baronio, crafted using his distinctive welding technique and sourced by our very own of A Whimsical World for her brand LES Collection. I like how they seem inspired by the way plants climb, twist and unfurl.

Enjoy the long June evening. They're hard to beat, aren't they?

x

Dee

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Hello!

It’s been a while. Throughout most of May, I kept thinking I'd finish the essay I was writing the next day, and then the next one after that. Outside, brilliantly green spring rolled into London, sun-starved Londoners spilled onto pavements and everyone seemed to have collectively agreed that life was full of promise again. I, on the other hand, had developed a full-time interest in feeling sorry for myself.

The culprit was the hefty dose of hormones I was taking at the time. I struggled to focus, and the whole month now seems like a blur, with essays started and never finished, books left half-read, and even the things that would normally excite me feeling like a grind. It was one of those months that could have lasted thirty-one days but just as easily half a year.

At the end of May, I found myself at lunch at Bouchon Racine, London’s notoriously difficult-to-book French bistro, with my boyfriend Kam and a work colleague of his I’d just met. The usual what-do-you-do question came up. As I began explaining that I’d trained as an attorney-at-law but no longer practised, Kam cut into my answer, saying: “and she’s also a writer”.

I turned to him, looking for some sign that he was only saying it to make me happy, but there was none. They had already moved on to discussing why the duck confit was the best any of us could remember eating. I nodded along, but my mind kept wandering back to what he had said.

I noticed that what I remember most from the things I read are the personal stories people generously share with others. They often draw me into places filled with different voices and possibilities I didn’t know existed. Long after I’ve finished reading them, they become another room I walk to when I think.

I also like knowing the people behind the ideas. When I enjoy someone’s writing, I inevitably become curious about the life that produced it. I want to know where their thinking comes from. I’ve spent many happy hours reading interviews, biographies and letters by writers whose work I admire.

Since so many new readers have joined over the past month, it feels like a good moment to tell you a story about how I ended up here, too.

I’m Dee. I live in London with my boyfriend Kam and our dog Bianca, and I’m rolling into my mid-thirties at terrifying speed. This place is my attempt to honour the curiosity of a kid who always wanted to write but somehow ended up somewhere else.

I’m also rather funny. So my boyfriend says.

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Why I write

I wrote a lot in my teenage years, keeping an extensive diary in which sprawling descriptions of school romances mixed with terrible poetry of my own making and screenshots of chats with friends on Gadu-Gadu (Polish equivalent of MSN messenger), which we all used in the early 2000s. Looking at this period, it’s remarkable how little of life I seemed willing to let pass unnoticed.

After high school, I somehow lost that spark to narrate my life on the page, and the oversized teenage diary remains my first and only magnum opus. I remember the years recorded in that diary vividly, unlike most of my childhood, which is patchy at best.

My memory lapses and the feeling that life disappears if I don’t write it down weren’t accidental. I was ten years old when my best friend Justina died in a car accident, and it changed me overnight from a curious and playful child into an anxious one. My mom says she couldn’t comfort me for the following year, but I don’t remember any of that. Instead, I remember imagining shouting “fuck!” in church and dashing out (funny now, terrifying then), or doing something else that horrified me and felt completely at odds with who I was.

There was always something tugging at the back of my mind, questioning whether I had checked the hobs before leaving the house or whether I had forgotten something important. I remember at some point wondering if it’s possible for a twenty something to develop a dementia because the brain fog was so heavy.

Uninterrupted attention and the feeling of being present felt like luxuries and, as I gradually got better, I realised that being able to place my mind where I wanted it to be was one of the great privileges of life. I got back to recording bits of what I liked, what happened and what I noticed, knowing that writing directs my attention away from whatever is consuming it and back into the vast, beautiful, interesting world.

It helps me notice more, understand more, and imagine more for myself. It perhaps helps me become a slightly better friend to myself and to other people. It took me a while to figure out what I want to do with my life, so it’s especially pleasant to finally become serious about something. I’m going to write as if it’s my job, and maybe one day it’ll become one.

What I keep writing about

I went through many phases over the past six months, but the core of this place is an ongoing research project about design, art, creativity and culture.

I tend to pursue certain topics when I want more of something in my life. One of the ongoing ones is decorative arts and interior design. We’re planning to buy a house soon and, before I decide what I want it to look like, I need to put things into context: understand styles, the designers who shaped them, the decisions behind the rooms they created, and what I might borrow for my own idea of home. I want to see the whole menu of ways of thinking about a space before choosing my own. More than anything, I want to feel inspired.

If you new here, these will give you feel how I think about places:

So far, I've mostly written about places from the perspective of a visitor. This particular project requires me to become more interested in how they are put together. I'm hoping that learning to see these things more clearly will make my own thinking about spaces more fluent and perhaps become useful to someone else along the way.

Many of the essays I write begin with a question: is there a better way of looking at this? I keep searching for ways of organising thinking that make me a more generous presence in my life. Artists especially make for a goldmine of various mental models, so I often end up writing about them.

For example, I noticed that whatever the subject—a hotel, a chair, a painter or a house—I kept being drawn to the same qualities, such as beauty, spirit and craftsmanship. But I couldn’t work out what I was supposed to do with that information. Was it simply a collection of preferences, or did it mean something more?

I kept circling around the question until I eventually wrote about a Georgia O’Keeffe-inspired idea: that paying attention to what I found beautiful could help determine what I pursued. What had seemed like random bits acquired a structure.

I also tried to reframe the need for specialisation that modern life seems to have instilled in me, and at which I continue to fail on a daily basis.

In one way or another, all of these essays are attempts to direct my attention a bit better. My writing will evolve ten times over and the topics will fluctuate, but I suspect this will remain a constant in everything I put out into the world.

To everyone who has been reading along—thank you! I’ve enjoyed our exchanges and more than once I’ve shown your messages and comments to my boyfriend, beaming like a full moon and feeling ridiculously pleased with myself.

Dee xx

Cocteau’s output is staggering in quantity and diversity, encompassing novels, plays, poems, films, essays, autobiographical writings, journalism, painting, and a voluminous correspondence. Much of this oeuvre is minor and some is frankly bad, but enough of it is outstanding, either intrinsically or as pure invention... His failures do not diminish his major accomplishments.

Tom Bishop, in Saturday Review, September 19, 1970

I recently posted a note featuring Jean Cocteau’s ceramics at Château de Montfort in Dordogne, which—during its ownership by Séverin Wunderman, a devoted collector of the artist’s work—served as a major exhibition space for Cocteau’s art. There’s even a swimming pool on the grounds designed by Cocteau, another bizarre addition to his already extraordinary portfolio.

The note prompted an exchange with from Art Thinkosaurus, who observed that she had never heard anyone rave about Jean Cocteau, and yet he feels like someone who has always belonged to the natural order of things. In discussing our first encounters with his work, Joana mentioned that, having studied at a French school, she was introduced to Cocteau primarily as a writer who also dabbled in theatre and film; as a member of the Académie française, he was the sort of figure whose books naturally occupied a place on one’s shelf.

She remarked that visual art was not what usually came to mind in relation to Cocteau, and pointed to two reasons for this: the comparatively limited presence of visual art in the French curriculum, and the fact that his work was most likely overshadowed by more dominant visual artists of his time, such as Pablo Picasso or Henri Matisse.

I wondered how Jean Cocteau had reached me through my Polish upbringing, and realised he hadn’t at all. He simply wasn’t part of the cultural landscape I grew up with, unlike other prominent artists of his era. At first, I only knew that he existed, without quite knowing what to make of him. I eventually came to him through his drawings, and especially his murals, as I became more interested in other people’s houses.

But there are also his films, theatre, paintings, poetry.

That creates a compelling melancholy: Jean Cocteau as someone central to culture but rarely central to any one discipline. A kind of cultural homelessness seems built into working across forms. You belong everywhere and nowhere in particular. It might be that, by spreading yourself across so many media, you become difficult to remember for any one thing.

Although the twentieth century celebrated avant-garde experimentation, it also marked the beginning of an increasingly organised creative life, divided into disciplines and institutions. Criticism, too, tended to privilege seriousness and gravity. Against that backdrop, Jean Cocteau could seem too playful, though “playful” hardly captures the myth, death, and subconscious running through both his writing and films.

I wondered how he thought about his own creative identity, and remembered something Le Corbusier once said about his. When the Swiss gallerist and interior designer Heidi Weber—a long-time champion of Le Corbusier the painter, a far less familiar figure than Le Corbusier the architect—asked him about his specialisation, he replied:

There do not exist sculptors only, painters only, architects only. The plastic event fulfills itself in an overall form in duty of poetry.

For Le Corbusier, the question of working within a single discipline never seemed to matter, and that shifts the search for a description of Jean Cocteau quite a bit. A building could be sculptural, just as sculpture could contain architecture, and painting could organise space. “Poetry,” for him, was the word for what ran beneath all the disciplines: a way of making that gave form meaning. The word carries something of that sense in its Greek root, poiesis—not simply producing, but bringing something into being.

Funnily enough, this is exactly how Jean Cocteau described his work, too. Always a poet first and foremost, Cocteau emphasised from the beginning of his career that, whatever the genre in which he worked, all of his creations were essentially poetry. He believed that:

The secret of poetry is to take things from the places in which habit has set them and reveal them from a different angle as though we see them for the first time.

So it wasn’t really about being a poet who also made films or drew or decorated chapels; all those things were the same thing. What it came down to was perspective.

Taking his own advice, I wonder if the reason I struggle to categorise Jean Cocteau is that I’ve been assuming there must be a category waiting to be found. It now seems to me that there may not be one primary thing a person is meant to be best at in the first place.

What matters, I think, is having something to say at all, and being willing not to wait until you’ve found the perfect container for it.

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If you enjoyed this post, you’ll find more articles on looking at things from different angles here:

I'd like this space to hold more than it has so far. Coming up, in no particular order:

• visiting Venice through the eyes of Carlo Scarpa

• stories about French and Italian design, beginning with Carlo Molino, Charlotte Perriand and Jean-Michel Frank

• London as I see it

• Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright, and their shared love of the American Southwest

• Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan

• things I’ve found and want to share: travel, art, design, vintage, and life

• more of me looking at things

Thank you for being here! If you enjoyed reading and you want to show support for my work:

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• Consider upgrading to a paid subscription

Dee x

In September 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe, then 29 years old, taught art at West Texas State Normal College in the small town of Canyon, just south of Amarillo. Years later, reflecting on that period, she said:

When I taught art, I taught it as the thing everyone has to use.

In Portrait of an Artist, her biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, Laurie Lisle writes:

She told them [her students] there was art in the line of a jacket and in the shape of a collar as well as in the way one addressed a letter, combed one’s hair, or placed a window in a house. Every decision should be affected by the same consideration: what was aesthetically sound or, to put it simply, what looked good.

You’d think there wouldn’t be much left to add about Georgia O’Keeffe, given how well documented her life is—largely thanks to her being such a careful curator of her own myth; but it’s precisely the abundance of material that allows something more intimate to emerge: not only who she was, but a way of seeing that feels recognisable.

For me, she’s not just a person I find interesting, but someone who grasped a fundamental thing about reality—that how you live is the work. She was living proof that you're responsible for uncovering and honing your own way of seeing, and that what looks good is a serious enough question to organise a life around.

Aesthetics gets dismissed as surface, but taken seriously, it's a decision-making system. It answers how should I live without requiring external authority; just a consistent, honest relationship with what you find true and what you don't. Developing that requires attention and the willingness to trust your own perception over received opinion. That's not a shallow basis for a life; it might be the most reliable one there is.

