T Qatar Issue 11 by Oryx Group of Magazines

The NewYork TimesStyle Magazine

QR: ------- 20 AED: ------- 20 OMR: ------- 2 BHD: ------- 2 SAR: ------- 20 CHF: ------- 6 JPY: ------- 500 USD: ------- 5.5 Euro: ------- 4

ISSUE 11 : 2012

To be on stands till March 2012

The CONTRARIANS an ode to THE 18TH CENTURY Design and Style 2012

50 writer, director and actor – nadine labaki.

34 there is art from egg-shellS too.

34 Remix Qatar

Art from Egg shells? Meet Mohamed Al-Baker who makes art from anything, even from egg shells. By Cassey Oliveira.

40 A man and his shoes How much are you willing to pay for a quality pair of shoes asks Rory Coen.

6 contributors

9 remix

42 Shared Experiences Students from Doha learn the art of glass blowing from the experts in the West.By Sindhu Nair.

S tyled to a T, The Stockholm collective Front, Hugo Franca, Cristoan Zunzunaga, Logo tees, pinkie rings, Norell comes to sale, American sportswear is this romantic’s new passion. By Suzy Menkes, Installation art in Marfa, Tex., inside designers’ (messy) studios, a survey of homegrown modernist style, the Pavilion of Art & Design visits the big Apple, The Selby does brunch in Berlin. The jeweler David Webb still wows Cathy Horyn.

44 Seen Qatar

The New York Times Style Magazine DESIGN & STYLE 2012

The Language Design Speaks At an imaginary roundtable, Laurene Leon Boym met with two titans of design to chat about the state of design in Doha. At one end sat American-educated, Doha-bred master architect Ibrahim Mohamed Al-Jaidah, and at the other the Italian-trained, Russian-born master designer, Constantin Boym.

92 eat your heart out, spider-man! Take a plunge with parkour in gaza.

50 Nadine Labaki

M ovie Maestro Lebanese movie maestro Nadine Labaki, currently taking the world by storm with her epic new film Where Do We Go Now. By Orna Ballout.

56 Face

A slick nude lip was the pout of choice on resort runways. 60 Expert: Reyad Fritas. 62 Profile in Style: Francesca Bonato.

64 Gifted

W hat a year! For these talented 10, name recognition at last. Photographs by Sebastian Kim. Fashion editor: Ethel Park. Text by Jacob Brown.

74 PASHA FIERCE

A collector's personal booty becomes a fantasy hotel in fez. By Christopher Petkanas.

84 the contrarians

These Chicago collectors bypassed the modernist route, turning their apartment into an ode to the 18th century. They did it their way â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and by themselves. By Pilar Viladas. Photographs by Annie Schlechter.

92 THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT

Two Palestinians practice how to run for their lives in a Gaza cemetery. Text by Stephen Farrell. Photographs by Klaus Thymann.

On the cover Jean and Steven Goldman's Chicago apartment is a treasure trove. Photograph by Annie Schlechter.

contributors

B Y k at h r y n b r a n c h

Stephen

Farrell Felix

Burrichter “It’s a sport about facing great obstacles,” says Stephen Farrell of the Gaza Strip’s parkour athletes, whom he met for “The Graveyard Shift” (Page 92). In the past few years, Farrell, an Anglo-Irish foreign correspondent for The Times, has been detained in Libya and kidnapped in Iraq and Afghanistan. “If you expect to walk through these worlds for months at a time and emerge unscathed and see human suffering all around you and think it can’t possibly happen to you, you’re naive in the extreme.”

For ‘‘All’s Fair in NYC’’ (Page 15), Felix Burrichter, the founder of the architecture and design magazine Pin-Up, writes about the impending arrival of the Pavilion of Art & Design fair in New York. ‘‘It’s a sophisticated and eclectic yet still approachable collection,’’ he says. A frequent contributor to The Moment, Fantastic Man and Interview, Burrichter also has a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University. Pin-Up’s fall/winter 2011 issue, he says, ‘‘focuses on how architecture and its designers can be both serious and fun at the same time.’’ The magazine hits newsstands in mid-October.

Thymann

Klaus

The Danish photographer Klaus Thymann specializes in sports and subcultures. ‘‘I’ve documented everything from gay rodeo to underwater striptease to snow polo,’’ says Thymann, who contributes regularly to V Man, Exit magazine and i-D. For ‘‘The Graveyard Shift’’ (Page 92), Thymann photographed Palestinians who practice the urban acrobatics known as parkour in the Gaza Strip. Currently, he’s at work on the world’s first glacier atlas, Project Pressure.

& editor- in- chief Yousuf Jassem Al Darwish chief executive Sandeep Sehgal executive vice president Alpana Roy vice president Ravi Raman

publisher

managing editor Vani Saraswathi deputy editor Sindhu Nair fashion & lifest yle correspondent Orna Ballout correspondent Rory Coen Ezdihar Ibrahim Ali editorial coordinator Cassey Oliveira art director Venkat Reddy asst director – production Sujith Heenatigala assistant art director Hanan Abu Saiam senior graphic designers Ayush Indrajith Sampath Gunathilaka M D photography Rob Altamirano managers – marketing Mohammed Sami Zulfikar Jiffry senior media consultant Chaturka Karandana media consultant Hassan Rekkab

Jeff

marketing research

& support

executive

accountant

sr. distribution executive

Emily Landry Pratap Chandran

Bikram Shrestha Arjun Timilsina Bhimal Rai

distribution support

Qatar

published by

Henrikson

‘‘I don’t overthink pictures,’’ says the photographer Jeff Henrikson, 27, who’s known for turning out cool, relaxed portraits of emerging talents. For ‘‘Styled to a T’’ (Page 26), he tagged along with the 17-year-old actress Taissa Farmiga on her first trip to Venice, Calif. When he’s not assisting the celebrated photographer Richard Burbridge, Henrikson may be on assignment for Bad Day, an under-the-radar Toronto arts quarterly. He’s particular about his medium: ‘‘I prefer film,’’ he declares. ‘‘I think digital takes some of the magic out of photography.’’

Oryx Advertising Co WLL P.O. Box 3272; Doha-Qatar Tel: (+974) 44672139, 44550983, 44671173, 44667584 Fax: (+974) 44550982 Email: tqatar@omsqatar.com website: www.omsqatar.com

remix styled to a t

photograph BY ami sioux Fashion Editor: andreas kokkino

Hair and makeup by karin westerlund at mikas looks.

On lindgren: Céline top, QR6,916. AT Barneys New York. Céline skirt, QR5,460. AT Jeffrey. go to jeffreynewyork.com. ON lagerkvist: akris dress, QR14,524. At saks fifth avenue. go to saksfifthavenue.com. tod’s loafers, QR2,785. Her own stockings. On von der lancken: céline top, QR9,646, and pants, QR8,008. at bergdorf goodman. céline loafers, QR3,167. at nordstrom.

The Designers The Trend

Front, the Stockholm collective made up of (from left) Anna Lindgren, Sofia Lagerkvist and Charlotte von der Lancken, combines rigorous concepts with visual humor.

Faux-bois print textiles look like freshly milled timber but feel luxe — and spare you the guilt of cutting down yet another tree.

The Thing

Their Soft Wood Sofa, from the Italian furniture manufacturer Moroso, is what it says it is (sort of): soft and wood (print). Go to morosousa.com.

* All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

remix

Once confined to a fat cat’s finger, today’s pinkie rings are dainty, pretty and made for a lady.

Hillier Glowing Heart ring, QR4,186, Bubble Heart ring, QR9,464, and Bunny Love ring, QR8,918. Go to astleyclarke. com.

Honorine Jewels Cleopatra Eye ring, QR1,511. Go to shoplatitude. com.

label maker Ileana Makri for The Row Round Eye Ring, about QR17,690. Go to therow.com.

‘‘A T-shirt?’’ asked the Lanvin shopgirl on the other end of the receiver when I inquired about logo tees. ‘‘We sell blouses. Have you tried calling the outlets?’’ My recent sartorial scavenge was prompted by Céline’s resort collection. I was already head over heels for the discreet French label, but then Phoebe Philo, its designer, showed an in-your-face Céline-tagged top, styled smartly beneath a bustier and a prim, tailored jacket. Only Philo could make blatant branding compulsively collectible so soon after we’d all stripped the initials (save our own) off our bags and sunglasses. ‘‘I’ve heard they keep them in the back,’’ said a saleswoman at Jeffrey when I went there looking for logos. ‘‘That’s the secret,’’ he added. ‘‘You have to ask.’’ A recent trip to Yves Saint Laurent confirmed this to be true. ‘‘We wouldn’t be YSL if we didn’t have an inscribed T-shirt, would we?’’ the sales associate coyly whispered to me before returning from the stockroom with a yummy stash of initialed tees in navy and magenta. ‘‘We’ll always have them.’’ Blouses, that is. RACHEL WALDMAN

thailand in Technicolor Officially, the designer Thakoon Panichgul (above left), of Thakoon, is an adviser to Thailand’s ministry of commerce. But this summer he put business aside and spent two weeks looking for inspiration in the country’s northern mountain villages near Chiang Mai. He found it in the bright, hand-woven and embroidered silk and cotton ikats of the Karen and Lua tribes — a vibrant palette similar to the saturated red, turquoise, mustard and pink yarns in his recent spring collection. ‘‘There is something so special about these communities of grandmothers,’’ Panichgul says. ‘‘It’s really a dying art. Each tribe’s ikat pattern is based on memory.’’ CHELSEA ZALOPANY 10

portrait by matthew kristall. fashion editor: rae boxer. céline t-shirt, QR1,474, bra, QR3,422, and underwear, QR3,240. hair by wesley o’meara at the wall group. makeup by daniel martin at the wall group. Still Lifes: Jens Mortensen; Runway: Go Runway.

this little pinkie

remix

Norman’s conquest A stash of pristine Norells goes up for sale. Cathy Horyn is tempted.

Clockwise from top: associated press; Stone/Condé Nast Archive © Condé Nast; Condé nast archive/corbis; olga elenciuc / 1stdibs.

n the American fall collections of 1960, Norman Norell did something seemingly too radical for a man who ate most of his meals at Schrafft’s and Hamburg Heaven. He had his models paint their faces in the bohemian-urchin style of Paris in the ’20s, with darkened eyes and red lips, finished off with shingle haircuts. Then he put the girls in pants. Technically these were split skirts, but who cares? The effect was the same. Long before Yves Saint Laurent issued le smoking, square Norman was there. ‘‘They may seem a little avant-garde at first,’’ he told The Times after his 1960 show, for which he received a standing ovation, ‘‘but I really do believe in the look.’’ He had uncanny instincts for anticipating change: the elongated sweater look, the return of waistlines in the mid-’60s, the dolman-sleeve rage of the early ’70s. He showed leopard patterns in the ’40s. The flapper makeup told a lot about Norell as well: stage-struck at an early age, he designed costumes in the ’20s at the Astoria studio of Paramount Pictures, dressing Gloria Swanson in ‘‘Zaza,’’ and later worked on Broadway musicals and burlesque shows before moving to ladies’ fashion. Norell has always been something of a quiet genius of American fashion — he was born Norman David Levinson on April 20, 1900, in Noblesville, Ind., and got his surname by chopping down ‘‘Norman’’ and taking one ‘‘l’’ from ‘‘Levinson’’ and the other from ‘‘looks.’’ And so it’s intriguing to find a personal trove of Norells from the ’60s and ’70s, some of it in mint condition. On Oct. 19, the site 1st Dibs will sell more than 100 ensembles that belonged to Beverly Dowis Blettner, a Chicago socialite and philanthropist. Ricky Serbin, a vintage-clothing dealer in San Francisco who has organized previous online sales, learned of the Norells from a friend and approached Blettner, who is 78 and housebound. ‘‘She kept the clothes in a separate apartment,’’ said Serbin, who was duly surprised by the depth of the collection. There were military-style coats with jaunty button accents, round-neck jersey dresses, shirtwaists, linen chemises in cream and buttercup yellow, and Norell’s signature bow blouses. Alas, Blettner, a great fund-raiser, had donated her sequined Norell mermaid dresses to the Chicago

Historical Society, but the 1st Dibs sale includes a cream-colored evening dress with a sequined bodice and draped skirt. On a second visit to Blettner’s home, Serbin was enticed with even more Norells, many of them samples bought directly from the designer in New York, before the house closed in 1972, shortly after his death. Born in Aurora, Ill., Blettner worked for a beauty-supply company and later a truck-leasing firm, purchasing the Norells on her own. In 1983, she married Edward Blettner, a Chicago banker. She never met Norell. But then in contrast with other designers of that era, Norell didn’t socialize with his clients. After an early dinner, usually at Schrafft’s, he went home to an elegant duplex in Amster Yard, outfitted with Aubussons, rare Chinese porcelains and a Coromandel screen — all of which were changed in summer, according to the writer Bernadine Morris, to Mexican cottons and sunflower silks. ‘‘If you look at the current collections, you see Norell’s influence,’’ Serbin said. Certainly you see it in the snappy military coats and jewel necklines popularized by Kate Middleton, in the ladylike restraint of the fall Valentino couture show, in the pin-neat coats for fall. Norell loved logic — the logic of a flattering, youthful neckline — with the shimmer of an opening night. Sly Norman was our fashion advance man. n

Back to now Clockwise from above left: Babe Paley, dressed by Norell and shot by Slim Aarons, circa 1946; the designer, in 1951, at a Fashion Critics Award rehearsal; a page from Vogue, in 1972, featuring a matching coat and dress; a dress from the 1st Dibs Oct. 19 sale.

remix crosscurrents rochas, fall 2006

nina ricci, fall 2009

olivier theyskens, fall 2001

fashion school. The word ‘‘Gothic’’ resonated for him only as Belgian churches with thin pinnacles pushing up into the sky. I remember from those early years black leather jackets, taut as corsets, set off by black pearls, lace and astrakhan; or long dresses, cut from his family’s collection of antique linen sheets and shown in a crumbling, gilded Paris mansion. Theyskens leapt to the international fashion stage in the late 1990s, and then made a relatively quiet start at Rochas in 2002. I later watched him tinting fabrics in his tiny studio, creating pastel Impressionist patterns that evoked Claude Monet water lilies at Giverny. Without ever reaching for the drama of John Galliano’s wild creativity at Dior, Theyskens produced moments of fashion enchantment. Dresses might be wisps of chiffon and lace, floating over a bared back. Their delicacy and decency in an era of ‘‘girly’’ vulgarity is Theyskens’s Parisian legacy. The idea of capturing fantasy in a perfume bottle — or a dress — made sense at Rochas. But its parent company, Procter & Gamble, gave up on fashion in 2006. At Nina Ricci, the designer was able to nurture his love of Victoriana and disheveled glamour. His last show for Ricci, in 2009, was typical in the teetering platforms below long dresses, silvered, as if caught in moonlight. Theyskens talks serenely about the closure of the fashion division at Rochas and the abrupt end of his contract at Ricci after critical acclaim. The relationship between his years in Europe and the fresh start in New York is summed up in the title of the book he published last year: ‘‘The Other Side of the Picture.’’ The designer cut all the patterns for his early

Olivier’s Twist American sportswear

theyskens’ theory, spring 2012

Man of the hour Olivier Theyskens (top right) has shifted from hyper-romantic clothes to modern sportswear.

ince Olivier Theyskens exudes an edgy romanticism with his poetic long hair, he has always seemed like a Belgian goth. At the end of the last century, when he was a 21-year-old prodigy, he made clothes with a hint of darkness and dressed Madonna in a long frock coat for the 1998 Academy Awards. Now, at age 34, he is making cool clothes for his own generation, creating a 21st-century version of American sportswear as designer for his own Theyskens’ Theory label and for the giant Theory company, which is under the umbrella of the Japan-based Fast Retailing group. Most of the years between were dedicated to luxury style at the Parisian houses of Rochas and Nina Ricci, both built on successful fragrances and an invitation to Theyskens to make hyper-romantic clothes. Typically his shows would present a young woman with feathers in her hair, balanced on stiltlike shoes while her long dress puddled into a train. ‘‘When I am doing clothes, I like to imagine I am her,’’ the designer says. Theyskens likes to dispel most of the received wisdom about himself. No, he was never a goth during his time in Brussels and his brief passage through the city’s La Cambre

collections (as he still often does today). And he was never wedded to the idea of high fashion: he always wanted his ‘‘cool girl’’ (he never refers to her as a ‘‘woman’’) to be able to buy his clothes at an easy price and mix the pieces in her own way. ‘‘I had to do a lot of things on my own, to make it happen,’’ Theyskens says. ‘‘I was the pattern maker from Day 1. I’ve been for a few years obsessed by making the right pant — simple things, done with subtlety and research.’’ The ‘‘cool pants’’ — a hipster trouser with a panel that rises to the natural waist — dominated the spring-summer 2012 Theyskens’ Theory collection in New York. The models’ legs were elongated by ridiculously high platform shoes that recalled the Ricci years. The difference is, of course, that Andrew Rosen, chief executive of Theory, brought Theyskens on to make feminized sportswear to sell at realistic prices. The madness of the footwear had become what the designer calls ‘‘a bridge between clothes and design — part of a fetish.’’ The show ended with the models stomping out in combat boots, to prove that he could do feminist femininity, too. Theyskens’ Theory is filling the gap between so-called fast fashion and high-end clothes that are 10 times more expensive. Prices are not rock bottom, but Theyskens says that he has achieved his aim to ‘‘do clothes in proper way, at a proper price, and in proper quality, not preciously made, but with the integrity of affordable fashion.’’ n

Portrait: Billy Farrell/bfanyc.com; Runway, from Top: Don Ashby (4); Theory (2).

is this romantic’s new passion. By Suzy Menkes

remix

work in progress

Paul Barbera shoots slick interiors for clients like Elle Decoration and Vogue Living. But before he ventured into the studios of the 32 designers in his new book ‘‘Where They Create’’ (Frame Publishers, QR163), he begged them not to clean up. ‘‘It’s not like messy wall, messy table, pencil on floor and rubbish near door equals great artist,’’ Barbera insists, but those intimate details make for rich material. Matali Crasset’s personal library, Maarten Baas’s prototypes and even the crudely fashioned cardboard strip that keeps Confetti System’s air-conditioner from jostling its hand-cut garlands reveal what it’s really like inside a designer’s world. M O N I CA K H EM S U ROV

For the L.A. artist Sarah Cain, space is more than just physical — it’s also psychic and emotional. ‘‘I try to morph the three,’’ says Cain, whose site-specific work dips into a playfully vivid palette that defies her contemplative nature. Cain used abandoned buildings to develop her style, and some of her earliest efforts, along the dirt roads of her native upstate New York, went entirely unseen. A 2004 installation in a squat in San Francisco’s North Beach, however, brought her the attention of the art world. She is now represented by Honor Fraser in L.A. and Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco and was recently commissioned by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) to do an installation in a former Masonic lodge in Marfa, Tex. On view through Dec. 4 as part of a suite of public projects, ‘‘Forget Me Not’’ takes its name from the flower pin once worn by the Masons and later adopted by the Nazis. ‘‘Supreme Being’’ (above), a three-dimensional canvas bordered in gold leaf, is the only component Cain created off-site for the piece; its diagonal stripes were traced from the floorboards in her studio. STEFFIE NELSON

back to the future

Postwar California provided the perfect environment for modernism to flourish. Newly available materials like machine-molded plywood combined with mass production to revolutionize furniture design; industrial steel transformed residential construction; and the region’s comfortable climate invited indoor-outdoor living. This month, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents ‘‘California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way,’’ a survey of California’s homegrown style including the iconic 1945-49 Eames House (a room from which will be installed as part of the exhibition), Barbie’s circa 1962 Dream House (complete with cardboard hi-fi/television console) and a 1952 desk (left) by Greta Magnusson Grossman. In New York, the Museum of Arts and Design offered a counterpoint with ‘‘Crafting Modernism’’, a look at the American Studio Craft Movement, which embraced traditional techniques like woodworking, weaving and silversmithing to produce radical results, like Vladimir Kagan’s trippy mosaic tile table or Jan de Swart’s 1965 blanket chest (right). SUSAN MORGAN

Top Left: Josh White/courtesy of Honor Fraser and Anthony Meier Fine Arts.

space invader

remix

Bottom: morgane le gall

all’s fair in NYC First the Frieze Art Fair announced the inauguration of its New York offshoot, in May 2012. Then another high-end fair, the Pavilion of Art & Design (or PAD) came to New York for the first time, from Nov. 10 to Nov. 14 at the Park Avenue Armory. PAD started in Paris in 1997, when it was known by the slightly less catchy name Pavillon des Antiquaires et des Galeries d’Art. In 2007 it introduced its London site. ‘‘Now that we have successfully established PAD in Paris and London, it feels only natural to come to New York,’’ says Patrick Perrin, who founded the fair with Stéphane Custot. PAD’s emphasis on modern art as well as 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century decorative arts and design reflects its founders’ respective areas of expertise: Custot is a partner in Hopkins-Custot gallery in Paris, which specializes in modern and contemporary art; Perrin is a design author and furniture

collector and dealer. (He opened both Galerie Perrin, a Parisian gallery for 17th-to-19th-century French furniture, and the famed Salon du Dessin, a fair for Old Master drawings.) ‘‘We love every single kind of art, every single period,’’ Perrin exclaimed. ‘‘We’re interested in everything — eclecticism is our goal.’’ Indeed, there will be what he describes as ‘‘lots of 20th-century paintings, photographs and so-called primitive art,’’at the fair’s 52 galleries from France, Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and the United States. In addition to 20thcentury furnishings by evergreens like Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand, there will also be a particularly broad mix of design, from Victorian jewelry (Primavera Gallery, New York) to contemporary furniture by Nendo or Studio Job (Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London). What led to scheduling PAD in November, outside of the regular New York art fair calendar? ‘‘It’s perfect because it’s during the fall auction season,’’ Perrin explains, ‘‘and it’s two weeks before Thanksgiving, so people stay in the city to work.’’ Perrin is also confident that the fair’s proximity to all the major uptown museums and cultural institutions will help weave it into the uptown cultural circuit. One thing he doesn’t want to waste too much time thinking about is whether the current economic climate lends

itself to starting an art fair. ‘‘Should we stop breathing?’’ Perrin shoots back, almost indignantly. Clearly for him, and for the sophisticated clientele PAD seeks to attract, collecting isn’t only about investing — it’s in the blood. For more information, go to padny.net.

