The beds have been made, the concierge desk polished and the piano
in the lobby has been tuned. On its tour around America, the Stoli
Hotel has set up shop in Miami where it will host a variety of invite
only music, fashion and sport events over the next two and a half weeks.
Designed by creative architecture agency Pompei A.D, the 10,000 square foot hotel-themed space is inspired by the iconic Hotel Moskva which features on Stolichnaya's labels.
"Each facet of the hotel has been carefully selected to incorporate
Stolichnaya's authentic heritage, while drawing upon the modern day
qualities that top metropolitan hotels possess" says Adam Rosen, Senior
Brand Manager of Stolichnaya vodka.
Guests can browse (but not sleep in) rooms designed
around Stoli blends, enjoy Stoli cocktails and indulge in manicures,
facials,
scalp treatments and chair massages.
You are, however, going to need to be wearing some serious bling if you
want to enter the elit suite. Paying homage to Stoli's high-end range,
it is only open to celebrities and VIP's.
Heading over to New York next, the Stoli Hotel adds yet another
milestone to Stolichnaya's unique history of innovation and championing
all things Russian. By Brendan McKnight.
It's not easy these days to create a point-of-sale display that truly
stands out in the hectic visual environment of an average busy
department store, yet alone one for Selfridges in London.
Manchester based True North were given the task to create a 'can't miss
it' bespoke display system for Adidas Originals within the Offspring
concession at the Oxford Street store.
Taking inspiration from the product itself where an Adidas shoebox
becomes a table and the shoebox lid, a chair, they have created a
display and "trying on" area where customers can fully immerse
themselves in the brand. Launching this week, we suspect these will be
the hottest chairs in London. By Brendan McKnight
Many of the world’s automobile manufacturers use the North American
International Auto Show as a platform from which to unveil new design
and new concepts in car design. This year’s exhibition just came to
an end in Detroit, Michigan and we are happy to report there were at
least a few new designs that caught our eyes.
A series of concept cars comprise the Lexus LF, or “L-finesse” line –
and this year the Toyota Motor Corporation introduced the LF-A Roadster
– a topless version of the previously revealed LF-A coupe. The LF
series represents a new direction in design for Lexus – centred around
the philosophy of intriguing elegance, incisive simplicity and seamless
anticipation.
The high performance topless roadster will be set to compete with some
of the most desired vehicles on the roads today. At a glace, the
low-profile aerodynamic form is built from lightweight carbon fibre and
aluminium, and a rear wing ascends automatically as a trigger speed is
reached. While there is no official word yet about which type of top
the LF-A roadster will be fitted with, we’re expecting to see a fully
automatic retractable hardtop as Lexus will want to keep its
competitive edge. By Andrew J Wiener
According to an early 2007 interview with Fast Company Magazine, designer and native New Zealander Karen Walker declared, "I started my career at age 18 with $100 and a heap of naiveté."
Incredibly,
the fashion world didn't catch wind of the designing sensation until
1998, 8 years after starting her career, when Walker presented her
first eponymous runway line in Hong Kong.
Since then, Walker's
quirky fashions have rocketed the designer to success. She has shown
her clothing at Australia, London, and (in Fall of 2006) New York's
Fashion Weeks. There are also currently over 140 stockists of the Karen
Walker label worldwide.
Recently, Walker decided to extend her
brand beyond clothing to eyewear. In October 2005, she launched a line
of whimsical "sunnies" in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The line
sold out in two weeks, according to The Independent of London.
Walker's
most recent shades for the 2008/09 season are marketed with the tagline
"Master of Disguise." There are 32 different offerings, all fun,
funky, and the perfect
complement to Karen Walker's carefree, wearable clothing designs.
Regardless of one's own power
issues, all fashionistas will embrace Walker's unique take on an
otherwise monotonous parade of black, over-sized "Nicole Richie"
shades. L. HarperL. Harper
Ohm, the measured frequency of the elliptical orbit of the Earth as it
travels around the sun, as well as our musical centre of gravity. Ohm
is said to be the purest of sounds – the vibration and resonance
created first and foremost by our place in the universe. But how
many of us have actually heard the subtle tone created by our
planet? And what about the possibly millions of other undetected
sounds that surround us each day?
Duncan Wilson knows that sound resonates from every surface in our
environment – if even in the form of the must subtle whisper. Wilson wondered how many of these undetected sounds could be
identified, combined and amplified to create a new sonic experience in
the form of ambient music.
