1. La Galerie de l’Instant

A photography gallery for people who love images as much as they love art. La Galerie de l’Instant specialises in photographs that capture cultural icons, cinema, music and moments that have become part of our collective visual memory. Expect a mix of vintage photography, portraits and images that feel almost like pieces of cultural history. A lovely reminder that collecting art doesn’t have to begin with a painting.

2. Espace Niemeyer

Paris has no shortage of beautiful architecture, but Espace Niemeyer feels like stepping into another dimension. Designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the headquarters of the French Communist Party is a masterpiece of curves, concrete and sculptural forms. It’s a reminder that architecture can be ideological, political and radically imaginative all at once. Check the programme before visiting, as access to the interiors depends on events and guided tours.

3. Carboni’s

For when you need a break from gallery-hopping and want something that feels a little more like home. Carboni’s brings an Italian touch to the Marais, with a lively atmosphere that works equally well for a long lunch or dinner with friends. Try their carbonara with egg yolk soooo good. Consider this your permission to temporarily abandon French cuisine.

4. Tennis de la Cavalerie

One for the tennis lovers, but also for anyone fascinated by architecture. Hidden in a 1920s Art Deco garage, Tennis de la Cavalerie feels more like a secret cathedral than a sports club. There’s something inherently Parisian about finding a place to play tennis in the middle of the city.

5. Sant Ambroeus

Milanese café culture meets the Left Bank. Designed by Milanese interior designer Fabrizio Casiraghi, Sant Ambroeus Paris translates the brand’s heritage into a cinematic, intimate salon. A little piece of Milan in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and a stop for anyone who appreciates how interiors can shape an entire atmosphere.

6. Centre Pompidou

One of the buildings that changed the way we think about museums. Designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Centre Pompidou turns architecture inside out, placing its colourful pipes, escalators and structural elements on the exterior. It became a defining landmark for modern and contemporary art in Paris, with an equally important collection of modern art.

The main building closed to the public in September 2025 for a major renovation, with reopening planned for 2030. Yet you can still follow its off-site programme.

7. Galerie Dina Vierny

A gallery with a history as interesting as the art it represents. Dina Vierny, the last model and muse of sculptor Aristide Maillol, opened the gallery in 1947 with the encouragement of Henri Matisse and Jeanne Bucher. Architect Auguste Perret designed its distinctive wooden interior, which still gives the space a particular character. Over the decades, the gallery has exhibited artists including Maillol, Rodin, Matisse and Kandinsky, while also championing Russian avant-garde artists during the Soviet period. I love places like this because they offer a story more than just a succession of artworks.

8. Vivant 2

For a dinner that feels a little less predictable than the usual Parisian restaurant circuit, head towards Vivant 2. It has the intimate, neighbourhood feel that makes the city’s independent dining scene so appealing. It has a distinctive atmosphere, where the candlelight is part of the experience. Go with friends, order a few things to share and let dinner take its time.

9. Chapelle XIV

One for the people who believe art and music have always belonged together. Chapelle XIV is an independent creative space in the 18th arrondissement that brings contemporary art into conversation with music, design and vinyl culture. The concept goes beyond a conventional gallery visit: it’s a place to discover artists, browse records and explore the visual worlds surrounding music. That combination makes it feel especially relevant to a generation that moves between exhibitions, listening sessions, fashion and underground culture without treating them as separate interests.

10. Institut du Monde Arabe

Even if you don’t go inside, stop to look at the façade. Designed by Jean Nouvel and Architecture-Studio, the Institut du Monde Arabe opened in 1987 as a symbol of dialogue between Arab and Western cultures. Its southern façade contains 240 moucharabiehs, geometric metal screens inspired by traditional Arab architectural patterns. Their mechanical apertures regulate the amount of sunlight entering the building, transforming a decorative reference into a functional piece of technology.

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Then access became part of the equation. Getting into the right room, being invited somewhere that was difficult to enter, having the reservation that everyone else was trying to get.

Today, access itself has become increasingly democratised. We can find almost anything online, book almost any restaurant and learn about almost any subject with a few taps on a screen.

So I wonder if the more interesting form of status now has very little to do with what you have access to.

When access becomes easy

We live in an extraordinary age of cultural abundance. You can discover a young artist on the other side of the world from your bedroom, find the name of a chair you saw in a hotel lobby, research the architect who designed it and read about a hotel before ever stepping inside it.

There is very little information we cannot access. The difficulty is knowing which of it matters. This is where personal taste becomes interesting.

When information is scarce, knowing something is valuable simply because you know it.

When information is everywhere, knowledge becomes more valuable when it comes with judgment.

Excellent vs. Pricey

There is also a difference between recognising something as expensive and recognising something as genuinely excellent.

We have become very good at reading the signals of price. We know what a certain material costs, which neighbourhoods carry a premium and which brands command a certain level of attention.

But price can tell us what something is worth in a market; it doesn’t necessarily tell us what it is worth to experience.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons knowledge matters so much in luxury. Once you have developed enough context to compare, you start seeing past the obvious signals of expense. You can appreciate why one object is extraordinary even when it isn’t the most expensive one in the room, or why a hotel can feel profoundly luxurious without announcing its price point.

Genuine excellence is often much quieter. It can be found in the proportions of a room, the quality of a material, the precision of a service or the thought behind something that most people would never consciously notice.

It is the kind of quality that becomes more apparent the longer you spend with something.

The quiet power of “influencers”

I have always found it interesting how much more valuable a recommendation becomes when it comes from someone whose way of living you trust.

The recommendation feels valuable because it has already been filtered through someone’s experience.

This is becoming increasingly important in a world where we are overwhelmed by choice.

The internet can give you a hundred options. A person with good taste can give you one.

This is precisely why, even from a business perspective, it is increasingly important to leverage not only attractive ambassadors, but knowledgeable and interesting personalities as a whole. Many times, that is worth way more.

The problem with knowing what everyone knows

Of course, knowledge can become another form of performance.

There is a certain type of cultural fluency that exists primarily to be displayed. Knowing the underground artist, the members’ club, the difficult-to-book restaurant, the designer whose name most people cannot pronounce. It can become a game of proving that you were there first.

The point of developing taste is eventually to become less dependent on whether something is considered important at all. You might discover a famous artist and understand immediately why their work matters to you. You might walk past the most talked-about exhibition of the season and feel very little. You might find an extraordinary object in a small shop that almost nobody has heard of.

The value is in being able to recognise the difference for yourself.

We scroll through beautiful things all day, often giving each of them less than a second before moving on to the next. We are constantly exposed to more references than any previous generation could have encountered in a lifetime.

The most interesting person in the room may not be the person who has the most impressive collection, the most exclusive address or the most enviable calendar. It might simply be the person who knows something deeply, has a reason for caring about it and is curious enough to keep discovering.

What is actually worth knowing?

Perhaps the most valuable part is knowing that you will never know everything.

Personal taste and preferences remain interesting precisely because they are unfinished. There is always another city to walk through, another artist to discover, another book to read, another room to enter.

In the end, I think the most compelling kind of cultural capital is curiosity.

To know enough to recognise what is good, enough to question what everyone else considers good and enough to remain interested in what you haven’t encountered yet.

Because when almost everything is accessible, perhaps the real luxury is having the discernment to know what is worth your attention.

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We can sleep better, eat better, work better, exercise more efficiently, invest more intelligently, and travel more strategically. We can do all of this so thoroughly that there is almost no possibility of accidentally ending up somewhere we did not intend to be.

Even leisure has become strangely productive. A holiday can be researched for weeks, a morning walk can contribute to a step count, a dinner reservation needs to be worthy of the evening, and an exhibition somehow feels more valuable when it comes recommended by someone whose taste we trust.

None of these things are inherently bad. I love a beautiful hotel, a good recommendation and the satisfaction of discovering somewhere worth remembering. I would also rather sleep well than badly, and I have no desire to romanticise inefficiency for its own sake.

Still, I sometimes wonder whether our obsession with improving life has quietly changed the way we experience it.

What happens when we become so busy designing a good life that we forget to actually live it?

At some point, living well became something of a project.

When everything can be improved

Optimization makes perfect sense when applied to machines. If a process can be made faster, cheaper or more efficient without sacrificing quality, there is little reason not to improve it.

The logic becomes more complicated when we apply it to ourselves.

Technology has given us an extraordinary ability to measure and compare parts of life that were once largely intuitive. We can know how deeply we slept, how many calories we burned, whether our heart rate was optimal and how productive we were over the course of a day. We can compare hotels before ever entering them, restaurants before tasting their food and destinations before seeing them with our own eyes. Even our romantic lives increasingly lend themselves to this logic. Dating apps allow us to sort through people according to countless preferences, which is undeniably appealing when the alternative is leaving everything to chance.

The promise of optimization is appealing because uncertainty is uncomfortable. If enough information is available, perhaps we can avoid the disappointing restaurant, the mediocre hotel, the wasted afternoon, the wrong date or the wrong decision.

And increasingly, there is always someone willing to tell us the right one.

We have become very good at avoiding bad choices. I’m less certain that this has made us better at discovering unexpected ones.

The cult of the curated life

Optimization has also extended beyond performance into appearance. We don’t simply want the best life; increasingly, we want the most coherent one.

Our homes, wardrobes, holidays, books and even hobbies can belong to the same carefully constructed universe, as they can all be expressions of who we are. We save references, follow people whose lives resemble the ones we imagine for ourselves and gradually develop an increasingly precise picture of what our idea of a good life is supposed to look like.

The problem begins when curation becomes a form of control.

When everything is encountered first through somebody else’s photographs, we arrive with expectations before we have experiences.

Instead of asking ourselves what we think of a place, we can find ourselves looking for the version of it we were promised.

The same thing happens beyond travel. We increasingly encounter objects, books, art, fashion and even people surrounded by context telling us how desirable they are. By the time something reaches us, it has often already been reviewed, ranked, photographed and approved.