Spheres of influence Kate Malone’s ‘‘An Atomic Spiral Bottle’’ from Adrian Sassoon at PAD New York.

FELIX BURRICHTER

so far, so Good

The Centre Pompidou-Metz is presenting the ‘‘Bivouac,’’ a retrospective dedicated to the work of the designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec until July 2012. ‘‘It’s like a big family dinner where everybody shows up,’’ says Erwan (left, seated). The family, in this case, is the brothers’ radically original work, from ‘‘Lit Clos’’ of 2000, a raised, semi-enclosed bed like a bird cage, to ‘‘Ploum,’’ a new sofa for Ligne Roset, which they compare to a very ripe fruit. This is the Bouroullecs’ first major show in their native France, organized by ambience and demarcated by supersize versions of their room-divider designs, including the plastic seaweed-inspired ‘‘Algues’’ and their textile ‘‘Clouds’’; one long wall will hold nearly 300 drawings. To coincide with the show, Phaidon is releasing a new monograph of their work. ‘‘We’re still young, so a celebration of our career is nice but a little anxiety-inducing,’’ said Ronan, the older of the two, who recently turned 40. ‘‘Each time we do an exhibition it feels like: that’s done, let’s move on to something else.’’ That something else will be a permanent lighting installation for the Gabriel staircase in the Château de Versailles. AMY SERAFIN 15

remix styled to a t

The Designer

Hugo França works with hardwoods indigenous to his native Brazil to create spectacular environments that are environmentally friendly.

The Thing

His series of massive cocoons, or Casulos, carved from felled pequi trees like the one here, were on view at R 20th Century in New York.

The Look

Knotty by nature. ‘‘I like to maximize the innate features of the tree,’’ França says. ‘‘It’s an exercise in finding functionality in the forms that are already there.’’

photograph BY Gabriel Rinaldi Fashion Editor: Andreas Kokkino Bottega Veneta sweater, QR2,730. His own levi’s jeans and his own shoes.

* All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

remix edible selby

A Movable feast Two expats serve up hearty brunch and installation art in a boho corner of Berlin.

Bonjour to Berlin Clockwise from top left: Damien Poinsard slices tomatoes to accompany a cheese crepe; Caroline Burnett at the counter; on the stovetop, poulet au miel; Poinsard flips a crepe; peering in the cafe’s front window.

P H O T O G R A P H s by the selby

hen Caroline Burnett decided to open Heroes, in Berlin’s Neukölln district, her initial emphasis was not on food. ‘‘The cafe was a pretext for the art,’’ says Burnett, an American editor who curates art shows in a dynamic exhibition space in the back. Today she and her partner, Damien Poinsard, a French-born cook who helps run a theater group on the side, are drawing regulars as much with their down-home fare as with their roster of up-and-coming artists. Crepes and quiches are standards; specials depend on who’s cooking. If Poinsard is in the kitchen, the menu might include pot au feu or stewed chicken; when Burnett is in, she says, the special is likely to be meatloaf, reflecting her nostalgia for home. abby aguirre

remix

The art of the meal From top: the cafe’s exhibition space; Poinsard makes a chocolate cake; the dessert case is stocked daily.

The SElby

Fresh direct From top: Poinsard pours maple syrup over fruit and pain perdu; the specials depend on which owner is cooking; Burnett prepares frosting for a layered carrot cake; the cafe’s exterior, in Berlin’s blue-collar Neukölln borough.

remix styled to a t

photograph BY RONALD DICK Fashion Editor: stevie westgarth

The Designer The Things

The Barcelona-born Cristian Zuzunaga trained as a type designer, and his love for letterpress squares evolved into a fixation on the pixel, ‘‘the icon of our time.’’

The Look

Block party. Zuzunaga’s pixels are Photo-derived pixel patterns. His fabric for Kvadrat on the Moroso a metaphor for a fragmented time. ‘‘These shapes are rooted in our armchair in his Shoreditch studio is based on a London cityscape; the unconscious,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m trying to play at a psychological level.’’ scarf mosaic is Moroccan-inspired.

* All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

grooming by maarit niemela/d+V management

calvin klein sweater, QR291. go to macys .com. gucci shirt, QR1,856. burberry prorsum pants, QR2,894. all other clothing and shoes, his own.

remix style map

His casa is your casa

Giorgio Armani Occupation: Designer, Hotelier

Milan It’s probably fair to say that Giorgio Armani owns this town — or at least a glamorous and centrally located chunk of it. Last month, the designer further expanded his domain with the opening of the Armani Hotel Milano. ondine cohane 2. Armani/Spa Located on the eighth floor of the new Armani Hotel, the nearly 13,000-square-foot spa is poised to become a destination in itself. The louvered windows, walls and roof give a whole new perspective on Milan’s skyline, and the swimming pool, steam room and sauna offer refuge from an otherwise hectic city. Via Manzoni 31; armanihotels.com.

1. Emporio Armani Caffè The cafe is a canteen for suitably kitted-out fashion types, hungry shoppers and businessmen looking to soak up some Armani glamour. Red-topped tables and green upholstered banquettes provide a sleek backdrop to a menu that runs from light salads to risotto Milanese. Open early morning until late. Piazza Croce Rossa 2; 39-02723-18680. 4. Armani/Manzoni 31 Armani/Libri (books), Armani/Fiori (floral arrangements), Armani/ Dolci (chocolates) — think of this complex as a one-stop shop for all essential nonessentials, including the designer’s new skin-care line, Regenessence; sunglasses; jeans; and even Armani baby bottles. Via Manzoni 31; 39-02-7231-8600.

3. Armani/Privé The designer’s 360-degree lifestyle concept continues at this pinklight-bathed after-hours spot, which shares a name with his couture collection. Get beyond the velvet rope (a hotel room key helps), and the vibe is more conducive to sipping prosecco than table dancing. Via Manzoni 31; 39-026231-2655.

5. Armani/Casa Take the Armani aesthetic home in the form of pale sofas, Chineseinspired screens, cream and beige sheets, and throw in the golds and neutrals that the designer favors. Among the objects you’ll find here are the Erika bowl in gold leaf (below), a limited-edition snakeskin writing desk and beautiful red Murano glass bowls. Via Sant’ Andrea 9; 39-02-657-2401.

Housed in the imposing 1930s Enrico Griffini building that has over the last few years become a showcase for all things Armani, the new 95- room Armani Hotel Milano in the heart of the Fashion Quadrangle represents the culmination of the designer’s vision for the ultimate lifestyle complex. ‘‘It is a personal triumph, the realization of a dream,’’ he explains. Furnishings come from Armani/Casa, naturally, but with customized hotel finishes; the Italian restaurant features seasonal local ingredients and a handpicked wine list; and ‘‘lifestyle managers’’ double as personal concierges. A ground plan of the project seen from above resembles a huge A. ‘‘I consider that to be a good omen,’’ Armani says. n

Armani: AFP; runway: first view; all others, courtesy of giorgio armani archive

Armani-ville

remix

The ring cycle A rock

Vast menagerie Top, from left: David Webb with a lady friend; magazine editorials from 1977 and 1971. Jewelry, from left: tiger bracelet, QR276,640; ring, QR83,720; nail ring, QR45,864; cuff, QR338,520; bull bracelet, QR495,040; giraffe bracelet, QR225,680.

he ring, a birthday present, is an austere hunk of gold with an ice rink of diamonds finished off by a flat piece of carved jade — a phoenix, according to a Chinese artist who spied the ring during a dinner party in Beijing. I gazed wondrously at the design so as not to appear rude but thought: phoenix, schmeenix. The ring was given to me by someone I love, and I can still see his creased, anxious face the night I opened the box. It was designed by David Webb, a name that had personal associations for me of New York; some borrowed from Vogue and W in the ’70s, others from those bird cages of rapture, the ‘‘women’s pages’’ in newspapers, where praise for Webb’s jewels was constant and vaguely haughty. Some years later, in the ’90s, if I happened to be in the vicinity of 57th Street and Park Avenue, I would glance toward the David Webb shop, a fortress marked by a sleek nameplate, and think the place was somehow equal to a private bank or club. Which just goes to show you what a myth New York is, or as Truman Capote called it, ‘‘a diamond iceberg.’’ It would be years, and the gift of a ring, before I would be able to appreciate the remarkable genius of David Webb.

To begin with, Webb never crossed the threshold of the Park Avenue shop. It was the creation of Nina Silberstein, his partner, who took over the business at his death, in 1975, and with her family ran it, more or less successfully, until 2009, when the company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was sold for a mere QR40 million. A decade earlier, when investors were offering blank checks for anything that glittered, the Silbersteins could have probably received 10 times that sum. But Nina never considered selling, says her son Stanley. ‘‘My mother always expected it to stay in the family,’’ he says. So they held on as a host of social and economic forces, including a recession, uprooted many of the old values. Today on that corner of Park Avenue stands a branch of Chase. Fortunately the Webb name was never tarnished. He was a man of outstanding qualities — charm, talent, enormous drive — whose death at age 50 from pancreatic cancer shocked his family and friends, some of whom resented Nina Silberstein’s control. But, according to Stanley, his mother had become Webb’s partner years earlier when she helped him buy out his original backer, a well-connected woman named Antoinette Quilleret, in 1963. (Stanley maintains that his mother, a Russian émigré, was also involved at the beginning,

clockwise From top left: Bela Cseh; Stan Malinowski/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive; Bert Stern/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive; Jens mortensen (6).

star among jewelers, David Webb still wows. By Cathy Horyn

remix

but others familiar with the firm’s history say she first functioned as his accountant.) Aside from getting on well with Webb, Nina seems to have provided a stabilizing influence. ‘‘David could never say no to anything,’’ explains Andrew Clunn, his right-hand man for years, who left in 1978 to go out on his own. ‘‘He bought a big ruby collection, and after Nixon went to China, a lot of jade came onto the market. He bought that, too. That’s where it was rather dangerous.’’ To the outside world at least, the business appeared as invulnerable as the new shop that Nina erected. Stone setters and enamelers continued to work off old designs, like the animal bracelets that women wore stacked in the 1960s or the fat rings and earrings, their semiprecious stones and chacha colors warming demure bouts of fashion since the ’50s. ‘‘It’s not like the quality and designs took a dive after he died. They didn’t,’’ said Lisa Hubbard, the co-chairman of Sotheby’s international jewelry division. Webb pieces owned by Elizabeth Taylor will be in the December auction of her belongings at Christie’s. Wherever starry provenance has been matched by exceptional stones, like Doris Duke’s circa 1957 diamond brooch, which sold at Christie’s in 2004 for QR1,250,340, prices for Webb have been well above estimates. One reason for the continuity was Webb’s creative output; during his career, starting in 1948, he produced between 40,000 and 50,000 designs. That made the company appealing to its new owners, Sima Ghadamian, Mark Emanuel and Robert Sadian, well-established dealers in estate jewelry, who were part of a group that successfully bid for Fred Leighton. Sensing that Webb held a richer story, one of American moxie, the partners decided to put their efforts behind Webb. ‘‘It has amazing name recognition,’’ Ghadamian says when we meet at the company’s new home, at 942 Madison Avenue, which houses a shop, a large workroom and the archive, including some 30,000 index cards of jewelry that was made. A half century of pleasure

“

His outsize personality was reflected in everything he made, perhaps most of all the fantastical objects he made as gifts of state for various presidents.

from top: kevin mazur/wireimage; Kevork djansezian/getty images; chris jackson/getty images.

”

Best and brightest From top: Mary-Kate Olsen, Jennifer Garner and Jessica Alba wearing Webb jewels.

and guilt is on record — every birthday gem, every makeup gift from a waltzing husband. When I ask Ghadamian why the former owners hit a wall, she suggests they were victims of their own success. ‘‘They were so successful and with such ease for so long that they didn’t dig a little deeper,’’ she says. But there is another reason the Webb name has endured, and that is Webb himself. His outsize personality was reflected in nearly everything he made, perhaps most of all in the fantastical objects he gave as gifts of state for various presidents. Born in Asheville, N.C., Webb arrived in New York at 16 and found work in the jewelry district. ‘‘Every client talks about his charisma,’’ says Ruth Peltason, who is writing a book about Webb. Kenneth Jay Lane says he was not unlike Bill Blass in looks and charm. He was a tall, well-tailored mixture of Southern gentility and roughneck talk. He had a gang of male friends, but, to Peltason’s knowledge, there was no central figure in his life. He loved to paint and was said to be a superb cook. With success, which came quickly (his pieces began to appear in Vogue in 1950), he bought a town house on the Upper East Side and filled it with art and Regency furniture. He liked gardening at his upstate house — a motif in his designs. ‘‘He had interesting friends, but I remember him as being private,’’ says Marjorie Reed Gordon, who first met Webb in his shop at 7 East 57th Street when, as a student in the ’60s, she bought a QR1,092 pair of frog pins on layaway. Andrew Clunn suggests that some clients, without careers or husbands, became too attached to Webb, a problem that Blass had as well. Shortly after Webb died, Clunn says, a few ladies turned up at the shop, insisting, ‘‘I know he loved me!’’ No doubt he did, but he loved his work more. Capote, who invited Webb to his Black and White Ball (he declined), was about the same age. In a 1946 essay about that period, he said of proving oneself (and avoiding a return to the provinces): ‘‘Only success, and that at a perilous peak, can give relief.’’ Webb was lucky in that he possessed both ambition and artistic talent. Not only did he produce an extraordinary range of designs, like the large jewels in coral, tiger’s eye, lapis and rock crystal — pieces that in their jivey brilliance seemed to anticipate mod and radical chic — but he also adapted his ideas to new attitudes. He created forms inspired by Mughal jewelry, did luscious things with pearls (like a twisted diamond encrusted ring finished off with two fat pearls) and, of course, made the popular animal shapes. Yet, at the end of the ’60s, as if summoning the cooler feminist era, Webb evolved from a figural artist to an abstract one. ‘‘He sort of invented this pure geometry,’’ Mark Emanuel says. ‘‘It has a lot of youthfulness and female power.’’ In the shop, Emanuel picked up a hammered-gold cuff set with a huge Persian turquoise and held it a moment. ‘‘It’s about how to hug a stone,’’ he said. Webb’s generation of rock stars, as Lisa Hubbard points out, lived in a time when everybody was less mobile and not plagued by ringing cellphones. ‘‘They had time and space and the ability to cater to this loyal and caring clientele,’’ she says. The challenge for the new owners is exactly the opposite: how to compete in a global market where customers want accessibility as much as exclusivity. ‘‘If a brand doesn’t have a global outlook, it’s essentially doomed to be a mom-and-pop operation,’’ Emanuel says. He and his partners have restored Webb’s inventory of stones, and Emanuel says they are exploring all kinds of ideas, like collaborations with artists and more affordable pieces. But for now, it’s enough for them to deal with the master’s groovy treasure trove and dig in. n 25

remix styled to a t

The Trend

Maui Wowie. From the lofty tropics of Givenchy and Stella McCartney to the more affordable climes of Versace for H&M and Milly, Hawaiian prints are very much in the air this holiday season.

The Girl

The Look

North shore or not, a papaya and guava colored crepe dress by Jill Stuart has us surfing the Web.

photograph BY Jeff Henrikson Fashion Editor: Sara Moonves jill stuart dress, QR1,820. Linda Farrow vintage sunglasses, QR1,292. go to lindafarrowgallery.com.

hair and makeup by Christina Buzas for ArtistsByTimothyPriano.com

Taissa Farmiga, the 17-year-old star of ‘‘American Horror Story,’’ TV’s scariest new show, got her break earlier this year with a lauded performance under the direction of her big sis Vera in the film ‘‘Higher Ground.’’

remix in-store

Gracious Home

Maison gerard The new outpost of Gerardus Widdershoven and Benoist F. Drut’s blue-chip gallery, on East 10th Street in Manhattan, features Art Deco, midcentury and contemporary furnishings in a former 1970s-era beauty parlor that is strikingly industrial and surprisingly intimate. Go to maisongerard.com. Sandra Ballentine

1. The partners have a penchant for contemporary ceramic and porcelain pieces. This monumental urn by the Danish ceramicist Per Weiss was inspired by Greek amphorae, ‘‘with a little Keith Haring thrown in,’’ says Widdershoven (above right). It’s QR80,080. 2. The only ceramicist in France to hold the title of Maître d’Art (Master Artist), Jean Girel is also one of the few artisans who creates his own porcelain paste. This piece, from his Bestiaire series, is QR24,752. 3. Thomas Boog, a Paris-based designer, takes seashell art to a new level, according to Drut (above left). ‘‘He slices, flattens, crushes and layers shells to create fresh designs

that are more chic than beach.’’ This mirror is QR35,672. 4. The New York artist Nicholas Howey’s geometric and richly saturated paintings ‘‘remind us of Japanese calligraphy and heraldic imagery of days gone by,’’ Widdershoven says. ‘‘Exchange of Letters,’’ shown here, is QR46,592. 5. The gallery owners introduced Hervé van der Straeten’s stylish metalwork to the United States in 2004. These bronze candlesticks are QR7,280 (small), QR7,280 (medium) and QR8,736 (large). 6. They are passionate about the midcentury designer Jules Leleu, and are particularly enamored of this lacquered wood, gilt and bronze table from circa 1962. It’s QR247,520.

7. The pair is drawn to sculptures by the Italian artist Mario Dal Fabbro for their pure, organic forms. ‘‘Ironically, he usually marked his pieces with NFS (not for sale)!’’ Widdershoven says. This one’s QR65,520. 8. Drut discovered Matthew Solomon’s work in Narrowsburg, N.Y., not far from his country retreat. ‘‘I immediately fell in love with his elegant, naturalistic ceramics,’’ he says. ‘‘And his glazes are vibrant and simply superb.’’ These tulips are QR1,365 and QR2,130. 9. This chair (one of a pair for QR127,400) by the French designer Jean Royère, is the only known example of his use of faux rattan.

when in France: The partners love food almost as much as furniture. On buying trips to Paris, they head to Restaurant Pharamond for ‘‘authentic french fare and an incredible wine list.’’ go to pharamond.fr. in the south, ‘‘we eat several meals, if not all of them’’ at Le Jardin du Quai, near Avignon. ‘‘The garden is lovely.’’ Go to danielhebet.com. They stay at La Maison sur la Sorgue in provence, a four-suite hotel that dates to the 18th century. Go to lamaisonsurlasorgue.com.

portrait by stefan ruiz

INterior: stefan ruiz

remix

A daptable table b y TA F a r c h i t e c t s f o r m u u t o, Q R 7, 2 6 2 . At D W R . G o t o d w r .c o m . M a r k e t e d i t o r : A n d r e a s ko kk i n o

G othic chair b y s t u d i o j o b f o r M o o o i , Q R 1 , 4 0 1 . At m o o o i at B & B ITA l i a s o h o.

Backdrops: Jens Mortensen

designs that make the ideal dinner companions

source

audrey chairs tat by P e ri om u s d o l o itenelessi e iss l i ss o i fi o fr t enm p sruknatri taeelcl e, a ro cm h i l l ac e Q R 1sc , 4 5i e2 n . g o kuamr te et lulr.c e so atcc , soemd. e n d a e

J ill fourstar b y a l F RED o h ä b e r l i f o r vitra.

P S 1 4 2 b y E u g e n i o g e r l i f o r T e c n o, f r o m Q R 7, 9 9 0 . At M 2 l . G o t o m 2 l . com.

lucio b y s e r g i o r o d r i g u e s , Q R 6 ,1 3 3 . at m o ss .

S tretch chair b y C a r n e va l e S t u d i o, Q R 3 , 2 5 8 . At AB C C a r p e t & H o m e . g o t o a b c h o m e .c o m .

E N zo M ari chair f o r H e r m è s , p r i c e o n r e q u e s t.