That matters to me because, despite being drawn to aesthetics above most things, I had a nasty habit of dismissing it. I thought that organising a world only around aesthetic judgment was lesser than—less serious than—other ways of making sense of things; like philosophy, for example.

It’s hard to argue yourself out of a belief like that, but you can find someone who never held it for a second, and follow them around long enough that their certainty starts to feel available. I grew tired of what I thought before I could name it, and in O’Keeffe I found permission to experience the world through this one filter alone: is it aesthetically sound?

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A place isn't just a backdrop to human action. It makes certain thoughts, feelings and selves possible that wouldn't exist elsewhere. The reverse is also true: a strong enough mind reshapes the place right back.

I keep reading about homes of creatives for exactly this reason—to understand how a deeply creative mind shapes a space. Ideally I take something away, a solution or a way of seeing. Most of us pass through only a handful of houses in a lifetime, and there are always more ways of looking at a space than one can imagine. Why do some places feel right, while others don’t? What did their residents think of that never occurred to me?

In the thick of writing this piece, while scrubbing dishes, I caught my mind drifting to a bas-relief by Alberto Giacometti over the fireplace at Le Jonchet. It can happen to you too after reading, and it’s a good use of time.

If you missed the last piece where I dissected Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio in Abiquiú, it’s here.

Hubert de Givenchy

One way I get to know people I’m curious about is by reading what others have said about them. Even when embellished, these accounts surface telling details. This is what was said about Hubert de Givenchy:

“He was a pleasant resident who never caused any problems; private, discreet, very courteous. His dream was to restore it [manoir] to its original appearance and it has been fulfilled. He was very interested in conservation, nature, and the environment. […] made a very substantial donation, through an association, for the restoration of the church roof. He also gave perfumes to the elderly for several years.”

recalled Philippe Gasselin, the mayor of Romilly-sur-Aigre where manoir Le Jonchet is located

“To spend a week with Philippe [Venet, Givenchy’s partner] and Hubert—the most fantastic couple—was heaven. I remember taking a long walk through a big field with tens of thousands of daffodils. Nothing was small with Hubert.”

said Thierry Despont, who designed Calvin Klein’s East Hampton mansion, among others

“If Philippe and Uncle Hubert took a 12-day voyage on their yacht, for example, 12 Camemberts would come with them, each one timed to be served on a particular day so it was perfectly ripe.”

said about his uncle James de Givenchy

The setting

Le Jonchet has a moat fed by the Aigre, a château-y silhouette, and neighbours like Chambord, Chenonceau, and Azay-le-Rideau—all the credentials of a Loire Valley château. But it was never a monument. Where those castles became museums of royal ambition, Le Jonchet was known only to those who were invited in (and the entire audience of Architectural Digest).

Built in the 16th century in the French Renaissance style, it reflects the Loire Valley’s way of absorbing Italian influence and making it its own: more vertical and decorative, still rooted in the medieval château tradition. Later reworked in the 18th century into a quieter, more classical order, it carries the tension between both moments: the decorative energy of the Renaissance and the cooler elegance of French classicism.

By the 1950s the manoir had fallen into disrepair, but was completely restored by its next owner, the modernist architect Fernand Pouillon, now a largely forgotten figure, though responsible for rebuilding the Old Port (Vieux Port) in Marseille after the war.

Aristotle Onassis considered purchasing the property for Maria Callas, and in my view, it's better for Le Jonchet he didn't—this kind of property would quickly become a cliché in the hands of someone whose taste runs to floral fairytale. In Givenchy's hands, the manoir kept its understated elegance.

The garden

Every account of the garden leads back to Italy.

Born into a French-Venetian family, de Givenchy returned often to his Venice, owning a pied-à-terre just steps from Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo. He was particularly taken with the gardens of San Giorgio Maggiore, redesigned in the 1950s by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, where a geometric boxwood maze was introduced.

He carried that image back with him, translating it into clipped boxwood patterns at his own estate. I so often feel the urge to come up with something myself but borrowing and translating into your own language is a perfectly valid way of working. The difficulty is remembering it when it matters. I've started keeping a folder for exactly this reason: inspiration encountered and then misplaced is worse than never having seen it at all.

A keen gardener, Givenchy nonetheless sought help from his friend Bunny Mellon—a self-taught horticulturist of exceptional taste, already famous for redesigning the White House Rose Garden for JFK in 1961, recently mercilessly paved over by the Trumps. Her motto was “nothing should be noticed”, by which she meant that design was about composition, not individual components:

“Bunny helped me with plant choices, placement and juxtaposition.” Givenchy recalls. “She had a model tree made of wood that she would fix big and little arms onto”, he says, noting that they would move the replica around the grounds as they worked. “She wanted to see how each silhouette would fit in. The end result always appeared to be simple.” He pauses for a moment. “She went for perfection.”

From the Sotheby’s magazine, A World of Her Own, by Sarah Medford

My boyfriend teases me for it, but my favourite way to spend money is on someone else's expertise. I could sink everything we earn into other people's perspectives on subjects I already dabble in because a fresh eye tends to advance my thinking faster than almost anything else. Givenchy understood this: he probably wouldn't have arrived at Bunny's method without an outside collaborator. Getting someone's expertise is usually the most efficient shortcut.

The interior

“I remember the first time we were there (…) inside, there were always candles—it smelled like orange blossom, or a mix of lily of the valley and citrus. Our bedroom was all the way at the top of the tower, with sculptures on the way that were lit from below—you felt you were in a theatre, in some ways. The light was always perfect. The fires were lit.”

recalls Olivier de Givenchy

I can put myself in the exact scene Olivier de Givenchy describes—I've been in scenes like it, mostly in hotels. I sometimes struggle to bring the right atmosphere into my own home as night falls because it's like having a second job: the candles, the scent, the fireplace if you have one, the lighting to get right. Setting an atmosphere is invisible daily labour, and it rarely gets credited. But that Olivier de Givenchy can recall a sensory memory decades later suggests it was worth every candle.

Hubert de Givenchy was known for his progressive mind, pushing in his early days against the formality of Dior—his 1952 debut introduced "Les Séparables", cotton mix-and-match separates that were, as he put it, "quite a novelty”. Curious what someone with that reputation actually collected, I looked it up, and the range is striking.

His favourite fine art was from the 20th century: Miró, Picasso, Rothko, Alberto and Diego Giacometti. But he loved pre-revolutionary 18th-century furniture and decorative arts just as much, and saw no reason to keep the Abstract and Surrealist works apart from the decorative. He particularly loved collecting chairs—440 of them, according to Christie's—and dressed them in upholstery sourced from his couture suppliers, the glove-makers, among others. If every piece of furniture carries something of its past owner when it moves to a different collection, then with Givenchy that happened in the literal sense.

Givenchy brought a fashion designer's approach to his interiors, adapting them seasonally as if making a new collection. Deeda Blair recalled that "furnishings were always being moved and tried out in different places", and looking through photos across different years, you can see exactly that.

During the warmer months he replaced the heavier rugs with raffia and slip-covered eighteenth-century giltwood chairs to soften the atmosphere. This is clearly visible in the photo below—the chairs dressed in perhaps not perfectly fitted white slip-covers. His labradors were allowed on every sofa and chair in the house; how they kept them pristine is another matter.

Venet recalled that “We never thought about decorating. We just bought things we liked, and a place would be found for them.” Objects don't carry meaning in isolation; placement amplifies or kills it. A heavy piece needs air or contrast—without it, the room collapses under its weight. Look at the photo below and you'll see exactly what Bunny Mellon meant by "nothing should be noticed."

It’s tempting to analyse the paintings on the walls, but since Givenchy and Venet made many copies of works they loved, it’s not always possible to distinguish a copied Picasso from the real one. As Venet recalled:

There are many homemades at Le Jonchet: a “La Fresnaye,” a “Picasso” that Hubert drew. After selling the big Joan Miró in his atelier to the Pompidou, I told him, “We must make a Léger.” So we did a collage together.

The Giacomettis

What fascinates me most, though, is the Giacometti thread.

Givenchy met the younger Diego as his career took off, having been struck by the pure aesthetic of a small table Diego had made, gifted to him by the textile designer and art collector Gustav Zumsteg. The friendship that followed led to Diego designing furniture for Le Jonchet throughout the 1970s.

Diego was primarily a designer and craftsman rather than a fine artist. He made the bronze furniture, lamps, and decorative objects that appeared in the work of Jean-Michel Frank. His output sits exactly at the intersection of fine art and decorative arts, which is probably why Givenchy collected both brothers: Alberto on the walls, Diego in the furniture and objects.

As Deeda Blair recalled: “he was forever commissioning one more Giacometti this, one more Giacometti that.”

Diego's work looks almost alive: there are insect legs, animal forms, mythological figures. Something is always hiding in the surface of a piece. Givenchy's collection included, among others:

• pair of andirons with birds in patinated bronze (c. 1973),

• stag candleholders in bronze and glass (c. 1970),

• several Labrador sculptures based on photographs of Givenchy’s own dogs, placed on their tombs in the garden,

• the octagonal table with caryatides and atlantes in patinated bronze and stained oak veneer (c. 1983), as seen in the photograph that opened this chapter; look at the small figurines at each leg, which show Diego's singular style.

From Alberto Giacometti's Surrealist period comes L'Albatros, a remarkable plaster work created around 1937 for the interior designer Jean-Michel Frank, displayed in the grand salon at Le Jonchet (visible in the sitting room photo above). Although plaster is typically a preliminary stage, Alberto produced several sculptures in this material as finished works—valuing, it seems, its particular colour and texture in their own right.

The Giacomettis, too, were eventually copied. As Venet recalled:

Hubert asked, “Why don’t we have some Giacometti?” We had just sold our chalet in Megève—I was a very good skier and served in a mountain patrol during my military service—so I said, “Why not?” When Christie’s auctioned our Giacomettis [in 2017], we had a ferronnier make us a copy of the octagonal table.

One thing I’ll borrow from Givenchy is the idea of a single recurring symbol creating a kind of subliminal continuity throughout a space. For him it was the stag—emblem of St. Hubert, patron saint of hunters—appearing at the entrance and returning on cushions and sculptures inside. I’m not sure what mine would be; my friends suggested a bun, the daughter of an ex-baker that I am. It’s the kind of question you don’t think to ask until someone else has already answered it.

At the core of Le Jonchet is composition: detail accumulated over time, nothing wasted. Once you start looking at the house this way, Bunny Mellon’s advice—that nothing should call attention to itself—makes complete sense.

Givenchy clearly loved this house, and that feels important. It’s not something we talk about often enough: loving the places we live in.

A home is like a dog: it asks for (almost) nothing and gives everything.

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Dee

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Ever since we came back, African culture, art, perspective, zebras, and checking the weather in various parts of Africa out of idle curiosity have become part of my days. What strikes me most, though, is how predictably sealed I am inside a Western cultural bubble, cut off from the vast majority of cultures that exist in the world. Europe will always be my cultural bedrock, but I make a point of stepping outside that bubble when something catches my eye. Below is one such outcome: a round-up of artists from across Africa, for anyone whose world could do with expanding.

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1) Richard Mudariki (b. 1985)

A Zimbabwean artist based in Cape Town, Mudariki is known for modernist figurative paintings dense with social commentary on life across the continent. He has shown extensively in South Africa, Germany, London, and Zimbabwe, and trained under established Zimbabwean artists Allen Kupeta, Helen Lieros, and Greg Shaw.

I have a soft spot for contemporary figurative painting—one of my favourite artists is Kerry James Marshall, and we started our own collection with a work by Korean painter Hyangmok Baik that hangs in our living room—so it's hardly a surprise that Mudariki stopped me in my tracks. There's something gripping about his canvases, and the colour palette is difficult to walk away from.

