Getting There

Home-Projector Technology continues to evolve, which is good news for consumers longing for improved performance and simplified installation and operation. It is especially welcome for home theater owners who prefer small, easy-to-operate DLP projectors rather than the larger, difficult-to-maintain CRTs. A number of compact front-projection units featuring the new HD2 processing chip have recently arrived […]

As the train rumbled north, the skyscrapers and bridges of Manhattan swiftly fell away. The steel rails unspooled beneath the car’s elegant carriage, scrolling out in parallel for miles toward the horizon. On the left, the Hudson River flowed lazily on, only feet away from the tracks, with the 500-foot cliffs of the New Jersey […]

The accidental traveler is fast becoming extinct. For many, leisure time has become too scarce and too precious to spend it wandering about the world in the hope of happening upon a life-affirming or life-altering experience. Instead, you board a plane with a specific goal, whether it is to indulge in a spa’s pampering, partake […]

We have a weakness for things that move. Whether we are born with the instinct or psychologically branded from our first spin in the perambulator, few objects in our private universes plumb the depths of sentiment like the sundry instruments of human locomotion. Cars, boats, trains, planes: We love them as much for their lines […]

Regardless of the advanced capabilities that a digital camera offers, pixel size and resolution ultimately determine the size of the prints that it can produce. While a camera may enable you to shoot in the dark from a moving vehicle, anything larger than a 3-by-5 will look digitized if it offers only 2 or 3 […]

Five years ago, some of Neiman Marcus’ best customers gathered in the third-floor men’s department at the Beverly Hills store for what could have been a routine Brioni trunk show. But rather than discuss suit silhouettes and tailoring while sipping their Champagne, they were drawn to the 200-pound bale of raw superfine wool fiber that […]

While de beers has spent millions of marketing dollars instilling in our minds that a diamond is forever, its latest joint venture with LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton makes a slightly different statement: A diamond is today. The massive South African diamond conglomerate that controls about 65 percent of the world’s diamond market is leveraging […]

Now that jewelers have brought yellow gold back into vogue, eyewear designers are catching yellow fever, too. Richard Morgenthal, owner and head designer of New York City’s Morgenthal-Frederics (888.608.8700, http://www.morgenthal-fredericsny.com), has injected his itsy-bitsy reading glasses with steroids (top), pumping them up with full-size frames called Royale and Belvedere that are made of solid 18-karat […]

Entrepreneurs Jamie Davidson and Padgett Mangan have Winston Churchill to thank for the success of their recently launched Normandy & Monroe windbreakers. After all, it was the former British prime minister who mandated England’s top textile mills to develop a water-, wind-, and heat-resistant fabric known as Ventile for RAF pilots to wear during World […]

Piaget’s first-ever pearl jewelry collection, Pearlissima by Piaget (800.359.4538, http://www.piaget.com), features a mark of distinction that could easily go unnoticed. With a nod to status logos, designer Ella Gafter subtly incorporated two inverted, diamond-pavéed Ps into each of the collection’s 12 pieces. The collection is the first such collaboration for Gafter, who has been affectionately […]

Maurice Lacroix’s flagship Masterpiece Collection strives to marry traditional craftsmanship with modern styling and function. Recently, the prestige collection added two automatic mechanical timepieces featuring triple time-zone functions. The Reveil Globe ($4,350 to $5,750) is a unique new triple time-zone alarm watch that keeps you on schedule while you are crisscrossing the globe. The Reveil […]

Liana Lee’s (212.588.9289) pillbox-sized men’s haberdashery on New York’s Lexington Avenue is stocked with shagreen cigar boxes, jeweled cuff links, handmade cotton dress shirts, and silk sleepwear, all reminiscent of a kinder, gentler day and age. This winter, the former television and film stylist delves even further into the past to a time when smartly […]

While many perfumers have ventured into the realm of bespoke fragrances, London’s Creative Perfumers goes one step further by describing itself as haute couture. Creative Perfumers is the brainchild of Anastasia Brozler, the former head of perfume marketing in Europe for L’Oréal and Estée Lauder. Brozler, who possesses a doctorate in fragrance marketing from the […]

It was the American Dream Machine, the most exhilarating, high-spirited car on the road. With a fuel-injected Big Block beneath its fiberglass hood, this vehicle turned heads like nothing else on wheels. Sitting at a stoplight with the engine revving, the exhaust roaring unimpeded through a set of laker pipes, and the Beach Boys urging […]

Automotive archives are littered with immortal initials. Everyone from Mercedes in the 1920s to Jaguar in the ’30s to Crosley in the ’50s to Chevrolet and—if you will pardon the mention—Excalibur in the ’60s has attached a variety of models and meanings to SS. GT implies Grand Touring whether the bearer car was, is, or […]