P irkka b y i l m a r i ta p i o va a r a f o r a r t e k , Q R 2 , 5 3 0 . At m at t e r . c a l l ( 2 1 2 ) 3 4 3 - 2 6 0 0.

ba 3 b y e r n e s t r a c e f o r r a c e f u r n i t u r e l i m i t e d, Q R 2 , 0 9 3 . G o t o c h a m p i o n m o d e r n .c o m .

H iroshima arm chair b y N a o t o F u k a s a wa f o r M a r u n i , f r o m Q R 2 , 2 5 0 . at l u m i n a i r e . G o t o l u m i n a i r e .c o m .

* All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

remix

T. U . b y p h i l i p p e n i g r o f o r l i g n e r o s e t, f r o m Q R 7, 9 5 3 .

arvada niles f r o m a r h a u s , Q R 9, 8 2 4 .

faint b y pat r i c i a u r q u i o l a f o r g l a s i ta l i a , Q R 3 6 , 0 7 6 . at d d c . g o t o d d c n y C .c o m .

volutes f r o m r o c h e b o b o i s , Q R 2 2,34 6. g o to ro c h e- b o b o i s. com.

E rasmo b y r o m e o s o zz i f o r p r o m e m o r i a , f r o m Q R 8 9, 5 4 4 . G o t o p r o m e m o r i a .c o m .

M an M ade b y P e t e r M a r i g o l d, Q R 3 6 , 4 0 0 . At M o ss .

D ylan d i n i n g ta b l e f r o m C B 2 , Q R 3 , 2 7 2 . G o t o C b 2 .c o m .

L C 6 f r o m C a ss i n a , f r o m Q R 8 , 9 7 3 . at H a w o r t h c o l l e c t i o n . G o t o H a w o r t h c o l l e c t i o n .c o m .

* All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

remix qatar

Art in an eggsheLl

Art from eggshells? Before you dismiss this straight off, meet Qatari jewelry and egg sculpture designer Mohammed Al-Baker who believes work of art can be crafted from anything. Just like how eggshells found their way from trash to his many treasures, writes Cassey Oliveira.

ack in 1988, when 12-year-old Mohammed Al-Baker, first came across a book by jewelry artist Carl Fabergè, he was intrigued by how the artist transformed an ostrich egg into a precious piece of art. Mohammed attempted his first creation by decorating a chicken egg with glitter. “It was ugly,” he recalls. Undeterred, he continued to learn more about egg art and explore its intricacies. “This is how you grow as an artist,” he says. And he has. Nine private exhibitions in the region, felicitated by HH the Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani during Qatar’s 77 Mta celebration and most recently – the inauguration of his first boutique at The Gate Mall. Al Baker Art Boutique houses Mohammed’s timeless creations – hand-made jewelry using precious stones, antique clockworks in wood, watches in fine leather and his signature egg sculptures adorned with gold and precious embellishments. These eggs, he says, are specially flown in from South Africa, London, the US and Canada. After coating them with a particular chemical that preserves the life of the shell, the artist gets down to work, offering each piece a unique finish. Seeking inspiration from his cultural roots, there’s always a touch of rich history that adorns his pieces, be it pearls or Islamic renderings. Mohammed has never had a mentor, though he admits to have been following Fabergè closely. “However, the best way to master an art is to experience it yourself. Learn to experiment, and you will create,” he says. The immense support that he receives from his family, friends and the public is overwhelming. “My family is my best critic, especially my brother. He’s not an artist but has a good taste in art. You don’t have to listen to the positive side always. Sometimes criticism lets you understand your

Beyond Art Mohammed Al-Baker's boutique showcases his timeless creations of jewelry, clockworks and egg sculptures. Right: Al-Baker with other leading Qatari businessmen.

weaknesses better and helps you improve yourself.” The genre of art that Mohammed touches upon is relatively new to the region. So though he doesn’t have to face competition in his medium of work, he feels it’s still challenging to satiate the discerning taste of the public. “As an artist, you need to keep evolving. People want to see something new each time, and you need to live up to their expectations.” n

‫قشور البيض تدخل دائرة الفن‬ ‫قبل أن تستهجن فكرة اإلبداع الفني من قشور البيض‪ ،‬ينبغي أن تقابل الصائغ‬ ‫القطري ومصمم المنحوتات من قشور البيض‪ ،‬محمد الباكر‪ ،‬الذي يعتقد أنه‬ ‫من الممكن تصميم األعمال الفنية من أي شيء‪ .‬فقد وجدت قشور البيض‬ ‫طريقها عنده من سلة المهمالت لتتحول إلى منحوتات فنية رائعة‪.‬‬

‫في‬ ‫العام ‪ ،1988‬وعندما كان حممد الباكر يبلغ من العمر‬ ‫‪ 12‬عاما‪ ،‬وقع بني يديه كتاب لفنان املجوهرات‬ ‫فابريجيه‪ ،‬فاف ُتنت بالطريقة التي حول بها الفنان بي�ضة‬ ‫النعامة �إىل قطعة فنية ثمينة‪ ،‬فحاول �أن يبدع �أول قطعة‬ ‫فنية له بتلميع بي�ضة دجاج لكنها "كانت قبيحة" كما‬ ‫يقول‪ .‬لكن ذلك مل يثبط من عزميته فوا�صل �سعيه ملعرفة‬ ‫املزيد عن فن البي�ض وا�ستك�شاف تعقيداته حيث يقول‪:‬‬ ‫"هذه هي الطريقة التي يتطور بها املرء كفنان"‪.‬‬

‫عينات من �أعمال الفنان حممد الباكر‬

‫وقد حتول حممد �إىل فنان بالفعل حيث �أقام ت�سعة‬ ‫معار�ض فنية خا�صة يف املنطقة‪ ،‬وهن�أه ح�رضة �صاحب‬ ‫ال�سمو ال�شيخ حمد بن خليفة �آل ثاين �أمري البالد املفدى‬ ‫خالل االحتفال ببلوغ الطاقة الإنتاجية لقطر من الغاز‬ ‫‪ 77‬مليون طن �سنويا‪ ،‬كما �أنه قد افتتح م�ؤخرا �أول منفذ‬ ‫له يف ذي جيت‪.‬‬ ‫وي�ضم منفذ حممد �إبداعاته اخلالدة من جموهرات‬ ‫م�صنوعة يدويا با�ستخدام الأحجار الكرمية‪ ،‬وال�ساعات‬ ‫العتيقة اخل�شبية‪ ،‬وال�ساعات اجللدية‪ ،‬ومنحوتاته من‬ ‫البي�ض املزين بالذهب والأحجار الكرمية‪ .‬وك�شف حممد‬ ‫�أن هذا البي�ض قد تنقل جوا بني جنوب �أفريقيا‪ ،‬ولندن‪،‬‬ ‫والواليات املتحدة‪ ،‬وكندا‪ ،‬لطالئه مبادة كيميائية معينة‬ ‫حتفظ ق�شوره من التلف‪ .‬وبعد ذلك قام الفنان بتزيني كل‬ ‫بي�ضة منها بطريقة فريدة متيزها عن الأخريات‪ .‬وهو الفنان حممد الباكر مع جمموعة من رجال الأعمال القطريني‬ ‫ي�ستمد الإلهام من جذوره الثقافية‪� ،‬إذ توجد دائما مل�سة‬ ‫تزين كل قطعة من قطعه الفنية �سواء ويتلقى حممد دعما هائال من عائلته واجلمهور �إذ يقول‪ :‬و ُيعترب هذا النوع من الفن الذي ميار�سه حممد جديدا‬ ‫من التاريخ الغني ّ‬ ‫"�إن عائلتي هي �أف�ضل نقادي وخ�صو�صا �أخي‪ ،‬رغم �أنه ن�سبيا يف املنطقة‪ .‬لذا على الرغم من عدم وجود مناف�سة‬ ‫كان ذلك من خالل الل�ؤل�ؤ �أو النقو�ش الإ�سالمية‪.‬‬ ‫لي�س فنانا‪� ،‬إال �أنه يتمتع بذوق فني مرهف‪ .‬لي�س من يف جمال عمله‪� ،‬إال �أن عليه دائما مواجهة التحدي‬ ‫ومل يكن ملحمد معلم قط‪� ،‬إال �أنه يعرتف باتباعه خط ال�رضوري �أن يتحدث النا�س عن اجلانب الإيجابي دائما‪ .‬املتمثل يف �إر�ضاء �أذواق اجلمهور املتميز‪ .‬و�أنهى حديثه‬ ‫فابريجيه ب�صورة وثيقة‪ ،‬م�ضيفا‪" :‬لكن �أف�ضل طريقة �إذ �أحيانا تتيح االنتقادات للمرء فهما �أف�ضل لنقاط قائال‪" :‬يحتاج الفنان �إىل التطور با�ستمرار‪ .‬فالنا�س حتب‬ ‫ر�ؤية �شيء جديد يف كل مرة‪ ،‬وعلى املرء �أن يرتقي �إىل‬ ‫التح�سن"‪.‬‬ ‫لإتقان �أي فن هي �أن يقوم املرء بتجربته بنف�سه‪ .‬عليك �ضعفه وت�ساعده على‬ ‫ّ‬ ‫م�ستوى تطلعاتهم"‪.‬‬ ‫�أن تتعلم كيف جترب‪ ،‬عندئذ �سوف تبدع"‪.‬‬ ‫‪35‬‬

remix qatar

Chanel Dawn of Spring

For the Spring 2012 makeup collection Peter Philips, Creative Director of Chanel Make Up, has translated into colors an exhilarating blend of the freshness of dawn and the softness of sunset that Spring brings along. A harmony of shimmering shades of pink, coral and peach adorn the collection to capture the changing moods of Spring. For the lips, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the sparkle of gloss, the charm of lipshine or the elegance of a satiny lipstick. The cheekbones are sun-kissed with a complexion so pure, while the eyes meet the gaze of luminous nude tones or the fantasy of amber. The glow of garnet amidst all that shimmer brings in a breath of sensuality to this seductive collection. 36

HermÈs Reviving straw marquetry The House of Hermès constantly celebrates hand craftsmanship, and the objects created tell the story of the astounding relationship between the hand and mind. This time Hermès honors the ancient art of straw marquetry – a form of expertise that has become extremely rare – by presenting it for the first time on a watch dial. Hermès introduces two new versions of the Arceau watch, originally created by Henri d’Origny in 1978. They feature the model’s signature asymmetrical lugs with a twist – its shape allows a stirrup leather to slide through it thus evoking Hermès saddle-making history. The distinctive italic typeface of the Arceau hour-markers has vanished to accommodate the exceptional straw marquetry on the dial. The blue and black motifs, framed by the 41 mm-diameter white gold watch case, depict two iconic Hermès tie patterns featuring chevrons and tiny squares. A matt indigo blue alligator strap further complements the straw dial. Endowing these two models with a 55-hour power reserve is a mechanical self-winding caliber H1928 by Manufacture Vaucher exclusively for Hermès.

remix qatar Harry Winston celebrates Richard III success

Harry Winston, the international jeweler and timepiece manufacturer, hosted an exclusive dinner with Al Fardan jewelry to celebrate the success of ”Richard III” performances in Doha at the Four Seasons Hotel. The event was attended by the cast and crew of the production as well as other VIP clients. Shakespeare’s ”Richard III” had two performances at the Qatar National Convention Center on December 16-17, 2011, as part of an international tour co-organized by the Doha Film Institute (DFI) in Qatar. The global tour had performances in Greece, Spain, Hong Kong, Singapore and Istanbul, and Qatar was the only Middle East destination to be included. The ”Richard III” tour kicked off amid great critical acclaim at The Old Vic on June 29, 2011. The cast has a mix of British and American actors including Maureen Anderman as the Duchess of York; Haydn Gwynne as Queen Elizabeth; Chuk Iwuji as Duke of Buckingham; Gemma Jones as Queen Margaret; Kevin Spacey as Richard III and Chandler Williams as George, Duke of Clarence. The play was directed by Sam Mendes. The tour is part of The Bridge Project – a unique collaboration between London’s Old Vic Theatre, BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music) and the independent UK production company Neal Street – and is presented by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Vacheron Constantin Timeless Treat

The latest newcomer to the elegant Patrimony Traditionnelle line is the first Vacheron Constantin watch to be approved according to the new Hallmark of Geneva criteria - the Patrimony Traditionnelle 14-day Tourbillon. At the heart of the tourbillon lies the Vacheron Constantin Caliber 2260 that boasts an exceptional 14-day power reserve. The caliber is equipped with four barrels mounted as coupled pairs and amount to a total length of around 2.20m while each of them enables approximately 13 development rotations – all in a caliber whose diameter is only 29.10mm. These barrels also guarantee a longer stability in time. In line with the high standards of this timeless line, the design incorporates a variety of delicate elements such as a slender bezel, a case middle with a fluted base, a screw-down case-back fitted with a sapphire crystal, faceted hour-markers that double at 12 o’clock, 5N pink gold dauphine hands and a historically-inspired opaline silver-toned dial adorned with a variety of finishes. Stamped with the Hallmark of Geneva, this timepiece is excellence certified.

See by ChloÈ Shimmery Show

Show off your perfect style this party season with the funky yet stylish Cherry bag from See By Chloè. The perfect little party bag has been embellished with light metallic gold pieces to give off a unique feather effect. Add an effortless touch of glamor to any outfit you pick with this uber-chic beauty the next time you plan for a glitzy evening. Not to forget, these bags serve as perfect gifts too!

Polo and party with Piaget

Aspen – one of the world’s most glamorous winter destination – provided an ideal setting for the 11th Annual World Snow Polo Championship and a glittering holiday party hosted by Piaget and Audi. The action-packed holiday began on an intense note with the Piaget polo team, featuring Piaget polo ambassadors Nic Roldan and Marc Ganzi along with top-ranked Kris Kampsen, competing in one of the most celebrated events of the polo season. Meanwhile the action off-field was just as intense as the polo crowd and Aspen jet set enjoyed an endless round of parties. The stellar crowd included Hollywood celebrities ”Twilight” star, Kellan Lutz; ”Star Treks’” Zachary Quinto and Chris Diamantopoulos, star of the upcoming ”Three Stooges” release, along with socialites Paris and Nicky Hilton, Nacho and Delfina Figueras, Jamie Tisch, Lita Heller, Amy Phelan, Marc and Melissa Ganzi and Jenny Kennedy among others. But the crowd-pleaser was clearly Piaget’s Polo FortyFive timepiece that adorned the wrists of nearly every polo player in attendance.

remix qatar

Federico Ferranti Santoni’s Commercial Manager for the Middle East in their outlet at The Pearl.

A man and his shoes By Rory Coen It’s often said that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. You don’t understand what a comfortable pair of shoes is worth until you've walkED three miles in a pair of boney clogs with a couple of stones wedged into the soleS of your fEEt. But how much are you willing to pay for a quality pair of shoes? WOULD YOU VALUE SHOES AS MUCH AS A DINNER JACKET?

eriously, how often do you really look at a man’s shoes?” pondered Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption”. Whilst this may be true for most people, there’s a prevalent thesis among women today that a man can be defined by the shoes he wears. EHow.com has even produced a webpage detailing the subtle skills required to perceive a man’s personality by the way he is shod. Its

number one tip for ladies, “Though it might be safer to check out his shoes rather than the rest of his body, do this carefully. You do not want to seem desperate if your eyes linger for too long”, tells us all we need to know, really. A man’s shoes are a more attractive feature than a six-pack midriff. Who knew?! EHow rationalises that if he keeps his shoes clean, then he must give them great care and attention and this naturally means he will also care and attend to his girl. If he wears boatshoes, he has an appreciation for the finer things in life. He’ll appreciate an outfit you’ve carefully put together or the new hair-style you’re showing off. It was for this reason I accepted an invitation last month from Santoni to their shop at The Pearl-Qatar where I was given an overview of their brand and its history before I was sized up for a pair of luxury shoes of my own. I figured I needed a neat pair of shoes because if EHow was accurate in

“

its analysis – and I had no reason to doubt them – then any woman I ever dated would definitely have thought I’d treat her like a rag doll! Santoni SPA was founded by Andrea Santoni in Marche, Italy – a region on the east coast – in 1975. Its headquarters are in a small town called Corridonia, and it employs its labor directly from the town. Andrea started with just four employees working in a basement under his house in 1972, but now has 450 employees working in three factories in his home-town. Italians have a penchant for apparel and they take their shoes without a pinch of salt. They have a long and labored tradition in shoe creation and design. I met with Federico Ferranti, their Commercial Manager for the Middle East, and his passion for the industry – and their brand in particular – was strikingly obvious. “We have a strong tradition of producing shoes in Italy,” he stressed. “The English were innovators in shoe construction, in producing sturdy soles, and we learned from this. But the upper sole – or the upper part of the shoe – is something very Italian. The look, the design, the touch, the feel. A Santoni shoe is distinctive in its coloring and design. The handmade stitching, the inside stitching, the finishing – incredible quality. “Santoni has always had a passion for quality and beauty – ever since he founded the brand. These were essential components of his shoes from the first day. He then introduced this unique handcoloring, where each coloring is like a secret recipe and every shoe is distinctive because it is finished by hand. When the assistants are coloring, they are obviously following a sample, but such is the varying weight and dryness of the leather, each shoe reacts to the pressure of a finger very differently.” All of which sounded very thorough and deliberate, I thought. I was pretty clueless as to how much a pair of these luxury shoes might cost, so when I was informed that they could cost up to QR5,000, my jaw nearly hit the ground. I don’t think I had ever paid more than QR400 for a pair before in my life. However, as I replaced my jaw, my thoughts quickly shifted to the indirect costs associated with acquiring a pair of these shoes. Santoni had kindly agreed to fit me for a complimentary pair, but would this mean I’d have to purchase a couple of brand new outfits to complement them? No good wearing them with a pair of combats and a t-shirt, after all. And if word of their price got around my locality, I’d be the next Shoeless Joe Jackson as soon as I set foot outside the door! After announcing my wrong shoe-size to Federico initially, and after two more failed attempts to find one which fitted properly, I began to feel like one of the ugly sisters. In my anxiety to end the torment, I agreed on a size which wasn’t quite perfect, but Federico detected my abandoned declaration and he persevered with or without me. On the fifth or sixth fitting, they finally slipped me into a pair of their 'limited editions' brand, and such was the comfort, I hardly knew I was wearing them as I took them out for a test-walk. They were of course unfinished at this time, betraying a rather sallow yellow color that didn’t go at all well with my denim jeans, but they felt magnificent. Federico sat me down and documented my preferred type of leather, design and coloring, which were then sent – with the shoes I had just fitted – to their headquarters in Marche, Italy for finishing. I really didn’t know much about customized shoes, so I just went for the old reliables. Dark brown, traditional leather and a conservative enough design. Let the women make out of that what they want n

I figured I needed a neat pair of shoes because if ehow.com were accurate in their analysis, then any woman I ever dated would definitely have thought I’d treat them like a rag doll!

”

Qatar

where ART lives.

If you want your preferred customers or guests to receive VIP copies, join our “Preferred Destination Program” email: info@omsqatar.com or call Patricia on +974-44550983

remix qatar

Shared Experiences By Sindhu Nair.

tark and subtle. Two words to describe the exhibition Shared Glass, put together by the students and faculty of MFA from VCUQ , at the Katara Art Center. But the process that went into it takes longer to illustrate.

The glass exhibits blend with the white-washed walls and yet stand out with their intricate designs. A sense of frailty hangs precariously in the air. But the thread that binds them is sturdy and significant; designs that embrace both Eastern and Western influences to create a global confluence. Traditional shapes with a modern interpretation. Designed by students in Doha, chiseled to perfection by expert hands at Fabrica, a design and research center in the Veneto region in Italy, and brought to life by the glassmaker Massimo Lunardon. The products The designs range from an Arab perfume-stopper-inspired fragrance vessel to sheesha stands and every day utility pieces like a cake tray or even an ordinary vase. But the design interpretations are not as mundane as their use.

“They had to repeat the process a couple of times to get the inside connection right,” he says. But what made this project even more enticing for the students was the synergy in design. “We worked as a team. We had endless discussions and helped each other in the pursuit of the best design. The whole collection was everyone’s engagement, not any singular piece of work. So by the end of the process we are not sure if the work finished by Ibrahim was entirely his or was a mix of all our combined ideas,” says Chamsine. Like Ibrahim’s glass object, which depicts the bond between East and West, the designers found that there was no race to excel in the Italian design community but to create a good design that transcends all barriers. The same goes for the MFA programme, which brings professionals from different backgrounds together.