Perhaps this is why so many beautiful things can begin to feel strangely familiar. We have seen them before we have seen them.

A life that looks right

There is another consequence of living so deliberately: life can slowly become something we observe from the outside.

We start asking whether things fit. Does this chair belong in my home? Does this purchase fit my wardrobe? Is this the kind of place I would normally go? Is this person someone I can imagine fitting into the life I have planned for myself?

These can sound like trivial questions, but I think they reveal something larger.

Once we develop a strong idea of who we are, it becomes tempting to protect that idea by choosing only the things, experiences and people that reinforce it.

Personal taste can easily become personal branding, and perhaps the same can happen to our idea of happiness. We don’t only want to be happy; we want happiness to arrive in a form we recognise.

Yet the irony is that many of the things that eventually become most meaningful to us would probably never have survived such careful selection.

These things acquire meaning precisely because they were allowed to surprise us.

The case for inefficiency

Some of the best things we do are remarkably inefficient.

Wandering around a city without Google Maps is objectively a terrible way to get from one place to another. Spending an afternoon looking at paintings will probably not make you more productive, and staying at dinner for another three hours is unlikely to improve tomorrow morning’s sleep score. Falling in love has never been particularly aligned with schedules, plans, checklists or five-year goals.

Art itself is almost defiantly inefficient. We spend hours making, studying and preserving objects that often have no practical function whatsoever, yet we continue to consider them among the most valuable things civilisation has produced.

Perhaps that tells us something.

Efficiency is useful when we know exactly where we want to go. It is less useful when the point is discovering where we might want to go in the first place.

There are parts of life where taking the shortest route makes perfect sense, and there are others where the detour is the entire point.

Leaving room for accident

I don’t think the answer is to stop planning in the name of spontaneity, because I believe having a clear intention is a cornerstone of any achievement. There is no particular virtue in making life harder than it needs to be, just as there is nothing inherently shallow about wanting a beautiful home, a thoughtful wardrobe or a life that feels considered.

The more interesting question, at least to me, is how much room we leave for accident.

An afternoon on a trip without a reservation. A book chosen because you stumbled across it rather than because someone recommended it. Something bought simply because you love it, despite the fact that it doesn’t quite fit your aesthetic. Maybe even an opinion formed before checking what everyone else thinks.

There is a kind of freedom in allowing some experiences to remain inefficient because they do not need to lead anywhere or improve anything. They can simply occupy time.

This might be increasingly difficult in a culture that encourages us to treat time as a resource that should always be used well. Yet some of the hours we remember most fondly are probably the ones we would have struggled to justify in advance.

Perhaps a good life needs some bad planning

I just wonder whether a perfectly curated life leaves enough room for us to change.

If every choice confirms who we already believe ourselves to be, there is very little opportunity to discover that we might like something else or become someone slightly different from the person we had planned.

Perhaps living well requires a strange balance between discernment and surrender: knowing enough to recognise what is good, while remaining curious enough to be wrong about what we thought we wanted.

We spend so much time trying to make life better that it is easy to forget how much of what makes it interesting was never planned in the first place.

Perhaps the parts of life we fail to optimize are the ones that eventually make it ours.

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This sounds, at first, like snobbery, but what I mean is that being difficult to impress is not about being difficult to please. It is about becoming more capable of noticing the difference between what is genuinely exceptional and what has simply been made to look that way.

We live in a world that is very good at telling us what deserves our attention.

The restaurant everyone is posting.
The hotel everyone wants to stay at.
The bag everyone suddenly owns.
The exhibition everyone says you must see.
The destination that appears on every “where to go next” list.

We are surrounded by things engineered to produce the same reaction: Wow.

And perhaps the strangest thing is how quickly we have learned to have that reaction on command.

The problem with having everything curated for you

Personal taste used to require time.

You had to look at a lot of art before you knew what you liked. You had to eat at a lot of restaurants before you understood what made one exceptional. You had to travel, read, listen, observe.

You developed preferences slowly, almost accidentally. Now, the algorithm can do much of that work for us.

It knows which chair you will like before you know the chair exists. It knows which hotel you will save. It knows which gallery you might walk into. It knows which aesthetic will make you stop scrolling.

This is incredibly convenient, yet superficial, because there is a difference between being exposed to taste and developing taste.

The first is passive. The second requires judgment, which can be uncomfortable because it means sometimes saying:

I don’t like this.

Even when everyone else does.

To say that something is mediocre can feel unnecessarily harsh. To question something that everyone else considers beautiful can make you seem pretentious or performative. So we flatten our opinions.

Everything is “beautiful.”
Everything is “iconic.”
Everything is “incredible.”
Every new opening is “a must.”

But if everything is exceptional, nothing is.

Discernment isn’t about believing that you are better than other people because you know more. It is about understanding why something moves you.

Why one room feels timeless while another feels merely expensive.

Why one artwork stays in your mind for weeks while another disappears the moment you leave the gallery.

Why one hotel makes you want to return ten years later, while another gives you beautiful photographs and very little else.

The more you know, the more specific your admiration becomes.

Expensive is not the same as extraordinary

We have become very good at manufacturing the visual language of luxury through neutral colours, beautiful typography and discreet logos.

Yet the most luxurious places I remember are the ones where someone has thought about everything: the lighting, the music, the way the flowers are arranged, the distance between tables, the person who remembers your small habits.

Luxury, at its highest level, becomes almost invisible.

It is not saying: Look how much money was spent here.

It is saying: Someone cared enough to think about this.

The danger of becoming impossible to impress

There is a trap here. Being difficult to impress should never mean becoming impossible to delight.

Some of the most beautiful experiences in life are not rare, expensive or culturally significant.

The real luxury is having your own reaction.

Perhaps this is what I mean when I say I want to become difficult to impress. I don’t want to stop being impressed. I want my reaction to belong to me.

I want to walk into a gallery without already knowing which artwork I am supposed to photograph.

I want to stay in a hotel because I love the feeling of it, rather than because it is on someone’s list.

I want to buy something because I will still love it when nobody else remembers that it was fashionable.

I want to be able to say: Everyone loves this. I don’t.

And also: No one is talking about this. I think it’s extraordinary.

That, to me, is the beginning of personal taste: learning to recognise what is good to you and being able to explain why.

Look a little longer. Question the obvious. Develop standards without losing curiosity. And, perhaps most importantly, remain capable of surprise.

Because the goal isn’t to walk through the world thinking:

I’ve seen better.

It’s to walk through it wondering:

Show me something I haven’t seen before.

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Art has become one of the most powerful tools for attracting a different kind of refined tourism: intellectually curious, culturally engaged, and willing to travel beyond the obvious. These places have built their cultural identity around a single work or a sustained artistic vision, and the results suggest that beauty, seriously pursued, is one of the most enduring economic arguments in existence.

Here are ten destinations where art is the reason to go.

1. Hauser & Wirth • Menorca, Spain

Menorca’s beauty lies in its untouched landscapes, prehistoric ruins, hidden beaches and a slower rhythm of life.

When Hauser & Wirth opened its outpost on Illa del Rei, a small island in Mahón Harbour, it transformed a forgotten eighteenth-century naval hospital into one of Europe’s most beautiful art destinations.

The project is not simply a gallery. It is a complete experience: sculpture gardens, Mediterranean landscaping, historic architecture and exhibitions by internationally renowned artists. The journey itself becomes part of the artwork.

It is a perfect example of how culture can bring attention to a place without destroying its character.

2. Cretto di Burri • Sicily, Italy

Some artworks do not sit within landscapes. They become landscapes.

After the earthquake that destroyed the Sicilian town of Gibellina in 1968, Alberto Burri proposed something that had never been done before: covering the entire ruined town in white concrete while preserving its original street plan. The result is a monumental land artwork that preserves the footprint of a dead city as a single continuous work. Walking through it feels like moving through a frozen memory.

It is part sculpture, part architecture and part archaeological site.

3. East-West/West-East by Richard Serra • Qatar

In the middle of the Qatari desert, four enormous steel monoliths stand across an empty landscape.

Created by Richard Serra, East-West/West-East is a work about scale, time and human presence. The four steel plates stretch over a kilometre between limestone formations, creating a dialogue between industrial material and earth.

It is a reminder that contemporary art can make even the most remote landscapes worth travelling for.

4. Brâncuși Monumental Ensemble • Târgu Jiu, Romania

In his Romanian homeland, Constantin Brâncuși created one of the greatest sculptural ensembles of the twentieth century: The Table of Silence, The Gate of the Kiss and the iconic Endless Column.

Together, the works transform an ordinary urban landscape into a philosophical journey about memory, sacrifice and infinity. In 2024, the ensemble was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, recognising it as one of the defining achievements of modern sculpture.

5. Naoshima & Teshima • Setouchi Islands, Japan

Once declining industrial communities, Naoshima and Teshima have been transformed into global art destinations through the vision of collector Soichiro Fukutake and architect Tadao Ando.

Here, museums disappear into hillsides, abandoned houses become artworks and the natural landscape becomes part of every exhibition. Visitors move between islands by ferry, discovering works by artists including Yayoi Kusama, James Turrell and Lee Ufan.

6. Château La Coste • Provence, France

Château La Coste combines wine, architecture and contemporary art across hundreds of hectares of Provençal landscape. Works by artists and architects including Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Ai Weiwei, Tadao Ando and Renzo Piano are scattered throughout the estate.

The magic lies in the discovery. You walk through olive groves and vineyards and suddenly encounter a sculpture, a pavilion or a building that completely changes your perception of the landscape.

7. Salvador Dalí’s House • Port Lligat, Spain

Salvador Dalí’s home in Port Lligat, on Spain’s Costa Brava, grew organically over decades as he added rooms, objects and surreal details. Everything feels unmistakably his. It is an accumulation of passageways, unexpected rooms and spaces that seem designed for no logical human purpose.

The landscape itself shaped his imagination. The same cliffs, light and silence that inspired Dalí became inseparable from his work.