2) Kaloki Nyamai (b. 1985)

Kenyan-born Kaloki Nyamai draws on stories of the Kamba community passed down by his grandmother, using them to explore how intertwined history and identity are, and how that inheritance shapes people living in post-colonial Kenya today. His work sits within a longer lineage of storytelling—tales carried from one generation to the next, producing an understanding of history as complex, plural, and contradictory. Paint is laid on heavily, left to crack and scar as it dries, while additional layers of ripped canvas pasted onto the surface build a rich palimpsest of colour and texture. Against the flat, one-dimensional identities that colonialism imposed and left behind, Nyamai's surfaces assert something more layered and alive.

3) Dolet Malalu (b. 1980)

Self-taught Congolese artist Dolet Malalu's unique and provocative style of urban art draws from what he sees in the streets of Kinshasa, embodying the spirit of La Sape—the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, or Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People, a name I will be adopting immediately (the linked article is worth your time).

Working in acrylic with pastels and spray paint on canvas, his work highlights Congolese culture in a register unlike any other contemporary artist from the country. Symbols recur throughout, among them bees, denoting life and birth. Highly imaginative and deeply rooted in tradition at the same time. Also funny.

4) Tabitha wa Thuku (b. 1963)

Born in the year of Kenyan independence, Tabitha Wa Thuku was among the very few women of her generation to become an artist—self-taught, no less. Over three decades she has developed a painterly language entirely her own: brooding, earthy, ranging from muted browns to deep reds, woven through with East African motifs—animals, landscapes, the textures of the land. Beyond her art, she is committed to mentoring emerging artists and supporting cultural development in rural communities.

5) Emeka Udemba (b. 1968)

Growing up in Enugu, eastern Nigeria, Udemba’s first encounter with art was watching his father—a London-trained forensic photographer—manually colouring portraits and social photographs with acrylic paint and brush, before colour photography arrived in Nigeria. Those early moments became the catalyst for formal study at the University of Lagos.

His technique is equally distinctive: each canvas is first layered with newsprint for texture, then built up not with brushes but with cut pieces of recycled plastic—thin strips to outline figures, larger pieces used like a palette knife to lay down bands of transparent colour.

As an artist of colour living in the diaspora, I explore identity, otherness, systemic biases and epistemic colonialism—juxtaposing history and the contemporary, appropriating materials and forms to connect past with present.

6) Kine Aw (b. 1977)

Born in Dakar in 1977, Kiné Aw spent part of her childhood in Kinshasa, where the city’s artistic energy left a mark that never faded. She graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar in 2006 and now works from her studio in the Village des Arts.

Women are at the centre of her work: their beauty, their inner lives and their roles within society. She builds a visual language out of curved lines, African mythology, ancient Egyptian symbolism, and the formal influences of Surrealism and Cubism. The result is otherworldly, sometimes mystical.

7) Boemo Diale (b. 2000)

Born in 2000 in Johannesburg, Boemo Diale grew up moving between the racial and socio-political worlds of Rustenburg and the city's suburbs. Her work sits in the space between: rural and urban, cultural inheritance and personal autonomy, symbolism and lived reality. The result is a dreamlike visual narration rooted in identity, generational trauma, spirituality, and desire. She’s cool, her Instagram is worth checking out.

Dee

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This is, admittedly, a slightly ridiculous question to spend an afternoon on, but by taking it seriously anyway, I tried to understand how the human brain naturally responds to different kinds of art. It’s a layer of experience more primal than taste, something that operates below the level we usually notice. I love cognitive science, and I love thinking about the brain as a small animal, shy and a little feral.

I could have tried to answer those questions while staying safely in Earth’s orbit, but my space obsession is out of control, and the more extreme version of the question interested me more: what if art were all you had? What if it were the only thing standing between your mind and the void?

I started thinking about this as we progressed with our serious binge of For All Mankind on Apple TV. It’s a what-if take on history in which the first man to set foot on the Moon was not Neil Armstrong but a Soviet astronaut, Alexei Leonov. What if the space race had never ended with America winning it, and the Soviet Union hadn’t fallen?

It’s a brilliant series, fast-paced, with pleasantly plausible hard sci-fi elements, and surprisingly accurate about the general vibe of a Marxist-Leninist mindset (no fun). What it captures well is how confinement, away from cultural stimulus, reduces a person to a very basic need: something to occupy the mind.

Historically, no NASA crew was stranded in space for anything like the durations the show depicts, but the psychological reality it portrays has real precedents in polar expeditions. Stranded on Elephant Island for four months while Shackleton crossed the Southern Atlantic to get help, a Cambridge physicist named Reginald James kept himself sane by working through geometry problems in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (someone had thought to bring it), while Admiral Byrd, wintering alone at an Antarctic base in 1934, named a phonograph his only real luxury.

In season two of For All Mankind, astronauts are stranded on the Moon with only a couple of episodes of The Bob Newhart Show, which they watch on loop until they remember every word—and when the tape wears out, they start replaying the show between themselves. Another time, a Korean astronaut listens to the same song on repeat, staring at his wife’s photograph, and only when the tape breaks does he begin to comprehend that he’s alone and possibly soon dead on Mars.

The pattern is clear: it’s connection with culture that sustains the human mind.

Which painting do I like the most?

When I began thinking which painting I would choose, I started with the obvious question: which one do I like most? Many paintings from across different styles and different eras came to my mind, but the more I thought about it, the less convincing it felt that the favourite one would be the best choice by default.

Our brains are relentless editors—repeated exposure dulls the response, and what once felt immense becomes ordinary with terrifying speed. The real question, then, is not which painting I like most, but which stays inexhaustible the longest, what that inexhaustibility represents, and whether representational and non-representational art differ in that regard. This isn’t a hierarchy, just a thought experiment with unusual constraints. All art welcome, Moon conditions apply.

An investigation

There’s a Rothko exhibition currently running across three locations in Florence that can serve as a good example to discuss. In two of the locations, the Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Rothko’s colour field paintings hang next to the frescoes of Fra Angelico and in dialogue with a vestibule designed by Michelangelo.

As Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi describes the premise of the exhibition:

Rothko’s first encounter with Florence dates to 1950, during a trip to Italy with his wife Mell. He was deeply moved by Fra Angelico’s frescoes at the Convent of San Marco and by Michelangelo’s architectural vision in the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which would inspire the Seagram Murals painted in the late 1950s—a dialogue that Rothko further developed during his second visit to Florence in 1966. (…) Rothko and Angelico shared a desire to evoke a sense of transcendence, a dimension at once distant and profoundly familiar. While Angelico achieved this through the emotional resonance of divine figures in dialogue with earthly reality, Rothko created colour fields capable of accompanying viewers into different emotional depths, challenging accepted notions of abstraction and colour theory.

Perhaps aptly for my Moon setting, Fra Angelico's frescoes were painted directly onto the walls of the friars' cells at San Marco to serve as a focus for contemplation in confinement, something to return to daily and get lost inside. Rothko strove for the same effect, creating an image you could look at a hundred times and still find renewed resonance each time. With different techniques both artists wanted to achieve the same goal.

We know that the mind cannot sustain itself without input. If art is cognitive fuel, are both paintings renewable sources to the same degree?

The brain is a story-seeking machine. While instrumental music or abstract art offer no explicit narrative and speak to feelings first, they ultimately draw out the viewer’s own memories and the meanings attached to what a piece makes them feel. When you stand in front of a Rothko, whatever rises up is already yours: joy or grief, free-floating or anchored to something specific.

There’s some evidence for this mechanism in neuroscience. When we see recognisable objects, the brain fires its usual recognition circuits, but when there are none, it shifts toward the default mode network (DMN), the same system active in daydreaming, self-reflection, and autobiographical memory. With no correct answer to reach for, the brain pattern-seeks in a more open-ended way, and the interpretive work turns inward.

In that sense abstract art is introverted, pulling you deeper into yourself. Depending on the viewer and their tolerance of ambiguity, it may give you an immensely powerful experience, but in isolation (or simply a bad state of mind) it might feed the wrong hunger, giving you more of what you already have too much of: your own interior.

On the other side of the spectrum, representational art is more extroverted, pulling you out toward another world, something that exists independently of what you bring to it. It can be a world that terrifies you, but it’s an outside world, with its own story and a landscape different from your own. Looking at something figurative, your brain recruits the same neural pathways it uses for actual perception. The visual cortex processes it and you’re essentially recognising, which means your brain is simulating the experience depicted, both emotionally and intellectually.

For this reason, narrative paintings might feed your brain with stories for longer, giving the mind the outer input it craves. Part of what makes this possible may be what psychologists call theory of mind, aka the cognitive capacity to step outside your own mental state and model someone else’s, to recognise that another mind exists and has its own inner life. It’s the feeling you get looking at someone, or something they made, and thinking: there is someone in there.

Which ultimately means that you might feel presence other than your own, and it’s exactly what you need when you’re alone. A figurative painting doesn’t just give you something to look at, but it can create the illusion of social presence. When faced with a scene full of people in particular, the brain automatically engages in social cognition, first recognising faces and actions, and then, through theory of mind, inferring the intentions and emotions behind them. It’s a kind of low-level storytelling that keeps running in the background.

Whatever the type of art, what’s amazing is that you reach toward the mind that made it, even if that mind has been dead for five hundred years. That’s what culture essentially is: a message encoded by humans into objects so that other humans can receive it across distance and time. Sometimes it pulls you toward another world, sometimes it pulls you deeper into your own, but either way, you are not alone anymore.

I’ve picked a few paintings to test what I wrote above. I usually looked at them only through the lens of enjoyment, so I’m quite excited to give them a different look. Which painting would keep my mind from slipping into the void? Let’s see.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510), Hieronymus Bosch

I first saw this painting in high school and have enjoyed picking through its details ever since. It’s unhinged, full of people chilling in clams, picking forbidden fruit while naked, wearing blackberries and cherries as headgear, riding birds, being ridden by birds. There are so many micro-narratives folded into the scene that my brain would have a lot to work with.

That said, I feel happiest looking at the left panel, which I realise is exactly what Bosch intended. Paradise, full of harmony. The central panel is funny but I don’t enjoy crowds, and when I look at it too long I get slightly overwhelmed. The inferno disturbs me, and in a worse state of mind I think I’d start to dread that side entirely.

I assumed this may be the one but I suppose I was wrong. Interesting that the maximum presence and narrative seem not to be enough. I’ll look for a different kind of presence, then.

Composition X (1939), Wassily Kandinsky

When I look at it, I feel my brain scanning for anything recognisable: that yellow element in the bottom left looks like a wing, I decided, the one in the top right is a clown. It makes me happy, and the more I look at it, the more elements I find I start telling a story about to myself. Despite the shapes being more geometric, I find decoding them not unlike decoding a Joan Miró.

The only caveat: it’s cosmic and who needs more cosmic energy on the Moon?

Speaking of Joan Miró:

Dutch Interior (1928), Joan Miró

I love it, I feel childish joy looking at it. It’s interesting how its elements are known and distorted at the same time, which makes decoding what they are an extra work that pushes my cognition towards more imaginative scenarios.

Which takes me to the painting on which Miró based his Dutch Interior:

The Lutenist (1661), by Martensz Sorgh

Ok, this one is easy, surely you could hang out with these people and their dog, and cat, listening to their music, looking through the window, smelling the skin of a peach, looking into a painting above, being in an actual room…

Pedernal (1941), Georgia O’Keeffe

Is a landscape enough to keep me sane?