EAST MEETS WEST Left: Students watch the expert glassmakers of Massimo Lunardon at work Above (clockwise): Designs being initiated and reviewed and two of the glass exhibits, Path and Eurab

Like the Eurab designed by Rania Chamsine – in essence a carafe or an oil bottle. But the complex interpretation makes it a design miracle when you think of the material that is used. Glass is heated and blown to arrive at this design masterpiece. A bulge here and then three loops and finally a spout, all inside an Italian carafe. “Eurab is a creature born out of the marriage of traditional ornamental Arab glass to the elegant European glass objects. Its body is inspired by the Italian carafe with Lebanese water jar spouts on its sides. On top, there is a straw inspired by the Egyptian sheesha,” says the Lebanese student of MFA, who has a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and Graphic Design. The process of heating the fragile glass and shaping it while it is heated is a wonderful process to watch, say the students. “The process played with the strength of glass and brought to life our designs. It was a gratifying experience,” Rania says. Another ostensibly simple jar is the brainchild of another student, Sameh Ibrahim, an Egyptian architect. Explaining his concept, Ibrahim says, “It combines two iconic traditional jars expressing Western and Middle Eastern cultures, with a secret path connecting them. A connecting path forms a heart from outside.” And this “simple” piece was not so easy to create for the glass experts.

The program This confluence and dialogue in design is part of the curriculum for the Master’s program at VCUQ. “We believe our students have to experience design from all aspects, from different countries and institutions. The whole program was about exchange of creativity, ideas and expertise,” says Constantin Boym, Director of MFA at VCUQ. “Each of us brings our own expertise into the MFA program and we learn from each other,” says Chamsine. The venue is equally important in this design synergy, feels Sidonio Costa, Artistic Director and Curator at Katara Art Center. “This is a platform for culture to connect with the audience. We share the creativity. VCUQ has a gallery of its own, but we have access to a lot more audience. Katara aims to become the hub of art and this is just the beginning for us. Katara has 12 art galleries and two within the Art Center. And we intend to have activities throughout the year. We intend to have an educational angle too to the exhibition. This way there will be engagement and education of art awareness to the public,” says Costa, visibly excited about the whole artistic movement that the Center has stirred awake. “Shared Glass” is the communication between communities, characterized by the particular mix of people, and reveals what is possible when they gather and discuss around a table n

seen qatar

Class Apart: The lobby at Kempinski Residences & Suites, Doha

ver a large quantity of the most expensive virtual pastries and a bottomless pot of overly sweet Karak tea laced with Rainbow brand condensed milk, the discussion turned to Design in Doha: past, present and future. With name brand international architects like Jean Nouvel and Co. contributing to the skyline, Dohaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fast track urbanization is here to stay. However, once you zoom into the details, you may be surprised to find that a majority of the engineering and architecture firms driving Dohaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

construction find their inspiration at a local shop. The multidisciplinary Arab Engineering Bureau (AEB) was originally established in 1966. With the arrival of architect Ibrahim Mohamed Al-Jaidah in 1991, the office sharpened its focus to create buildings that enhanced and defined the architectural style of modern Qatar, while preserving essential elements of traditional Qatari architecture. Many of the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s iconic buildings originated from the offices of AEB. In Doha alone, there are at least 850 buildings that bear his imprimatur. Fellow tea-drinker and educator Constantin Boym was offered in 2010 an opportunity to become Director of the first MFA Design Program in the Middle East, at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar (VCUQ ). This June there will be the first graduating class from the multi-disciplinary department under his tutelage. Boym is a relative newcomer to the Doha design scene, but he has a deep well of experience spanning three decades prior.

Doha? Once the oil and natural gas exports began (in the 1950s) how did the influx of wealth and progress shape and change the direction of Qatari architecture? Since Doha went from a small village to a large metropolis in half a century, how do we define “Urban Qatari Design”? IMJ: It’s true, the past of Qatar was a village on the sea, a real melting-pot. When you look at the history of the city, like any traditional sea town, you discover many of the people were travelers and merchants. People traveled for business and outsiders brought their sensibilities here from their own cultures. Gulf architecture is unique, and it’s easy to see the visual influences of many parts of the Gulf in Qatar. There are

Design Maestros: Top: Italian-trained, Russian-born master designer Constantin Boym; Right: Americaneducated, Doha-bred master architect Ibrahim Mohamed Al-Jaidah

Before he set his sights on Qatar, Boym ran the much admired, visionary design firm Boym Partners Inc. in New York, while at the same time juggling academic coordinator duties in the Product Design program at Parsons School of Design. When his world-class reputation as a design guru grew, Boym expanded his teaching agenda to include international Master Design workshops and lectures in Asia, Europe and America. Boym Partners also received the highest design award in the United States, the 2009 National Design Award in Product Design from Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. THE PAST LLB: The Doha of 2012 I’ve gotten to know is a progressive and optimistic city, looking ahead toward the future. It’s well documented that the city got its start in fishing, pearl hunting and trading. How did these humble origins shape the city of

elements from multiple cultures: Saudi, Iraq, Iran, India, Oman and Zanzibar, even. Then there are influences from the interior – nomadic tribes such as the Najd, who utilized the rangeland. All of this together is a big mix! But that cultural melding was not just a strong influence in the historical Qatari architecture, it’s still on at this moment. CB: Recently, I stumbled upon an amazing website of photographs from the architectural history of Qatar. The

seen qatar

“ ”

The most successful projects are mainly Gulf-influenced, with a modern direction. It’s an Arab vernacular style with the functions changed to fit the needs of today.

planning of old Doha was essentially a social, pedestrian city. It was not a car culture where people drove into underground garages. Residents strolled everywhere, and buildings and homes were designed to flow into the street. It’s an aspect of Arab life, very different from the gated communities and compounds people live in today.

LLB: Looking back, Doha is in need of more public green space to re-awaken and facilitate the traditional Arabic urban social fabric. We have amazing weather here five months in a year. However, living in a lifestyle compound is the defacto way of life now for nationals and expats alike. One woman recently said to me “I wanted my own backyard”. I thought that was an interesting trade-off, a 3m x 3m private patch of green lawn for a model of living that has destroyed Arab social life. LLB: IMJ, your book on the history of Qatari architecture 1800-1950 is considered the definitive book on the subject. It’s quite comprehensive; can you talk a little about your book? IMJ: Well, there are actually two books. One has already been published – “The History of Qatari Architecture” is the book that you’re talking about. I’m currently at work on a new interior design book, to be published by the end of 2012. It’s a volume on Traditional Qatari Interiors to inspire designers working on Islamic architecture here and abroad. The research in the book is already quite extensive. The book will portray existing Qatari interiors inspired by the traditional way of living. CB: The first book is an invaluable resource for students and designers alike. I’ve seen your first book on many a student’s desk at VCUQ. There is a great desire among students to know the tradition, so that their design proposals are in tune with the past and have a certain cultural relevance. LLB: So how can we reconcile the old and the new purpose-built Creative Touch: structures? Which Laurene Leon Boym

projects of the past 20 years come to mind in Doha that best illustrate a philosophy of incorporating the old traditions alongside the new way of life? IMJ: The most successful projects are mainly Gulfinfluenced, with a modern direction. It’s an Arab vernacular style with the functions changed to fit the needs of today. Standouts from that early period are the headquarters of the Qatar Foundation, out in Education City. Also, the Diplomatic Club in the West Bay Lagoon is a great building. THE PRESENT LLB: Doha has opened up to foreign designers in addition to shops like AEB that are already based in the region. What unique qualities can Qatari designers contribute to the global urban image of Qatar? IMJ: I welcome the amazing foreign architects working in the region with open arms, as their diverse experiences and points of view are adding so much value to the city we are creating together. Having a more diverse pool of international architects building in Doha creates an extremely healthy situation for everyone participating. It goes without saying I’m enthusiastically pro-global. CB: To be a contemporary metropolis, Doha has to be international, and has to be built with participation by an international roster of architects. At the same time, these ‘outsiders’ bring a critical re-evaluation of the local traditions

Visual Splendor: Clockwise: Swimming pool and the exterior view of the Diplomatic Club; exterior view of Kempinski Residences & Suites; swimming pool of Al Sharq Village & Spa; QF headquarters; the courtyard and relaxation area of Al Sharq Village & Spa.

seen qatar

and style. Paola Antonelli, the design curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), wrote about “digging deep into local culture in order to achieve the universal sublime”. For design and architecture alike, local traditions have in recent decades proved to be the most meaningful way to move beyond modernism without giving up the great qualities of modern design. LLB: Can you tell us about some internationally-born architects designing buildings in Qatar that have managed to co-opt and incorporate some local flavor into some of the skyscrapers, institutions and museums that have gone up in the past few years? IMJ: The Japanese designer Arata Isozaki has done an extraordinary job developing Education City. When AEB designed the original Qatar Foundation that was the only building of reference out in Education City. Isozaki built on the original idea of Education City, beautifully. Jean Nouvel and Pei partners referred to Islamic architecture and have designed buildings that fit in the local environment. THE FUTURE LLB: We have a long way to go in Doha before environmental awareness is part of our citizens’ everyday lexicon. IMJ, I was impressed with the emphasis on the sustainable aspects of your firm’s work. Can you update us on your involvement in the green building practice?

“

Architect Rem Koolhaas has said that “the Gulf is not just reconfiguring itself; it’s reconfiguring the world The solutions which we try here might become a norm in many parts of the globe ten years from now.

programs move from narrow specializations into understanding design as a comprehensive field that stretches over separate disciplines. The design problems (and solutions) of today are just too complicated to fit within one traditional discipline. To prepare design leaders for this fluid and complex condition, we need to teach collaboration, to make designers comfortable to work in teams, to enable them to move easily between separate disciplines. In education, there should be a fluidity required in thinking about addressing problems, not just learning physical tools. IMJ: Design is an evolving discipline. The design schools are already doing an excellent job of preparing young designers to work in a contemporary context, and readying them for the challenges of 2022. The process has accelerated to such an extent that students are learning the same skills at the same time with mature members of the design community. LLB: How do you see the fully formed Doha of the 2022 World Cup through the visitor’s eyes? How will residents benefit from these advances? IMJ: There are so many projects in the works for 2022 already. What we are going to see, because of high demand, is a lot more hotels, and a public transportation system. Ultimately, we are committed to making Doha the gold standard for the Gulf region. A social, educational and cultural renaissance of Qatar is happening. The 2022 World Cup initiative is contributing to the acceleration of designdriven changes in our capital. Around the world, designers are searching for ways to design Doha 2022.

CB: The idea is to use the World Cup event as a catalyst to transform the city, to make it livable, sustainable and enjoyable for generations of people after 2022. The Cup is just a few weeks long, but life goes on! Talent-wise, Qatar has the world’s best thinkers at its disposal. Holistically, what should be done to improve our quality of life here? Perhaps there is a need to get inputs at all different levels to look critically at the city. Architect Rem Koolhaas has said that “the Gulf is not just reconfiguring itself; it’s reconfiguring the world”. The solutions which we try here might become a norm in many parts of the globe ten years from now. Integrating city planning, infrastructure with new IMJ: Our ancestors already had green building practices in place that would win certification today. There was sensitivity construction, sounds like boring stuff compared to building to materials, orientation and scale that made those structures new buildings. But ultimately it’s complementary, and everything has to work side by side. It’s a different way of very livable and green. Only in the past year or two, green looking ahead. Stepping back to the vantage point of how building practice has mainstreamed in the MENA region. At AEB, we make it a point to include the basics of sustainability people live, I’m thinking about those little patches of green grass here and there that families picnic on so pleasurably in in every building we design now. the good weather. Precisely because we are looking ahead, we can’t just tear LLB: CB, your energy is now being invested in educating the everything down. Because of the enormous financial younger generation. Do you have thoughts about learning design and behavior by example and research? What type of role resources at hand, there are the opportunities for Qatar to be a major player in social change. The ultimate goal should be do you feel design education plays in the future of this country? to channel designers and their creative talent toward addressing community needs. CB: Graduate-level design education in the region is very new, and there are lots of challenges setting up a new design program... like anywhere in the world. Here, there are some Laurene Leon Boym is a partner in the Doha/New York City-based parallels to the West. Most importantly, design is now design studio Boym Partners. She has taught at Parsons The New understood and taught as a multidisciplinary activity. The School for Design and the School of Visual Arts.

”

seen qatar

Photography by Jihad Hojeily

riter, director and actor, are each difficult roles to handle in the making of a film. Fuse the three roles together and you get Lebanese movie maestro Nadine Labaki, currently taking the world by storm with her epic new film “Where Do We Go Now”. She opens up to T Qatar about her riveting career...

Nadine Labaki Fierce Film Flair By Orna Ballout 50

A group of women, Muslim and Christian, all clad in black, united by a sense of grief, perform a moving tribute dance for lost loved ones in the opening scene of “Where do We Go Now” – a film about women trying to calm inter-religious tensions between the men in their unnamed village. Nadine Labaki’s powerful musical film blends the right amount of drama, comedy and romance. It’s hard not to laugh out loud at the witty village women, who are on the ultimate mission to prevent their beloved menfolk from harming one another. In order to do so, they devise a set of comical plans to distract them, such as inviting Ukrainian dancers to stay in the village, and cooking a batch of treats dosed with hashish! “The film has given me the ability to portray things I want to say and explore. I’m really happy it’s been well received by people around the world. Lebanon is such a small country, with no film industry, so it makes me proud to showcase a Lebanese film to the rest of the world,” Labaki shares. Before her foray into the realm of film, Labaki was already a household name in the region, renowned for her work as a director of many popular Arab music videos and commercials. But it was her first film “Caramel” that catapulted her into the global spotlight. “Caramel” tells the story of five Lebanese women who meet consistently in a beauty salon in Beirut. The intimate setting of the salon proves to be their ultimate escape – a place where they can freely express their thoughts and troubles about sex, men, motherhood and marriage. Despite its success, Labaki worried about her future projects. “When I started writing “Where Do We Go Now”, I thought that maybe it wasn’t going to be as successful as “Caramel”. However, I’m happy that people aren’t comparing it to the

Movie Maestro Labaki's latest film Where Do We Go Now is both comical and serious, focusing on a group of women trying to calm tensions between Muslims and Christians in their unnamed village.

Film Credits Lebanese Labaki is a superhero when it comes to movie making, as she manages to simultaneously juggle roles of writer, actor and director.

first film, and most people seem to like it more. It’s quite relieving in a sense.” “Where Do We Go Now” certainly looks promising. In 2011, it received the People’s Choice Award at the Annual Toronto International Film Festival and scooped the Audience Award for Best Narrative at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. Now, it’s just a waiting game as to whether Labaki can make history in her home country, Lebanon, by taking home its first Oscar at the forthcoming 84th Annual Academy Awards, as it’s the country’s official entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Category. Labaki’s incredible talents are evident on- and off-screen, as to date she has managed to juggle simultaneously the

roles of writer, director and actor in both her movies. “It is a very challenging job in general, especially when you’re making films in Lebanon where there’s no industry and no film structure. I mostly work with non-professional actors, and the fact that I’m directing and acting makes it even more challenging. However, we end up overcoming these challenges and it is amazing achieving the things you want to.” In both films, Labaki emulates the realities and dilemmas many women in modern society are faced with. In “Where Do We Go Now”, she portrays the character of Amale, a Christian woman in love with a Muslim man; while in “Caramel”, she plays Layale, a devout Christian woman in love with a married man. Her ability to play different

Living the Dream Labaki's husband Khaled Mouzanner is the man behind the music of ”Caramel” and ”Where Do We Go Now”

Photography by Jihad Hojeily

seen qatar

characters is something that gives her much fulfillment. “I like to be a different person in every film because it allows me to explore my different natures. I like to live many lives and am grateful my job allows me to do this.” Family, however, is Labaki’s most pivotal role. While writing “Caramel”, she fell in love with musical composer Khaled Mouzanar, who she went on to marry and start a family with. The pair also worked together on “Where Do We Go Now”: “It’s really special to have such a close working relationship with the music composer; it’s helpful, as the music is born with the film and everything revolves around what you’re doing.” Opening up about her relationship with her husband, she shares: “It’s like living in a movie! Our job isn’t about numbers or profitability, it’s about art and creativity – it’s nice to talk about these things. Sharing a human experience makes you feel better.” Attending film festivals and glitzy affairs comes hand in hand with Labaki’s job. Describing her signature style as “simple, elegant and comfortable,” the beautiful star certainly knows how to rock the red carpet in style, and counts designers Elie Saab, Stephane Rolland and Melia M among her favorites to help her achieve an effortlessly chic look. “I work with a lot of designers and like the way that somehow, each of them manages to give me a different personality through their designs. I like pieces that give me different ways of expressing myself.” With plans to write her next film in the winter, and various offers to act in other films, one would imagine Labaki has little time to do much else. “When I’m not working, I like to spend time with my two-year-old son. I also like to practice yoga and Pilates – although it’s not on a regular basis as traveling is time-consuming.” n

Global Star The success of ”Caramel” catapulted Labaki into the spotlight; it tells the story of five Lebanese friends who find escape in the intimate surroundings of a beauty salon.

‫‪Photography by Jihad Hojeily‬‬

‫"�أحب �أن �أكون �شخ�صية خمتلفة يف كل فيلم لأن ذلك يتيح يل الفر�صة ال�ستك�شاف‬ ‫اجلوانب املختلفة لطبيعتي‪ .‬و�أحب �أن �أعي�ش حياة متعددة اجلوانب و�أنا �سعيدة لكون‬ ‫عملي يتيح يل القيام بذلك"‪.‬‬ ‫غري �أن العائلة تلعب دورا حموريا لدى نادين فقد �أحبت �أثناء ت�أليفها لفيلم "�سكر‬ ‫بنات" امللحن واملو�سيقي خالد مزنر فتزوجته وبد�أت بتكوين عائلة معه‪ .‬وعمل‬ ‫يكون املرء‬ ‫كالهما معا على فيلم "وهلأ لوين"‪ .‬وعن ذلك تقول‪�" :‬إنه لأمر رائع �أن ّ‬ ‫عالقة عمل وثيقة مع ملحن مو�سيقى‪ ،‬كما �أنه �شيء مفيد لأن املو�سيقى تولد مع‬ ‫الفيلم وكل �شيء يدور حولها"‪.‬‬ ‫وحتدثت عن عالقتها مع زوجها قائلة‪�" :‬إنها ت�شبه العي�ش يف فيلم‪ ،‬فر�سالتنا لي�ست‬ ‫الأرقام �أو الربحية و�إمنا هي الفن والإبداع‪ .‬ومن الرائع �أن نتحدث عن هذه الأمور �إذ‬ ‫من �ش�أن ت�شاطر التجربة الإن�سانية �أن يجعل املرء ي�شعر �شعورا ح�سنا"‪.‬‬ ‫وكثري ما ت�سافر نادين حل�ضور املهرجانات ال�سينمائية بحكم عملها‪.‬‬ ‫وت�صف نادين �أ�سلوبها يف انتقاء مالب�سها ب�أنه "ب�سيط و�أنيق ومريح"‬ ‫�إذ تعرف هذه النجمة اجلميلة بالت�أكيد كيف تدخل عامل ال�سجادة‬ ‫احلمراء ب�أ�سلوب راق‪ ،‬وهي تعترب امل�صممني �إيلي �صعب‪ ،‬و�ستيفان‬ ‫روالن‪ ،‬وميليا �إم‪ ،‬من امل�صممني املف�ضلني لديها مل�ساعدتها على‬ ‫الظهور مبظهر �أنيق‪ ،‬م�ضيفة‪�" :‬إنني �أعمل مع الكثري من امل�صممني‬ ‫و�أحب الطريقة التي يعطيني من خاللها كل منهم �شخ�صية خمتلفة من‬ ‫خالل ت�صاميمهم‪ .‬و�أحب املالب�س التي متنحني طرقا خمتلفة للتعبري‬ ‫عن نف�سي"‪.‬‬ ‫وتعتزم نادين كتابة فيلمها املقبل يف ال�شتاء‪ .‬وقد يعتقد املرء �أنه لي�س‬ ‫لديها �أي وقت للقيام ب�أي �شيء �آخر �إال �أنها تقول‪" :‬عندما ال �أعمل‪،‬‬ ‫�أحب �أن �أم�ضي بع�ض الوقت مع ابني الذي يبلغ �سنتني من العمر‪ ،‬كما‬ ‫�أنني �أحب ممار�سة اليوغا والبيالت�س على الرغم من �أنني ال �أقوم بذلك‬ ‫ب�صورة منتظمة لأن ال�سفر ي�ضيع الكثري من الوقت"‪.‬‬ ‫‪53‬‬

‫‪Photography by Jihad Hojeily‬‬

‫تتمتـع نــاديــن لبكــي‬ ‫مبواهــب متعـــددة‬ ‫حيـث جمعت بني �أدوار‬ ‫املخــرج وامل�ؤلف‬ ‫واملمثـــــل فـــي‬ ‫فيلميها‬