OTTO (meaning ‘ear’ in Greek), created by Wilson, along with Manolis
Kelaidis at the Royal College of the Art, is a device that uncovers
diminutive vibrations by placing magnets and suction mechanisms on
various surfaces and magnifies them through an integrated
speaker. By placing several units on your window, a glass of
melting ice water, a goldfish bowl, or any other unassuming item in
your surroundings, OTTO devises a multidirectional audio atmosphere. By Andrew J Wiener
Since 1991, San Francisco-native Jeanie Fuji has acted as the
traditional Japanese okami (land lady or female inn keeper) of the Fujiya
Ryokan (traditional wooden inn) in the Ginzan Onsen (hot springs) area.
That year, she married Fuji Atsushi, the son and heir of the
350-year-old inn and started her rigorous training under her
mother-in-law in the art of serving customers, true Japanese style.
This included preparing all meals, washing the dishes and cleaning all
rooms. The goal was to make sure every need of every customer was
anticipated and met following the age-old inn tradition of providing
the right amount of service at the right time.
Fuji describes the types of things she had to learn. “Sliding a fusuma
door open and shut, greeting guests, bringing them meals on small o-zen
tables... everything has to be done a certain way, following the old
traditions. And I had to learn how to talk with the guests using
polite, formal Japanese. I often wanted to give up and go home to the
United States. But now I love my work here,” she says in a Japanese
publication.
By the time she had a good decade of experience behind her, Fuji had
gained a celebrity okami status that she modestly and reluctantly
dismisses. By 2004, she and her husband hired Tokyo-based celebrity
architect Kengo Kuma to raise the personal service of the inn to even
higher level. Kuma overtook a complete remodelling of the inn that
reopened in July 2006. Kuma is behind many well-known buildings,
including the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey headquarters in Tokyo.
The capacity of the thoroughly wooden, three-story Fujiya Inn
was reduced to only eight rooms with full capacity at 16 persons.
Considering the location of the inn, right in the middle of a
relatively remote rural area known for its hot springs and natural
beauty, the level of luxury in the inn is astonishing.
Kuma has been able to combine traditional Japanese simplicity with
international tastes and needs, yet avoided the dumbed-down,
westernized version of Japanese style. In fact, Fuji has written an
autobiography on this subject Nipponjin ni wa, Nihon ga Tarinai
(Japanese people are not Japanese enough), in which she emphasizes that
it is important for modern Japanese to recognize and re-claim the value
of their own millennia-old customs and history.
At Fujiya Inn, you feel that you are part of an ancient, authentic and
almost organic history that seems to be seeping through every seam and
screen here. Many aspects contribute to this effect. One is Kuma’s
brilliant use of layers, screens as thin as veils, to both hide and
reveal space. The omnipresent samushiko bamboo screens by craft master
Hideo Nakata (no, he’s not the horror-movie director) and his son
required 1.2 million four-millimetre-wide strips of bamboo. Green
stained-glass panes by Masato Shida and the prolific use of the
handmade, richly textured Echizen Japanese paper add to the feeling of
lightness and transparency.
The organic, natural quotient of the inn is also boosted by the baths
and the hand-prepared, fresh food. The inn has five beautiful private
hot springs baths including an open-air bath on the top floor. The food
is based on a regular washoku (Japanese cuisine) menu and features many
edible plants and other local ingredients. Fuji’s favourites include
the sansai, mountain vegetables, including kogomi (ostrich fern
fiddleheads) and urui (plantain lily petioles.) The only exception to
this local-only rule is Cafe Wisteria (English for fuji), open only in
the summer months, and offering international coffees and cakes.
To get to the Fujiya Inn, take the 3.5-hour trip on the Yamagata Bullet
Train (Shinkansen) from Tokyo and then get a bus to the hot springs. Or
fly from Tokyo to the Yamagata airport and arrange for a pick up by the
inn. By Tuija Seipell
A house attic does not evoke images of style and chic design.
Rather, we find ourselves thinking of dark, cobweb-infested, damp and
dreary crawl spaces. We think of attics as leftover space under the
roof where we abandon unwanted stuff – outdated clothing, old books,
grandma’s hat boxes, grandpa’s hunting gear, coin collections and bags
of seashells from that long-ago beach holiday.
