Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday, along with monthly travel and beauty guides, and the latest stories from our print issues. And you can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com. STAY HERE A Hotel With Garden Terraces in the Middle of Milan
The engineer Giuseppe Laveni was a prominent figure in Milan’s early 20th-century architectural landscape. He was responsible for the city’s 1929 Odeon theater and the Hotel Gallia from 1932 — both prized for their ornate Art Nouveau detailing and grand proportions. His own home, built in the 1800s, is similarly embellished. Decorative cast iron pilasters run vertically up the facade, an imposing frontage overlooking Via dei Bossi, a threadlike street that runs through the center of the historic Brera neighborhood. Over a century later, the five-story building has been transformed into a hotel named Casa Laveni in honor of its former owner. Designed by the Rome-based firm Delogu Architecture, the space was conceived to feel like a private residence, with guest room details reminiscent of classic Milanese apartments, including blond parquet flooring, decorative cornices and paneling on the walls. Art Deco-inspired brass-toned mirrors conceal televisions, and cloud-printed wallpaper drifts across the ceilings. Among the 30 rooms are five with plant-filled terraces: four overlooking the neighboring terra-cotta rooftops and one enveloped within the architecture. “Milanese palazzi are known for having these amazing private courtyards,” says the design studio’s founder, Francesco Delogu, “so that was important for us to incorporate.” On the hotel’s ground floor, guests can have breakfast, light snacks or an evening aperitif in the glass-roofed cafe or intimate library. For dinner, the beloved local haunts Trattoria Torre di Pisa and La Libera are a short walk away. Casa Laveni opens April 12; from $520 a night, casalaveni.com. SEE THIS Martin Wong’s Popeye Paintings, on View in New York
Popeye the Sailor Man, the pugnacious cartoon figure popularized in the 1930s, is canonically heterosexual, but fans often interpret him as queer-coded. This was especially true for the painter Martin Wong, who died in 1999. Raised in San Francisco, Wong moved to New York in 1978, where he created variations on the character throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Some of them will be on view, along with other Wong pieces, at “Martin Wong: Popeye,” an exhibition opening April 18 at PPOW in downtown Manhattan. Many works in the show feature Wong’s signature allover brick pattern, recalling the Lower East Side where he lived and worked for much of his career. One small piece depicts Popeye as a tattoo inked onto a crotch. Hung in an antique gilded frame, the painting illustrates Wong’s “fascination with elevating ostensibly low culture to a place of high status,” says Isaac Alpert, PPOW’s director of estates. The exhibit also fulfills Wong’s intention to motorize his plywood cutouts of Popeye. Six such paintings appear in the show, each four feet tall and covered in Wong’s brick motif, with arms that rock up and down as if steering a ship. These works, Alpert says, are “a bittersweet reminder that, had we not lost him before his time to H.I.V., Lord knows what he could have gone on to accomplish.” “Martin Wong: Popeye” is on view from April 18 to May 30, ppowgallery.com. GO HERE Matthew Williamson Brings His Archival Fashion to Majorca With a Bright New Shop
In a townhouse in Deià, Majorca, the British fashion designer Matthew Williamson recently opened the shop Caserra 71 with his life partner, Joseph Velosa. “I’m pouring everything I know about color and product design into this project,” says Williamson, who founded his namesake label with Velosa in 1996 and worked as the creative director of Emilio Pucci from 2005 to 2009. Williamson, who moved to Deià in 2016, sees the shop as a kind of three-dimensional autobiography. Even its name is personal: “71” nods to the year Williamson was born and the design era he loves most. For the store’s inaugural season, he curated roughly 40 standout pieces from his fashion archive, selecting one-of-a-kind runway looks from the past 20 years that he felt would endure over time. “There’s a chiffon gown my friend Sienna Miller once wore to an event styled alongside a vintage T-shirt that would make a cool beach-to-bar cover-up,” he says. Joining those pieces is an edit of Williamson’s favorite contemporary brands (Jacquemus, OAS), home objects and local art, including his own paintings. The store’s design reflects Williamson’s sensitivity to his surroundings: The building’s original wooden doors were restored and waxed, its shutters refreshed in toffee-toned paint and its rooms’ colors — peach, yellow and blush — drawn from the original ceramic tiles of its stairwell. caserra71.com. GIFT THIS Pillows That Evoke Summertime on Martha’s Vineyard