‫بذلك ف�إنهن يقمن ببع�ض احليل واخلدع الكوميدية مثل‬ ‫ا�ستقدام راق�صات ذي �أ�صول �أوروبية �رشقية‪ ،‬وخبز‬ ‫ود�س احل�شي�شة والأدوية املخ ّدرة فيها‪.‬‬ ‫احللوى ّ‬ ‫تقول نادين عن الفيلم‪" :‬لقد �أتاح يل فيلم "وهلأ لوين"‬ ‫ت�صوير الأمور التي �أريد �أن �أقولها‪ .‬و�أنا �سعيدة للغاية‬ ‫لكون الفيلم قد القى قبوال ح�سنا من قبل النا�س يف‬ ‫خمتلف �أنحاء العامل‪� .‬إن لبنان هو بلد �صغري للغاية ال‬ ‫توجد فيه �صناعة �سينما‪ ،‬وهذا ما يجعلني �أ�شعر بالفخر‬ ‫لعر�ض فيلم لبناين على بقية العامل"‪.‬‬ ‫وقبل ولوج نادين �إىل عامل ال�سينما‪ ،‬ا�شتهر ا�سمها‬ ‫يف املنطقة كمخرجة لكليبات العديد من امل�شاهري‬ ‫والإعالنات التجارية‪ .‬لكنها دخلت �إىل دائرة ال�ضوء‬ ‫العاملية من خالل فيلمها الأول "�سكر بنات"‪.‬‬ ‫ويحكي "�سكر بنات" ق�صة خم�س لبنانيات يلتقني‬ ‫با�ستمرار يف �صالون للتجميل يف بريوت‪ .‬وت�ساعد‬ ‫حميمية ال�صالون يف حتويله �إىل مكان يعبرّ ن فيه بحرية‬ ‫عن �أفكارهن وم�شاكلهن املتعلقة باجلن�س‪ ،‬والرجال‪،‬‬ ‫والأمومة‪ ،‬والزواج‪ .‬وعلى الرغم من جناح الفيلم �إال �أن‬ ‫نادين �شعرت بالقلق حيال م�شاريعها امل�ستقبلية �إذ‬ ‫"اعتقدت عندما بد�أت بكتابة فيلم "وهلأ لوين" �أنه‬ ‫قالت‪:‬‬ ‫ُ‬ ‫قد ال يحقق نف�س النجاح الذي �أحرزه فيلم "�سكر بنات"‪،‬‬ ‫لكنني �سعيدة لأن النا�س مل يقارنوه بفيلمي الأول فيلم‪،‬‬ ‫كما �أنه يبدو �أن معظم النا�س قد �أحبوه �أكرث‪ ،‬وهذا ما‬ ‫جعلني �أ�شعر بالراحة"‪.‬‬ ‫ويبدو بالت�أكيد �أن فيلم "وهلأ لوين" فيلم واعد‪ .‬ففي‬ ‫عام ‪ ،2011‬فاز بجائزة اجلمهور يف مهرجان تورونتو‬ ‫ال�سينمائي الدويل ال�سنوي‪ ،‬وح�صد جائزة اجلمهور‬ ‫لأف�ضل فيلم روائي يف مهرجان الدوحة ترايبيكا‪.‬‬ ‫وتنتظر نادين الآن �أن حتقق �إجنازا تاريخيا من خالل‬ ‫جعل لبنان يفوز ب�أول �أو�سكار يف م�سابقة جوائز‬ ‫الأو�سكار الرابعة والثمانني املقبلة حيث ت�شارك لبنان‬ ‫بالفيلم ر�سميا يف فئة �أف�ضل فيلم �أجنبي‪.‬‬

‫وتتمتع نادين مبواهب متعددة حيث جمعت بني �أدوار املخرج وامل�ؤلف‬ ‫واملمثل يف فيلميها‪ .‬ويف هذا ال�صدد تقول‪�" :‬إنها مهمة �صعبة للغاية ب�صورة‬ ‫عامة وخ�صو�صا عندما يعمل املرء يف �صناعة الأفالم يف لبنان التي لي�س‬ ‫فيها �أية بنية حتتية ل�صناعة الأفالم‪ .‬ف�أنا �أعمل يف معظم الأحيان مع ممثلني‬ ‫غري حمرتفني‪ ،‬كما �أن قيامي بالتمثيل والإخراج يف وقت واحد يجعل الأمر‬ ‫�أكرث حتديا‪ ،‬لكننا يف نهاية املطاف تغلبنا على هذه التحديات‪ .‬ومن املده�ش‬ ‫�أن يتمكن املرء من حتقيق الأمور التي يرغب بتحقيقها"‪.‬‬ ‫وحتاكي نادين يف كال الفيلمني الواقع وتتحدث عن امل�شاكل التي تواجهها‬ ‫العديد من الن�ساء يف املجتمع احلديث‪ .‬ففي فيلم "وهلأ لوين" مثلت نادين‬ ‫�شخ�صية �آمال‪ ،‬وهي امر�أة م�سيحية حتب رجال م�سلما‪ ،‬بينما لعبت يف فيلم‬ ‫"�سكر بنات" دور ليال‪ ،‬وهي امر�أة م�سيحية متدينة حتب رجال متزوجا‪ .‬وقد‬ ‫�أتاحت لها قدرتها على لعب �شخ�صيات خمتلفة حتقيــق ذاتهـ_ا حيث تقول‪:‬‬

‫�إن فيلم "وهلأ لوين"‬ ‫فيلـــم واعـــد‪ .‬ففي عـــام‬ ‫‪ ،2011‬فـــاز بجائــزة‬ ‫اجلمهــور فــي مهرجان‬ ‫تورونتــــو ال�سينمائــي الدويل‬ ‫ال�سنــوي‪ ،‬وح�صد جائزة‬ ‫اجلمهور لأف�ضل فيلم روائي‬ ‫يف مهرجان الدوحة ترايبيكا‬

‫‪54‬‬

‫نادين لبكي‬

‫مخرجة سينمائية أم مايسترو؟‬ ‫بقلم �أورنا بلوط‬

‫إن‬

‫دور كل من الكاتب واملخرج واملمثل هي مهام �صعبة يف جمال �صناعة الأفالم‬ ‫ال�سينمائية‪ .‬لكن عند دمج هذه الأدوار الثالثة معا ف�إنك حت�صل على ماي�سرتو الأفالم‬ ‫اللبنانية نادين لبكي التي فاج�أت العامل م�ؤخرا بفيلمها اجلديد امللحمي "وهلأ لوين"‪.‬‬ ‫حتدثت نادين لـ تي قطر حول م�سريتها الفنية املميزة‪...‬‬ ‫يتحدث الفيلم عن ن�ساء يحاولن تهدئة امل�شاحنات الدينية بني الرجال يف قرية معزولة‬ ‫عن حميطها‪ ،‬وي�صور الفيلم يف م�شهده االفتتاحي جمموعة من الن�ساء من امل�سيحيات‬ ‫وامل�سلمات مت�شحات بال�سواد وهن يرق�صن حزنا على �أحبائهن الذين فقدوهن‪.‬‬ ‫ومتتزج املو�سيقى القوية يف فيلم نادين لبكي مع الكوميديا والدراما والرومان�سية �إذ من ال�صعب �أن ال ي�ضحك‬ ‫املرء ب�صوت عالٍ على براعة ن�ساء القرية اللواتي ي�سعني ملنع �أحبائهن من الرجال من �إيذاء بع�ضهم بع�ضا‪ .‬وللقيام‬ ‫‪55‬‬

A Nude Awakening Youthful and cool, a slick nude lip is the pout du jour. By Sandra Ballentine

PHOTO G RAPH B Y r i c h a r d b u r b r i d g e

fashion editor: sara moonves. carven jacket, $1,900. at riccardi, Boston. call (617)â&#x20AC;&#x2030;266-3158. hair by diego da silva for wella professionals. makeup by lisa houghton using ysl beautĂŠ and elizabeth arden at jed root. model: valerija kelava.

face

face There’s something very sexy-cool about a glossy,

nude lip. It says, ‘‘I’m hot, but I didn’t try too hard,’’ and it works for almost everyone. (And for almost every designer, judging by how many copped the bare-lip look for their resort and spring shows.) It’s also super-low-maintenance. ‘‘You don’t have to be concerned that your color will bleed,’’ says Lisa Houghton, who did the makeup on the previous page. The only caveat: you need a well-prepped pucker. Houghton exfoliated our model’s lips by dabbing on a bit of Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream and rubbing it off with a tissue. Then she applied a mixture of Arden’s Crystal Clear Lip Gloss and a touch of High Shine Lip Gloss in Tropicoral for the right pinkish tone. Before getting your gloss on, use a targeted product like Bliss Fabulips Treatment Kit, which contains a cleanser, scrub, plumper and balm, or Fresh Sugar Lip Gloss, which smells practically edible. Kate Somerville’s new Quench and Correct Plumping Gloss and Restorative Lip Treatment comes in a convenient, double-ended tube that’s great for showing lips some love on the run. Keep skin sheer and fairly matte to offset the shiny lip look. Tom Pecheux (Estée Lauder’s creative makeup director), who devised a gorgeously warm, nude lip for Derek Lam’s resort show, cautions: ‘‘Go with a satin face and a metallic eye. Or a very matte eye shadow. Don’t do a shimmery eye shadow or shiny face. If everything is too shimmery, it won’t work.’’ Don’t be afraid to load on the lip gloss, though, says Tom Ford, whose new cosmetics collection contains a line of high-shine glosses, including a great nude called Naked. ‘‘If you’re going to wear gloss, really go for it. It should be full on.’’

Lip service Clockwise from top left: Bobbi Brown Lip Gloss in Nougat; Yves Saint Laurent Golden Gloss Shimmering Lip Gloss in Golden Whisper; Gloss d’Armani in Beige; Guerlain KissKiss Essence de Gloss; Tom Ford Ultra Shine Lip Gloss in Naked; Chanel Rouge Allure Extrait de Gloss in Discretion; M.A.C. Pro Longwear Lipglass in Ready or Not!; Kate Somerville Quench and Correct Plumping Gloss and Restorative Lip Treatment; Sephora Ultra Shine Lip Gloss in 20 Shiny Perfect Nude; Fresh Sugar Lip Gloss in Sugar Charm; Neutrogena MoistureShine Gloss in Super Sparkle; Make Up For Ever Lab Shine Lip Gloss in #S4.

Face forward

Giorgio Armani Designer Lift This advanced formula purports to lift and tighten skin. QR237.

still lifes: jens mortensen: m c Grath: Ludovic Belmonte.

High-tech, versatile and available in almost every skin tone, the fanciest new foundations have nothing to hide. K athryn B ranch

Tom Ford Traceless Foundation Stick Easily blendable coverage on the go. QR284.

pat mcgrath backstage at Dolce & Gabbana

Chanel Perfection Lumière This breathable, feather-light formula comes in 20 shades. QR200.

Dolce & Gabbana Perfect Finish An ultracreamy foundation that glides on seamlessly. QR240.

Dior Forever Packed with mother-of-pearl and hydrating agents for a luminous, smooth finish. QR167.

* All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

face expert

Current affair

Known for electric facials that make A-list clients look as if they’ve had face-lifts, Melanie Simon uses her magic machines (and Circ-Cell, her product line) to coax youth from even the most stubborn complexions. Go to circcell.com. Sandra Ballentine

Tip sheet For dewy, angelic skin before a big event, Simon recommends a 45-minute intravenous amino acid drip. She gets hers from the L.A.-based Sat Hari, ‘‘who put this treatment on the map.’’ Simon mixes her own perfumes using essential oils from Young Living. ‘‘It’s important to know where your oils come from, and I have seen their distillery with my own eyes.’’ For clients who have trouble with sleep and/or regularity, she suggests Natural Vitality’s Natural Calm Plus Calcium drink mix. ‘‘Take it at night to help relax you, and in the morning you should be right as rain with no cramping.’’ The hot new neutraceutical on the block — Livon’s Lypo-Spheric Vitamin C — is almost as good as a C drip, Simon says.

Melanie’s world Her favorite places for pampering? The spa at Encore at Wynn Las Vegas (below) — ‘‘truly amazing’’ — and Adrift Float Spa in Dallas, where she floats in a dark, silent, room-size salt water tank for an hour. ‘‘Sensory deprivation stimulates theta brain waves, promoting mental clarity, and sea salts pull metabolic waste out of your pores.’’ A flower addict, she buys piano garden roses from fiftyflowers.com. Butter London nail polish in British Racing Green is a Simon signature. She takes her tea with cream and Xagave, ‘‘the only agave that tastes exactly like sugar.’’

Portrait by Rachael Yarbrough; encore: Russell MacMasters; Gauze, calm, Jasmine, Nail Polish: Jens Mortensen.

Tools of her trade Custom-built to administer Simon’s electrical cocktail, this portable ST-8 machine stimulates lymphatic drainage using nano and pico currents. Microneedling, in which tiny needles are rolled over the face and neck, is her preferred technique for fighting acne and surgery scars. She developed Circ-Cell Crème ER3, which she says mimics the effect of hormone replacement on the skin, with her go-to beauty guru Dr. Michael Galitzer. ‘‘He uses homeopathic and naturopathic medicines in conjunction with bioidentical hormone replacement,’’ she says. ‘‘There’s no better specialist in this area in the world, and he’s given many women a new lease on life.’’ She uses surgical gauze to apply toners and serums. ‘‘Saturate it with liquid and press and hold it to each area of your face for 15 seconds. This intensifies the effect of any product, so start slowly.’’

face expert

True Color

One of New York City’s hottest hair colorists, Frédéric Fekkai’s Reyad Fritas, can spin straw into gold. ‘‘I see a lot of overprocessed, dry hair out there,’’ he says. Not on his glossy girls, bien sur. ‘‘We get their hair into amazing condition and give them color that sparkles.’’ Sandra Ballentine

‘‘The most beautiful colors, to me, are the ones that respect a woman’s natural base,’’ Fritas says. ‘‘Many women have bad color, and it’s because they strayed too far from what works with their complexion.’’ Uniform color is modern, he says, and he prefers warm shades to cool ones. ‘‘I don’t do her hair, but I love Vanessa Paradis’s coppery cinnamon hue.’’ He does do Heidi Klum’s signature blond tresses. ‘‘She’s adventuresome, so it’s fun to work with her.’’ Freja Beha wins in the brunette stakes. ‘‘Her color’s very natural and always looks cool without being extreme.’’

Trade secrets The French have a remedy for everything, including thin hair. When in Paris, Fritas picks up tablets containing brewers’ yeast and selenium for his New York clients. He mixes Leonor Greyl Huile de Magnolia (QR178 at beautyhabit.com) with color. ‘‘It helps the hair hold it better.’’ Known for his skill with balayage, he uses custom-made brushes to apply color. His favorite conditioner? Frédéric Fekkai’s Protein Rx PM Repair Strengthener. He tames his own locks (cut by the superstylist Michel Aleman) with Fekkai’s Coiff Nonchalant and Pomade Cristal. Reyad’s World Fritas travels around the city on his Parisian-style bicycle. ‘‘It’s a great workout, it gets me everywhere on time, and I can do a million things in a day,’’ he says. ‘‘Most importantly, it gives me a sense of freedom.’’ An art lover, he’s as inspired by street artists like Mr. Brainwash (below right) as he is by visits to MoMA. The colorist wears subtle pieces by the jeweler Lizzie Fortunato (‘‘I bought this necklace at Maryam Nassir Zadeh on the Lower East Side’’), and Dior Homme (right) is his go-to designer. Fritas collects vintage-style glasses, like this pair he found in Berlin. When it’s time to let his hair down (pun intended), he frequents sexy bars and lounges, including Raspoutine, a Russian-style cabaret in Paris.

P ortrait by I O ule x

Paradis: Foc Kan/Wire Image; Klum: Steve Granitz/Wire Image; Beha: Chris Moore/Getty Images; Runway: Go Runway; Mr. Brainwash: Amusement Art, LLC; Bike: Ioulex; Still Lifes, clockwise from Leonor Greyl: Jens Mortensen (7).

Fine examples

face profile in style Bonato is a flea-market junkie, always searching for old scissors (right) and vintage Mexicana like this stack of antique rebozos (below), of which she has more than 300.

When they’re not at their 16th-century house in Valladolid, Mexico, Bonato, Malleville and their son, Léon, live at Coqui Coqui, the hotel they built in Tulum (left and above).

francesca bonato

Francesca Bonato’s accessories line, Hacienda Montaecristo, was born of necessity. When she and her husband, the model Nicolas Malleville, opened their hotel, Coqui Coqui, in Tulum, Mexico, 10 years ago, ‘‘Calvin Klein didn’t sell linens here,’’ she says. So the couple made their own, working with local weavers for everything from towels to uniforms. Along the way, she fell in love with the traditional shawl called the rebozo, which she and her partner, Jacopo Janniello Ravagnan, use for their bags, sandles and jewelry. ‘‘We’re inspired by the synchronicity of the colonial and local traditions,’’ she says, ‘‘by the romanticism of Mexico.’’ jeffries blackerby

Above: a bag made from rebozo fabric and hand-dyed leather. Right: Bonato with a group of Hacienda Montaecristo weavers in Valladolid.

P H O T O G R A P H s B Y T he selby

“

‘I started weaving and sewing with artisans when I was pregnant. I just wanted to do something with my hands.’

Hacienda Montaecristo combines rebozos and leather into sandals (right) and a necklace (below) that gives traditional Mayan dress a high-fashion spin. The pieces are sold at Barneys and Colette in Paris.

face

”

Mannequin, Stitcher, grand hacienda and book image courtesy of Hacienda Montaecristo. All other images by The Selby.

Bonato and husband in Valladolid. Below: an inspirational image from a flea-market book. ‘‘It looks both colonial and Mayan,’’ she says. ‘‘A great symbol of our collection.’’

Above: Bonato and Janniello Ravagnan, her best friend for 15 years, at work on their line. Above right: pictures of their jewelry along with vintage pieces used as reference.

Right: Bonato strives to recreate the aesthetic of Mexico’s faded but still grand haciendas. Below: the Hacienda Montaecristo showroom in Valladolid.

Right: the fringe on a rebozo can take two months to complete. ‘‘The fringe makes each one unique,’’ Bonato says. Far right: a leather stitcher from the 1970s, one of the few machines in the factory.

gifted Charlie DAY

The syncopated beat he brought to this year’s hit comedy ‘‘Horrible Bosses’’ follows the cult-humor trajectory of ‘‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,’’ the FX sitcom that he helped create and stars in and that has made him a household name among a certain brand of young and rowdy future frat boys. In 2013, look for him to break type in a Guillermo del Toro-directed sci-fi action thriller. Etro Jacket, QR8,539, shirt, QR1,540, and Tie, QR539.

Big and bigger

What a year! For these talented 10, name recognition at last. Photographs by Sebastian Kim Fashion editor: Ethel Park Text by Jacob Brown 64

gifted aymeline Valade

You may recognize this extraordinary beauty from one of the 22 times this year she has either opened or closed a major fashion show. Her breakthrough moment came in October 2010, when she took her first turn on the runway for Balenciaga. She is now the face of New York’s own Alexander Wang. Louis vuitton jacket, QR19,838, and sweater, QR6,425. Marc jacobs shirt, QR855. Theyskens’ theory JEANs, QR910. Tods boots, QR2,712. Alexis Bittar Ring, QR455. go to alexisbittar. com.

RYAN TRECARTIN

No other artist has been as successful translating the postInternet aesthetic to a serious audience. His work has traveled to four museums this year, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in a show that runs until Jan. 8. His elaborate, purposefully amateur-seeming video pieces, usually presented mise-en-scène in a gallery space, feel like exactly what they are: a high-concept, highart conversation in the Tumblrand YouTube-informed vernacular of the new generation. Comme des garçons shirt, QR2,384. Brunello Cucinelli T-shirt, QR1,019. His own jeans, socks and sneakers.

* All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

gifted

THeophilus london

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not exactly news that rap is going through convulsive changes for the better. Backed by a guitar band, this Trinidad-born Brooklynite has incorporated influences as varied as electro, new wave and post-punk in a manner so subtle that you wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t notice unless you pay attention. Lanvin hat, QR3,986, coat, QR16,726, collar, QR564, and shirt, QR1165. Givenchy by riccardo tisci jeans, QR5,733. His own belt and Jewelry.

gifted

louis C. K.

Like Jerry Seinfeld before him, Louis C. K. is doing something revolutionary with his hilarious sitcom about nothing. But his nothing is kind of depressing. When he takes his daughters to visit an aged aunt, hoping it proves educational for the girls, the aunt turns out to be vilely racist. And there’s no redemptive moment: she ends up dying midshow, and he’s left feeling like a bad parent. That’s life. Loro Piana coat, QR13,450. J. crew T-shirt, QR91. AG Adriano goldschmied jeans, QR819. New balance sneakers, QR528.

chris lilley

Australian comedy has proven hard to translate for an American audience. Outback oddballs are just too odd for Yanks to grasp. But somehow Lilley, who plays multiple characters on his shows, ‘‘Summer Heights High’’ and ‘‘We Can Be Heroes,’’ succeeds where others have failed. His latest series, ‘‘Angry Boys,’’ on HBO in January, includes new and recurrent characters. You’ll soon be laughing at the mention of ‘‘Slap My Elbow.’’ Calvin Klein jacket, QR3,185, and pants, QR1,911. Banana republic shirt, QR291. Alexander Mcqueen SHoes, price on request. * All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

gifted

lexi thompson

Winning a ladies pro golf tournament at 16 years old is certainly an accomplishment. That and her all-American glow make Thompson so intriguing. On the blogs and in pretty much every golf magazine out there, Thompson, as the new narrative goes, is Tiger Woods’s replacement on the links. Suddenly that Austin Powers joke about ‘‘unibrows’’ and the Ladies Professional Golf Association feels so out of date. Alexander wang sweater, price on request. Tommy hilfiger skirt, Qr1,085. Puma sneakers, QR255. Rolex watch, QR22,932. Finn ring, QR2,366.

gifted

alexis page

marjane satrapi

Most of the amazing designer makeup collaborations that M.A.C. has brought us over the years have been developed by this pale 29-year-old beauty. Her latest creation, a collaboration with Gareth Pugh, hit stores last month. Ranging from sultry to ethereal and encased in wonderfully cubist packaging, the pieces are exactly what you’d want from Pugh. Without crossing the line into something angstily goth, it gives out a dark vibe and still looks pretty.