8. Giardino dei Tarocchi • Tuscany, Italy

Hidden in the hills of southern Tuscany, the Giardino dei Tarocchi is one of Italy’s most eccentric art environments.

In 1979, French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle began building twenty-two monumental sculptures above Capalbio, each representing one of the cards of the Tarot’s Major Arcana.

Walking through the garden feels like entering a dream where architecture, sculpture and mythology merge. It is playful, extravagant and completely unique.

9. James Turrell’s The Dome • Aarhus, Denmark

Aarhus is Denmark’s second city quietly building a reputation as one of Northern Europe’s most ambitious art destinations.

ARoS museum already had Olafur Eliasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama (2011), the circular glass walkway wrapping the its roof in colour. In June 2026, it added its perfect counterpoint: James Turrell’s As Seen Below – The Dome, the artist’s 100th Skyspace and the largest ever created for a museum.

Turrell described the work as “an experience of consciously entering the earth and emerging in the heavens.” That is more or less exactly what it feels like.

10. Storm King Art Center & Dia Beacon • New York, USA

The Hudson Valley has become one of America’s most compelling art destinations.

Storm King Art Center transforms hundreds of acres into an open-air sculpture park, where works by Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero and Maya Lin exist in constant dialogue with the landscape.

Nearby, Dia Beacon occupies a former Nabisco factory and houses one of the world’s finest collections of Minimalist and contemporary art. The vast industrial spaces were adapted specifically for the scale of Donald Judd’s stacks, Dan Flavin’s fluorescent installations, Michael Heizer’s monumental works and Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings.

Together, they represent a different way of experiencing art: not as something contained within four walls, but as something inseparable from space, architecture and the surrounding landscape.

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There is a moment in every business encounter when the client is welcomed into a room, offered a coffee, and asked to wait a minute. In that minute, their eyes move. What they land on, whether they know it or not, is already doing work on them.

Monte dei Paschi di Siena began collecting art in 1472, making it arguably the first corporate collection in history. The origins of today’s JPMorgan Chase Art Collection date back to the mid twentieth century, when David Rockefeller built out Chase Manhattan’s holdings, transforming corporate collecting into a strategic tool for brand identity, employee engagement, and cultural patronage. Today Deutsche Bank holds more than 57,000 works and UBS around 35,000. The logic travels well beyond finance, with law firms and other industries employing art as a means of decorating buildings, expressing civic prestige, and reinforcing identity and legitimacy.

The case for art as a negotiating instrument

This matters most for institutions that sell something intangible. Trust, discretion, judgement. A law firm cannot let a client inspect its counsel the way they might inspect a car, and neither can a private bank let them inspect its judgement in advance. So the environment adds to the proof. What is really being deployed here is what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic capital: prestige that only exists once someone else recognises it as legitimate. A collection cannot buy trust directly, but it can signal the kind of institution that trust tends to attach itself to. It becomes a credential.

The official language these institutions use for their collections tends to circle three words: inspiration, dialogue, legacy. Deutsche Bank’s own framing is that art “questions, inspires people, opens up new perspectives.” Britta Faerber, the bank’s deputy global head of art, has spoken of collecting as something that pays “emotional dividends” and carries a trace of an institution’s own point of view.

There is also a quieter, more tactical function. Art gives people something to talk about that is not the deal, which lowers resistance. A shared reaction to a piece, even a mild disagreement over it, builds a small patch of common ground before the harder conversation starts.

Why the choice of art is never neutral

Where the psychology gets interesting is in the specifics, because different art has a different impact depending on where it hangs.

Colour research consistently finds that blue environments read as trustworthy and calm, which is presumably why so many financial institutions and law firms gravitate toward cool, restrained palettes in their public facing spaces. Warmer tones, reds and oranges in particular, are associated with urgency and stimulation, useful on a trading floor where a fast decision is the point, entirely wrong in a room where you want a client to feel unhurried and secure.

Scale and texture matter as much as colour. A vast abstract canvas in a lobby communicates confidence and ambition, the institutional equivalent of a raised voice used well. A smaller, quieter, more intimate work in a private meeting room does the opposite job: it signals that this space, unlike the lobby, is personal. Curating for these environments, then, is really curating for a sequence of feelings: awe at the entrance, ease in the boardroom, discretion in the room where the actual number gets discussed.

There is a risk in getting this wrong that most institutions underestimate. Art chosen purely to signal wealth, an obvious blue chip name with no relationship to the room it sits in, tends to produce the opposite of trust. It reads as a purchase rather than a point of view, and clients, particularly the ones sophisticated enough to be worth closing a deal with, notice the discrepancy.

Art has always been used to close distance between people. Prestigious institutions simply understood that closing distance is most of what closing a deal actually is.

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1. Mirador del Río

In 1973 Manrique carved a viewing point into the cliff at the very top of the island. From the outside it is nearly invisible, two circular white apertures in the rock, then you walk through and the whole northern ocean opens in front of you through glass. The interior, all white curves and local materials, has a bar and a sculptural ceiling that makes the whole room feel like the inside of a shell.

2. LagOmar

In the early 1970s, an English developer named Sam Benady commissioned Manrique and sculptor Jesús Soto to design a house carved into the volcanic hillside of the village of Nazaret. While the house was still under construction, the actor Omar Sharif was on Lanzarote filming The Mysterious Island, visited the site, and bought it on the spot. Within days, Benady challenged him to a game of bridge. What Sharif did not know was that his opponent was the European Bridge Champion. He lost the house in a single evening, left Lanzarote and never came back. The building, now a museum and bar at night, is my fav spot on the island.

3. Fundación César Manrique

Manrique built his home directly on top of five volcanic bubbles, transforming natural lava chambers into living rooms connected by tunnels and gardens. More than a museum, it is the clearest expression of his philosophy:

Architecture should never dominate nature. It should reveal it.

4. El Cóctel Bar de Kamezí

Hidden within Kamezí Boutique Villas, this intimate space feels surreal after sunset. The rooftop cocktail bar sits above the Michelin-starred restaurant below, with the ocean to one side and Fuerteventura on the horizon. The bar does not take reservations, come for the view.

5. Jameos del Agua

Manrique transformed the cave itself into architecture. A natural lava tube becomes an auditorium, a restaurant, a swimming pool and a cultural centre, all connected to each other. Hidden within the underground lagoon lives one of Lanzarote’s most unexpected residents: a tiny blind albino crab found nowhere else on Earth.

6. Bodega Uga

The vineyards on the island are unlike any others. Each vine is planted in its own crater, dug into the black volcanic ash and protected from the winds by a semicircular wall of lava stone. Bodega Uga is the perfect place to experience it. Order some good wine, their avocado salad and the calamari they’re simply delicious!

7. Famara

Famara, on the northwest coast, is my favourite beach on the island. Below dramatic cliffs rising 600 metres above the sea, a vast stretch of sand runs for kilometres with almost nothing built on it. The village behind the beach is small and filled with surfers who come for the waves and the wildness of the landscape.

8. Jardín de Cactus

This was Manrique‘s last major public work on the island, completed in 1990, and it is both the most playful and the most rigorous thing he made. Everything has been thought through: the sight lines, the shadows, the relationship between the individual plant and the whole. It is, genuinely, a garden as sculpture.

9. Mura

Teguise was the island’s capital for centuries and on Sunday mornings it still fills with one of the best markets in the Canaries. Mura is the coffee shop to go to, set in the white village on the main square. You’ll find specialty coffee, toasted sandwiches and house-baked pastries.

10. Las Grietas

These dramatic fissures were formed as lava cooled and fractured, creating narrow passageways that feel like landscapes from another planet. The resemblance is no coincidence: Lanzarote has often been used as a stand-in for extraterrestrial worlds in film and photography. Walking through Las Grietas, it is easy to understand why César Manrique always described the island as something otherworldly, here you get exactly what he meant.

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Kant: the beautiful vs the sublime

In his Critique of Judgement (1790), Immanuel Kant draws a distinction between the beautiful and the sublime.

The beautiful concerns form. It is bounded, harmonious, restful. It reconciles us with the world.

The sublime, by contrast, begins where form breaks down: the storm at sea, the mountain range, the starry sky, the mathematically infinite.
These do not please us; they overwhelm us. Our senses cannot fully take in what stands before us. For a brief moment, we experience our own smallness.

Yet paradoxically, this experience elevates us.

Why? Because although nature exceeds our senses, we discover something in ourselves that exceeds nature: reason, the capacity to think the infinite even when we cannot picture it.

The sublime humiliates the senses and exalts the mind.

Schopenhauer: art as an escape from suffering

Arthur Schopenhauer begins from a much darker premise.

In The World as Will and Representation (1818), reality itself is the problem. Beneath every appearance lies the Will: a blind, aimless, insatiable striving that manifests in everything from gravity to hunger to love. To exist is to want, and to want is to suffer. Satisfaction is momentary; the pendulum swings between pain and boredom.

If suffering originates in desire, can we ever become free?

Schopenhauer proposes three paths.

One is ethics, through compassion. By recognising ourselves in others, we loosen the grip of selfish desire.

Another is asceticism, the radical denial of worldly wants. Saints and monks embody this path, attempting to extinguish desire altogether.

Then there is a third path, perhaps the most accessible of all. Art.

In aesthetic contemplation, the subject stops willing. We cease to be an individual with appetites and become, in his phrase, the pure, will-less subject of knowing.

For Schopenhauer, specifically music stands above all the other arts, because it is a direct copy of the Will itself.

Nietzsche: between Apollo and Dionysus

For Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Greek tragedy revealed the deepest truth about existence because it united two opposing forces:

The Apollonian – order, reason, proportion, clarity.
The Dionysian – instinct, ecstasy, chaos, transformation.

Neither alone suffices. Pure Apollo is an illusion of harmony; pure Dionysus is annihilation. For Nietzsche, this tension is life itself.

This idea feels surprisingly contemporary.

Take Cy Twombly: loops that whirl with genuinely Dionysian violence, gesture on the edge of formlessness, and yet held, barely, by an Apollonian intelligence of composition.