I know so much about Georgia O’Keeffe at this point that I’ll probably think of her in this landscape and that would make me feel less alone. Pedernal was her favourite mountain she could see from her Ghost Ranch house that she often painted. Similarly to Paul Cézanne and his Mont Sainte-Victoire, Pedernal to O’Keeffe was alive and always changing. Interesting how much knowledge about the painter changes the perception of the painting—if it were an anonymous mountain by a painter I know nothing about, I’d probably be more indifferent to it. Knowing it’s in New Mexico and hearing O’Keeffe’s stories about the New Mexico desert adds a lot to how I perceive it. I’ll also think about my own mountainous upbringing and perhaps replay all the hikes I had that would help me be surrounded by everyone I hiked with. Promising.

The House Opposite (1945), Leonora Carrington

Reading this post by surrealist covens I learned a lot about this painting, well worth a read.

Looking at Bosch's and Carrington's work in such close proximity, it's crazy how similar a Surrealist painting can be to something created centuries before. Given how often Surrealist paintings depict nightmares, I can straightaway rule out those pieces—I simply can't watch anything close to horror, the anxiety I feel watching it is real. But the one above is pleasantly whimsical and I feel invited to linger in this world, giving names to these figures and trying to figure out what they're on about.

No. 14, 1951 (1949-1951), Mark Rothko

Back to Rothko. I feel the need to narrate it and already started to tell myself that it's like a sea of red with a blue sky above. Seems like my brain can't stop this chatter. Trying to turn inward, I straightaway connect colours with emotions, believing that red represents all the bad things, and blue is when I'm out of the woods. It actually also looks a bit like a landscape. Still, this painting is not very different from the sea of regolith in the first photograph, and I feel like it wouldn't be the best companion.

I'd love to hear about your Moon painting! Every interaction with my work helps, so please share, like and restack—there may be more people out there who need to spend their time on this topic.

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For obvious reasons, special prize goes to this painting:

A Newfoundland off the English Coast by Edmund Bristow

Dee

On a rainy January evening a couple of weeks ago, I met my friend Viv at Tate Britain for Lee Miller’s exhibition. We were soaking wet and gravely late because I first headed to Tate Modern only to realise I should have gone to Tate Britain instead (yes, people do that). We were still let in with a wide smile, which I consider one of the brightest achievements of London’s cultural hospitality. Nobody here seems to care much about strict hours; they just want you to have a good time.

I’ve shared a couple of highlights from the exhibition in my notes, but I kept thinking about it afterwards and decided to revisit some of the works I’d saved on my camera roll that day. I enjoy tracing the relationships between artists I admire, so it’s hardly surprising that I mainly took pictures of Miller’s portraits of her artist friends. I did it for my own reference but then kept coming back to them—and here we are.

She lived multiple lives, and as I walked through the eleven exhibition rooms I felt as if I were reliving all of them with her simultaneously (her son, Antony Penrose, wrote a book about his mother aptly titled The Lives of Lee Miller). The exhibition spanned her early years as a model, her creative relationship with Man Ray and her rise as a leading figure of the French Surrealist movement; her time in Cairo and travels in the Middle East; her work as one of the most well-known photojournalists of World War II; and finally her graduation from a course at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, where she reinvented herself as a gourmet cook.

Leaving Tate, I realised that at the start of the show I wasn’t nearly as interested in her work as I was by the end. Perhaps this is what the best exhibitions do: they leave you invested in someone’s story far more than you might have expected.

It was the most extensive retrospective of Miller’s work ever staged in the UK. There’s an archive of her photographs online, but seeing them in person made it possible to capture something of their texture. We spent two hours bringing our faces close to the frames and stepping back again to see them from different angles. I enjoyed eavesdropping on the people around us discussing exposure, depth of field, and the capricious nature of light. Fellow viewers are often insanely knowledgeable, and I frequently learn more from them than I do from the wall labels.

Every photographer has a subject that drives them most. When you think of Helmut Newton, fashion is usually the first thing that comes to mind; when you think of Ansel Adams, it’s landscapes. Arnold Newman—portraits, and remarkable ones at that (he shot this portrait of Josef Albers, about whom I wrote here). Lee Miller’s archive is vast, and there is barely a type of photography she did not try: Surrealist experiments, travel photography, fashion, photojournalism. There’s a lot, yet the work I like most is her natural, barely staged portraits of people she knew. There’s a photojournalistic flair to them—a story captured in a frame—and a certain mystery, too. It’s her relationship with the people she photographed that makes them so compelling: the way she sees her friends at a certain moment in time.

Perhaps inevitably for a Pole, I lingered over the photographs she took during World War II. The ones that surprised me most turned out to be among the most widely known: the images of Lee Miller and David Scherman in Hitler’s bathtub in his Munich apartment, taken on the day of his suicide, 30 April 1945, and later published in British Vogue.

First of all, why anyone would want to sit in the same bathtub where Hitler cleaned his butt is beyond me. Puzzled, I asked my Polish friends—there are quite a few of them—whether they knew these photographs existed, and all but one said they had never heard of them. It’s all the more surprising because, growing up in Eastern Europe, we were exposed to many of the starkest photographs of World War II, since showing images of death camps to children is almost a rite of passage there. For that reason, I wasn’t particularly shocked by the photographs Miller took in Dachau and Buchenwald (as much as one can get used to looking at such things), but I still couldn’t understand how none of us had ever heard of what is considered one of the most widely known photographs taken by a Western correspondent.

It may be that Vogue is a Western breeze that reached Poland all too late (in 2018), but I think it says more about how differently historical memory circulates depending on where you stand on the map. Western cultural infrastructure was essentially inaccessible to Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and when it did arrive, it arrived late and only partially. There’s also the Vogue factor specifically. Western fashion media as a vehicle for serious photojournalism is itself a very particular cultural context. The idea that one of the most significant photographs from the fall of the Third Reich was published in Vogue is almost conceptually alien if you didn’t grow up with that magazine as a cultural reference point.

Miller largely abandoned photography once she got back to the UK after the war. “After the things she had seen, she couldn’t go back to taking photos of frocks and hats,” said Antony. It’s a common story with war photographers that they return from the front in a state of profound despair. Sebastião Salgado is another example—after returning from Rwanda, he couldn’t pick up a camera for years. (Anyone who hasn’t seen Wim Wenders’s The Salt of the Earth yet should watch it. It’s inspiring.)

By Antony’s account, Lee went even further and never mentioned to him that she had once been a photographer. He discovered it by accident after her death, when his wife found 60,000 negatives in the attic.

Miller reinvented herself as a gourmet cook after her husband, painter Roland Penrose, gifted her a course at Le Cordon Bleu for her 50th birthday. Her housekeeper, Patsy, remembered her specialising in “historical food” such as roast suckling pig, as well as Surrealist fare like marshmallows in Coca-Cola sauce—a concoction she made to annoy the snooty English critic Cyril Connolly, who had once rudely told her Americans could not cook. (Then again, you don’t have to be a Surrealist to come up with something like that, given that the Scottish eat Mars bars deep-fried.)

She lived with Penrose and their son in a cottage in East Sussex, Farleys House, which we haven’t had the chance to visit yet, travelling almost always with our dog in the back of the car (justice for dogs, who are rarely welcome at cultural sites!). But summer is coming and Sussex will bloom again soon, and perhaps the promise of looking at photographs with our noses close to the paper will make a trip without Bianca worthwhile.

I’m still not entirely convinced—there’s no way of explaining to her why we went to the countryside without her. Every moment of our dog’s life feels like liquid gold. However, the mural in the kitchen and Picasso’s tile above the stove do look tempting, and I read that dogs are allowed in the sculpture garden, so perhaps we can make it work.

When my Saturday pans out particularly well, I spend a sweet hour or two browsing anything from Architectural Digest to House & Garden. I browse until something catches my eye, partly for the thrills, but mostly for my own education.

I learn best from focus: one designer, one expert voice with the archive and knowledge to back it up. Pinterest is fine for mood boards, but it’s all association, no analysis. If you don’t dig deeper, you end up seeing the same few images bouncing around the internet. It trains the eye to see interiors as compositions and doesn’t go beyond that. For actual understanding, I need design publications or Substack writers who can explain why something works ( does this beautifully).

The question is always the same: how does a house become a home? Or more precisely, how do you make a home that can be lived in, adjusted without breaking, and respects the people inside it?

If you haven't noticed yet, I'm obsessed with places and spaces. I keep circling back to the idea of genius loci, the spirit of a place. I remember books and films best when the setting feels like a character—Call Me By Your Name, obviously; my favourite photographers specialise in capturing a sense of place (Stefan Gifthaller is the OG); I'm constantly thinking about how to make our flat feel more functional and more like us.

My post about Georgia O’Keeffe’s home—which I see, at its core, as a piece about how a home can carry the personality of its inhabitant—has been my most read so far. I know it’s partly because so many people love her, but I like to think it’s also because it’s about a home so full of character it feels almost conscious. I think about this place a lot, particularly about how O’Keeffe kept adjusting it to herself, and how the point was to never stop changing it.

Last Saturday, I studied Chester Jones's designs on the House & Garden website and found his article on the failings of modernism that made me circle back to the question of how you make a space your own. For those who'd like to put a name to the interiors, the first photo and the photo below are of Jones's design projects. He's on his own mission to "humanise the interiors through mixing harmony and disparity, practicality and perversity." He has a classic hand but is no minimalist; he sees eclecticism, with its less formulaic approach to design, as a way to accommodate the evolving nature of home. Jones's work is built on a belief I share: that art, sculpture, and cherished objects make a house feel like home, whether old or new, as long as they carry meaning for the resident.

In the article, Jones gives a compelling example that I see as a story about the clash between a house understood as a finished object and a house as a process, open, adaptable, and accumulating.

It goes like this: in 1928, architect Mies van der Rohe, who would become the last director of Bauhaus before the Nazis closed the school, designed Villa Tugendhat, a modernist open-plan house that gained international acclaim lasting to this day. We all know the dazzling photos of airy modernist villas, some of us are guilty of posting them (me), and yet we rarely give any thought to what it actually meant to live there. Turns out, many of them, including Villa Tugendhat, became something of a headache for the families who moved in:

The hubris of many great modern architects inclined them to ignore this [the balance between creative independence and sympathy for a client’s temperament]. Consider Fritz and Grete Tugendhat commissioning Mies van der Rohe c1928 to design a new villa for them near Brno in what is now the Czech Republic. Grete was an avowed modernist and a collector of contemporary art, and apparently the owner of two Van Goghs. However, due to Mies’s planning and walling details, she ended up with a house in which hanging paintings of any sort became an impossibility. As a consequence, there are none at all in any of the principal rooms. Fritz expressed a wish to use some of his existing furniture in the villa, but was outmanoeuvred by the architect, so none appeared. History applauds Van der Rohe’s achievement, while the family’s responses are undocumented. Years later, however, a colleague of mine who knew the architect well noted that his own Chicago apartment was filled with great lumpy pieces of comfortable upholstery, and a traditional sideboard on which personal mementos were prominent.

Research suggests there were some smaller paintings in the bedrooms, but the point stands: Grete's Van Goghs had nowhere to go in the main living spaces of her own home.

The many sins of modernism in its ideological form aside, the biggest was delivering a house as a finished project, almost a shrine. Books and articles have been written about it, many of which will put you to sleep easily if you struggle with insomnia, but Rem Koolhaas, author of the now iconic Delirious New York, got it sharp. He argued that modernism’s failure lies in its reductionist, top-down approach, which prioritised abstract ideals of functionality and rationality over the emotional and symbolic needs of people. That spilled into modern architecture as well.

We like to think we’ve learned from modernism’s mistakes, but scroll through Instagram and you’ll see the same impulse: homes styled to perfection, every surface clear, nothing out of place. It’s Villa Tugendhat for the algorithm, beautiful to photograph, impossible to inhabit. The medium has changed but the error is the same: confusing visual purity with livability.

