Commissioned by a couple about to retire to renovate an apartment in Nanjing, China, newly fledged Shanghai-based @sfa_scaleforestatelier offers a fresh perspective on retirement urban living by designing a space that reflects the couple’s living habits and emotional needs. Modelled on a Chinese garden, the property was transformed from a typical three-bedroom apartment into an open-plan, multifunctional space comprising a series of functions, from a “play yard” and planting area, to a book alle...

Nestled amongst palm and almond trees on a hillside in Sayulita, a laidback beach town popular with surfers on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, this ambitious yet unassuming mixed-use residential project by Mexico City-based architectural practice @palmamx was conceived as a house-hotel hybrid that can be configured in accordance with the guests’ composition and combined in various configurations, from a single residence for a large family or group of friends, to two separate apartments, to six independe...

Katowice-based interior design studio @mistovia have a talent for turning nondescript, compact apartments into convivial, playful and sophisticated dwellings thanks to their spatial deftness and a keen eye for colour and pattern. For this 57-square-metre apartment in Krakow, the team did away with existing partitions, adopting an open-plan layout with a rounded wall whimsically separating the bedroom from the living areas, and custom-designed furnishings elegantly concealing air ducts, cables an...

Conceived as a house-hotel hybrid, this just completed mix-use residential project in Sayulita, a laidback beach on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, consists of a pair of slim towers facing each other like two opposing thumbs amid a lush garden. Housing six units and communal areas across four floors plus rooftop terraces, the two towers were designed by Mexico City-based architectural practice @palmamx to provide a flexible configuration for seamless indoor-outdoor living, as well as to ensure privacy a...

Housed in a 19th century in Neo-Mudéjar style mansion in Madrid that used to house the art and literary magazine Blanco y Negro and the national newspaper ABC, @torcuatomadrid takes its name from the publications’ founder Torcuato Luca de Tena whose extensive travels around the world inspired the restaurant’s boldly eclectic interiors – the work of interior designer Pepe Leal’s (@lealpp) who also drew from the building’s eccentricity. “At the end of the 19th century it was very fashionable to mi...

LG OLED Gallery TV has been likened to a piece of art and for good reason. Not only does it boast incredible resolution, richness of colour, and excellent viewing quality from every angle, it’s also ultra thin. In fact, we bet it’s thinner than many of the picture frames on your wall. Combined with its incredibly thin bezel, it can transform into an artwork with the push of a button, or more accurately into a multitude of artworks, from impressionist masterpieces and abstract paintings, to immer...

Located in the heart of Madrid’s “Golden Mile”, @torcuatomadrid opened its doors last year to much anticipation; apart from its premium location, it boasts immersive, kaleidoscopic interiors that playfully mix styles and époques with panache, courtesy of interior designer Pepe Leal (@lealpp) painterly dishes that ingeniously fuse flavours and cuisines, created by acclaimed chef Sergio Fernández (@sergio_umami), plus one of the most beautiful dining terraces in the city. Both Leal and Fernández h...

Once the centre of Barcelona’s industrial revolution, Poblenou has emerged as one of the city’s coolest neighbourhoods attracting start-ups, designers and hipsters in equal measure. While most of the area’s factories and warehouses have been converted into tech offices and design showrooms, local architecture and interior design studio @allaroundlab have turned this compact industrial space into a bright and airy two-bedroom residence by applying their signature style of crisp minimalism and int...

Tucked away in a Parisian apartment in the Marais, @maestria_paris is an online art & design gallery launched last autumn by Léa Coussy (@leacoussy) and Lucie Marquand-Gairard (@lucie_marquandg) with an aim to unearth new talent. The gallery offers a new collection every four months bringing together a variety of mediums based on a theme. For its second collection “Bonjour Tendresse”, which takes its name from Françoise Sagan’s first and best-loved novel “Bonjour Tristesse”, Léa and Lucie have f...

Commissioned by a young family to transform two wooden bungalows in the Dutch countryside into a modern residence where they can escape to, interior designer Carl Devin Wesselius of Amsterdam-based @studioasker created a minimalist yet soulful retreat inspired by the calming rural landscape. Surrounded by a swimming pond and overlooking a wooded area, the building’s idyllic rural setting is the epitome of peacefulness and tranquillity which explains why Dutch painter and sculptor W. G. Van der H...

Anecdotal and qualitative evidence suggests that humans are innately attracted to nature. Working on the synthesis of ecology and psychology (a field that would eventually be called ecopsychology), Robert Greenway theorized in the 1960s that "the mind is nature, and nature, the mind"; psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote in the “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” in 1973 about biophilia, “the passionate love of life and of all that is alive”; a decade later eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson coine...

Greeks love their coffee; they may not consume as much caffeine as the Scandinavians who top the per capita list, but they definitely are the champions in the amount of time they spend in coffee houses where a cup of coffee with friends lasts on average one and a half to two hours. Walk along the main street of any Greek town and you’ll see countless cafés packed all day long with people. In fact, the “kafenion”, the traditional Greek café, has been the social hub of towns and villages for centu...