So... will art save us?

Through beauty and the sublime, we measure ourselves against the infinite and discover a mind that exceeds its own senses. Through contemplation, we suspend the machinery of wanting and glimpse what it feels like to simply know. Through the tragic, we look directly at chaos and give it a form we can bear.

Art, in other words, is how human nature exercises itself: how it transcends, how it rests, how it affirms. Art and beauty keeps us human, and being fully human may be the only salvation on offer.

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The most interesting thing about Costa Smeralda is that it was never designed by hoteliers. It was designed by dreamers.

1. Hotel Cala di Volpe (Jacques Couëlle)

Everything starts here. Cala di Volpe was the first hotel built on the Costa Smeralda, opened in 1962. Designed by Jacques Couëlle, the hotel remains one of the purest expressions of the Costa Smeralda dream. Corridors twist unexpectedly, walls curve like waves and every corner seems designed to frame the sea. Nothing is rigid, symmetrical or predictable. The lobby remains one of the great interiors of the Mediterranean.

2. Porto Rafael (Rafael Neville)

Before there was an Aga Khan, there was a count who had a dream. Rafael Neville, Conte di Berlanga, son of a Spanish filmmaker friend of Picasso, claimed he saw the whole place in a vision: a bay, seven islands, a little piazzetta, a few white houses. He bought his first piece of land in 1960, two years before the Aga Khan’s consortium even existed, and built it stone by stone with the help of a local builder everyone called Dumè. His motto, painted on a plaque that still stands in the village, was sognare è vivere, to dream is to live. Michele Busiri Vici designed much of the architecture, including the tiny chapel of Santa Rita. Every August, for the Count's birthday, the village dressed in white and gathered in the piazzetta to celebrate.

3. Private Villas (Alberto Ponis)

A young Genoese architect named Alberto Ponis moved to Sardinia in 1963, and over the following decades he designed more than two hundred houses around Punta Sardegna, Porto Rafael, and Costa Paradiso, each one sited with an almost obsessive attention to the exact contours of its rock. Many of his villas remain almost invisible from the road, absorbed into the landscape and deliberately difficult to access.

4. Jungle Surf

Jungle Surf is the cool kids surf shop of Palau and Porto Pollo, run by the same family for more than thirty years out of a small storefront in the area. Part surf community, part creative gathering point, Jungle Surf represents a different side of Sardinia. Far removed from the polished image typically associated with Costa Smeralda, it attracts photographers, designers, surfers and free spirits who gravitate toward a more understated lifestyle. Its symbol, a whale’s tail, comes from a story the family tells about togetherness: whales swimming close enough to touch their baby whales. It is a small, unglamorous, deeply loved institution built by people who simply loved the sea.

5. Ritual Club

In 1968, a gem trader from Parma named Andres Fiore bought a granite hillside above Baja Sardinia sight unseen, drawn by rumors of a cave hidden within it. He camped there for a week, sleeping among the rocks, and decided it would become his life’s only architectural work. He never called it architecture, but a scenografia, a stage set. What he built is a spiral carved directly into the mountain, where niches and staircases seem aligned with the stars, and a DJ booth now sits at the center of the space.

6. Villa La Grotta (Jacques Couëlle)

On the rocky spur of Monte Mannu, Jacques Couëlle carved out a house for himself and his wife, quite literally, into the granite itself. Curved doorways, asymmetric hand-glazed tiles, a bedroom window shaped to suggest a face if you look at it the right way. Couëlle was a friend of both Picasso and Dalí and was once described, fairly, as an architect-sculptor. His son Savin later inherited both the family eye and the family commissions, and much of Porto Cervo’s most distinctive private architecture carries the Couëlle name in one form or another.

7. Romazzino, A Belmond Hotel (Michele Busiri Vici)

Romazzino opened in 1965, designed by Michele Busiri Vici with his son Giancarlo, white curves rising from the sand like something Gaudí might have done if Gaudí had built on a beach. Grace Kelly stayed here. So did Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot. Since 2024, the hotel has become part of the Belmond portfolio and retains much of its original charm.

8. Porto Rotondo (Cascella & Ceroli)

Porto Rotondo is what happens when two Venetian counts decide a holiday village should also be an open-air museum. Founded in 1964 by brothers Luigi and Nicolò Donà dalle Rose, the village still centres on a piazza named San Marco, a deliberate, slightly nostalgic nod to the family’s home city. Andrea Cascella and Mario Ceroli shaped much of Porto Rotondo’s identity, from the piazzetta to the Chiesa di San Lorenzo and a series of sculptural details woven into the village.

9. Pietro Terzini at Poltu Quatu

Costa Smeralda has always evolved by absorbing contemporary cultural references. Poltu Quatu means hidden port in Gallurese dialect, and for most of its life it lived up to the name. This year, artist Pietro Terzini has brought his signature text-based interventions, introducing a distinctly contemporary voice into one of the area’s most picturesque settings. His works create moments of irony and reflection within a landscape often associated with glamour. Terzini’s language feels digital and current, while the surrounding architecture remains rooted in the Mediterranean imagination of the 1960s.

10. Phi Beach

Phi Beach sits on a cliff in front of a historic fortress in Baja Sardinia. Over the season, it hosts internationally acclaimed DJs, but the real draw is sunset hour, when the entire structure seems to dissolve into the light. Very few venues in Europe offer this kind of dialogue between architecture and atmosphere after dark.

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1. Bourse du Commerce — Pinault Collection

In 2021, François Pinault opened his Paris collection inside a building masterfully adapted by Tadao Ando. A monumental concrete cylinder now sits within the eighteenth-century Bourse du Commerce, creating one of the most compelling architectural dialogues in the city. The exhibitions are consistently excellent, but the building itself is the real masterpiece. It remains my favourite museum stop in Paris.

2. Fondation Louis Vuitton

Frank Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton is one of the most extraordinary buildings in Paris. Its glass sails seem to float, appearing almost different from every angle. Inside, Bernard Arnault’s collection sits alongside a temporary programme that consistently delivers major international exhibitions. One of the most influential cultural institutions in the world.

3. Ojii & Bar Omi

Ojii sits discreetly behind a black lacquered door and delivers one of the most beautiful dining rooms in Paris. Gold-leaf details by Jenna Kaes, acid-etched mirrors and deep red lacquered walls create an atmosphere somewhere between a film set and a private residence.

Its younger sibling, Bar Omi, near Place Vendôme, offers sushi and wine in an intimate 1980s-inspired interior designed by Fanny Perrier.

4. Hôtel Costes

Hôtel Costes is as much a mood as it is a hotel. Jacques Garcia’s interiors, from crimson velvet and dark woods to heavy drapery and softly lit courtyards, have defined a certain vision of Parisian glamour for decades. The remarkable thing is that it still works. It feels timeless precisely because it was never trying to be contemporary. The courtyard remains one of the great people-watching spots in Paris.

5. Sainte-Chapelle

Everyone queues for Notre-Dame. Yet just around the corner lies Sainte-Chapelle. Built by Louis IX in the thirteenth century to house the Crown of Thorns, the chapel contains fifteen towering stained-glass windows that make the entire interior glow from within, like the inside of a jewel. One of the most extraordinary spaces in Paris.

6. Institut Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti spent more than forty years working in the same modest Montparnasse studio, even as he became one of the defining artists of the twentieth century. The Institut Giacometti offers something increasingly rare: an intimate encounter with an artist’s world. Sculptures, drawings, archival materials and reconstructions of the studio create a deeply personal experience, far removed from the scale of a major museum.

7. Gallery Hopping — Le Marais & the 8th Arr.

Two of my favourite gallery districts are Le Marais and the 8th arrondissement.

In Le Marais, you’ll find Perrotin, Thaddaeus Ropac and a dense concentration of contemporary galleries, often tucked inside beautiful hôtels particuliers. The 8th arrondissement, particularly around Avenue Matignon, offers a more established ecosystem of blue-chip galleries, auction houses and secondary-market specialists.

8. Mamiche

Mamiche belongs to that category of Paris institutions dedicated to doing simple things exceptionally well. The croissants are among the city’s best, the pain au chocolat is worth the queue. There is no better way to start a day in Paris.

9. Hôtel Massé

Hôtel Massé feels like a collaborative artwork. The founders invited artists, architects and craftspeople to contribute individual elements. Christian Rosa canvases, vintage lighting, burgundy corridors, okoumé wood and 1970s carpets create a space that feels collected rather than designed.

10. Silencio

Designed by David Lynch, Silencio feels exactly how one might expect a David Lynch nightclub to feel: cinematic, mysterious and slightly surreal. Gold surfaces, unexpected materials and dimly lit corners create the impression that something interesting is either about to happen or has just happened. Still one of the city’s most enduring late-night addresses.

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1. Fondation Maeght

Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence may be the finest small art foundation in the world. Opened in 1964 by dealer couple Aimé and Marguerite Maeght and designed by architect Josep Lluís Sert, it sits in the hills above the village and feels like the landscape and the art have always been the same thing. The Giacometti courtyard, the Miró labyrinth, the Braque mosaic pool and chapel, Calder mobiles turning in the pine-scented air: it feels like a dream.

2. La Colombe d’Or

The story of La Colombe d’Or is simple and almost too good to be true. The Roux family, who have run this inn in Saint-Paul-de-Vence since the 1920s, once accepted paintings in lieu of payment from artists who couldn’t afford their bill. The artists in question included Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Léger, Miró, and Calder. The paintings are still there, hanging on the walls of the restaurant and the bar, next to which you will eat your lunch. The iconic pool is one of the most photographed on the Riviera.

3. Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild

Béatrice de Rothschild built her rose-pink villa on the narrowest point of the Cap Ferrat peninsula between 1905 and 1912, and she did not do it quietly. The Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild contains one of the most significant private art collections assembled in the Belle Époque period. Outside, nine gardens (French, Florentine, Spanish, Japanese, Provençal) are laid out across the hillside. It is eccentric, obsessive, and… pink!