It is often the case that the more pure the ideology, the more holes appear in its fabric. Rigidity and oversimplification are not the most durable materials after all. O’Keeffe, with her infallible instinct for what’s simple and beautiful, did the opposite. She treated her house as a living organism and bent every piece of furniture she owned to her own needs, whether designed by a modernist master or made by a local artisan. She had the very same Mies van der Rohe Barcelona table, and the moment it turned out to be too low for the adobe seating she’d built for the room, she had its legs recast. It honestly feels like karma coming back for Mies, who, as it turns out, couldn’t live the way he built.

I've never been much of a fan of his, but it was the first time I learned he designed houses that left no room for the people who lived there, and it didn't exactly make his approach more compelling. Years after Villa Tugendhat, he designed the Farnsworth House in Illinois the same way, and once again, despite it becoming a blueprint for many other modern houses, its owner, Dr. Farnsworth, described it as "almost unlivable." If you dig deeper, Le Corbusier is responsible for the same. His 1931 Villa Savoye was also declared unlivable by its inhabitants and looks generally sad and unwelcoming from the inside, despite a design aimed at letting nature pour in.

The world we live in is obsessed with control and definite answers, but the irony is that the homes we most respond to are the ones that resist both—like O'Keeffe's adobe, or a place designed by someone who understands that personality isn't a design choice but something that accumulates over time as the people inside change.

In the article, Chester Jones quotes the writer Stewart Brand’s dictum that “you don’t finish a building, you start it”. A house can’t be finished before the life begins. Jones writes:

Behind every practical need in a home there is an even greater emotional one, the place to which we may retreat. This should be a sanctuary of resource and reflection, a place where we can empathise with the people who are most dear to us. We live in an increasingly complex world, marked by contending theories and conflicting opinions, from which we need occasional respite and a measure of independence. We feel it is in the client’s interest that the implications of these should be explored with them. It is through access to their heritage, their intellectual inclinations, their curiosity, that empathy is established and more personal options be developed.

Because I feel like being mean to Mies, I'll recount what Chester Jones does when there's a need to hang art on the wall. He was introduced to this method by his friend, the great British painter Patrick Heron who, on being bequeathed the St Ives studio of Ben Nicholson, discovered this to be a wonderfully flexible way of displaying an art collection. It involves fitting walls with horizontal battens on which you hang a revolving display of paintings, framed textiles, drawings, whatever you like. The frames have screws on the back that hook into the grooves on the battens, allowing for easy changes. You can then enliven the space by adding, editing, and periodically rearranging the collection. This sounds like a poem to my ears, and if you don't believe me, you have to trust Georgia O'Keeffe, who changed the art on her walls all the time.

Before I finish, I want to share a couple of articles from fellow Substackers that get at this same question. If you care about how spaces evolve with the people in them, you'll love these:

Remotely by Lucy Williams

The Perils of the 'Too Perfect' Room

I was recently trying to tweak our spare/guest room because it was just feeling a bit too flat and predictable, but it quickly became a game of unsatisfying jenga as I tried to take one thing out and add another without letting the whole room metaphorically (hopefully!) crumble. I took the chair out of it and the room felt lost. I tried switching up the lamps in there and nope, that didn’t work. I tried mixing up the art and still no… I was at a loss…

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2 years ago · 151 likes · 7 comments · Lucy Williams

on the perils of too perfect rooms:

[…] the conundrum of this [guest] room got me thinking about rooms that are almost too perfect. I know that sounds like an oxymoron but bare with me. My two favourite rooms in the house (our interconnecting sitting rooms) are the opposite of this. I can throw anything at them and it sticks. I could change the colour of the sofa, the fabric on the ottoman, the art, the rugs and the rest of the room would, for the most part, still work. I love rooms like this. Rooms that never quite feel full or finished and can take plenty of tinkering.

A Whimsical World

Is It Impossible To Design An Authentic Home?

How do we create a home that feels like an authentic reflection of who we are inside? Asking for a friend. J.K.—asking for myself. It's a deep insecurity of mine that my home doesn't feel like an actual portal into the depths of my soul. Facilitating authentic design is, after all, what I do for a living. Our mission at…

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2 years ago · 51 likes · 6 comments · Lauren Sands

on letting homes evolve with their residents:

Here's what I'm starting to realise: maybe our homes aren't meant to be a perfect mirror of who we are right now. Maybe they're more like journals—capturing pieces of us at different points in time—layers of our experiences, our values, and the people we love, all woven together into something that's still unfolding.

The House Diaries

The House Diaries: From clickbait to belonging: why interiors should be lived, not performed

The World Of Interiors published a very thought-provoking article recently about “clickbait to cliché”. In it, Tony Liu argues that interior design today is being reshaped by algorithms, social media, and the keyword-driven logic that accompanies them. What used to be descriptions of styles or rooms (serene, rustic, eclectic) have turned into easily hashtagged, trendy labels …

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a year ago · 11 likes · Patricia Rodi

And finally, on the same point Chester Jones made. She also has a great series called Home Cooler Than Your Friends.

For me, every project is about creating interiors that belong to the people who live in them, not to a feed or a trend cycle. Each space is tailored, layered, and, importantly, allowed to evolve. It’s about celebrating imperfection, embracing contradictions, and acknowledging that beauty comes from how a home is used, loved, and lived in, not from its visual performance online.

When a home is designed this way, it carries life. It carries memory. It carries care. It is not a backdrop, but a repository for the everyday, messy, beautiful reality of living. And that is what drives everything I do as an interior designer - a commitment to spaces that feel like they belong, not spaces that simply perform.

I hope you enjoyed this! If you did, any interaction helps—likes, shares, and recommendations are all very much appreciated. And however you're reading, I'm really glad you're here!!

Dee x

Yesterday, I wrote a piece I struggled to put together. Writing it felt like forcing myself through a book I'd already lost interest in, and when I finished, I felt hollow. I had a wrenching gut feeling it wasn't good enough, and that I wouldn't read it if I were you.

I liked the idea: artists who build a signature style by borrowing structures from outside art, like science or craft, but on paper it turned into an art history survey with no happy ending. It’s well-trodden territory in art criticism (hi Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Systemic Painting), but I found myself drawn instead to artists like Georges Seurat and Ruth Asawa, whose chosen frameworks—optical colour theory and a simple looped-wire basket technique—interested me in particular.

As one of Asawa’s teachers, the German abstract painter Josef Albers, put it: “We don’t always make works of art, but experiments. Our ambition isn’t to fill museums; we’re gathering experience”. My post about borrowed systems ended up in a cemetery of unpublished drafts. Non tutte le ciambelle escono col buco, as Italians say. Not every donut comes out with a hole.

I decided to approach Asawa’s story from a different angle. I love that she borrowed from Mexican craftsmanship, but what really fascinates me is how Albers trained her eye, and how that training allowed her to turn a craft technique into sculpture.

Albers, a Bauhaus-trained German refugee, taught at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Asawa studied. His teaching shaped major artists—Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ray Johnson, and Susan Weil among them. What made him such a formative teacher was his method: a systematic, rigorous attention to how perception works. Albers didn’t teach style; he taught how to see.

He wrote Interaction of Color, a seminal book arguing that colour and form never exist independently, but always in relation to one another. A red square will look brighter next to dark green, duller next to orange, brownish next to intense crimson. The "same" colour is never actually the same; perception is always relative.

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I went skiing in the French Alps this week, and as I travelled, I got more and more excited about staying at a new hotel I can test inside and out. I consider myself a freelance Michelin inspector (hotel department), and I live for staying in new establishments that I collect like stamps.

Over the years, I’ve developed an elaborate system for gauging whether a place is worth visiting. It isn’t perfectly rational and can be overly critical, but the decision ultimately comes down to how a place feels.

It doesn’t need to belong to a particular hotel genre, or even a particular place. City or countryside, homey or refined—I don’t really care, as long as it makes me feel good. What I love most is the excitement of being somewhere new and seeing whether it actually meets the criteria I picked it for. Some might say this borders on an obsession and they wouldn’t be wrong.

I’ll happily travel anywhere if a place relies heavily on art and design. It’s a treat to notice a painting as I lift a fork to my mouth, or wake up in a room so full of personality it could only have been designed by a genius. I’m also drawn to places with a broader understanding of what they consider art.

There’s one place in Italy that’s very special to me, and that I’ll never mention publicly, on the off chance I suddenly gain Leonardo DiCaprio–level influence. Stranger things have happened. It treats every part of the experience as art: the food, the service, the drinks. I feel like a princess there and always half-expect a legendary Italian designer to drop by for aperitivo.

To set the record straight and give you a clearer sense of which hotels quietly double as serious art destinations, I’ve rounded up a list of European places worth visiting from an art and design perspective. Seven for now, because it takes time to work them properly through my preliminary Michelin sieve.

I haven’t visited any of these yet, but they’re all places I’m very keen to test properly. They’ve been designed very deliberately to shape your experience, so don’t expect the quirky soulfulness of family-run hotels, which can be just as wonderful, but sit in a different category altogether.

Speaking of which, if you ever go skiing in Portes du Soleil, we stayed at Le Dahu, which is a good example of the other end of the spectrum. Family-run, ridiculously welcoming, and even though parts of it could probably use a renovation, you don’t really care because of how it makes you feel. Like an Alpine grandma has invited you to stay in her chalet, scrubbed clean to within an inch of its life, and insists you eat far more than you want to.

Hotel Saint-Georges, Megève, France

I’ve been a fan of Luke Edward Hall for a long time, probably even before he skyrocketed into being one of the most influential young British designers around. I was impressed by his work for Ginori 1735, and I’m still impressed by how perceptive his eye is.

His whimsical, maximalist style has always felt inviting to me, even though it’s notoriously hard to do well. You need a vivid, spatially skilled imagination to layer that many elements into an interior and still keep it uplifting.

Continuing my Alpine streak, Luke’s latest project is in Megève, where he’s reimagined a classic mountain house through the lens of Alpine folklore and his own visual language. There’s a lot of red and green, sensible colours alongside Alpine wood, unlike the soulless grey-and-wood combinations I keep seeing in some chalets. Soft, washed murals of mountain lakes and snow-capped chalets are painted directly onto the walls by French fresco and lettering artist Pauline Leyravaud.

He’s also managed to introduce a note of decadence, with columns and mirrored ceilings in the restaurant. This is no small feat in an Alpine setting. And then there’s the Piano Bar. In a chalet. Not Claridge’s, obviously. The carpets there are based on traditional Welsh blanket designs, which feels like exactly the kind of move that shouldn’t work, but somehow does.

I’ve never been to Megève, but given my track record with Alpine destinations, I doubt it’ll stay that way for long.

Château Voltaire, Paris, France

Since Paris is only a Eurostar ride away from London, I save far more hotels there than I’ll ever realistically manage to visit. Château Voltaire is one I keep coming back to.

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He’s one of those artists who, like a Matryoshka doll, reveals layer upon layer of cultural references mixed with a deadpan sense of humour. You think you know Hitchcock? Look again. There’s always something he’s thought of, you just didn’t look closely enough.

I had my nose glued to the screen from the moment I first saw it, completely spellbound by moving images, a bit like the kid in Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 film Cinema Paradiso. It sounds awful to say this in 2026, but screen time hasn’t always been a bad word in a millennial vocabulary. It used to mean watching Power Rangers and The Addams Family all day, back when time moved at a glacial pace.

Watching—and talking about what we’ve watched together—is our little family love language. With thousands of films and TV series produced every year, there are more than a handful of classics we still haven’t seen. Hitchcock’s films often felt particularly daunting; we kept waiting for the right time and mood, which never seemed to come easily, as if a classic cinema séance needed some kind of foreplay.

Then, sometime last year, we put Rear Window on, and it turned out to be one of the brightest evenings of 2025.

