Play Time | Carsten Höller’s “Book of Games” (“Spiele-Buch”) grew out of a tiresome dinner party 32 years ago, when he and two artist friends starting speaking and responding to each other only in questions. To this zany exercise, Höller added hundreds more, with titles such as “La Bamba—Silent or Drunk” or “Louse Hunting.” The 1998 first edition, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, is long out of print, but Taschen is bringing it back this fall, with an intro by Obrist along with photos by Höller (left, for the game “Order a Dream”) and others.
Home Free | When Evan Mirapaul began collecting houses in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2011, he had an unusual goal: to offer each to an artist who would make a permanent installation there, open to the public and free of charge. Mirapaul’s Troy Hill neighborhood now has three such projects; one is by Thorsten Brinkmann, another by Robert Kuśmirowski and the third by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis. The fourth, opening this fall, is Mark Dion’s “Mrs. Christopher’s House” (pictured), an attic-to-basement realization of Dion’s fascination with sociology and public attitudes toward science. A black bear, a family Christmas, unknown substances in jars: they’re all in the house.
—Sarah Medford
Warm Welcome | An innovative residence hall opened on New York’s Union Square in 1891. The Margaret Louisa Home, named for the Vanderbilt heiress who funded its construction, was built for single women moving to the city to pursue teaching and secretarial work. They could rent rooms while they looked for more permanent lodgings and spend time with their fellow new arrivals in the deliberately homey communal spaces. Fast forward to 2024, the Romanesque Revival structure is reopening as a different kind of urban refuge and home-away-from-home: a 77-room hotel and private club. The Twenty Two, which has its roots in London, debuted in 2022 in a historic Mayfair manor. Now co-founders Navid Mirtorabi and Jamie Reuben have expanded their concept to Manhattan with the help of local developer Michael Chetrit. London design firm Child Studio gave the interiors a sensitive makeover, with a pretty palette and nods to period furnishings. Serendipitously, given the building’s history, the food and beverage offerings are women-led: At the helm are Jennifer and Nicole Vitagliano, the sisters behind two acclaimed New York spots–Raf’s and the Musket Room–with chefs Mary Attea and Camari Mick taking charge in the kitchen.
Moving into Focus | In the 1980s, artist Gary Schneider became a go-to processor and printer for many photographers on the New York art scene, eventually starting a lab with his partner, John Erdman, in their East Village walk-up. Schneider was encouraged in this line of work by his friend and photographer, Peter Hujar, who connected him with other photographers in search of skilled printers. “Peter had assumed the role of mentor and I totally trusted him,” Schneider recalls in his new book, “Peter Hujar behind the camera and in the darkroom” (CraveBooks, $50), which is part-memoir of their friendship, part-detailed guide to Hujar’s photographic approach.
Hujar printed his own work, in a jury-rigged bathroom darkroom, until his AIDS diagnosis in early 1987. For the next few months, until Hujar’s death later that year, Schneider printed for him, including a rare 10-piece edition of “Will Shar-Pei” that Hujar made to thank the various doctors he was unable to pay. Schneider describes how Hujar, on seeing the edition, was at first visibly shaken: “It was just so difficult for him to see his image printed by somebody else,” writes Schneider, adding that Hujar soon came around.
In recent years, Schneider has created some posthumous Hujar prints, occasionally using digital processes to best match the originals’ tones. “I make one print at a time, as Peter taught me,” Schneider notes. “This way, the process of exploration can continue.”
Works Like a Charm | There’s something of the magician in Hervé Van der Straeten, the French furniture and lighting designer with the uncanny ability to make cabinet drawers vanish, glass appear to melt and a toddler-style tower of lacquered cubes support a console table with aplomb. Van der Straeten works hard to maintain these illusions: From an atelier just outside of Paris, he crafts his pieces with the refinement of an 18th-century ébéniste. The designer is now celebrating a 20-year collaboration with New York’s Ralph Pucci gallery in a show of 12 pieces, from a parchment-and-lacquer sideboard with swooping bronze handles (pictured left) to a faceted mirror. A rock-crystal chandelier that evokes Van der Straeten’s beginnings as an avant-garde jeweler—taken up straight out of art school by fashion futurist Thierry Mugler. Since then, it has been nothing but pure enchantment.
—Sarah Medford
Hervé Van der Straeten Buffet Satellite, price on request; ralphpucci.com
What’s Cooking | Long a fixture of the Miami Beach scene, the 23-year-old restaurant and private club Casa Tua opened outposts in Paris and Aspen before finding its way to New York this fall. The Upper East Side address, in The Surrey hotel, has public and members-only dining spaces, serving spaghetti alla nerano (pictured) and other Mediterranean-style dishes.