4. Villa Santo Sospir

In 1950, Jean Cocteau was invited by his patron Francine Weisweiller to stay at her villa on Cap Ferrat. Unable to leave a surface undecorated, he covered the walls, ceilings, and fireplaces of Villa Santo Sospir with murals drawn directly onto the plaster in a total environment he called “the tattooed villa.” It hosted many iconic visitors, including Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder. Romy Schneider and Alain Delon spent their first romantic weekend here. The villa will soon open again after a thoughtful restoration.

5. Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc

Nothing on the Côte d’Azur commands the same place in the collective imagination as Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Perched on the legendary Cap d’Antibes since 1870, it has welcomed everyone from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, alongside generations of the world’s most celebrated and affluent figures. Its iconic tennis court, tucked among fragrant Mediterranean gardens, is as storied as the hotel itself. More than a Riviera landmark, Eden-Roc remains the benchmark against which every luxury hotel on the coast is measured and, more than a century and a half later, it still sets the standard.

6. Château La Coste

Just outside Aix-en-Provence, Château La Coste is the rare place where world-class contemporary art, architecture, and winemaking exist in perfect harmony. Conceived by a visionary collector, the estate has become an open-air museum shaped by some of the most influential creative minds of our time, including Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Louise Bourgeois, and Lee Ufan. As you wander through vineyards, olive groves, and fields of lavender, monumental artworks and architectural interventions emerge unexpectedly from the landscape. More than a winery, Château La Coste is a journey through art, architecture, and nature, where every turn reveals a new dialogue between culture and landscape.

7. Le Palais Bulles

Pierre Cardin bought an unfinished experiment in organic architecture above Théoule-sur-Mer in the 1990s and turned it into one of the most extraordinary private residences in existence. Le Palais Bulles was designed by Hungarian architect Antti Lovag in the 1970s with no straight lines, no right angles, only interconnected spherical rooms carved into the cliff face above the sea. Cardin hosted fashion shows here for decades. It is now used for events and opens occasionally for visits, worth planning around.

8. La Chapelle Matisse

Henri Matisse called the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence his masterpiece, which is a significant claim from an artist of his stature. Built between 1948 and 1951 as a gift to the Dominican sisters who had nursed him during a serious illness, he designed everything: the acid-yellow, emerald-green, and cobalt-blue stained glass windows, the black-line ceramic tile murals of St. Dominic and the Virgin and Child, the vestments, the altar. Matisse was 80 when it was completed and considered it the culmination of a life’s work.

9. Villa Kérylos

Théodore Reinach was a classical scholar, archaeologist, and member of one of France’s great intellectual dynasties, and between 1902 and 1908 he built himself an ancient Greek house on the rocky promontory of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, designed by architect Emmanuel Pontremoli and furnished entirely to period. Reinach lived in it seasonally for the rest of his life, wearing a tunic and adopting Greek customs indoors. The result is one of the strangest and most beautiful interiors on the Riviera: mosaic floors, frescoed walls, a marble bath fed by the sea, every room opening onto light and water.

10. Château de la Messardière

Saint-Tropez in season is an exercise in sensory overload, and Château de la Messardière is where you go when you want to be above it, literally. The 19th-century neo-Gothic château sits on a hilltop with views over the bay and the town below. The pool is the thing — perched on the hillside with the bay stretched out below it, the kind of view that makes you forget you were ever anywhere else. The art collection throughout the property is considered, the terrace at sunset, the bay turning gold and the Maures hills behind, is the image you came to the South of France to find.

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Capri is the extension of that energy, but sun-drenched, cinematic, slower, where everything becomes a frame.

1. Villa San Michele

Built by Swedish physician Axel Munthe on the ruins of an ancient Roman villa, Villa San Michele feels like a dream translated into architecture. Perched high above Capri in Anacapri, everything there seems suspended between sky and sea. It is truly one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.

2. Concettina ai Tre Santi

Concettina ai Tre Santi carries the energy of a family institution while still attracting a younger crowd interested in food as culture.

The pizzas taste amazing, but the point is really the atmosphere. There’s warmth everywhere, no stiffness, no performance. Just people fully enjoying life around a table, which is perhaps the most Neapolitan thing possible.

3. Plan X Capri

Capri has always attracted artists, collectors and beautiful people orbiting somewhere between leisure and culture, and Plan X feels like a contemporary continuation of that tradition.

The space brings a younger, international energy to the island’s cultural scene, balancing the polished glamour Capri is known for with something more experimental and current. During summer especially, exhibitions, conversations and openings blur naturally into aperitivos and dinners nearby.

4. Punta Tragara

The walk toward Punta Tragara is part of the experience itself. Quiet villas hidden behind gates, white walls reflecting sunlight, bursts of bougainvillea everywhere. Then suddenly the view opens completely onto the Faraglioni.

At the end of the path sits the iconic hotel originally designed by Le Corbusier in the 1920s. Go close to sunset, when the entire landscape softens into red tones.

5. Grand Hotel Quisisana

The Quisisana is a social institution of Capri. Since the nineteenth century it has attracted aristocrats, artists, actors and people who prefer their luxury slightly understated. The tennis courts hold onto that atmosphere, framed by some of the most beautiful views on the island. A very specific kind of European elegance still survives here.

6. Buonocore

Every island has its ritual stop, and in Capri it’s Buonocore. The icecream cones are still handmade on the spot throughout the day.

There’s usually a queue, but nobody seems impatient about it. The experience is simple in theory: gelato, warm cone, walking through Capri. Despite all its glamour, the island is ultimately best enjoyed through small pleasures done extremely well.

7. Chiostri di Santa Chiara

Few places capture the emotional contrast of Naples quite like the Chiostri di Santa Chiara. The cloister was rebuilt after World War II and remains one of the most beautiful examples of Neapolitan decorative art. The painted ceramic benches and columns depict pastoral scenes that feel almost dreamlike compared to the intensity outside the monastery walls.

8. Cicciotto a Marechiaro

Marechiaro has long represented the more poetic side of Naples, close to Posillipo, and Cicciotto captures that atmosphere perfectly. Tables sit directly above the water, fishing boats drift nearby, and lunch stretches naturally into late afternoon.

The seafood, the pasta, the view: everything about the experience suggests that Naples has been perfecting this particular combination for a very long time.

9. Gallerie d’Italia

Located inside Palazzo Piacentini on Via Toledo, Gallerie d’Italia hosts part of Intesa Sanpaolo’s corporate collection, one of Italy’s most significant examples of corporate patronage and cultural investment.

The Naples location balances historical collections with ambitious contemporary programming, creating an interesting tension between classical Italian grandeur and present-day cultural discourse. Marble staircases, monumental proportions and restrained design choices give the space a sense of intellectual and artistic refinement.

10. Teatro di San Carlo

Teatro di San Carlo is the oldest continuously operating opera house in the world, opened in 1737, and somehow it still feels emotionally overwhelming when you enter.

Opera matters in Naples in a very real way. Even if you don’t attend a performance, the building itself embodies the city’s relationship to emotion, spectacle and beauty: just unapologetic magnificence.

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Over the last decade, luxury has progressively shifted away from pure ownership and toward participation. The wealthy consumer of 2026 is not simply buying a watch, a handbag or a painting. They are buying access, communities and experiences that signal belonging to an increasingly global network of taste.

Tennis courts, golf clubs and padel matches have become the new social salons of wealth. None of this is accidental. And none of it is really about sport.

Just as collecting art evolved beyond aesthetics into a form of social capital, participation in certain sports increasingly functions as an entry point into high-value communities. The rise of experiential luxury accelerated this transformation. Younger affluent consumers appear more attracted to experiences that combine health, exclusivity and social proximity.

This partly explains why so many fashion houses and watchmakers are gravitating toward sports culture. Tennis and golf naturally embody the qualities modern luxury seeks to project: discipline, elegance, internationalism, wellness and controlled exclusivity.

The aesthetic dimension matters too. The visual language of tennis whites, country clubs, padel courts and golf resorts has become deeply intertwined with contemporary luxury branding. What once represented traditional elite leisure now fuels moodboards, campaigns and social media strategies targeting a new generation of globally mobile consumers.

Increasingly, luxury is about signaling access to the right spaces, routines and people. In this context, the line between social platform, luxury experience and networking infrastructure becomes increasingly blurred.

The watchmakers moved first and most intelligently. Rolex has been at Wimbledon and Roland Garros for so long that the association feels geological.

Audemars Piguet took a different approach. Padel is the right sport for this moment: technically accessible enough that the barrier is social rather than athletic, growing fast enough to feel like a genuine cultural shift, and associated with a demographic (urban, affluent, international) that AP has spent years cultivating through the Royal Oak. The racket is the brand’s logic, expressed as sporting equipment.

Richard Mille’s golf balls and Patek Philippe’s course accessories operate on similar principles. The sport object functions as a proof of presence.

All of the above are a legitimacy transfer mechanism, discretely packaged as a collector’s item.

Fashion houses come to this from a different angle. They already have the infrastructure for object-making. What these collaborations ultimately purchase is the symbolic capital and credibility carried by the sport itself.

The Gucci tennis capsule is the clearest example using tennis as an aesthetic register.

Louis Vuitton’s passport holder extends the logic further into travel, which is where these sports actually live.

The car brands are the most unexpected entrants.

For Porsche, the golf bag is a natural extension of a decades-long approach to precision-driven lifestyle design.

The Lamborghini x Babolat padel racket is the opposite. It is spectacular and deliberately so. Lamborghini does not do restraint and it says exactly what it means to say: that the brand lives wherever adrenaline is adjacent.

None of these brands needed these objects commercially. The margins on a branded golf bag or a limited-edition tennis ball are not the argument. The argument is presence in a social context that advertising cannot fully penetrate. Sport is one of the last arenas where community forms through doing rather than consuming, and luxury brands have understood that the most efficient entry point is to be legible in its native language where the object is a credential.