Presenting the Master of Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) was born in Leytonstone, now part of London, where I buy my Christmas trees.

Before he made his first film, Hitchcock picked up a fair share of different skills. He started out studying engineering, then moved into creative writing and technical illustration. Drawn especially to American cinema, he went on to work for Famous Players–Lasky, a production arm of Paramount Pictures that had opened a studio in London. By the time the Second World War broke out, Hitchcock was already an established director in his home country, and soon after, he relocated to Hollywood.

For people like me, who spend about 90% of their energy wondering who they want to be when they grow up, it’s comforting to see how many of the early greats arrived at their destination sideways. Stanley Kubrick was a photojournalist for Look magazine; David Lynch was a painter; Michelangelo Antonioni studied economics and worked as a film journalist. Those early detours later fed directly into their singular styles—which, in Hitchcock’s case, feels a bit like visual Tetris. It’s all about control: everything fits, and every detail is doing narrative work.

He sits in a strange category of his own. Directors whose visual side is so deeply conceptualised often drift toward experimental, austere, or academic cinema. Hitchcock went the other way, bringing modernist, near-abstract thinking into thrillers, star vehicles, and mainstream entertainment, a combination of formal rigour and popular appeal that remains rare.

A man who loved all culture

I love his deep attraction to popular crime culture—tabloids, sensational news, pulp fiction, macabre humour—which is where much of his wit and cruelty come from. He was never a high-art-only snob.

We often relax and become more perceptive when we realise an artist is human. I love David Lynch precisely because he directed Mulholland Drive and once sat at a junction in Los Angeles with a cow. My favourite writer remains Jonathan Franzen, because of how accurately he writes about everyday human life, and because, somewhere among all that domestic and emotional drama, I’m always half-expecting him to drop a recipe for a pound cake.

The most underrated skill right now might be holding opposites together without collapsing into one or the other—like loving both high(er) and low(er) culture. It feels like a small but necessary step towards undoing the black-and-white thinking that keeps ruining the world.

Paul Klee, Hitchcock’s favourite painter

I’m not self-indulgent where content is concerned; I’m only self-indulgent about treatment. I’d compare myself to an abstract painter.

There’s a famous anecdote about how Alfred Hitchcock acquired one of the first works in the modern art collection he built with his wife, Alma. It would later grow to include works by artists such as Georges Rouault, Raoul Dufy, Maurice de Vlaminck, Auguste Rodin (his favourite sculptor), Giorgio de Chirico, and other twentieth-century artists they admired.

In 1938, not long after the premiere of The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock wandered into a London art exhibition and stopped in front of Paul Klee’s Mask and Scythe. He lingered there, eyes moving between the painting and its £600 price tag (approximately £52,000 today), clearly weighing the moment.

The film had been a success, but this was still a serious sum. He paced, stepped away, doubled back, stood in front of it again. Eventually, after one last look, he decided it was worth it and wrote the cheque.

Klee was Hitchcock’s favourite painter. In his art, he untethered himself from the literal, using form to explore something closer to a dream than a story. Line, plane, and colour were the story.

Hitchcock approached cinema in a similarly controlled way. His films aren’t driven by emotional expression in the confessional sense, but by form: composition, balance, and the careful arrangement of images to guide perception. He planned his films so meticulously through storyboards that much of the work was done before the camera ever rolled.

North by Northwest (1959)

If you spend even a few minutes with North by Northwest, the sheer level of planning starts to feel almost smug. Hitchcock is showing his hand from the outset, beginning with the title sequence. Designed by Saul Bass, it was his second collaboration with Hitchcock after Vertigo, and you can feel the confidence dial being turned up.

By 1959, Bass was already well-established, but North by Northwest feels like a moment where something clicks. The titles are clean, minimal, almost architectural. This wasn’t just stylish packaging; it was Hitchcock quietly setting the rules and daring a viewer to keep up.

Film geeks (and more than a few scholars) have spent years tracing visual influences in Hitchcock’s films, and North by Northwest comes up a lot; its scenes often feel as if they’ve been pulled straight from abstract paintings, obsessed with composition and colour.

Starring Cary Grant as an ordinary man who very much did not sign up for espionage, North by Northwest watches like a proto-James Bond film, before Bond had a number, a martini, or any sense of irony about the whole thing. You’ve got shadowy organisations, false identities, glamorous women, and increasingly elaborate chase scenes, all building towards the completely unhinged moment where Grant and Eva Marie Saint end up clinging to Mount Rushmore, as if this were a perfectly reasonable place for a thriller to climax.

Three years later, in 1962, along comes Dr. No, the first official piece of the James Bond franchise, and at that point, Hitchcock’s influence stops feeling subtle and starts feeling foundational.

There’s modern architecture in the mix too, because of course there is. The villain, Vandamm, lives in a spectacular modernist house clearly inspired by Fallingwater, designed in Pennsylvania by Frank Lloyd Wright. In the film, the house is improbably perched near Mount Rushmore, although in reality it never existed at all, having been built entirely as a set on an MGM soundstage.

Rear Window (1954)

Rear Window is widely considered one of the best movies ever made, and a pinnacle of Hitchcock’s career.

Jeff, a photojournalist played by the great James Stewart (loosely modelled on war photographer Robert Capa) is stuck in his apartment with a broken leg. Not exactly a still-life photographer, Jeff feels trapped in one place, so he does the only thing available to him: he looks outward.

What starts as boredom gradually hardens into obsession. Watching his neighbours across the courtyard, Jeff begins to piece together a story, and eventually convinces himself that a woman living opposite has been murdered.

Rear Window isn’t really interested in the story so much as the way it’s seen. As you watch, there’s a growing sense that you’ve encountered these images before; not the plot, but the way the world is arranged within the frame. The compositions, the colour, the urban voyeurism all feel familiar. It becomes clear that Hitchcock is drawing on Edward Hopper, particularly Night Windows.

Hopper’s work often feels photographic: quiet, still, slightly exposed, like you’ve arrived at the scene a moment too early or a moment too late. Hitchcock borrows that suspended calm and tightens it, turning it into something uneasy. You’re invited to look, and then reminded that you may not always like what you see.

Spellbound (1945)

Paul Klee and Edward Hopper couldn’t look more different on the surface, but both are obsessed with structure and balance. Watching North by Northwest and Rear Window, that way of organising images feels consistent. That’s why it surprised me that, back in 1945, Hitchcock turned to Salvador Dalí for the dream sequence in his psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound. Surrealism (and even more so Dalí) doesn’t immediately suggest order.

As Hitchcock later explained in an interview, what drew him to Dalí was the architectural sharpness of his work. Dalí’s images are strange, yes; but they’re also meticulously structured. In Spellbound, the nightmare isn’t frightening because it’s blurred; it’s frightening because it’s so carefully designed. You can see sharply every line, every object. And once again, it comes back to control: even the subconscious, in Hitchcock’s world, has to obey the rules of composition.

A funny man

I’ll leave you with a bit of Page Six.

The Uniform. Hitchcock’s suits were almost as famous as his films. There was a widespread belief that he owned exactly one black suit and simply wore it everywhere, regardless of heat, geography, or common sense. James Stewart remembered Hitchcock enduring the heat of Marrakech without loosening his tie.

In reality, the suits weren’t black at all, but a very dark navy Hitchcock referred to as French blue (which is not, strictly speaking, French blue at all). And there wasn’t just one. There were many, in different sizes. “They’re all my sizes,” he once said. “If my weight changes, up or down, I’m prepared.”

Pranks and Phobias. Off set, his humour tilted toward the quietly deranged. He dyed all the food blue at a dinner party because there weren’t enough blue foods. He once had a horse delivered to a friend’s dressing room. Eggs, meanwhile, horrified him. Watching someone eat one could make him feel physically ill. Yellow! Revolting.

I do sometimes worry about his protein intake.

Any interaction with my work helps it reach new readers, so likes, shares, and recommendations are always appreciated!! And however you’re reading, I’m very happy you’re here!

Dee

I was thrilled to learn that we needed to remove anything remotely edible from the car if we didn’t want bears breaking in for a picnic. We saw a raccoon crying over the body of its child. We almost got lost in the wilderness. It was epic.

You could enrol in camp-run activities each day, so we spent our evenings eating s’mores and stargazing through a digital Unistellar telescope (separately). It was the first time I’d been close enough to space for it to feel intimate. We spotted a nebula, a star cluster, and the pale swirl of a comet. It felt faintly outrageous, like peeking through someone else’s window. Why had nobody been showing us this?

I hadn’t seen any part of space up close like that before. Everything I knew came from sci-fi films and making a solar system model at school, which I still consider one of the peak experiences of my childhood. The subject was only skimmed over, and years later, trying to remember when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon felt like being asked to list the dates of the Hussite wars.

What I remember most vividly is Saturn’s rings, which looked uncannily like the sour gummy strips we were addicted to. It made me wonder how it felt to know even less than I do now, when the sky was still mostly unknowable, and what people made of Saturn’s rings.

A place no one had ever been

For most of human history, space was a real place that no one had ever been to. Painting it required the same kind of imagination we reserve for places we can’t access directly. The closest comparison I can think of is the deep ocean: undeniably real, scientifically acknowledged, and, to a point, largely constructed in the mind.

Even then, there are reference points to lean on. You’ve seen water. You’ve seen fish. You’ve seen darkness. Space was more distant than that. From Earth, it appeared as little more than a black canvas punctured by a few stars—or none at all, if you happened to live in London, as I do now.

Visual voyage

For centuries, artists played the cards they were dealt. At first, there was no more up there than gods and symbols. With the invention of the telescope around 1608, artists knew that planets and stars were more than points in the sky, but much of what lay beyond still had to be imagined.

As science progressed, planets began to appear in drawings and paintings with increasing detail and precision. Many of these images came from people working somewhere between science and art, back when telescopes weren’t widely accessible and understanding space relied as much on imagination as it did on optics.

I was especially struck by these “lunar” images (below) created in 1874 by James Nasmyth, a retired engineer. Because photography wasn’t yet capable of capturing the Moon at such magnification, he built plaster relief models based on careful observation, then photographed them under controlled lighting to simulate the lunar surface.

By the beginning of the 20th century, as astronomy advanced and better telescopes, astrophotography, and data became available, space was something science could depict more accurately than art ever could. A painted crater could no longer compete with a photograph of the Moon. Painting literal planets began to feel redundant, even restrictive.

So painters changed the question. For artists like Kazimir Malevich, painting a planet was beside the point; he wanted painting itself to escape gravity. Malevich was a keen amateur astronomer who carried a pocket telescope, constantly observing the night sky. With Wassily Kandinsky, circles, lines, and colour suggested cosmic movement and harmony without ever naming space. The cosmos moved inward.

Chesley Bonestell: the man who dreamed a space

Then space painting became pure sci-fi. Chesley Bonestell arrived.

According to American space policy expert Howard E. McCurdy:

No artist had more impact on the emerging popular culture of space in America than Chesley Bonestell. Through his visual images, he stimulated the interest of a generation of Americans and showed how space travel would be accomplished.

Carl Sagan, once said he didn’t know what other worlds looked like until he saw Bonestell’s paintings.

His work helped shape the American space programme and circulated widely in popular magazines and books from the 1940s through the 1970s. He’s often described as one of the founders of space art, and his influence stretches across science fiction illustration, cinema, and Hollywood more broadly. His planets, stars, and spacecrafts were rendered with near-photographic precision, balanced by a distinctly cinematic sense of drama.