Ann Demeulemeester jacket, QR9,242. go to anndemeulemeester.be. Zero + Maria Cornejo dress, QR3,622. Fogal Stockings, QR15. Go to Fogal.com.

nicolas andreas taralis blouse, QR3,855, and dress, QR11,120. at patron of the new. bulgari necklace, QR23,296. Theyskens’ theory shoes, price on request. On right hand: Van Cleef and Arpels ring, QR22,022. Bulgari ring, QR43,316. Mauboussin Ring, QR33,670. On left hand: Van cleef and Arpels rings, QR3,276, QR7,826, QR10,192 and QR56,420.

The Iranian-born French graphic novelist and filmmaker first found a wide audience with her animated drama ‘‘Persepolis,’’ which portrayed Middle East politics through dreamy teenage eyes (her own). It won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007. This year she presented her first live-action film, ‘‘Chicken With Plums,’’ based on her 2004 graphic novel by the same name. Chronicling the last eight days of a man bent on suicide over the loss of his much-loved violin, it was greeted with great fanfare at the Venice Film Festival.

* All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

talk

mother modern A pioneering historian of 20th-century California architecture. By Susan Morgan

Manhattan transfer Esther McCoy, at home in Santa Monica, around 1985.

Courtesy of Esther M c Coy Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

etting a read on the city of Los Angeles has never been easy. Twenty years ago, when my husband was offered a job in L.A., we left New York. I figured that as a writer, my work was portable, and as an urbanite, I would easily adjust. But Los Angeles, with its shifting perspectives and unwieldy size, was perplexing. When we first arrived, I spoke with an architectural historian on the verge of relocating. He offered me one salient tip before making his exit: ‘‘The two most interesting things about Los Angeles,’’ he said, ‘‘are the domestic architecture and the ephemeral population.’’ He was right: the stream of characters is constant, and the number of exceptional houses is astonishing. And as the critic Reyner Banham had so famously done before me, I got my driver’s license, began reading Esther McCoy and learned to love Los Angeles. ‘‘No one can write about architecture in California without acknowledging her as the mother of us all,’’ Banham declared. McCoy documented the state’s neglected architectural heritage and was a witness to midcentury Modernism, which she pithily described as ‘‘a marriage between Walden Pond and Douglas Aircraft.’’ ‘‘Five California Architects,’’ her 1960 classic, delivered an unprecedented look at Modernist architecture and its distinctly West Coast origins, through the early-20th-century work of Irving Gill, Bernard Maybeck, R. M. Schindler and the brothers Charles and Henry Greene. She spelled out the basic elements of modern residential design: open floor plans, ample natural light, simplified forms, an easy flow between indoors and out and an embrace

From Top, Clockwise: Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); Courtesy of Hennessy + Ingalls, Inc.; Courtesy of Esther M c Coy Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Courtesy of Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library and Marion Rand.

talk

Los Angeles, by the book Above: two

of McCoy’s books on California Modern architecture. Her career as an architectural writer began with an article on R. M. Schindler in the journal Directon. Below right: the writer with the tai chi master Marshall Ho’o on Zuma Beach in Malibu, circa 1933.

She wrote fiction and found work as a research assistant for Theodore Dreiser, gathering stories ripped from the headlines. In 1932, after McCoy had been hospitalized with double pneumonia, a friend urged her to go to Southern California and recuperate. She went west, intending only to wait out the raw New York spring, but ended up staying. She was 85 when she died at her home in Santa Monica. In California, McCoy set off on the itinerant career of a freelance writer. Her stories appeared in university quarterlies, progressive broadsides and the best of ‘‘the slicks.’’ She reported on slum clearances and the crisis in low-cost housing and wrote book reviews and a trilogy of detective novels. of new building materials and engineering techniques. Her When her friend Jean Evans, a writer for New York PM Magazine, married the future director Nicholas Ray in 1936, writing was lucid and sharply observed, its plain language shot through with wit and unexpected poetry. A daring hilltop McCoy served as a witness. With Ray, McCoy collaborated on a screenplay about troubled youth that was never finished. house designed by Schindler was ‘‘a veritable jack-in-theDuring World War II, McCoy worked as an engineering beanstalk structure: it grew like a light vine from the bottom draftsman at Douglas Aircraft. As the war was ending, she of a canyon up to the road, clinging to the narrow ledge of hoped to study architecture at the University of Southern level land at the top by structural tendrils.’’ McCoy wrote six books about architecture, which have been California, but as a woman in her 40s, her application was described as a ‘‘Balzacian cycle’’: characters reappear in major strongly ‘‘discouraged’’ by a school filling up with male students on the G.I. Bill of Rights. When she learned that and minor roles, and a compelling portrait of a place emerges. R. M. Schindler’s only draftsman had been called up, she Her long career as an architectural writer began in 1945 with applied for the job with drawings she’d made to renovate her her rhapsodic appreciation of R. M. Schindler for the leftist own house. Expecting only ‘‘a cool dismissal’’ and a good literary journal Direction. ‘‘His houses are wrapped around look at Schindler’s 1922 North Kings Road house and studio, space,’’ she wrote. ‘‘A Schindler house is in movement; it is in becoming.’’ Her last essay, commissioned by the Museum she was stunned when Schindler hired her on the spot. From 1944 to 1947, McCoy worked in the south studio, of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and published two months where ‘‘the drafting boards were low, and we sat on plywood before her death in 1989, was a scholarly memoir about chairs of Schindler’s design rather than stools, and as I swung the postwar Case Study House, a program created by Arts & around before answering the telephone, which so seldom Architecture magazine. And although she was incredibly rang it always startled me, I usually tipped over the chair. To prolific, there was no McCoy anthology. Most of her work see one of his fine structivist chairs tipped over wounded him; existed only as far-flung ephemera: a 1948 New Yorker short it was as if I had contradicted one of his sacred beliefs.’’ story, ‘‘The Important House,’’ a wry domestic drama about Across the road was the Dodge House, Irving Gill’s 1916 a modern house, a female homeowner and an overbearing masterwork widely regarded as the first fully modern house male photographer; a 1986 profile of Frank Gehry and his in the West, one that McCoy described as ‘‘the record of a ‘‘blessed childhood’’ overseen by a baby-sitting blind boxer; satirical riffs on the conservative adversaries of modern design. genius which blossomed in this climate, this place.’’ Throughout the 1960s, McCoy campaigned to preserve the A few years ago, I visited the Archives of American Art in Dodge House and wrote and produced a short film about it, Washington, D.C., where McCoy’s papers are housed, and I began to assemble ‘‘Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther directed by Robert Snyder, which will be screened as part of the exhibition. When the house was finally demolished, in McCoy Reader’’ (due out this month from East of Borneo), a collection of her writing about Southern California, exactly 1970, the need for architectural preservation in Los Angeles became harshly evident, something McCoy knew all along. the sort of guide I’d been wishing for when I first arrived. ‘‘One incentive to write about Southern California was that it And along with the architect Kimberli Meyer, the director was so neglected,’’ McCoy once told an interviewer. ‘‘It was of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler a place that was not taken seriously. And damn it, I wanted it House in Los Angeles, I curated ‘‘Sympathetic Seeing,’’ to be taken seriously.’’ n the first exhibition about McCoy’s life and work, on view at the MAK Center through Jan. 8, 2012. As I discovered, her story is panoramic, unexpected and enormously heartening.

‘I

f you lived in New York, it was proper to make fun of Los Angeles,’’ McCoy remarked 50 years after abandoning Manhattan for the wrong coast. Born in Arkansas in 1904, she was raised in Coffeyville, Kan., in a book-loving household ‘‘where someone read to someone else every night.’’ Educated in the Midwest, she moved to New York at 21 and landed in the cultural hothouse of Jazz Age Greenwich Village. 71

talk

waste not, want it With Petit h, Hermès

raises the bar on recycled chic. By Cathy Horyn

Salvage beauty Hermès’s Petit h project, which uses scrap and defective materials, produces objects both useful (a rosewood and woven cotton folding screen) and whimsical (a giant panda).

ascale Mussard lifts the top of the large packing crate, and I look inside. She has already shown me around her workroom at Hermès, a treat for anyone interested in how things are made, and now she is permitting me a peek at a project to which she is profoundly attached. I find it hard not to crack a smile at her kindergarten-teacher gravity, enhanced by the canvas apron that covers her long white Indian linen dress. Strands of blond hair escape from her bun.

P H O T O G R A P H B Y benjamin bouchet

For three years, Mussard, a sixth-generation member of the Hermès family, has been leading the Petit h line, a unique salvage mission: to retrieve discarded materials from Hermès’s workshops and turn them into new objects. The line isn’t exactly a bid by the Mother of the Birkin to be perceived as sustainable, though a few blogs seemed to think so and mocked the effort as ‘‘upcycling.’’ That may be a fair assessment of a jigsaw puzzle made from leftover crocodile skin, an object nobody really needs. On the other hand, this view may be too literal minded. The objects of Petit h — which boasts a roster of designers like Gilles Jonemann, Christian Astuguevieille, Alice Cozon and Adrien Rovero in addition to the company’s artisans — are not toys, but they do express childlike qualities: innocence, playfulness, creaturely allusions. ‘‘Hermès is all about stories,’’ as Mussard says. More important, these objects also extend a warrant upon which Hermès was built: the

talk

benjamin bouchet

Throwaway chic Above, from left: coffee cup holders made of crocodile scraps; the Porte-Gallet, a paperweight or doorstop; the Collier d’Air, a necklace made from a pleated Hermès silk scarf.

possibility to own something that can be repaired. Years ago, when Mussard was starting in the family ateliers, a great-uncle, Robert Dumas, explained that this was the fundamental difference between Hermès and other companies selling expensive goods. That ethical standard — repairing instead of replacing — infuses the Petit h line. But be prepared to be surprised and taunted. I peer into the crate. There, resting in a state of repose, is a giant rabbit, its floppy ears, like the rest of its squashy body, made in classic Hermès orange leather. My first thought, once I stop laughing, is to imagine the absurd pleasure it will give the lucky stiff who manages to buy it. For, despite the pleas of disappointed customers, Mussard has no plans to reproduce the rabbit, or indeed the other animals in the Petit h menagerie, which include a panda, a fawn and an enormous camel in crocodile. (The rabbit, fawn and camel have all been sold.) In early November, some 2,200 Petit h objects will go on sale for three weeks in the New York flagship, as part of a tour that began last winter in Paris. While that total is impressive, given that everything is made by hand, it includes duplicates of objects, like coiled silk-print necklaces or leather sleeves for your morning Starbucks cup, that were relatively easy to reproduce because the materials were available. That isn’t the case, though, with most of the Petit h objects, which present a seeming paradox. Mussard says it was never her intention to create a permanent trove of objects, even if customers seem willing to pay for them; for Petit h, the prices range from QR146 for a leather charm to QR364,000 for the panda. Recently Mussard had to tell a Chinese customer that, no, he could not put an option on the panda, which will be offered only in New York. She is not being snooty. The whole point of Petit h is to find new and creative uses for leftover scraps of leather and silk or defective china and crystal — not turn out more products, however delectable. ‘‘I hate wasted things,’’ says Mussard, who spent afternoons as a child watching the Hermès leather workers, or the three women who repaired clients’ gloves. Economy was always built into the process, she says: ‘‘At the end of each day, the craftsmen who were making bags took their leftovers to the people making bracelets or belts. So everything was kept and reused. In fact, I didn’t invent this at Hermès. The smallest pieces were for watchbands.’’

hree years ago, after giving a speech about luxury at the Villa Noailles in Hyères, France, Mussard was approached by Gilles Jonemann, a jeweler. He told her that without money to buy stones early in his career he had turned to other materials. By then, Mussard had spent 30 years at Hermès, and she’d developed sharp instincts. She asked Jonemann if he’d like to collaborate. Over the next six months they created some 80 objects from leftovers and rejects. Then Mussard gathered the family and made her pitch for Petit h. Hermès’s aesthetic demands, as well as the problems inherent with scraps — not enough material, the wrong scale for the task — provide Mussard and her team of designers and artisans with challenges that, she says, have transformed their thinking. She recalled how a young designer, Godefroy de Virieu, wanted to play around with silk. She introduced him to Gérard Lognon, whose firm does pleating. ‘‘They had a real love at first sight,’’ Mussard says. ‘‘This old man who has been four generations in pleated fabric for haute couture, and Godefroy.’’ The young man wanted to pleat silk three-dimensionally, a technique he resolved — to Lognon’s surprise — with marbles to form shapes and later a corrugated tube, not unlike a vacuum cleaner hose. The results were the coiled silk necklaces. ‘‘Now we are making our own profile,’’ Mussard says. ‘‘I always say at Hermès we must have our own mold. . . . I like easy things but I also like to add something.’’ This is a pretty good description of Hermès’s aesthetic: keep it simple but be sure to add something. ‘‘We are surrounded by things that you don’t need,’’ Mussard says. ‘‘It helps Hermès to grow.’’ The Petit h studio is now working on a crystal vase with decorative pleated leather. I tell Mussard that one of my favorite objects is a doorstop made from a translucent cylinder of white crystal and the handle of a Kelly bag. ‘‘Of course,’’ she says, ‘‘you could use a piece of marble to stop a door, but to me this object has an honest quality. It’s more than a perfect product.’’ In a sense, Petit h is about finding harmony between two opposing values — those of perfection and imperfection. As Mussard says, ‘‘I want to be like my uncles and my grandmother. They were always, until the end, pushing everyone. Yes, it’s the way it has to be.’’ n

* All prices indicative. For availability & boutique details check Brand Directory on Page 98.

talk Maître de medina From left: the courtyard of Le Jardin des Biehn, complete with koi pond; the owner’s collection of antique textiles.

I pasha FIerce A collector’s

personal booty becomes a fantasy hotel in Fez. By Christopher Petkanas 74

P H O T O G R A P H s by tom mannion

f you travel over and over to the same place, you start to know people without really knowing them, exchanging a weak smile with a shopkeeper, a street sweeper, a waiter at the cafe. If the place is Provence, France, and you are interested in old things, especially textiles and folk costumes, you may have had a glancing acquaintance with the antiquarian Michel Biehn, an inescapable presence in the region from the late 1970s until last year. Biehn began small with a stand at the Aix-en-Provence flea markets, trading up to a cupboard-size shop on the Place des Trois Ormeaux, where he preached the gospel of Provençal boutis — woodblocked quilts that, when he entered the business, were used as moving blankets to wrap Louis XVI commodes at chateau sales. Having attracted a following, Biehn moved on, living and dealing on the main drag in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in a town house whose hulk and hauteur

talk

tom mannion

Tile world Clockwise from above: the ‘‘shell salon’’; the Pasha suite; the Fez cafe; a path in the garden; a window in the Sultans suite.

seemed not accidental echoes of his own. Like Christian Lacroix, Côté Sud, Pierre Deux and braids of garlic, he’s been an indivisible part of the global post-Picasso fashion for all things Provençal. That look has been waning for a while now and may in fact be fini. No matter. The news is that one of its chief architects has deserted, to Fez, quietly opening a nine-room hotel in the thick of the medina. While it’s tempting to think of Le Jardin des Biehn as just another of the riad hotels that open by the dozen in Morocco, there’s obviously something more ironic and cosmopolitan going on beyond the usual roll call of North African signifiers, beyond the mosaic tile work, moucharabieh trellises, keyhole arches, carved plaster friezes and rendered walls waxed with soap. Connoisseurs are not known for their modesty. ‘‘L’oeil du maitre’’ — the eye of the master, Biehn suggests evenly. He debarked in Morocco with a shipping container filled with a lifetime of scholarly collections assembled throughout the East — nautilus shells with cameo-like engravings of Alexander the Great’s chariot, shapely Syrian ewers, Ottoman ostrich eggs suspended in the most delicate crocheted nets. Consequently there’s a lot of museum-quality eye candy at Le Jardin des Biehn — a striking suzani from Samarkand here, a luscious Yemenite silk robe there. The only other hotel I know that is such a concentrated expression of one man’s taste, designed around the personal booty of a world-class collector, is Alistair McAlpine’s Il Convento di Santa Maria di Costantinopoli in Puglia, Italy. If ‘‘museum quality’’ says to you ‘‘ladi-da’’ and ‘‘don’t touch,’’ you have the wrong aesthete. As Biehn writes in his

memoir, ‘‘La Conversation des Objets,’’ ‘‘Charm, more than magnificence, gives rise to luxury, and there is no real pleasure without fantasy.’’ In the Fez Cafe at Le Jardin des Biehn, a stage-set version of the kind of lazy dive you fall upon in the Moroccan Sahara, lunch is served on tables in the shape of bottle caps, draped for dinner in the striped skirts of market farmers from the Rif mountains. Really loud games of what the French call ‘‘baby foot’’ (foosball) are encouraged, not tolerated. The worn benches of babouchiers, makers of traditional Moroccan slippers, are repurposed as night tables in some guest rooms. And Biehn’s wife, Catherine, offers, improbably, consultations in the relaxation technique known as sophrology in a jewel box at the foot of the long, narrow fountain that acts as the frontier between the couple’s domain and everything else.

he everything else includes the restaurant, a hammam, an Andalusian-style garden edged with coursing water and planted with rare citrus varietals, and a terrace for yoga classes and concerts. (Fez is the last place you’d expect to hear the Yale Whiffenpoofs, 75

talk

“

Biehn debarked in Morocco with a lifetime of scholarly collections — nautilus shells with cameo-like engravings, shapely Syrian ewers, Ottoman ostrich eggs suspended in nets.

Arch triomphe Clockwise from left: Awning stripes in the Pasha suite; the hotel’s spa; hot and cold pools in the Pasha suite’s Moorish bath; the Pasha suite’s bathroom.

tom mannion

”

ceremony in the sumptuous family palace and a secret, private one in a modest residence (relatively modest, anyway) that he built around an existing garden pavilion. As the palaces are but there they were this summer.) There’s also a tiny atelier where custom just three minutes apart along a snaking route in the medina, he did not have babouches are made before your eyes far to go to kick back. The pasha’s and a gallery/shop devoted to Biehn’s private apartment, now a guest suite, textiles and costumes, and whatever odds and ends — bubble-glass tumblers, has 40-foot ceilings culminating in a halka, a roof opening to the sky; a woven plastic totes — catch his fancy in Moorish bath with two sunken soaking the souk. pools, one hot, one cold; and, in a For Biehn, moving to Fez could have been a terribly isolating experience, but high-wire flourish perhaps only Biehn could manage, scrolling awningit hasn’t turned out that way, he says: striped Napoleon III upholstery in a ‘‘Perhaps because I’m not a hotelier sitting room pulsing with tiles laid in by trade — though I know what makes multiple geometric patterns. a good one — we somehow seem to Unseen at the hotel, for now, are attract as guests people we actually have the strange collages Biehn builds out a desire to meet. It’s very nourishing. of precious old scraps of cloth, shells, I’m un passioné, not a businessman. Whatever I do usually ends up working, beads, buttons and passementerie. He began making these narrative works, but money is never the motor. I’m with titles like ‘‘Low Tide’’ and ‘‘The 62. If I didn’t do this now. . . . Not that Birth of Venus,’’ in the town house it was easy. Moroccan bureaucracy is in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. For a customer a nightmare. When you buy real estate, there, it was difficult to know where you need a lawyer and a notary. But Biehn’s living quarters ended and his at the same time everything here is done with such charm, a certain quality shop began, what was for sale and what was not, an ambiguity he shrewdly of smile. Find me the French notary cultivated. (Woe to him who put his with charm.’’ foot on the first step leading upstairs.) When Biehn first visited the property, it was a shantytown inhabited You were also never sure how welcome you were. The kitchen was directly by 14 families, all of whom needed inside the front door, where Biehn to be relocated. It was owned by the could often be spied, oblivious to the far-flung heirs of Si Tayeb el Mokri, world, blanching cardoons or preparing a legend among Arab voluptuaries who some other obscure Provençal dish. served Morocco as finance minister You could wave your credit card all you and, until his death in 1949, as pasha liked. Too bad. Now, though, you’d of Casablanca under the current king’s never know he wasn’t always in the grandfather. El Mokri led two lives hospitality business. n in Fez: a formal one with lots of stifling

2 Al JAssAsiyeh stone CArVinGs Al huWAilAh, northern QAtAr

restAurAnts

hiGhliGhts A

QMA GAllery (BuildinG 10)

QAtAr PhilhArMoniC orChestrA (oPerA house, BuildinG 16) d

A new art space run by Qatar Museum Authority hosting various art exhibitions all year long. From 20th January 2012 to 1st June 2012: Conscious & Unconscious by the late artist Louise Bourgeois B KAtArA Art Centre (BuildinG 5) The Katara’s epicentre for art with exhibition space, retail units focusing on original creative works and an art bookshop.