The Coast is Clear | Lying just southwest of Tortola, Peter Island is a wild patch of land sticking out of the sea, with something of a “Pirates of the Caribbean” history. (There’s a reason the main stretch of sand is called Deadman’s Beach.) These days it is the largest of the privately owned islands in the British Virgin Islands. And since 2017, when Hurricane Irma destroyed the main resort, there has been no place for eager visitors to stay. It has taken six years to rebuild on the footprint of the old ’70s compound, but the new Peter Island Resort opens this fall with many upgrades it received as part of that overhaul, most importantly that the bulk of the 52 accommodations now face the beach and pale-blue waves beyond. There is also a full-service marina for guests arriving by sailboat or 200-foot yacht, and high above it all, perched on a mountaintop, is the 21,000 square feet six-bedroom Falcon’s Nest suite (pictured), which benefits from panoramic ocean views.
Art and Commerce | Fashion goes hand in hand with art, so it’s nothing new to find blue-chip works gracing the walls of sought-after brands’ boutiques. In the mid-1990s, Calvin Klein commissioned Dan Flavin to create signature light pieces for his Madison Avenue store. When Tom Ford opened his namesake brand’s first flagship, in 2007, he set a bold tone by pairing a Lucio Fontana slash painting with a Claude Lalanne alligator desk. Architect Peter Marino, who over the years has designed retail spaces for Tiffany & Co., Chanel, Dior and more, is known in particular for deploying museum-level work. Tiffany & Co.’s massive Manhattan flagship is bursting with prestige pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, James Turrell, Damien Hirst, Sarah Sze, Rashid Johnson and others.
As stores become less about selling clothes—after all, those can be bought online—and more about meaningful connections with consumers, a growing group is leaning into art and design to heighten the experience. Gucci has tapped art advisor Truls Blaasmo to source pieces, and Loewe works with Andrew Bonacina, former chief curator of the Hepworth Wakefield, England.
Many houses have started art programs of their own. Chloé creative director Chemena Kamali recently instituted Chloé Arts, to elevate women artists. The first selection is Danish artist Mie Olise Kjærgaard, whose work is at Chloé’s Paris flagship. In 2019, Hedi Slimane launched the Celine Art Project, which works with living artists like Mel Kendrick and Davina Semo to commission pieces for its boutiques. Adjacent to its LA store, Dries Van Noten even has its own gallery with rotating exhibitions.
Focusing on art can also be a way of drawing out a brand’s origin story. Sweden-based Toteme sometimes turns to Swedish artists, such as Jenny Nordberg and Gunnel Sahlin, for its stores. Azzedine Alaïa was an avid collector, and Alaïa’s store on Rue de Moussy in Paris, displays pieces from his personal trove. For the label’s New York store, Alaïa creative director Pieter Mulier sought out work by U.S. artists he admires, bringing in Donald Judd chairs, a Mike Kelley diptych and Robert Rauschenberg prints.
—Reporting by Laura Neilson and Akari Endo-Gaut
Center Stage | A theater’s safety curtain is fundamentally a utilitarian necessity, meant to stop mechanical fires from spreading to the audience. The Austrian art organization Museum in Progress takes these drab surfaces and uses them as vast canvases for displaying art. Most prominently, for 26 years now, the Vienna State Opera’s 1,900-square-foot curtain has been hung with works by Carrie Mae Weems, Joan Jonas, David Hockney, Cy Twombly and others. This season’s selection is the colorful “Abdominal cavity flies over a dam,” by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist.
Until June 30, 2025; mip.at
Portrait Mode | A hand-embroidered rendering of American artist Danielle McKinney’s figurative work “Shelter” features on one of the latest in the Dior Lady Art series of artist-created handbags.
Price upon request; dior.com
Mountain Time | Chef Andreas Caminada made a name for himself at Schloss Schauenstein, a Swiss castle he took over at the age of 26, running the kitchen and restoring the property, which now has a three Michelin- star restaurant and nine guestrooms. Caminada’s focus has always been the hyperlocal cuisine and culture of the surrounding Alps. Separately from the schloss, his group of three restaurants–in Zurich, Bad Ragaz and Bangkok–is named Igniv, which means “bird’s nest” in Romansh, a language spoken in his area of Switzerland. In time for ski season, Igniv is opening an outpost in the Swiss mountain resort of Andermatt. Caminada, whose motto is “develop great humans,” has tapped one of his proteges, Valentin Sträuli, as executive chef. “It’s completely different but in the same family,” Caminada says of the new iteration. With winter on the horizon, he and his team were already at work pickling, fermenting and preserving, and embracing the root vegetables and bitter greens that punctuate cold-weather dishes.