There is a second function worth naming. These objects are, almost without exception, priced well below the brand’s core product universe. A Patek Philippe watch averages around €50,000. A set of Patek Philippe golf balls does not. A Lamborghini starts at €200,000 whereas the racket is attainable. This is deliberate. The sport object operates as a collectible: a lower-threshold entry point that extends brand presence into the life of a consumer who admires the house but has not yet arrived at its core price point. It is a social object as much as a luxury one, something to be given, displayed, photographed, discussed. The Rolex tennis ball on a desk communicates things in the same vocabulary as the watch on the wrist, at a fraction of the cost and with considerably more conversation value. So the brands are not cheapening themselves.

The sport collaboration is not a product extension. It is a bid for residency in that ecosystem. And as luxury increasingly shifts from ownership to participation, the value of that residency will only increase. Perhaps this is where luxury is ultimately heading: a space where aesthetics, wellness, networking and identity merge into one seamless experience.

A note on something I am building

I started building MotiMatch, a curated social sports app for tennis, padel and golf players — backed by the Tech Europe Foundation (Bocconi University and Politecnico di Milano). The premise follows directly from everything above: the internationally mobile, aesthetically literate, professionally active 25-to-40-year-old who expands their social life through sport. The brands described above have identified this person with considerable precision. We are building the infrastructure they are actually moving through.

The modern urban consumer wants to find the right people to play with. MotiMatch aims to facilitate real-world connection around these sports matching you with the right people, on the right courts, in the right cities.

We held our first event in Milan in April. More to follow. If you play tennis, padel or golf and you are reading this, follow along on Instagram @moti.match launching in May 2026 !!

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1. Gran Priorato di Roma — keyhole

A tiny keyhole with one of the most perfectly framed views in the world. Peek through and you’ll see the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica aligned between sculpted hedges, a composition so intentional it feels almost too good to be true. Located on the Aventine Hill, one of the dreamiest corners of Rome, the atmosphere feels almost suspended in time. Go early or during lunch break, the line forms quickly.

Nearby bonus: stroll around the entire Aventine area which is full of quiet elegance, umbrella pines and hidden villas.

2. Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana

The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, known colloquially as the Colosseo Quadrato, is one of the most stunning pieces of rationalist architecture in existence. Built during the Fascist era, it was intended to celebrate Italian civilisation for the 1942 World’s Fair that never happened. Fendi chose it as their global headquarters in 2015, which does something interesting to the building’s already layered symbolism.
Worth making the trip to EUR around sunset for the aesthetics alone.

3. Hotel de Russie — Rocco Forte Hotel

The unofficial headquarters of chic Rome. The Rocco Forte property sits just off Piazza del Popolo and has been the preferred address for people of a certain sensibility. Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau (who called the place “paradise on earth”) were regular guests there, alongside dancers and composers such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky, who now have suites named after them. The terraced garden at Le Jardin de Russie, layered, lush, slightly hidden, is designed by Olga Polizzi. The art collection throughout the property is understated and genuinely considered.

4. Conciliazione 5 — George Rouy

One of the most interesting contemporary activations in Rome right now. Located in Via della Conciliazione 5, steps from St. Peter’s, the work is visible from the street twenty-four hours a day. Opened in 2025 for the Jubilee and run by the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See, its 2026 programme takes reading as its subject. Currently on view one of the hottest British contemporary artists: Presence in Form by George Rouy is a large-scale painting whose distorted figures feel both sensual and slightly unsettling.

5. MAXXI — Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo

Designed by Zaha Hadid, MAXXI is worth visiting for the building alone. Fluid concrete lines, dramatic staircases and light cutting through the interiors make it feel almost like moving through a sculpture. The museum focuses on contemporary art and architecture and attracts a younger, more international creative crowd.

6. Orient Express La Minerva

Orient Express La Minerva is the first hotel the brand has ever opened which, given that the train has existed since 1883, makes it an event worth noting. The interiors reference Italian craftsmanship at every turn, and the rooftop offers one of the more surreal views in the city, including the dome of the Pantheon.

7. Musei Vaticani — Galleria delle Carte Geografiche

On the way to the Sistine Chapel there is one of the most extraordinary rooms in the world (and my fav): the Galleria delle Carte Geografiche. A long corridor covered in luminous topographical frescoes of Italy with an absurdly beautiful green-and-gold ceiling. It feels almost unreal in person.

The Sistine Chapel is, obviously, the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo painted the ceiling and the famous The Last Judgment between 1508 and 1512, commissioned by Pope Julius II. The chapel is also the site of the papal conclave, where the pope gets chosen.

8. Villa Medici + Giuseppe Penone, Foglie di pietra

Villa Medici is the Accademia di Francia a Roma, perched on the Pincian Hill above the Spanish Steps, whose gardens alone justify the visit with views over the city that make everything else feel very small. Fendi has long been among the institution’s closest supporters, a patronage relationship that has produced some of the most interesting programming in Rome’s cultural calendar.

On the way there, a piece that often goes unnoticed is Foglie di pietra by Giuseppe Penone, one of the defining voices of Arte Povera: two towering bronze tree forms holding enormous marble boulders suspended, seemingly impossibly, within their branches. Installed near Palazzo Fendi in Largo Goldoni, the work was commissioned by the maison that has long supported contemporary art in Rome.

9. La Matriciana 1870

Because cool kids into art also need pasta. La Matriciana is one of Rome’s classic institutions for proper cucina romana, opened in 1870 and still doing exactly what it set out to do. The bucatini all’amatriciana is the point, and so is their millefoglie, available only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. The old-school interiors match the vibe perfectly.

10. Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola

Baroque maximalism at its peak. The church is famous for its illusionistic ceiling frescoes by Andrea Pozzo, but lately it’s also become known for the mirror installation that lets visitors photograph the ceiling perfectly reflected above them. Expect a queue, it’s visually worth it.

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Here are the ones that stayed with me long after the carpet ended.

Emma Chamberlain — becoming the canvas itself

Emma Chamberlain’s Mugler look felt less like a dress and more like a painting that had somehow learned to move.

What made it interesting wasn’t only the obvious Van Gogh-esque brushstroke effect. The gown was reportedly hand-painted over 40 hours and inspired by Emma’s childhood growing up around her father’s watercolor and oil paintings.

Louisa Jacobson — Joan of Arc reimagined through couture

Louisa Jacobson (Meryl Streep’s daughter) understood the assignment. Her look leaned into one of history’s most mythologized female figures, the warrior saint immortalized for centuries through paintings, tapestries, and sculpture: Joan of Arc.

The metallic detailing and structured silhouette captured the tension of femininity versus strength, sanctity versus rebellion.

This is my fav one!

Mona Patel — the Leonardo da Vinci fantasy

Dolce & Gabbana conceived Mona Patel’s look as an homage to Leonardo da Vinci.

The outer cape resembled a floating manuscript covered in sketches, notes, and references to the Vitruvian Man. Underneath, the gown explored anatomy through pleated chiffon mimicking muscles and fascia.

Leonardo studied bodies the same way couturiers study silhouettes.
Both are obsessed with structure, movement, proportion, illusion.

That’s why couture can feel almost architectural at its best.

Eileen Gu — the future of couture

Eileen Gu’s Iris van Herpen look may have been the clearest example of fashion becoming actual installation art.

The dress reportedly contained over 15,000 glass bubbles and required more than 2,500 hours of craftsmanship, but the truly surreal detail was the hidden technology embedded underneath that produced floating bubbles around her body as she moved.

It felt like contemporary immersive art: part sculpture, part science experiment, part dream sequence.

Hailey Bieber — the color that makes history

Hailey Bieber arrived in a custom Saint Laurent dress.

The solid 24-karat gold breastplate was reportedly moulded directly from her own body, referencing Yves Saint Laurent’s 1969 collaboration with sculptor Claude Lalanne, who pioneered these surreal metallic torso pieces decades ago.

But the blue is what stays with you. Jacques Majorelle, the French Orientalist painter, developed that specific shade in 1937, using it to paint his villa in Marrakech, a colour so vivid it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Yves Saint Laurent later purchased and restored that villa, incorporating what became known as Majorelle blue into his own collections.

Rachel Zegler — the blindfold that was never decorative

Rachel Zegler wore a Prabal Gurung design finished with a delicate strip of gauze across her eyes. The look was inspired by Paul Delaroche’s 1833 painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, which depicts the sixteen-year-old queen being guided toward the block after ruling England for nine days before Mary I claimed the throne.

Alex Consani — Botticelli’s garden, remade

Alex Consani made history as the first trans woman to co-chair the Met Gala. She hit the carpet in a Gucci gown and white faille cape by Demna, reportedly inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera. Then, in a dramatic moment, she removed the cape to reveal a sheer nude bustier paired with a skirt and train covered in black feathers.

Obsessed with her hair style.

Gracie Abrams — a Klimt in motion

Gracie Abrams wore a gold Chanel gown directly inspired by Gustav Klimt’s gold-leaf period — The Kiss, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. His figures are barely distinguishable from their backgrounds; the decorative and the human collapse into each other.

Klimt’s women aren’t dated because they were never entirely in time. They exist in that golden suspension where beauty tips into myth.

Fashion is art when it carries a reference beyond itself, when it means something to the person wearing it, and something again to the person looking.

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1. The Row

The entrance to The Row’s Mayfair flagship greets visitors with a Turrell piece, illuminating the space with its slowly changing light display. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who collaborated with architect Annabelle Selldorf on the space, incorporated unique pieces throughout the entire store from an Isamu Noguchi sculpture to a John Chamberlain crushed-car piece and furniture by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand.

2. The Red Room at The Connaught

A hidden jewel for late-night drinks. The Louise Bourgeois central piece make it feel closer to a collector’s private salon than a hotel bar. When hotelier Paddy McKillen described his vision to Jerry Gorovoy, Bourgeois’ long-time assistant, Gorovoy brought up the painting packaged for another exhibition from a basement, and McKillen purchased it on the spot. Alongside it: Bourgeois’ scarlet hologram from 1998 and works by Jenny Holzer, Ti-a Thuy Nguyen, and Trina McKillen. The room is almost entirely a space for female visionaries.