Last summer, the antique collector and shopkeeper Paula Rubenstein went to see her friend Amanda Brooks’s newly renovated apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. While she was there, Rubenstein admired a cushion that Brooks, an author and a former shopkeeper herself, had covered with old cloth from a Parisian flea market. They decided to work together on something similar: a collection of summery cushions inspired by Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons in the 1970s, covered in vintage fabric from Rubenstein’s stock. “There are ticking patterns I found at farm sales in rural Pennsylvania,” says Rubenstein, “and romantic chintzes picked up in New England, at tag sales in the ’80s and ’90s.” Brooks’s creative collaborator Mahnee Titus flew over from England with her sewing machine to stitch the cushions together, sometimes using materials that were originally curtain panels, scarves, or bandannas. Around 70 cushions will be for sale starting April 9, and they can be purchased only in person at Rubenstein’s shop on Chrystie Street. “Every piece is one of a kind,” says Brooks. “The whole point of this is the pleasure of making.” From $280, paularubenstein.com. COVET THIS Seasonal Art and Objects From a British Perfume House
In Somerset, England, where the small-batch fragrance house Ffern is based, crocuses have given way to magnolia blossoms and “the fields are a verdant, acidy green,” reports the brand’s creative director, Emily Cameron. As for what the landscape smells like? In Ffern’s interpretation, there are notes of tuberose, blue chamomile and valerian root, all bottled up in its latest quarterly release. Since her brother Owen Mears launched the company in the winter of 2019, its limited-run perfumes have drawn on seasonal ingredients. (Each drop is mailed out only to subscribers and also available at its London store.) To build a creative universe around each scent, Ffern enlists a rotating cast of mostly British artists and makers for one-off projects. This spring, with the arrival of the online Artefacts Store, members can also shop an expanding catalog of home objects. The introductory lineup includes a fantastical urn by the ceramist duo Liv & Dom and a brass brooch with a beechnut pendant by Jess Wheeler. Teas made with an English herb farm bring nature indoors. So do the reclaimed walnut candlesticks by the woodworker Sophie Sellu, whose grooved surface treatment mimics a beaver’s tooth marks. That animal also stars in Ffern’s new short film, “This Wild Land,” narrated by Claire Foy and shot at Knepp, a rewilding project in West Sussex. From $25 for seasonal tea, ffern.co. BUY THIS In Turin, Italy, a Survey of Walter Pfeiffer’s Wide-Ranging Photography
The Swiss photographer Walter Pfeiffer, 80, gained recognition in the 1970s with intimate, erotically charged images of young queer men that would subsequently influence a generation of photographers including Ryan McGinley and Wolfgang Tillmans. Over his six-decade career, Pfeiffer has drawn equally from his experimental, Dada-inspired art school training and his time working as a commercial illustrator and fashion photographer. The resulting photographs are rich in saturated color, sometimes playful and theatrically staged and other times almost diaristic in their immediacy. Later this month, the Pinacoteca Agnelli museum in Turin, Italy, will host the first comprehensive survey of Pfeiffer’s work outside Switzerland. The exhibition brings together around 100 pieces, including not just tender photographs of his muses and cheeky self-portraits but also landscapes of Swiss mountains, female nudes and still lifes of floral bouquets and fruit arrangements. “For me, it’s about a constant search for beauty,” he says. “Walter Pfeiffer: In Good Company” will be on view at Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, Italy from Apr. 30 to Sep. 13, pinacoteca-agnelli.it. FROM T’S INSTAGRAM
Fabrics with floral motifs, some of which have their roots in 14th- and 15th-century European verdure tapestries while others hark back to Indian-printed chintz cottons, have become such staples in fashion that we all but expect to see them season after season. There are those collections, though, in which flowers are more than merely decorative. Now that spring has arrived in earnest, we’re revisiting presentations from the recent past in which plants were a driving force. Click here to see all 11 shows and follow us on Instagram.
Read past editions of the T List here.
|