ArAB PostAl stAMP MuseuM (BuildinG 22) A stamp collection covering 22 Arab countries as well as equipments used in the past in Arab post offices and a small library that houses books about stamps Admission is free.

A sAffron lounGe (BuildinG 26) Modern Indian Cuisine and the menu was designed with the consultation of Michelin-starred chef Vineet Bhatia. Opening hours: 12.30 to 3pm, 7pm to 10.30pm Phone: +974 3325 8919

Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra performs B KhAn fArouK tArAB CAfe and promotes western and Arabic music (BuildinG 7) to inspire development of music in this Traditional Egyptian Cuisine with shisha region. and live music The 2012 season will see performances Opening hours: 12noon to midnight of pieces from Rimsky-Korsakov, Marcel Phone: +974 4408 0840 Khalife, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Stravinsky. For full schedule and tickets, C suKAr PAshA (BuildinG 31) please refer to http://qatarphilharmonicorchestra. Turkish and Arabic cuisine with beautiful Ottoman inspired lounge for private org

parties and dining Opening hours: 6.30pm to midnight Phone: +974 4408 2000 l’WzAAr seAfood restAurAnt (BuildinG 27)Modern Seafood with a fresh seafood counter where you can take your pick on the choices and have it cooked to your liking Opening hours: 12 to 3pm, 7pm to 11pm shoPPinG Phone: +974 4408 0710 d

e red VelVet CuPCAKes (BuildinG 24) A cute and chic cafe from United States specializing in cupcakes and coffee Opening hours: 19am to 12 midnight Phone: +974 4408-0700

KAtArA

GPS 25.36008, 51.52614

Katara is Doha’s cultural village, a collective of restaurants, galleries and artistic and creative societies.

KAtArA BeACh The Katara Beach is open to public with admission charges and is a great place for water sports and activities. It had about 800 umbrellas and beds. Opens daily from 9am to 6pm. e

Spend the afternoon relaxing at the beach, or take a tour around the museum and exhibitions around the village and end the day with

Take advantage of the free buggy services available when going to different locations of Katara

dininG Wear comfortable walking shoes as Katara is designed with cobblestone landscape

Call ahead to make reservations at the restaurants that you would like to dine in especially during the weekends

GPS 25.0388811, 51.4060266

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2 1 sinGinG sAnd dunes, dune BAshinG And desert sAfAri

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2

24 hours or More If you are spending 24 hours or more in Qatar, take the opportunity to explore the natural beauty of the desert by taking trips out of Doha. Dune bashing, desert safaris and expeditions to forts and old settlements out of the city can be arranged via tour operators who will make sure you get the best experience.

GPS 25.33344, 51.46498

GPS 25.26028, 51.44273

Doha is one of the few areas in the world where the desert dunes produce a deep and resonant humming sound that earned it the nickname of singing sand Dunes. this is a natural phenomenon resulting from the friction of a thin layer of sand flowing down the side of a sand dune. the friction sound is amplified by the crescent shape of the dunes and can be heard up to 10km away. The exact location for the singing sand Dunes is at GPs coordinates: 25.0388811, 51.4060266

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2

VillAGio – shoPPinG MAll

+974 44135 222 Aspire Zone, Al Aziziyah estiMAted OpeningdriVinG hours: Duration to the8am Airport Carrefour: to 10pm 40 Minutes Starbucks: 8.30am to 10pm Other Stores: 10am to 10pm 48 h o u r s as q aan t aItalian r I 2 0village 12 Designed with

The shopping scene in Doha is growing rapidly as more and more new brands enter the market. Just like dining, you can find a variety of shopping to suit your taste, budget and preference here. For local merchandises, hit the souks to interesting gems along with visiting thefind singing sand Dunes, thelike carpets, pottery and crafts while the malls will offer all the international brands you can think of. For a more chic style, visit the travel operators will usually plan the day trip few dependent boutiques where you can find unique pieces from all around together with an experience of Dune Bashing. the world. Get ready for an exhilarating adventure as you take on the desert dunes in big 4x4 wheels! If you opt for a full day safari, the itinerary 4 8 setting h o u r supqcamp a t a ratI the 2012 will usually include inland sea for the night where you will get to experience a taste of Bedoiun lifestyle. Enjoy the stillness of the desert night skies and wake up to the beautiful sunrise over the sand.

Al Zubara town is one of the most interesting archaelogical attraction in Doha. It was originally the centre of power for Qatar and the town was established as one of the most important port and pearl trading centers in the Persian Gulf in the 18th Century. The site is currently being excavated to gain better insight into the1 Al MourJAn – leBAnese +974 4483 4423 glorious times of the trading port. The Al Al Corniche Street, West Bay Zubara fort was built in 1938 during the Sat to Weds: 12.30pm to 12.30am reign of Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thurs to Friday: 12.30pm to 1am Thani and was erected beside the ruins of the original fort from the 18th century. It was used as a coastguard station up Situated on the Corniche, you get excellent view plus the experience of till the mid 1980s.

AMERICAn

ALCOHOL

ITALIAn

SPICY FOOD

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2

+974 4487 5222 Madinat Khalifa Opening hours: Carrefour: 8am to 10pm Starbucks: 8.30am to 10pm Other Stores: 10am to 10pm

restAurAnts

gondola rides and visions of blue skies on the ceilings, Villagio is a one stop entertainment spot for the family. Other than shops of established brands like Zara, Mango, H&M and the likes, there is also With Marks and Spencer and BHS as its an ice hockey rink and a cinema. The new anchor tenants, Landmark is a favourite extension of the mall is home to its luxury Dining in Doha can be quite anbrands experience with the extensive variety of for fashion lovers with including brand tenants including Marc Jacobs, cuisines available. The choices reflect the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Victoria’s Secret and Kurt Geiger. Louis Vuitton, and Dolce & Gabbana. composition of the residents in the city. You can explore the best of each cuisine at different meal times of the day and large number of restaurants are clustered together in areas such as ramada Plaza, the Pearl and souq Waqif. 4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2 Be sure to call ahead to make reservations because some restaurants can be fully booked especially during the weekend. Licensed restaurants means that alcohol is available in the establishment. In the cooler months, take advantage of the outdoor seating provided by most restaurants to enjoy the weather.

Umm Salal is home to the Umm Salal Mohammed Fort and the Barzan Tower, both a historical attraction to this area. The fort was built during the late nineteeth and twentieth centuries as a residential fort and features thick high walls and an impressive facade. The was also designed with unique decorative and architectural elements. The Barzan Tower was originally built as a watch tower and has a ‘T’ shaped architectural style. It has three levels and an external staircase.

PAMPAno – MexiCAn

tse yAnG – Chinese

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2

+974 4495 3876 ext 2071 Porto Arabia, The Pearl Daily: 7pm to 11pm

BurJ Al hAMMAM – leBAnese

+974 4495 3876 ext 1291 Porto Arabia, The Pearl Daily 10am to 10pm Impressive selection of Lebanese food in a very posh environment, this can be considered Lebanese fine dining. Outdoor dining available. Licensed. Good for entertaining guests

leBAnese shAWArMA – leBAnese

+974 4466 2616 Between D Ring and E Ring Road, Off Airport Road Daily noon to 2am

tiPs & Guide

Shawarma and Falafel Sandwich snack place. On The Go.

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2

GettinG Around

The best way to getting around the city is to organize transportation with the hotel that you are staying in. Most hotels will provide limo service for hire by the hour or by the destination that you intend to visit. Make sure to keep the hotel’s or the limo service’s number so that you can call them whenever you need to be picked up. Cab services are available but it is always advisable to arrange your transportation in advance as cabs might not be available at all spots in the city. For longer trips, you may opt to rent a car.

The best way to navigate around the city is to identify landmarks in the location that you are headed to. In this guide, you will find more of location descriptions for the destinations rather than street addresses. Providing these information will be more helpful to your driver as street addresses are not commonly used for navigation.

dressinG

Qatar is a Muslim country so it is advisable to dress respectfully in accordance to the local culture. Generally, skirts should be of knee length or longer and tops should cover the shoulders for women. It is also a great idea to carry a shawl or a scarf, which can be wrapped

Chinese fine dining cuisine helmed by a Shanghainese chef who brings the best of the Far East to this region. Also has a swanky bar great for catching up with friends in the evening. Licensed. 4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2

PAssPort siZe

uMM sAlAl, north of dohA

An excellent Mexican seafood restaurant with outdoor seating facing the marina. A different take than the usual Mex-Tex fare. Licensed. 5

lAndMArK – shoPPinG MAll

5 uMM sAlAl MohAMMed fort And BArzAn toWer

+974 4495 3876 ext 1221 Al Istiqlal Street, The Pearl Daily: 6pm to 1am

dining by the water. Good for entertaining guests

GPS 25.40541, 51.44134

4 Al Khor MuseuM Al Khor CorniChe, north of dohA +974 4472 1866 oPeninG tiMes VAry throuGhout the yeAr. CAll Before VisitinG.

WATER FROnT

Al zuBArA, northern QAtAr

a meal at one of the restaurants while enjoying a variety of seasonal entertainment including live music and cultural shows.

GPS 25.68692, 51.51631

This museum overlooks the beautiful Al Khor coastline and displays archaelogical finds from neolithic and bronze ages. It also offers a glimpse into the fishing, pearling and dhow building industries. the museum is also famous for displaying the legend of Ghilan and Mae, believed to be the region’s BEST SEA FOOD first female pirate.

Al zuBArA fort And Al zuBArA toWn

shoPPinG

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2

GPS 25.9770111, 51.0454156 3

location : Lusail Street, West Bay opening hours : Various opening times for the various establishments Contact : +974 44110003 Website : http://www.katara.net time to spend : Half day or full day depending on points of interest to visit

These rocky hills close to the northeastern coast of Qatar between the two villages of Al Huwailah and Fuwairit, contain more than 900 prehistoric carvings depicting different types of boats and symbols. Spread over a large area, the carvings may be difficult to spot, so it is advisable to hire a tour operator for a guided tour.

tiPs And AdVise

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0 1 2

around the shoulders, especially if y are visiting communal places like th souq or the park. Tops with plunging necklines and spaghetti strap tank tops should be avoided. Men should avoid wearing sleeveless t-shirts or shorts. Swimwear including bikinis a allowed at the hotel pools but make sure you are covered once you mov away from the those areas.

soCiAl etiQuette

As with all cultures, travelling to a new country means that you may need to learn a slightly different set social etiquette. In Qatar, be mindfu when you are meeting locals of the opposite gender. Always wait for them to extend their hands first f a handshake as some may not feel comfortable touching a stranger of the opposite gender.

4 8 h o u r s q ata r I 2 0

Free

AvAilAble At over 300+ locAtions

48 hrs is a visitors’ handbook which stands out by offering concise, up-to-date and wellcatalogued information on the city and country. apart from advising on popular choices and destinations, it highlights hidden gems which a visitor can explore and experience. it presents the best of events, destinations, dining and shopping options. To find ouT more abouT 48 hrs conTacT: tel: (+974) 44550983, 44672139, 44671173, 44667584 fax: (+974) 44550982 e-mail: info@omsqatar.com

talk

sitting pretty

The hostess who cares the mostest still goes by the book. By Christopher Petkanas

A 78

don’t want to know when they are asked to your house that there will inevitably be chicken à la creme,’’ she huffed. ‘‘You can keep a record of your parties and the guests at them and what you gave the guests to eat, and then you won’t confront Mr. J— with the same dish for the seventh time. . . .’’ For heaven’s sake! For every party she gives, Carol Mack, whose husband, Earle, was ambassador to Finland, keeps a vinyl binder that notes or contains: the occasion (dinner for Bibi Netanyahu), the invitation, the guest list, the menu, the seating chart,

Tools of the trade Clockwise from top: Carol Mack’s seating plan; Hilary Geary Ross’s seating easel from Vogel; the popular Smythson party diary. Jens Mortensen

n acquaintance at Goldman Sachs knows what he is about but worries what the outside world would make of his keeping a dinner-party journal. Actually, there are few things he takes more seriously than maintaining a log not just of his menus but also of his centerpieces, place settings (china, crystal, silver, linen), guests’ food preferences and even their allergies. Not that he is trying to steal Pat Buckley’s tiara or anything. ‘‘Hostess books,’’ as they’re still sometimes called, may be a creaky social nicety associated with the kind of women who spent afternoons at Kenneth having their hair teased, but it’s surprising how many people hang on to them out of sheer usefulness — for remembering that the paella was so dreadful it should be taken out of circulation, that the sweet peas merit a replay. It’s a long way from the Bois de Boulogne and the Duchess of Windsor, but you do what you can. You’d be surprised who doesn’t keep party books: Annette de la Renta, Henry Grunwald’s widow Louise, Aerin Lauder. ‘‘In my next life I am planning to keep one of those books, I swear,’’ Nora Ephron said. Others make the time or delegate the task to flunkies: Valentino, Betsy Bloomingdale, Dede Wilsey. Bringing up the rear are Carol Mack, of Palm Beach, Fla.; the designer Jasper Conran; and Christopher Spitzmiller, the preppy potter whose double-gourd lamps are de facto with people who get their lattes at Sant Ambroeus and their stocking stuffers at De Vera. Conran documents his parties the new-fashioned way, photographing them with his iPhone, then loading the images onto his computer to create ‘‘an aide-mémoire, sort of.’’ One in a long line of metahostesses who relished the fastidious tradition of building entertaining dossiers, the Duchess of Windsor personalized the practice to the point of cruelty, noting any deficiencies on what her servants called the ‘‘complaint pad,’’ kept at her elbow during dinner parties and sheathed in a gold Van Cleef & Arpels case. In ‘‘Elsie de Wolfe’s Recipes for Successful Dining,’’ published in 1935, de Wolfe invites readers to find inspiration, ‘‘as I often have when at my wits’ end,’’ by consulting menus ‘‘chosen from among my own files of reference on the subject, covering many years.’’ A decade later, in ‘‘Entertaining Is Fun!’’ the steamrolling domestic oracle Dorothy Draper unloaded on lazy bones who always fall back on the same dish. ‘‘People

talk pictures of the table decorations (from 1999, canvas tablecloths painted with 18th-century French garden scenes), the flowers and the entertainment (Spanish guitar for a soiree for Peter Martins and Darci Kistler). Noted on a checklist that includes the need for olives is a reminder to order tablecloth liners. ‘‘Without the checklist,’’ Mack said, ‘‘no one would think to see if we have any cocktail onions. Some people still want a martini with an onion in it.’’

hristopher Spitzmiller uses his ledger to record what he could do better, ‘‘[invite] a few younger people next time!’’), how the party went (‘‘really nice night!’’) and mishaps (‘‘oven door fell off in the middle of cooking salmon!’’). His annual buffets have two immutable excuses: chick-hatching season (‘‘the orpingtons were much adored’’) and the Westminster Dog Show (‘‘the Sussex spaniel won!’’). Without her diary, the decorator Maureen Footer said she might never recall how well chocolate follows poulet à l’Armagnac. Since she had nothing for dessert the first time she made it except leftover Halloween candy, she put out a bowl of Snickers and hoped for the best. Everyone loved them, so the next time she served chicken she made chocolate mousse. Footer would rather invest in a box of marrons glacés than a fancy book to record them in. Her spiral notebook does the job as well as the 12-pound doorstop Minnie Dubilier, a former Vogue editor, commissioned from the Vogel Bindery,

“ ”

Swears Nora Ephron: ‘In my next life, I am going to keep one of those books.’

from top left: collection of hugo vickers; jens mortensen (3)

Best-laid plans Clockwise from top: a reminder for one of the Duchess of Windsor’s parties; Minnie Dubilier’s book; Maureen Footer’s archive.

adorned with a Wayne Thiebaud engraving of a toqued chef scratching his head over his menu. Vogel also supplies Hilary Geary Ross with seating easels that allow her to reshuffle her guests on bits of paper until she nails the plan. While Smythson’s pigskin party register is the default diary for the jewelry expert Janet Mavec, Scully & Scully also has a nice version, and Graphic Image’s ‘‘Entertaining’’ is one of the only ones that includes table shapes other than oval for recording seating plans. Mavec can tell you whether you ate duck breast or quail stuffed with Cajun sausage when she invited you to dinner in 1979, whether it took place in her dining room or the Knickerbocker Club and whether the tablecloth was paisley. Also whether Peter Duchin played. Only Dorothy Rodgers, the composer’s long-suffering wife, found it unnecessary to write things down. But then she had a mind like a steel trap. If, after a party, it was discovered that safety pins had been missing in the powder room, she made a quick mental note. As she put it in ‘‘My Favorite Things,’’ a bathroom used by dinner guests must also contain aspirin, cotton balls and fresh combs. Since you never know when a woman is going to destroy her manicure on an oyster shell, Mrs. Rodgers thought emery boards were crucial, too. God help Dick if he left his pajamas on the bathroom door. n 79

Sophie Delaporte

The New York Times Style Magazine

DESIGN FALL 2011

our kind of tea party artwork by Astier de Villatte

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is having lunch at New York’s Union Square Cafe, hoping Danny Meyer’s chicken soup will soothe his allergies. He has just returned from Newark, where he interviewed Mayor Cory Booker for his new PBS series, ‘‘Finding Your Roots.’’ After lunch he’s catching a flight to Martha’s Vineyard for Bill Clinton’s birthday party. Author of 14 books, editor in chief of the online publication The Root, documentary producer and presenter, Gates, 61, is a one-man multimedia industry. ‘‘I have no plans to slow down,’’ he says cheerfully. A clear line runs through Gates’s myriad projects. ‘‘I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture,’’ he says. ‘‘I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.’’ Gates’s love of technology has been a boon in this regard. He is always thinking about new ways to circulate his ideas. ‘‘The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature’’ (1996) included a CD of oral literature with recordings of poets like Langston Hughes reading their work. He followed up ‘‘Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African American Experience’’ (1999) with Microsoft’s Encarta Africana on CD-ROM. The success of The Huffington Post inspired him to start The Root, The Washington Post’s online African-American publication. ‘‘I’m a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?’’ Gates has always wanted to reach a wider audience than scholarship alone could attract. In 1995, he and his family rode 3,000 miles through Africa for the BBC documentary ‘‘Great Railway Journeys.’’ His genealogy series on PBS — ‘‘Faces of America’’ and ‘‘African American Lives’’ — drew 25 million viewers. This latest installment, the first to run in prime time, might beat that. ‘‘It would take a thousand years for my book ‘The Signifying Monkey’ to get to that many people,’’ he says. Which isn’t to say that he has abandoned print. In November, Knopf will publish ‘‘Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African-American History, 1513-2008.’’ Accessibly written and lavishly illustrated, it’s aimed at readers who may have shied away from his earlier, encyclopedic compendiums. It is also quirkier. Alongside requisite sections on the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights movement, it includes entries on the television show ‘‘Soul Train’’ and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Gates’s slant on African-American history has been influenced by the research he did for his most recent book and television series, ‘‘Black in Latin America.’’ In a move sure to raise eyebrows, he opens this latest volume with Juan Garrido, a free black conquistador who accompanied Ponce de León on his 1513 expedition to Florida. The year 1619 is when most historians date the presence of African slaves in the colonies, so why does Gates start 106 years earlier, and with an ‘‘oppressor’’ rather than with the oppressed? ‘‘The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up,’’ he says. ‘‘One principle I’ve been fighting for that doesn’t endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.’’ Gates’s belief in the complexity of American culture has only been reinforced by the genetic research that has informed his recent books and television programs. In them, Gates explores

the lineage of Americans like Chris Rock, Meryl Streep, YoYo Ma and Tina Turner. Using genealogical and historical resources, he traces their family stories as far back as he can. When the paper trail runs out, he resorts to DNA tests. Gates is a member of the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School, and he and his late father (who died at age 97 on Christmas Eve, 2010) were the first AfricanAmericans to have their entire genomes sequenced. The tests showed that Gates Jr. has 50 percent European ancestry and descends from John Redman, a free African-American who fought in the Revolutionary War. In 2006, Gates was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution. ‘‘When I do a black person’s DNA, there are never any people who are 100 percent black, no matter how dark they are,’’ he says. Gates also learned that he is related to a fourth-century Irish king. It is a distinction he shares with James Crowley,

The 10 percenter

Henry LouIS GATES jr. has a simple but exhausting goal — to make the common culture reflect what’s black in america. By Robert S. Boynton Photograph by Richard Burbridge the police sergeant who arrested Gates for disorderly conduct in July 2009. Responding to a report of a break-in, Crowley ordered the professor to step out of the house. He refused and was arrested. The incident became national news, with President Obama saying the police had ‘‘acted stupidly.’’ A few weeks after, he convened a White House ‘‘beer summit’’ with Gates, Crowley and the vice president. Gates cites Obama’s intervention as an example of his talent for navigating America’s vexed racial legacy. ‘‘I began receiving hate mail and death threats after the arrest, and that all stopped after the summit,’’ he says. It pains Gates that the president doesn’t seem able to bring people together as effectively as he once did. Why is this? He puts on his literary scholar’s hat. Gates recalls the excitement of Obama’s inauguration, which he attended. ‘‘Obama is searching for a narrative. He had an election narrative but hasn’t found the vocabulary for governing.’’ Gates wonders how more combative politicians, like Lyndon Johnson, would have responded to the slights Obama has received from Congress. (‘‘He would have grabbed these people by the balls and said, ‘I am the president of the goddamned United States!’ ’’) But that isn’t Obama’s, or Gates’s own, style, he says: ‘‘What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He’s been bridging divisions his whole life.’’ n

A culture of complexity Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, photographed in New York City on Sept. 2, 2011.