3. Mount St. Restaurant

Part of the Hauser & Wirth universe, this is where British cuisine and the London art, fashion, and collector crowd casually overlap. Rashid Johnson’s floor commission Broken Floor is a palladiana mosaic of different marbles that visitors can explore, stand on, and physically interact with. Over 200 works feature throughout: Warhol, Matisse, Lucian Freud, Philip Guston. Even King Charles has eaten here, choosing the main public room over the private dining. You’ll understand why when you’re sitting beneath a Freud at lunch.

4. Abuelo

One of the chicest coffee stops in London. The name means grandfather in Spanish, and the room is built on that logic: large communal tables, interiors that reference the 1970s are designed and built on site without trying too hard, filled with the kind of creative crowd that somehow always looks effortlessly cool. Great coffee and matcha.

5. Tate Modern

The Rothko Room is one of the most well-known displays in Tate Modern and the nine Seagram Murals that hang there were never originally meant for a museum at all. Rothko was commissioned to paint them for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building, the most prestigious public commission ever awarded to an abstract expressionist, but came to believe a fashionable restaurant was not the right home for such work, and withdrew. He gave them to the Tate instead.

6. Lagana

Lagana takes its name from a Greek flatbread, and the whole restaurant is built around that spirit, generous, loose, made for sharing. With paper tablecloths and crayons left on the tables so everyone can draw throughout dinner, the whole restaurant somehow turns into a collective sketchbook by the end of the night.

7. Adret

Iykyk. There is almost no information to be found on their website. No e-commerce. No Instagram feed of product shots. The analogue approach is entirely the point. Everything is handmade in Indonesia and only available in-store. Adret is a menswear label founded by Adam Rogers, who designed for Ralph Lauren’s Purple Label, and Seto Adiputra, who was the editorial director of a leading menswear publication in Southeast Asia and is also the brand’s photographer, known for his unhurried visual language. Together they travel between London and the Indonesian mountains, working side-by-side with local artisans. The store on Clifford Street is the physical expression of everything they believe: somewhere between a collector’s apartment, a gallery, and a dream.

8. Maison Assouline

More than a bookstore, a lifestyle fantasy for people obsessed with art, fashion, photography, and beautiful objects. Hidden behind the shelves is the Swans Bar, serving cocktails, wine, and snacks. It feels like old-world intellectual glamour.

9. Gallery Hopping in Mayfair

Start around Cork Street and wander through Pace, Almine Rech, Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Thaddaeus Ropac and more. The beauty of London is that the galleries are embedded into the rhythm of the city, you move from museum-quality exhibitions straight into cafés, restaurants, and auction houses within minutes.

Bonus point: attend an auction. Even just sitting in the room at Sotheby’s or Christie’s during an evening sale is one of the coolest experiences in the art world. The viewing days before a sale are open to anyone, you can stand within inches of works that will sell for millions.

10. Réalisation Par

Réalisation Par has one of the most quietly seductive boutiques in London. The brand built its following entirely through the quality of its silks and a very specific fantasy of how a woman might dress, and the store translates that same logic into a physical space: warm, chic, and effortlessly pretty. The pieces almost sell themselves once you're inside. And then there's the iconic photo-booth :)

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Indeed, much of the concern that surrounds copying, imitation, and delegation in the art world seems to rely on the figure of the artist as a solitary genius, singularly responsible for both the conception and the execution of the work. While this figure has become central to how we evaluate artistic legitimacy, it does not accurately reflect how art has been produced for most of its history.

If one considers the structure of Renaissance workshops, the distance between our current expectations and historical reality becomes immediately apparent. Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci did not operate in isolation, but rather within highly organized studios in which apprentices and assistants played an essential role, not only in learning the craft but also in actively contributing to the production of works that would ultimately bear the master’s name. These workshops functioned as sites of transmission, replication, and refinement, where copying was not only accepted but actively encouraged as a primary mode of training and dissemination.

A similar model can be observed in the practice of Peter Paul Rubens. In his case, assistants were often responsible for executing substantial portions of a painting, from backgrounds to secondary figures, while the artist himself would intervene selectively, focusing on key areas that required his direct input and ultimately ensuring the coherence of the composition. The resulting work, though materially collective, was nonetheless understood as authentically his.

The idea that a work of art is the singular, irreplicable product of one person’s hand is a fantasy that we have somehow absorbed as an art-market truth.

What emerges from these examples is a conception of authorship in which the artist’s role is defined less by the execution of every detail and more by the orchestration of a vision, by the ability to conceive, direct, and finalize a work that may, in practice, be the result of multiple hands.

Fast forward three centuries, and we arrive at Damien Hirst. His spot paintings, which now number in the thousands, are made almost entirely by assistants. He has said this openly. The dots are mechanically even, the colors mixed by others, the execution delegated. When asked whether this bothered him, he replied that he could not actually paint as well as his assistants. The spots are better without him.

A spot painting by Damien Hirst sells for a Damien Hirst price, because what they are buying is not the physical labour of his hand but access to the concept, the signature, the cultural position.

Jeff Koons operates similarly. Koons has described himself as working “more like a director.” His studio at peak production employed over 150 people. The shining stainless steel surfaces of his sculptures require a level of technical finish he does not himself possess. What he contributes is the concept, the vision, and the cultural authority to make those works.

In the current art market, the model of the artist as a conceptual originator and director clearly outweighs that of the artist as a maker, as value is assigned not to the physical labor of production, but to the intellectual and symbolic framework that defines the work. Artistic authorship has long operated through structures that are more collective, more mediated, and more complex than we are often willing to acknowledge.

Understanding this complexity does not mean dismissing the ethical questions it raises about credit, about visibility, about whether the assistants who spend years executing a famous artist’s vision should have more claim on the work than the signature allows them. These are worth having. Yet the art market now is not just a market for unique objects. It is a market for stories. For the narrative of genius, of scarcity, of cultural inevitability that institutions and dealers and auction houses construct around certain names and not others. The physical work is the vessel.

It is in this sense that the discourse around artistic value as residing entirely in the physical act of making is far more complex than it appears, encompassing a combination of concept, context, intention, and market positioning. The hand is only one component within this framework, and historically, not always the most significant one.

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In 1528, Baldassare Castiglione published Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), a manual for navigating the refined and highly codified world of Renaissance courts. In it, he describes an essential quality that the perfect courtier must possess: a certain nonchalance, a cultivated ease that conceals the labor behind every gesture, every word, every display of talent.

Its root, sprezzare, means to despise or disregard. To practice sprezzatura is to perform a kind of visible indifference toward the very mastery you are displaying.

“Avoid affectation in every way possible. Practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does appear to be without effort.”

— Baldassare Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano, 1528

II. WHERE VALUE CANNOT BE MEASURED, BEHAVIOUR BECOMES THE PROOF

Most industries rely on one thing: the number. Revenue, yield, occupancy rate, return on equity. The art world, like luxury, like certain corners of architecture and high-end advisory, does not. The question of what something is worth cannot be answered by pointing at a spreadsheet. It can only be answered by pointing at the people who have decided it is worth something.

This is the structural condition that makes sprezzatura not merely attractive in these fields, but functionally necessary. When there is no formula for value, the people who appear most comfortable with ambiguity become the de facto arbiters of it. Confidence in the absence of certainty is, in itself, a credential. And the particular form that confidence takes, unhurried, underdressed, unimpressed, is exactly what Castiglione meant.

The psychological mechanism is precise: in a market without objective pricing, the person who most visibly needs to transact is the one who loses the most in the transaction. Desire becomes a liability. And so the learned behavior is the management of visible desire, not its elimination, because total indifference reads as ignorance, but its careful rationing. You signal that you see the value. You do not signal that you need it.

III. WHY IT WORKS: THE PSYCHOLOGY

Effortlessness signals surplus. When we perceive that someone is not straining, we unconsciously register that they possess more resources than the current task requires: time, experience, social capital, financial cushion. Surplus, in social and economic terms, is one of the clearest markers of power.

Humans are acutely sensitive to signals of effort and need. When something, or someone, appears to strive too visibly, it introduces a subtle asymmetry, suggesting that value must be argued for rather than assumed. Sprezzatura, by contrast, removes the visible traces of striving and, in doing so, shifts perception.

Scarcity of desire creates desire. This is not manipulation, or rather, it is, in the same way that all social behavior involves some choreography of impression. What distinguishes sprezzatura from mere pretension is that the underlying competence is real. The effortlessness is performed; the mastery is not.

IV. THE PARADOX OF EFFORT

Here is the central irony: sprezzatura requires enormous effort to maintain. In Castiglione’s time, it required discipline, practice, and a deep internalization of the codes one was expected to navigate. Today, it demands a similar foundation. The ability to appear effortless in high-stakes environments is often built on a significant accumulation of competence, taste, and experience. Without this underlying substance, attempts at sprezzatura risk reading as an emptiness disguised as ease.

In business, the most effective practitioners share a specific quality: they are intensely deliberate in private and entirely relaxed in public. Sprezzatura is therefore an enduring strategy for operating within systems where perception, discretion, and symbolic capital matter as much as explicit declarations of value. In a cultural moment defined by overexposure and constant articulation, that restraint becomes not only elegant, but powerful.

Advice in this regard is inherently tricky. You cannot learn sprezzatura from an article about sprezzatura. The awareness that you are practicing it undermines the practice itself. What you can do is something slower and less glamorous: accumulate genuine competence, reduce your attachment to specific outcomes, and cultivate the patience of someone who has seen how most things unfold.

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But what makes it interesting is that beneath that surface is a scene that’s incredibly refined: interested collectors, world-class galleries, historic restaurants filled with masterworks, and a lifestyle that quietly integrates culture at a very high level.

It’s not loud, it’s not trying to impress you but if you know where to go, Zurich is the place to be.