In a 1969 interview, when asked about the Apollo 11 landing, Bonestell admitted to a mild sense of disappointment. The Moon, as it turned out, was flatter and more eroded than he’d imagined, less jagged, less theatrical. Ironically, those same exaggerated landscapes went on to inspire Stanley Kubrick, who deliberately favoured Bonestell’s sharper, more dramatic lunar vision in 2001: A Space Odyssey over the scientifically accurate but visually duller terrain revealed by lunar probes in the 1960s.

The first time anyone had been there

The first time someone went into space feels comparable to the first Homo sapiens who decided to get dressed. It set a precedent.

Until 1961, space still presented itself as a place no one knew what it actually felt like to be in. Yuri Gagarin became the first human to see Earth as a single object from orbit. He didn’t take a photograph, and he wasn’t supposed to. The Vostok 1 capsule wasn’t built for that kind of reflection, and, as was often the case with Soviet missions, the priority wasn’t seeing but surviving.

What Gagarin brought back instead was something harder to document. Later termed the overview effect (the phrase wasn’t coined until 1987), it describes the shift astronauts report when they see Earth suspended in space: fragile, interconnected, and startlingly small. At the time, there were no words for the combination of beauty, loneliness, and grief that came with that view. It was the first moment in human history when the planet was perceived that way. It may also have been one of the last times we encountered something we didn’t know how to describe.

Soon after, Gherman Titov became the first person to photograph Earth from orbit. The experience made him violently ill—he was the first recorded case of what’s now known as space adaptation syndrome—but it didn’t dampen his sense of wonder.

The images he took on a Konvas camera were technically poor, blurred and uneven, but that hardly seemed to matter. The view itself gave him immense joy. In later recollections, he wrote:

I had the feeling that our Earth is a sand particle in the universe, comparable to a particle of sand on the shore of the ocean. It was strange to have a black dome above me and our earthly blue sky below.

In 1965, as the space race accelerated, Alexei Leonov became the first person to walk in space. It nearly ended in disaster. His Golden Eagle spacesuit ballooned in the vacuum so dramatically that he couldn’t fit back through the hatch. With no other option, Leonov manually released pressure from the suit, well beyond the safety limit, risking the bends in order to survive. Soviets.

It’s fortunate he did. An accomplished artist off the clock, Leonov went on to make the first piece of art ever created in space.

A man on the Moon

If it weren’t for NASA, Earth might not have become a shared visual object quite so quickly after Yuri Gagarin first saw it from orbit. In 1968 came Earthrise, the image that opened this post, taken by William Anders from aboard Apollo 8 as it circled the Moon.

With every astronaut’s journey, a place no one had ever been to became real, and with every photograph taken from within space, imagining was gradually replaced by knowing. In 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the lunar surface and redefined what it meant to live on Earth.

Feeling shameful I couldn’t remember the year of the Moon landing to begin with, I went down a small research rabbit hole and looked up what camera they used, and who was actually behind it. Neil Armstrong carried a Hasselblad 500 EL for most of the Moon walk, which is why so many of the images, including the most famous ones, show Buzz Aldrin instead. The camera had been specially adapted for an environment that had never been photographed before, which feels like an appropriate way to end this particular line of inquiry.

The rest is history

In 1987, Andy Warhol produced his Moonwalk series. Space fully folded into pop culture, reproduced and flattened until it became instantly familiar.

It has been marked by humans now. Described, painted, measured, photographed. We know what Saturn’s rings actually look like, and they’re less dramatic than Bonestell imagined.

For centuries, artists had to fill the gap between “we know it exists” and “we’ve never seen it.” And then we went. And we found out what it actually looked like.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have gone, obviously we should have gone. But there was something cool about that period when space was real but unknowable. When the only way to show someone what it looked like was to imagine it with total confidence and hope you got close.

Any interaction with my work helps it reach new readers, so likes, shares, and recommendations are always appreciated. And however you’re reading, I’m very happy you’re here!

Dee

Spending time in Vince Gilligan's universe is a crash course in the human condition, but what struck me most was New Mexico itself, so vivid and self-possessed it might as well have been another character.

Curious about its stealthy charm, I began drifting through the region’s history, its architecture, its art. I caught myself gasping at houses I’d happily move into tomorrow, then stopping short when I stumbled upon Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio in Abiquiú, the blazing sun at the very centre of New Mexico’s architectural orbit.

Couldn’t quite let it go, I kept digging for more photographs of the place. I fell in love with the ones I found—as did more than three thousand readers who liked the note posted here. It went viral, and the photographs are still there to enjoy and swoon over:

Comments and DMs poured in as readers started to share stories about their visits to the house. Many people reflected on how this place changed them profoundly; others wondered how can you not be an artist in such a setting. It was clear there was something about this place that rings true for many, and I felt that if I named it, I would be closer to understanding what we collectively long for in spaces, which happens to be a hobby of mine.

New Mexico

When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I’ve never seen anything like it before, but it did it to me exactly. Like something that’s in the air, it’s just different. The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different… I shouldn’t say too much about this because other people may get interested and I don’t want them interested.

Says Georgia o’Keeffe in the documentary Georgia O’Keeffe: Portrait of an Artist, naming what is probably the most universal desire: to keep places we consider special to ourselves.

O’Keeffe came to New Mexico for the first time in 1929, and kept returning until she moved there permanently after her husband, a photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, died in 1946. At first, she bought a small plot of land and a house on Arthur Pack’s Ghost Ranch, and a couple of years later, her second home in Abiquiú, a place that at the time had fewer than 200 residents. She lived in the area until her death in 1986.

When she began taking refuge in New Mexico, it wasn’t only the strain of her marriage she was distancing herself from, but also the performance of New York’s art world. Out west, she drove alone through the desert in her Model A Ford, gutting the passenger seat in 1934 to make space for the only companion she wanted: her art.

At that point, she was primarily known for paintings of blown-up flowers. In the sun-scorched desert, where flowers were scarce but bones were everywhere, she turned instead to skulls.

In the documentary, she reflects on how her skull paintings grew out of a desire to create something distinctly American. At the time, New York circles were anxiously trying to define the Great American novel, play, painting—a debate led largely by people who had scarcely ventured beyond the Hudson River. Rather than theorising the Great American painting, she made one, framing the cow skull against a field of red, white, and blue that quietly echoed the American flag. She painted it this way because of how animal skulls look against a blue sky. She then added frames of red, perhaps as a reference to the valour and bravery the colour symbolises in the American flag—and most certainly because Georgia loved a pop of red.

She understood the whole of America well. Born on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin, she formed a bond with the natural world that only a childhood shaped by land and weather can create. As much as she enjoyed New York, that connection was harder to tend to there; returning to the wild meant returning to the perceptual ground that had shaped her sense of beauty in the first place.

Home and studio in Abiquiú

I used to come just to look at that door. This door was why I bought the house. I knew it was a good place but you don’t find anything like that door any other place.

She dreamed of owning a house she could renovate, leaving it marked unmistakably by her hand. A house on Ghost Ranch was more of a turnkey property than something redone from scratch. She continued searching for a place whose essence she could infuse with her own sensibility.

It took her thirteen years from first wanting the Abiquiú house to finally acquiring it in 1943. Another three years were spent restoring it before she was able to move in. The project was a joint venture between two women: O’Keeffe and her friend Maria Chabot.

Parts of the house are believed to date to the 1730s. The building was in deteriorating condition when O’Keeffe first spotted it in the 1930s. Built with adobe that melts when not kept up properly, it required total rebuilding. That was exactly what Georgia was looking for. She was very insistent on deviating from a traditional, expected style, stating in an interview, “I didn’t want a Spanish house; I didn’t want an Indian house, [or] a Mexican house; I wanted my house!”.

Leafing through the photos of the house, you may notice there’s an unusually big number of huge windows. It’s not a coincidence: O’Keeffe and Chabot were mindful about introducing modernist elements into an adobe structure that would make it lighter and more expansive—hence skylights and large picture windows providing expansive views of the surrounding landscape and bringing natural light into areas that adobe houses traditionally didn’t have.

There’s a strong sense of personality in the Abiquiú house, and it’s hard not to notice how rare that feels now. We’re surrounded by interiors that are slick, efficient and interchangeable, and perhaps that is why encountering a home that doesn’t try to impress, but only to express can feel oddly moving. It reminds you of being younger, when taste was instinctive rather than curated.

What can we borrow from Georgia O’Keeffe home?

When I peek into her sitting room (below), I feel joy. It’s the kind of room where you can be sure to lead a happy and interesting life. Her visceral need to create a home shaped down to its foundations by what she found interesting and beautiful is almost palpable.

It doesn’t feel styled, more like an extension of her thinking—another form of work. What’s the secret sauce?

• She treats the space as an ongoing experiment

When you start making a home, it is difficult to stop changing it, imagining it different. (1981)

I admire O’Keeffe for her relentless need to experience the world as an artist all the way, without any breaks from this way of being. She was actively chasing novel ways of looking at her surroundings with a set of fresh eyes, constantly moving things around to see them from different perspectives. If a painting stayed on the wall for too long, she moved it somewhere else to notice it again. Her art often hung on different walls before she decided if a piece was finished, treating the house like a gallery space.

She was never afraid of customisation. When a table by Mies Van Der Rohe (the Barcelona table, pictured above) turned out to be too low for the adobe seating she made for the room, she had its legs recast—a move that would bring many aficionados of collectible design to the brink of a heart attack. When she got tired of the adobe seating, she got rid of it. She hung her Noguchi lamp (my personal rule is that every space is better with at least one Noguchi) with a custom mechanism that allowed her to adjust its height depending on what she needed the lighting for.

She was always making something with her hands: painting, making and fixing cracked pottery, sewing; constantly repurposing textiles delivered to her by a dear friend, a textile and interior designer, Alexander Girard, who at the time lived with his wife in nearby Santa Fe. Most cushions in the house are sewn from Girard’s fabrics.

I love this way of looking at space: a living organism that can be constantly reimagined, never quite finished. It frees me from the fear of mistakes. What is even a mistake if you can simply change your mind? No biggie.

• O’Keeffe taste encompasses every detail of the house

She surrounded herself with objects she loved, leaving no room for blind chance. An OG of personal branding, she chose things not only because of how they looked, but because of what their function was in the space. Her home feels personal because everything she chose to fill it with was personal to her, from the walls to what she wore (Marimekko!).

Travelling extensively, she stayed in touch with modern trends, particularly Scandinavian design, which she was inspired by. There was a shared idea that beauty and function are linked, and that both emerge when nature is absorbed into an object, through simplicity, proportion, and the way materials feel. There was a love for negative space, and for a pop of colour, mostly red, orange, and blue. No one loves pops of colour more than O’Keeffe and the Scandinavian masters.

Through Alexander Girard, her friend circle included modern American designers Rae and Charles Eames, and Finnish designer Eero Saarinen (he studied with the Eameses at Cranbrook Academy of Art). That reflected in the furniture she owned: among others, Eero Saarinen’s green Womb Chair and a couple of LCW Eames chairs, which she regarded as an example of the perfect fusion of experimentation and technology.

Abiquiú’s minimal, earthy interiors served as a perfect backdrop to the furniture—pieces that today are often put to work as the most show-off pieces in the room. When you look at the photo above and the one below, neither the Bertoia nor the Womb chair screams I’M VERY EXPENSIVE, but they complement the earthy minimalism and invigorate the space with their modern twist.

• She brings nature and terroir into the house

Mud is really warm, a live experience.

This house was hers, but also of its place. Just as chalets belong to the mountains, it made sense to stick to the materials and techniques developed in the desert. Georgia was enamoured by its earthy minimalism and kept the adobe brick walls plastered with adobe mud. Because this architecture doesn’t hide its structure, the beams were left exposed, running through almost every room and setting the rhythm of the space.