The CONTRARIANS

No minimalist showcase for these Chicago collectors, who turned their apartment into an ode to the 18th century. They did it their way â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and they did it themselves. By Pilar Viladas Photographs by Annie Schlechter Treasure trove Above: a pearl chandelier adorns the bedroom. Opposite: the couple designed the wood paneling in one of the libraries, which contains a 17th-century Italian scagliola table and 18th-century French furniture. Throughout the apartment, Jean did the decorating.

Jean and Steven

Goldman have always done things their way — which has usually meant swimming against the current. In the mid-1960s, when the newly married couple lived in Cambridge, Mass., where Steven attended Harvard Law School and Jean worked as a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, they could have bought Warhols and Lichtensteins (which were going for a song then). Instead, they set their sights on what Jean has called ‘‘postage-stamp Renaissance scribbles,’’ gradually amassing a large and important collection of Italian drawings from the 15th to the 17th centuries. And in the mid-1990s, when the Goldmans — Jean by then an art historian, and Steven in transition from academia to real estate — decided to move back to their native Chicago and sell their David Adler-designed 1921 French country manor in suburban Glencoe, Ill., they could have installed themselves in the kind of sleek, plush aerie favored by many of their art-collector peers. But no. The couple bought a spacious apartment in an austerely elegant Art Deco building on Chicago’s Gold Coast and proceeded to turn it into an 18th-century fantasy, a city cousin of their beloved Adler house, complete with two libraries (and no guest rooms), parquet de Versailles floors, carved French and Italian furniture and, of course, their collection of drawings — now at 180 and still counting — by Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Guido Reni, Agnolo Bronzino and various Carraccis, among other masters. Nor did they do it the way you might imagine, directing a small army of architects and decorators. The Goldmans designed and decorated the apartment themselves (with the help, of course, of first-rate carpenters and craftsmen) and discovered in the process a level of obsessiveness that surprised even them. Once Steven had said of the existing space, ‘‘Everything had to go,’’ it was, as Jean recalled, ‘‘a slippery slope.’’ Making things has always been big in the Goldman family, according to Jean, who favors up-to-the-minute clothes from Ikram — the Chicago store owned by her daughter-in-law, Ikram Goldman, who is married to the older of the couple’s two sons, Josh — and who has the birdlike figure to carry them off. ‘‘When the kids were small,’’ she recalled, ‘‘we made our own dishes. We made decoupage trays, and we grew Hooked on classics The Goldmans designed the living room fireplace mantel, above which hangs an 18th-century Venetian mirror, its gilded frame carved with depictions of musical instruments.

Past perfect The library bookshelves were made to look bowed with age. Opposite: Reflections of the past through the mirrors in the room.

The couple shares an extreme attention to detail. ‘What Steven isn’t obsessive about,’ Jean Goldman said of her husband, ‘I am.’ Luxe and calm Right: the 18th-century paneling in a multipurpose room off the kitchen conceals things like a washing machine as well as dinner plates. Below: a sliding panel in the dining room opens to the kitchen.

pumpkins and made pumpkin cake, and gave it as gifts to teachers on the trays.’’ A tray is one thing; an entire apartment is quite another. The Goldmans started pretty much from scratch, replacing doors and designing a new fireplace mantel for the living room, as well as paneling, bookshelves (in one library, they were deliberately bowed to make them look old) and even moldings. Steven bought a book of molding profiles and then sculptured his own versions out of Play-Doh. When it was discovered that the apartment’s existing parquet floors were missing from part of the living room (which was revealed only when the previous owner’s area rug was removed), Steven worked with a carpenter to achieve a perfect match, even suggesting that the carpenter find reject pieces of oak and soak them in an ammonia bath, which was done in the 19th century to kill worms but which also brought out the grain of the wood. Jean, of course, was no slouch either. ‘‘What Steven isn’t obsessive about, I am,’’ she explained, as if anyone doubted it. Her attention to detail is evident in the apartment’s decorating, with its elegant touches (like the smocked silk curtains in the bedroom) and serene palette, with its dominant shade of blue that puts you in mind of the French artist Watteau. Jean also oversees the framing and matting of the couple’s drawings, which will eventually go to the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is a lifetime trustee. And, in what must have been rare moments of spare time, she also made the needlepoint rug in front of the living room fireplace. The renovation took about five years to complete, which is not surprising when Jean and Steven explain that the painters alone spent thousands of hours on the project, most of them preparing the walls — which are, it must be said, almost impossibly smooth, with the depth of tone that only a costly, expert paint job can provide. But then, said Steven, ‘‘These guys were more than painters.’’ Indeed, they were connoisseurs — just like the Goldmans. n 90

the graveyard shift

converts to the urban sport of parkour, two young palestinians practice how to run for their lives in a gaza cemetery. by stephen farrell photographs by klaus thymann

Urban gymnastics This structure is near the Khan Yunis cemetery in Gaza, which serves as the primary training ground for the refugee-camp athletes.

Leaps of faith From left: Mohammed al-Jakhbeer, Abed Allah Enshasy, Jihad Abu Sultan and Ahmad al-Jakhbeer share tricks. Jakhbeer and Enshasy maintain a Facebook page that links them globally to the sportâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practitioners.

ohammed al-Jakhbeer and Abed Allah Enshasy sprint along narrow walls. They somersault off concrete pillars and land in the deep sand. ‘‘At first people didn’t accept us,’’ Enshasy, 23, explains. People would say: ‘‘You jump like monkeys and you climb buildings like thieves. What are you doing?’’ The brand of urban-obstacle-course gymnastics they practice may be at odds with the socially conservative mores of Khan Yunis — the southern Gaza town and periodic war zone that they call home — but it is their chosen form of self- expression. Calling themselves the Gaza Parkour Team and practicing with a rotating crew of like-minded edgy acrobats, they spend their days rehearsing routines and teaching the sport to schoolchildren. The local graveyard serves as their practice arena. As Enshasy puts it, ‘‘The dead people don’t mind.’’ Among the headstones of local dignitaries and graffiti commemorating militants are bullet holes from battles between Palestinian factions and Israeli troops, who were once based in the former Jewish settlement that adjoins the cemetery. ‘‘I have witnessed war, invasion and killing,’’ Enshasy says. ‘‘When I was a kid and I saw these things, blood and injuries, I didn’t know what it all meant.’’ He and Jakhbeer, 22, are wary of straying too near the Hamas training zone, just as they are wary of leaving their homes when Israeli drones appear in the sky over their cinder-block refugee camp. They prefer the comparative safety of their daring leaps and bone-shattering landings. They believe that, one day, their ticket out of Gaza will be written by parkour. Parkour originated in the suburbs of Paris and is a corruption of the French word ‘‘parcours,’’ meaning route or journey. In a very literal sense, the sport is about overcoming barriers, living beyond the restraints of physics. It inspires a philosophical outlook on life that mirrors the actions of its athletes. According to Jakhbeer, parkour helps untangle the ‘‘anger and depression’’ that comes with living where they do. Indeed, nowhere could a philosophy of escape and freedom have a greater resonance than in the narrow, politically and militarily confined Gaza Strip, home to a boxed-in population of 1.7 million Palestinians. As it so happens, the dense urban setting is perfectly suited for the activity, a fact Enshasy realized immediately upon watching the famous documentary ‘‘Jump

From every angle Clockwise from top: Ahmad al-Jakhbeer and Enshasy perform gravity-defying acrobatics in the ruins of the Gaza International Airport near Rafah, about eight miles from their home in the Khan Yunis refugee camp; Mohammed al-Jakhbeer and Sultan take their turn in Gaza City; concrete blocks are no obstacle for Mohammed al-Jakhbeer and Enshasy on this Mediterranean coast road north of Khan Yunis.

Up, up and away From left: Enshasy goes sideways in a former Israeli settlement near the Khan Yunis cemetery; team dynamics on display near the ruined airport outside Rafah. Opposite: Mohammed al-Jakhbeer soars in K.O. (Know Obstacles) sneakers from the World Freerunning Parkour Federation.

children, they say they can separate their feelings about Israel’s politics from its people, to whom they bear no ill will. They see themselves as athletes first and not political figures of any sort. Because they speak only Arabic, they are limited in how much they can interact with those outside the Middle East. But parkour is a visual spectacle with London’’ on television a few years ago. He recruited Jakhbeer, sequences that can be broken down into individual moves. So while they are and needing no expensive equipment and aided by the Internet, studying a YouTube video or a series of stepped walls on the Gaza seafront, there is a rat-tat-tat exchange in Arabic and broken English between them, as they they picked up moves quickly, discovering a talent for fluidity evaluate obstacles and identify moves — ‘‘back flip,’’ ‘‘amaamiya’’ [front], ‘‘cat through extreme motions. Jakhbeer, a basketball player, does better on the jumps, while Enshasy regards tumbling as his forte. leap’’ and ‘‘jidar’’ [wall]. ‘‘When I watch the people who do parkour outside, I’ve never seen anybody The sandy soil of their training grounds slows down their who does it better than us,’’ says Jakhbeer, a burst of electronic music from his routines at points where they would prefer firmer surfaces headphones indicating that even as he speaks, most of his attention is directed for jumping-off, but it also helps to break bad falls. High toward the latest video that he has found on the Internet. sand dunes are also ideal for spectacular leaps, which feature Even though they cannot easily reach the outside world, sometimes it intrudes, in the videos that Jakhbeer — who studied film editing unbidden. At one point, Jakhbeer tears off his headphones with news that the at college — puts together with footage shot on borrowed Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, has been killed. For a moment sport is cellphone cameras. put aside, and the youngsters and adults gather around the screen in Enshasy’s Both are confident of their abilities, but they have never home, as confused by the implications of this passing as the rest of the world. been able to test themselves against other parkour devotees One obstacle to their ambition to be professional athletes is pressure to get a outside Gaza. A cheap Korean computer in a pink-washed back job, not easy in an area of high unemployment. Jakhbeer, in particular, says his room in Enshasy’s home is their only conduit to the outside family is nagging him to start bringing money in. For the moment he has managed world. Both spend hours each day online, their quick eyes and to resist and to continue devoting himself to parkour. fingers rarely leaving the keyboard and screen. His immediate goal is to secure entry to a parkour competition in Miami next Through a Facebook page they chat, mostly in Arabic, with enthusiasts from Kuwait, Bahrain, Algeria, Morocco and Egypt. spring, the Cross Urban Scramble, which would transform their international profile. They seize upon the arrival of English-speaking journalists to get a proper A commenter for a recent video singles out Enshasy — ‘‘the translation of the competition rules, nervous that they might have missed the dude with the long hair’’ — for having ‘‘awesome tumbling deadline to submit a video — they hadn’t — and that two people might not be skill.’’ Another writes in Arabic, ‘‘May God bring enough for a team. (It was.) my level to their level.’’ The real uncertainty is whether they will be able to leave Gaza. Jakhbeer once A third commenter, this one in English, writes: ‘‘Amazing lived in Saudi Arabia, so he has travel documents. But Enshasy has never left the guys! You got so much better from last year. I hope there will coastal strip, and the bureaucratic and financial hurdles are many. be peace between us one day.’’ Another, also in English, writes The gateway to Egypt is barely five miles down the road, but there is no way simply, ‘‘I love it.’’ Both are signed ‘‘Peace from Israel!’’ of knowing whether fate will allow them passage. Though the only Israelis Jakhbeer and Enshasy have ever Miami seems a long way away. n met are settlers and soldiers, at whom they threw stones as

brand directory Aigner

Blue Salon - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44466111 Highland - The Mall - 44678678 1 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1051

A. Lange & Sohne

Al Majed Jewelry - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44478888

Agent Provocateur

7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2271

Alexander McQueen

7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2231

Amouage

51 East -Al Maha Center - Salwa Road - 44257777

Armani Exchange

Villaggio Mall - 44135222

Balmain

51 East - Al Maha Center - Salwa Road - 44257777

Balenciaga

6 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1861

Banana Republic

Villaggio Mall - 44135222

Barbara Bui

Zai - Salwa Road - 44092600

6 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1831

Calvin Klein Collection

10 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2561

Carolina Herrera

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134748

Cartier

Cartier Boutique - Royal Plaza 44131381 Cartier Boutique - Villaggio Mall Via Domo - 44507798

Celine

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134763

Chloe

7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2181 Villaggio Mall - 44135222

Christian Dior

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44135222

Chopard

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44519900

Cugini

2 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1471

Betty Barclay

Damiani

Berluti

David Morris

Emporium Shopping Centre 44375796/98 Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44161860

Bikkembergs

Blue Salon - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44466111

Blumarine

6 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1811

Boss Orange

Salam Plaza - 44485555 The Mall - 44551325 Porto Arabia,The Pearl Qatar 44953876 Extn 1521

Bottega Veneta

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44507354

Breitling

Blue Salon - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44466111

Brioni

51 East -Al Maha Center - Salwa Road - 44257777

Burberry

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134551

Bvlgari

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134568/44134566

Boucheron

Lagoona Mall 44361111

Canali

Blue Salon - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44466111 Ali Bin Ali Watches & Jewelry Royal Plaza - 44131391

Diesel

Salam Stores - 44485555 4 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1701

Dolce & Gabbana

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44161007

D&G

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44135222

Domenico Vacca

1 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1061

Dunhill

Royal Plaza - 44131381 Villaggio Mall - 44134788

Diptyque

7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2241

Elie Saab

Zai - Salwa Road - 44092600

Emporio Armani

7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2161

Ermenegildo Zegna

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134765

Fendi

Jaeger LeCoulture

Franck Muller

John Galliano

Frette

John Richmond

Al Majed Jewelry - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44478888 Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44135222 Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44519900 Royal Plaza - 44360560 Landmark Shopping Mall 44874331

Galliano

4 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1771

Georg Jensen

7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2251

GF Ferre

4 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1631/1641

Giorgio Armani

6 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1921

Giovanni Ferraris

Al Muftah Jewelry - Al Sadd 44441320 Al Muftah Jewelry - Royal Plaza 44131341 Al Muftah Jewelry - City Centre 44833000

Giuseppe Zanotti Design

7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2291

Givenchy

The Mall - 44678888

Gucci

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134612

Harry Winston

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44519900

Harmont & Blaine

2 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1481

Hermes

6 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1911

Hublot

Al Majed Jewelry - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44478888 Al Majed Jewelry - Villaggio Mall 44507701

Hugo Boss

Salam Plaza - 44485555 The Mall - 44672200 The Gate - 44077162 Extn 320

Ice Iceberg

4 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1651

Al Majed Jewelry - Villaggio Mall 44507701 Al Majed Boutique - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street -Al Saad - 44478888 7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2301 4 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1741

Just Cavalli

4 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1751

Kenzo

Porto Arabia - Parcel 4 - The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 - Extn 1991 Emporium Shopping Centre 44375796/98

Lacoste

Villaggio Mall - 44507191 Landmark Shopping Mall 44887604

Lanvin Paris

Zai - Salwa Road - 44092600

LeoPizzo

Ali Bin Ali W & J - Royal Plaza 44131391

Loewe

Zai - Salwa Road - 44507356 Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44507356

Love Moschino

2 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1061 Emporium Shopping Centre 44375796/98

Louis Vuitton

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134927

Maurice Lacriox Watches

Blue Salon - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44466111

M Missoni

4 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1691

Marc Jacobs

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134767

Montblanc

Villaggio Mall - 44507009 The Mall - 44674920 City Center - 44839532 Royal Plaza - 44131398 The Four Seasons Hotel 44935288

Mulberry

1 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 - Extn 1111

Nespresso

Blue Salon - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44466111

Omega

Rivoli Prestige - City Center 44833679 Rivoli Prestige - Villaggio Mall 44519750 Rivoli Prestige - Landmark Shopping Mall - 44873190 Rivoli Prestige - The Mall 44678866

Pal Zileri

Blue Salon - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44466111 The Mall - 44678888

Panerai

Villaggio Mall - 44135222

Patek Philippe

Al Majed Jewelry - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44478888

Paris Hilton Bags

Royal Plaza - 44131381

Prada

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44135222

Qatar Executive

Qatar Airways Office - Airport Road - 44453800

Ralph Lauren

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44135655

Rene Caovilla

6 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1851

Richard Mille

Ali Bin Ali W & J - Royal Plaza 44131391

Rizon Jet

Behind Doha International Airport - 44991878

Roberto Cavalli

Villaggio Mall - 44135222 7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2151

Romain Jerome

Ali Bin Ali W & J - Royal Plaza 44131391

Rolex

51 East -Al Maha Center - Salwa Road - 44361111/44257777

Schreiner

Ali Bin Ali W & J - Royal Plaza 44131391

Sonia Rykiel

6 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1801

Sephora

Landmark Shopping Mall 44875222 Villaggio Mall - 44135222

Sergio Rossi

7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876

Salvatore Ferragamo

6 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1941

Stefano Ricci

6 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1791

Qatar

Stella McCartney

7 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 2281

S.T. Dupont

where style lives.

Royal Plaza - 44341765

Swarovski

Landmark Shopping Mall 44838158

Tanagra

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134780

Tod's

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134937

Tiffany & Co.

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44134976

Ulysse Nardin

Ali Bin Ali Jewelry - City Centre 44838012/44838034

Valentino

Villaggio Mall- Via Domo 44135222

Van Cleef & Arpels

Villaggio Mall - 44129399

Vera Wang

1 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 5157

Vertu

Rivoli Prestige - City Center 44833679 Rivoli Prestige - Landmark Shopping Mall - 44873190 Rivoli Prestige - The Mall 44678866 Rivoli Prestige - Villaggio Mall 44519750

Versace

Al Majed Jewelry -Versace Boutique - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44477333

Versace Collection

Villaggio Mall - 44135437

Virgin Megastore

Villaggio Mall - 44135824 Landmark Shopping Mall 44182242

Weekend Max Mara

2 La Croissette Porto Arabia -The Pearl Qatar - 44953876 Extn 1611

Zenith

Blue Salon - Suhaim Bin Hamad Street - 44466111

51 East

City Center Doha Salwa Road - 44257777

Blue Salon

Suhaim Bin Hamad Street 44466111/44678888

Emporium

Suhaim Bin Hamad Street 44375796/44375798

Lagoona Mall

West Bay - 44257766

Royal Plaza

N Y T I M E S . C O M / T M AG A Z I N E | M O N T H T K 0 0 , 2 0 0 8

139

Al Sadd Street - 44130000

Salam Studio & Stores

Salam Plaza - Near City Centre 44485555 Salam Stores - The Mall 44672200

The Mall

D-Ring Road - 44678888

The Gate

Maysaloun Street - West Bay 44932524

Villaggio

Al Waab Street - 44135222

Write to us if you have a question, comment or need help finding a fashion brand retailer. For any additions, amendments or corrections please contact us at info@omsqatar.com.

If you want your preferred customers or guests to receive VIP copies, join our â&#x20AC;&#x153;Preferred Destination Programâ&#x20AC;? email: info@omsqatar.com or call Patricia on +974-44550983

timely

Bethan Laura Wood

Mix and Maxed ‘‘I’ve always made stuff and wanted to know how things worked,’’ says Bethan Laura Wood, a 28-year-old British product designer who studied under Martino Gamper and Jurgen Bey, and whose work was featured with that of her mentors at the cutting- edge Milan gallery Nilufar in April. Wood takes nuts-and-bolts materials to fantastic places; her Moon Rock tables are inlaid with laser-cut plastic laminate, as is her Particle jewelry (shown here), inspired by lowly particle board. Wood’s own look, a confection of glitter, pattern and wrapping, has evolved since her teen years from a defense against bullying classmates (‘‘I thought I’d give them a reason’’) into a form of play. Look for Wood at the Pavilion of Art & Design London show this month. 100

P H O T O G R A P H B Y ben toms . fashion editor : vanessa traina .

chloé dress, QR6,534, and shirt (worn as headpiece), QR4,022. go to chloe.com. jean paul gaultier leggings (worn as headpiece), $580. at opening ceremony. call (646) 237-6078. particle jewellery bracelets (worn as necklace), from QR1183. go to woodlondon.co.uk. fashion assistant: Guillaume Harrison. hair by Karin Bigler at D+V using redken. makeup by Hiromi Ueda at Julian Watson agency using chanel.

B Y P I L AR V I L ADA S