1. Kronenhalle

Since 1924, friends, families, and creative professionals have gathered at the Kronenhalle in the heart of Zürich, drawn by outstanding cuisine and an atmosphere that pays homage to tradition. What makes it extraordinary, however, is not the food alone but the walls: the collection of original works by Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Matisse, and Braque that hangs throughout the dining rooms, acquired directly by the founding Zumsteg family over decades. The interior was designed by architect and designer Robert Haussmann, and the light fixtures are by Diego Giacometti, Alberto’s brother, whose bronzework is as quietly remarkable as the paintings surrounding it.

2. Le Club Lacoste – The Dolder Grand

The Dolder Grand is one of those hotels that justifies the category of grand hotel in the most literal sense with incredible tennis and golf facilities. In collaboration with Lacoste, the hotel has reimagined its tennis experience as something closer to a private club experience: a newly designed court nestled in the surrounding forest, reserved for hotel guests, spa members, and Le Club Lacoste members. So chic!

3. Pavillon Le Corbusier

A small but iconic architectural statement. This lakeside pavilion is Le Corbusier’s final project. The coloured steel panels, modular structure, and precise proportions make it less of a building and more of a manifesto. The setting, with the lake just steps away, makes it one of those rare museum visits that feels like a genuine pleasure from start to finish. Really loved strolling around.

4. Babu’s

Babu’s opened its doors with a bakery and coffeehouse concept that was new to the city, with the aim of reinventing brunch culture and making high-quality, handmade, freshly baked bread, pastries, and cakes more available. The atmosphere is cosy and vibrant, with a steady flow of creatives and locals.

5. Kunsthaus Zürich

One of the greatest art museums of Europe, the Kunsthaus holds the largest collection of Alberto Giacometti sculptures and drawings in the world, a fact alone worth the visit :)), alongside major works by Monet, Munch, Hodler, and Picasso, and a collection of Swiss art from the 18th century to the present. The 2021 extension by David Chipperfield is a significant and well-curated addition to the exhibition space.

6. The Matcha Club

Founded by Chiara Dalla Mora, a former corporate professional turned entrepreneur, The Matcha Club was born out of a genuine frustration: matcha served outside Japan was almost never prepared correctly, tasting watery or bitter, and rarely from ceremonial-grade leaves. The result is Zürich’s contemporary organic matcha bar with a minimalist, considered identity that feels entirely right for this city.

7. UB Law

An unexpected library stop in the Faculty of Law. Its elliptical wooden skeleton spirals 30 metres up to a radiant glass dome that floods the entire atrium with natural light. The quietly breathtaking interior is one of the best architectural surprises in the city.

8. Hauser & Wirth

One of the most significant contemporary art galleries in the world, with spaces in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Menorca among others, its original home is right here in Zürich, where Iwan and Manuela Wirth founded the gallery in 1992. A reminder that this city’s relationship with contemporary art runs considerably deeper than its reputation suggests.

9. La Stanza

A hot spot in the city with a creative, international, relaxed crowd. More about the energy and the people than just the drinks, though the menu selection is great!

10. The Bagel Shop

The Bagel Shop does one thing and does it properly: freshly made bagels with a yummy selection of fillings. The young, colourful space is the perfect lunch stop, not trying to be anything more than it is, and that’s exactly why it works.

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Somewhere in the jungles of Ubud, there is a tent that belongs to a cartographer. Not a real one. There is no cartographer. There never was. But the maps are hand-drawn, the instruments are worn at the edges, and the objects arranged across every surface tell a story so precisely that you find yourself believing it anyway. You unpack your bag in someone else’s fiction. And somehow, it feels more real than most places you have actually been.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard spent much of his career trying to account for exactly this feeling. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he described a world in which the symbol becomes more important or authoritative than the original, essentially where authenticity is replaced by copy, and reality gives way to what he called the “hyperreal”. The fiction, he argued, does not conceal the truth. It is the truth, or at least the only version of it that registers emotionally.

Whether by instinct or intention, Bill Bensley’s hotels operate on exactly this logic.

Bensley is the Bangkok-based designer behind some of Southeast Asia’s most obsessively realized hotels—essentially properties that move in the opposite direction of universally palatable designs, toward the specific, strange, overstuffed, and sincere. His hotels are stories themselves, told through objects. And what makes those stories hold is something French theorist Roland Barthes understood long before hospitality caught up: that meaning does not live with the author. It lives with the reader. In The Death of the Author (1967), Barthes argued that a text’s unity lies in the audience, not the creator.

In that tent in Ubud, the invented cartographer is not the point. You are the point. You are the reader completing the narrative by walking through it.

This is what Bill Bensley does, and there is no one quite like him.

Capella: The Brand With No Template

To understand why Bensley’s work lands the way it does, it helps to understand who he is building for.

Some of Bensley’s most notable works fall under Capella Hotels and Resorts. Capella is not a large brand. It does not want to be. With fewer than twenty properties worldwide, it sits at the quieter, more considered end of ultra-luxury hospitality, raising the bar in the Asian market on the conviction that a hotel should feel like nowhere else on earth.

Capella Hanoi: The Opera That Never Ended

Capella Hanoi opened in 2021 inside a colonial-era building in the city’s French quarter. The property is organized around a fictional world of performers, impresarios, and traveling artists who supposedly passed through the building during Hanoi’s early twentieth-century golden age of opera. More than a thousand pieces of memorabilia populate the interiors, including costumes behind glass, playbills pinned to walls, stage props arranged as if someone just set them down. Each piece is tied to a character: invented, named, given a backstory. The objects are real. The grief of a soprano who never existed is somehow, inexplicably, present in the room. The hotel is a kind of living archive of a world that never was—and that is precisely why it lingers.

Capella Hanoi Junior Suite — Source: Capella Hotels

Capella Ubud: A Jungle of Invented Lives

If Hanoi is a stage, Ubud is an expedition.

Capella Ubud is a collection of tents and pavilions suspended in the Balinese rainforest. Each tent is built around a distinct persona—the explorer, the cartographer, the naturalist, the storyteller—with handcrafted objects, commissioned artifacts, and locally made furnishings chosen to make that identity feel genuinely inhabited. Guests arrive at a life in mid-sentence: maps half-unrolled, specimens pinned to boards, journals left open on a desk.

Capella Ubud Terrace Tent — Source: Bensley

Competitive Advantage, By Object

Bensley has been explicit that his design philosophy is not meant to please everyone: “if you try to satisfy everyone, you will only create a basic box.”

It’s a strategic position that maps onto what management theorists have spent decades trying to articulate. In his foundational 1991 paper in the Journal of Management, Jay Barney argued that sustained competitive advantage derives from resources that are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and non-substitutable. The VRIN framework, as it became known, is usually applied to corporate capabilities and supply chains, but it describes a Bensley property quite well. A sourced antique is valuable. A commissioned narrative built over years is rare. A thousand pieces of opera memorabilia tied to invented characters is imperfectly imitable. And no amount of capital can substitute for the accumulated curatorial decisions that produced it.

This is the commercial logic that most hotel procurement departments miss. They are optimizing for cost efficiency within a category, focusing on selecting furniture, art, and objects that hit a price point, when the actual competitive question is whether those objects can be replicated by a rival with the same budget. With this kind of thinking in mind, what emerges is a subtle though consequential shift, where the hotel becomes an opinionated environment—one whose opinion, expressed through objects, compounds into brand differentiation on the property and pricing power at the revenue management level.

An important distinction to make, however, is that not every hotel should attempt what Bensley does. Most cannot, and should not. At the ultra-luxury end of the market, where location is table stakes and service quality is assumed, the conventional levers of differentiation have largely been exhausted. What remains, and what commands the most durable pricing power, is irreproducibility. Bensley is evidence of where value can be generated when everything else has been commoditized.

The Financial Paradox

An opinionated environment, it turns out, has an accounting problem.

In standard hotel development, interiors are classified under FF&E—furniture, fixtures, and equipment—and depreciated on a fixed schedule, typically over seven to ten years. Every line item in the room is assumed to move in one direction: down.

Art breaks that assumption. And the deeper you look, the stranger it gets.

Under GAAP accounting, a curated collection sits on the books at original purchase cost, depreciating like any other FF&E asset—eventually written down to zero. In reality, well-assembled collections can hold or appreciate in value over decades, quietly moving in the opposite direction to everything else on the balance sheet. This gap between book value and fair market value—invisible on the income statement—is a real source of wealth that standard hotel accounting often cannot see.

The practical implications for owners and developers are clear. Not everything in a Bensley property appreciates—custom upholstery, soft furnishings, and lighting fixtures follow the standard FF&E depreciation curve like any other hotel interior. But within the same room, a sourced antique, a site-specific work, or a locally made artifact with genuine provenance follows an entirely different curve. The balance sheet treats them identically. Standard accounting cannot distinguish between a sofa and a piece of opera memorabilia tied to an invented character in a fictional narrative—both are written down on the same schedule, toward the same zero.

The gap between those two curves is where the mispricing lives. Art-forward properties are likely being underwritten on compressed NOI assumptions that fail to account for the pricing power a curated environment generates. RevPAR premiums driven by narrative identity and irreproducibility do not show up as a discrete line in the pro forma—they are absorbed into blended rate assumptions and treated as a function of location or brand rather than curatorial investment. The result is that at acquisition, the cap rate calculation systematically undervalues exactly the assets that drive the most durable outperformance.

The Designer Who Builds for You

Most hotels are built to be understood immediately. Bensley’s are built to be completed by you, walking through them, choosing what to believe. In turn, his properties command higher rates, resist imitation, and accumulate value in ways the balance sheet cannot see.

The reason Bensley remains genuinely difficult to replicate is not the antiques, or the memorabilia, or the hand-drawn maps. It is the understanding that a hotel is a text, where the guest—unpacking their bag in someone else’s fiction, half-believing in a cartographer who never existed—is always the reader.

Nobody else in hospitality is building for that reader. Bensley has been doing it for thirty years.

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