But as space in our urban areas is at a premium - not a square metre
can go to waste. Architects and designers are starting to see the
potential of this extra space, and offer solutions that meet the needs
of the most demanding style freaks. Sunlight, additional rooms, extra
bathrooms — it is all possible in the attic. Starchitects around the
world have made dramatic rooflines trendy, so we can all give up on our
visions of the embarrassing drywalled and pine-paneled disasters that
attics tended to morph into, every time we tried to make them livable.
Within very few square metres, designers are finding space for
sleeping, cooking and eating, and using the sloping rooflines to create
impressive skylight windows.
We can all see the delightful benefits of maximising the amount of
livable and usable space – even if it involves clearing away the
precious collections of bric-a-brac we’ve spent generations
accumulating. Ample sunlight penetrating the attic apartment means than
even nocturnal arachnids are sent packing. By Andrew J Wiener and Tuija Seipell
The office of Zaha Hadid, the sometimes controversial and always bold
Baghdad-born, London-based architect, has revealed design plans for a
striking new building in the most traditional and affluent of places,
Oxford.
The new composite-glass structure, to be named the Softbridge Building,
is an extension to the Middle East Centre at St Anthony’s College. It
will link the 66 and 68 Woodstock Road buildings, one a Victorian mock
Tudor and the other Edwardian.
The new, concave, shiny structure looks like a modern sculpture that
fell from the sky and wedged itself between the two sleepy oldies. The
exuberant and dynamic Softbridge appears to have known that, against
all odds, the old buildings will not buckle, the mature trees will not
die and the limited space into which the newcomer must settle, will be
just enough.
The Softbridge will house a lecture theatre and the library, taking
pressure off the old, bursting-at-the-seams facilities. Other goals are
to provide a better research environment for students and to connect
the academic and public functions of the institute. The above-ground
floors house the reception and exhibition areas, the main archive
reading room, library storage and the main library. The lecture theatre
and additional storage will be located in the basement.
The outspoken Hadid continues to produce bold design work,
characterized by rounded shapes and unconventional approaches, in spite
of the widely publicized controversies surrounding some of her
buildings in Britain, including the Olympic Aquatic Centre. In an
Oxford Times article, Hadid was quoted as saying, “As a woman, I’m
expected to want everything to be nice and to be nice myself. A very
English thing. I don’t design nice buildings. I don’t like them. I like
architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality.” By Tuija Seipell.
In an attempt to revolutionise the process of car design, David Hilton, founder of Motorcity Europe,
along with C2P Automotive, created the MC1 Supercar in just three
months. Hilton, who spent much of the formative part of his career
working for Ford, believes the MC1 will be production-ready by 2011, if
he finds the right client. Presently, the mid-engine, V10-powered
supercar has no set identity or branding. We’re willing to bet a
recognisable logo will soon sit neatly within its grill.
By quickly translating computer-based design into engineering,
Motorcity Europe achieved a radically different approach to supercar
design in regard to its proportions and manufacturing processes. While
certain aspects of the exterior appear entirely futuristic from nearly
every angle, the MC1 looks like one of those cars we always dreamed we
could afford. Fortunately, all anyone can see right now is the outside
– the interior will be ready this spring. By Andrew J Wiener
Publicity stunts don't come on much of a larger scale than this. To celebrate the launch of the new Fiat 500 in London last night, one of the vehicles was placed into a pod on the London Eye where it will live for the next 2 weeks.
The launch of this 'time capsule' was at 8pm, exactly 500 hours into the year and as one would expect for such an event, was a star-studded affair and included a light show that lit up the river Thames, and performances by Mika and The Feeling.
The car itself is a remodel of the original version which was first presented 50 years ago, and is Fiat's go at re-releasing a retro classic, as VW (Beetle) and BMW (Mini) have arguably both done quite successfully in recent years.
The 500 was recently named the 2008 Car of the Year and has been praised in numerous auto publications. By Brendan McKnight
We came across this clever print ad for Vespa scooters. Visually
effective and well executed, it is playful, simple and gets the point
across fast (no pun intended). Nice work team Vespa. By Brendan McKnight
We wish we could tell you the details about this thrill but we must
remain mum (well, almost...). This dramatic, "dark ride"(as in not
open-air) is an exhilarating waterslide illuminated with super-cool LED
lighting. It is one of those experiences you hesitate to try but
when you do, you cannot wait to do it again. As lightheaded and dizzy
as you may feel, do not close your eyes or you'll miss the best part -
the after-effect of the LED lights you just zoomed through. Wait for
the Coolhunter TV, launching later this year, to see this in action. By Tuija Seipell
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