Big panoramic windows and a mostly open-space plan of the house brought nature into the interior. Look at the photo below: the mesa outside looks like a vast painting. At other times (photo above), the outside spilled into the room, immersing it in the surrounding nature.

O’Keeffe invited the outside world into the home by collecting things: animal skulls, rattlesnake skeletons, rocks, and cones. They were displayed on multiple surfaces throughout the house, along local Pueblo pottery and Kachina dolls carved by Native American Hopi people.

Loving Georgia O’Keeffe

Loving her doesn’t feel particularly difficult.

Just like Picasso or David Lynch, she was relentlessly prolific, living the artist’s life as though it were simply the most obvious way to exist. There was no sense of performance in it, no visible effort to justify the choice.

What stays with me isn’t her exceptionality so much as her ability to keep her attention focused. She noticed what she noticed. She chose what she chose. She arranged her life around those decisions and kept going.

I’d love to hear more stories about Georgia, so please don’t hesitate to share in the comments!

Dee x

Exactly a year ago, I announced to anyone who asked (and several people who didn’t) that I was done with New Year’s resolutions. I’d been making elaborate handwritten lists every January since my teens, plotting upgrades to my days through swapping coffee for tea (wishful thinking), regular diary-keeping, and promises to become marginally more sociable. Every January, I’d start my life over again, quietly cancelling the previous year for failing to live up to whatever standard I’d set that time around.

Renouncing resolutions helped, but not in any neat or decisive way. This January, I didn’t erase the previous year, and I didn’t replace myself with a shinier, more disciplined version either. But there was no obvious turning point. I felt suspended in a sweet, sweet jelly of indecision.

Stuck in this limbo, I was circling the same thoughts I’d been dodging for quite a while. Mostly, they had to do with how I actually want my everyday life to feel, and whether the inconvenient fact that there’s only now should have any bearing on how often I do things that feel indulgent or celebratory, like eating caviar.

I knew that if I wanted my thirties to involve learning new skills, building a different career, and not napping after every minor stunt, some reckoning with how I use my days was inevitable. I needed a come-to-Jesus moment, entirely self-administered.

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How president Eisenhower saved my 2026

When no amount of rest seemed to quiet the questions I’d been carrying around, I spent the first five days of January trying to come up with a plan I wouldn’t immediately resent.

I’m not famously good at sticking to systems. In my dated diary, a Hobonichi Techo Cousin, which I love for its paper weight and how it lies flat, I write on whichever page I happen to open. Whenever I join a club, I leave shortly after the initial burst of enthusiasm fades. In every structure I’ve ever been part of—school, work, planning—I’ve instinctively bent the rules into my own private variations. The pattern is hard to miss, even if I’ve occasionally tried to reframe it as flexibility rather than commitment trouble.

A big, beautiful spreadsheet mapping out all my plans and hopes was out of the question. I briefly tried an elaborate planning system someone else had generously shared, but panic set in around slide fifteen, when I was instructed to do yet another visualisation. I knew I wouldn’t use it, even if I wanted to.

The general sense of no clear direction kept pressing on me until I came across a line Dwight Eisenhower once said—planning is everything, but the plan is nothing. It landed with surprising force. Maybe I didn’t need a plan to follow after all. Maybe the planning was the point.

I hadn’t expected the 34th president of the United States to help me get my life in order before I turned 34, but the timing felt oddly right.

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I was surprised to learn that almost every president was appalled by the White House’s interior upon taking office. Perhaps that’s not so surprising: taste is personal, and power doesn’t erase it.

Curious, I leafed through images of Louis Tiffany’s gilded-age Art Nouveau total makeover (yes, that Tiffany, of Tiffany & Co.), which repulsed President Theodore Roosevelt so thoroughly that he ordered it stripped out. Famously, when an architect he hired to redo the interior was shown the kaleidoscopic screen (below), he sneered, 'I would suggest dynamite.' (I don’t think it’s that bad at all; it’s just of its time).

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Listening further, I confirmed which First Lady had the best sense of style (Jackie Kennedy, naturally). I also learned that Bill Clinton had a special room for playing the saxophone, which feels oddly on brand.

Eventually, the hosts walked me through Donald Trump’s plans for a new addition to the White House: a ballroom. They noted that the White House lacks the sort of grand ballroom you’d expect from a global superpower—a gap Trump will no doubt fill with his signature restraint.

How president Pompidou looked to the future

The episode was funny, but it lingered because it fulfilled a primal urge: the desire to peek into someone else’s home. It struck me how consistently presidents felt compelled to redesign their private quarters—to claim a sense of belonging, however temporary. I’m endlessly curious about how other people live—and whether they work from home, as presidents technically do. Given the chance to look closely inside the White House, I was happy to spend an hour and a half listening to stories about interiors I’ll never set foot in.

Some time later, I came across photographs of the private apartments in the Élysée Palace, the official residence and office of the French president, redesigned in 1971 by avant-garde designer Pierre Paulin for President Georges Pompidou. It made me think about how interiors don’t just reflect their time—they can actively push it forward, using modern art and experimental design to suggest new ways of living.

The White House, treated largely as a national relic, leaves little room for experimentation (though one might call what’s happening there now an experiment of sorts). So how did the French president come to commission such a dramatic redecoration for the Élysée Palace—a building roughly 80 years older than the White House?

Georges Pompidou genuinely loved contemporary art and design in a way that’s striking for a head of state. Among other projects, he commissioned the now-famous Centre Pompidou, cementing France’s place at the forefront of contemporary culture.

During his presidency (1969–1974), France was still recovering from the social upheaval of May 1968, when student protests and nationwide strikes nearly toppled the Fifth Republic. Although de Gaulle initially survived, he resigned in 1969 following a failed referendum, leaving the country profoundly transformed. Pompidou’s role as his successor was to reconcile this newly changed society with the authority of the state: to show continuity without being stuffy, and modernity without feeling abrupt. There was a sense of cautious optimism that his approach could be humane: that France could modernise its economy, embrace contemporary culture, and build ambitious infrastructure with style and intelligence, rather than soulless efficiency.

Pierre Paulin: a man who brought chic to the heart of state power

For Pompidou, change was meant to be embraced, not fought against—even if, by some accounts, the result of Paulin’s audacious makeover proved more unsettling to him than to his wife, Madame Pompidou, who reportedly delighted in the interiors.

The photographs below reveal Paulin's bold, flowing vision of power.

The Élysée Palace is as palace-y as it gets—giltwood panels, chandeliers, the works- but Paulin covered the walls entirely in beige fabric and filled the rooms with pouf modular furniture in his signature sensual, biomorphic forms. He wasn’t just decorating; he was experimenting, imagining a future of human-centered authority, maybe even going a bit further than Pompidou had expected. Pompidou wasn’t a revolutionary, just a moderate moderniser trying to soften the edges of power. Paulin, though, pushed it further: showing that influence could be stylish, approachable, and undeniably chic.

Look at how inviting these interiors are—encouraging conversation, letting the mind wander along the flowing curves of the ceiling, or drawing inspiration from the paintings on the walls. I showed them to my boyfriend, and he instantly remarked that he could have his listening room (he’s a hobbyist DJ) designed like that.

Pompidou used these spaces not only for reflection but also for hosting guests in a relaxed, informal setting. It’s exactly the approach we should take when designing our own gathering spaces—calming, conducive to conversation and reflection, and inspiring, rather than assaulting the senses with harsh lighting or sterile, impersonal rooms.

Sadly, much of Paulin’s interior scheme at the Élysée was dismantled after Valéry Giscard d’Estaing succeeded Pompidou in 1974. Giscard, who favoured a more classic aesthetic, reversed many of the contemporary design gestures introduced under Pompidou, sending several of Paulin’s décor elements elsewhere and reinstating more traditional furnishings. That shift reflected broader cultural currents of the time, as the brief window of technocratic‑humanist optimism gave way to a more restrained, conservative mood.

A new era at the Élysée Palace (again)

But cycles turn—and they reveal themselves differently across contexts. While today American state power expresses itself through gilded Mar-a-Lago excess and deliberate grandiosity, France once again took a different path. In 2019, Emmanuel Macron commissioned French designer Thierry Lemaire to redecorate the Élysée, this time extending the redesign beyond his private apartments to include the palace’s official areas.

In the new Élysée, gilded wood and 18th-century opulence now sit side by side with contemporary art and design. Take the Salon Pompadour: four panels in the gilded woodwork depict the Roman goddesses Diana, Juno, Minerva, and Venus. Against this historic backdrop, the room now features two Picasso sculptures and a large Joan Miró tapestry, reimagining the space for the present.

In the Salon des Ambassadeurs (below), Lemaire introduced a patterned rug—an addition that didn’t thrill commentators on Reddit, where a thread about the redecoration erupted with opinions. Some said the Élysée now looked like someone had a toddler; others joked it resembled a dystopian future straight out of Kubrick. Not a bad diss—I’d take that as a compliment.

During a recent meeting with European officials, Steve Witkoff—Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East—admired the Salon’s authentic gilding from 1773–1786, remarking that it looked like a club in President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. One imagines the comparison between a registered historic monument and a private Florida resort was not received as the compliment he intended.

Into the future

I sense this is a feeling many of us share—that we’re heading into 2026 after several years that felt genuinely heavy, overloaded with bad news and exhausting overstimulation. The consolation, perhaps: history moves in cycles. Periods of excess are followed by moments of retreat; grandeur gives way to intimacy, rigidity to comfort, tradition to experimentation.

Hoping for a turn of events, I love looking back at moments when design really put people first. Paulin’s principles—spaces that feel visually calm, soft to the touch and just easy to be in—was his way of showing how our surroundings shape how we feel and act. He believed we all deserve comfort and ease, creating interiors where conversation, connection, and simply being present felt natural.

This gives us a useful way to think about the cycle we’re entering. What might happen if we made ease a priority? If we cut down on visual clutter instead of adding more? If our spaces actually supported the lives we’re living, not the ones we think we should be living? At the end of the day, it’s not really about rugs or furniture: it has always been about creating interiors we truly want to spend time in.

Dee

I don’t remember much from the book apart from the scene where they used a magical wardrobe as a secret portal to enter Narnia. I was mind-blown. I tried to enter Narnia through my own wardrobe, but to no avail.

I was thinking about finding a portal to Narnia while browsing Etsy the other day. You can really waste a lot of time there, scrolling through dupes and a bunch of stuff you’d never actually buy for your home. Stuff you’d wish didn’t exist, if only for the whales’ sake. But when you find the right portal, what you find there can really blow your mind.

“Always winter and never Christmas,” the White Witch in Narnia promised. Not on Etsy. On Etsy, it’s always Christmas, which is its own kind of curse. But I found the portal to the good stuff.

I present to you a list of vintage finds to swoon over.

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Vintage 1990s aluminium serving dish, £161.04 (~$210, ~€182). A whimsical riff on the silver-plate trend everyone’s into now, the kind of thing you see all over Instagram, especially if your algorithm thinks you live in Copenhagen. It’s funny how metal trays suddenly became the aesthetic, when in much of Asia they’ve been standard forever. I was chatting about it with my Singaporean friend, who reminded me that metal plates weren’t meant to be minimalist or chef-y, just practical, durable, and affordable. What’s considered “elevated” here is everyday there.

Anyway, I can’t stop picturing this dish piled with haricot verts or puntarelle. Green and silver—peak Slytherin energy.

Vintage Peg Solitaire Game, £21 (~$27, ~€24), original from 1980. There’s also this beautiful marble version on Vinterior, French, circa 1920.

It’s a one-player game traced back to the court of Louis XIV in the 17th century—for anyone still mixing up their Louises. She played it like this:

The game isn’t quite as dead as the lady above, but culturally, it’s not far off. Perhaps it’s time for a revival.

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