During Boeing’s annual investors’ conference last May, Connexion by Boeing President Scott Carson clicked on several plasma screens to begin his videoconference with Ed Laase, the company’s system development director. Carson was in St. Louis while Laase was in Arizona—or, to be precise, 37,000 feet over Arizona, aboard Connexion One. While the Boeing 737-400 flew […]

Success stories in the fractional aircraft business are as rare as they are among commercial airlines. Indeed, most of the more than 50 companies that entered the fractional market in the last decade have failed. However, at least four—NetJets, Bombardier Flexjet, CitationShares, and Flight Options—continue to thrive and offer clients a variety of ownership options. […]

Until someone discovers how to create a true H.G. Wells– style time machine, private business jets will have to do. Although the latest bird from Boeing or Bombardier will not transport you to the past or the future, it does enable you to manipulate time and space when you can depart for a far-flung destination […]

Several times a week, on clear, cloudless days, Martin Cutler peers down and chuckles at the phalanxes of cars and trucks choking the highways ringing greater Boston. If Cutler, an ophthalmologist, was in his car, the 30-mile drive between his home and office could take 90 minutes or more. In his Robinson R44 helicopter, however, […]

While cruising over the Bay Area at 22,000 feet, I key the mike button on the Bravo2, Mooney Airplane Co.’s new four-seater, and check on the conditions over Oakland, Calif. “Center, Mooney One Sierra Bravo. Do you have a ground speed?” “Mitsubishi One Sierra Bravo, Oakland Center,” comes the response. “Reading 270 knots, plus or […]

The aisles of the Lannan Ship Model Gallery in Boston’s waterfront district are as confused and congested as the roads that have been rerouted by the Big Dig construction project taking place just outside its doors. With binnacles (compass cases), engine room telegraphs, life rings, antique diving helmets, old lanterns, and buoys cluttering its floor, […]

While Scots celebrate their legendary toughness—manifest over the centuries by their kicking the Romans off their shores, rejecting English rule, and relishing their proclivity for haggis—truth be told, they would rather be fishing or shooting (game, that is, not Englishmen). When it comes to their love affair with angling, no stream is more romanced than […]

From somewhere off the Venezuelan coast, over his SatCom phone, the owner of the 147-foot Delta Marine yacht Gran Finale provides an update of his boat’s early November travels. The vessel, which was delivered last March, is en route to Isla la Tortuga and Isla de Margarita. “It’s lovely,” he says. “It’s 85 degrees, no […]

Manhattanite Jean-Marie Lusk had an unusual request for her interior designer. “I want to be able to walk out of my apartment wearing my curtains,” she told Samuel Botero. Of course, she was exaggerating, but only slightly. She wanted her curtains “to look like ball gowns,” and Botero obliged. All of the windows of her […]

The real stars of scandia—the restaurant that joined the ranks of the Brown Derby, Chasen’s, Perino’s, and the Mocambo as a legendary “Old Hollywood” hot spot in the mid-1950s—were not the luminous regulars such as Gable, Bogart, Crosby, and Stewart, but subtler, more patient occupants with such names as Mouton, Latour, Heitz, and Montelena. The […]

Most hotel visits are like blind dates: An arrangement is made, you may even see a photo or two, but you enter with a sense of uncertainty, hoping for the best. As with love, however, it is often a chance encounter with a hotel that is likely to set your heart alight. So it was […]

It sounds like every golfer’s dream: Stroll out the back door to find a rolling swatch of manicured bent grass, perhaps with an adjoining bunker filled with siliconlike bleached sand. You could drop a few balls and putt and chip for hours to hone a short game that would be the envy of even Phil […]

Last summer, Aronne Miola invited a select group of fashion industry VIPs on a sunset helicopter ride high in the sky over Florence, Italy. The owner of the firm Gruppo Forall, which makes suits under the Pal Zileri label, was underscoring his belief that modern menswear should be designed for travel. After whizzing between Brunelleschi’s […]

Only a hardened watch industry insider or collector recognizes the names Svend Andersen, Thomas Baumgartner, or Bernhard Lederer. Goldpfeil, the German leather company embarking on its first foray into wristwatches, views such obscurity as an asset. By tapping the talents of seven of the most accomplished, yet unsung, watchmakers in Switzerland, Goldpfeil has created the […]

With the launch this year of a new Tibetan rug collection for Aga John, a decorative ceramic tile line for Astor Tile Works, and his first luxury plumbing collection through Rohl, Michael Berman has been an extremely busy Californian. But he is the first to tell you that he left his heart in Detroit, Chicago, […]

Audiophile-grade cables—the elaborate wires that connect the components in an audio/video system—have done more to undermine the credibility of specialty audio than any technology, product, or claim. The debate over the benefits of high-end cable began some 25 years ago when manufacturers attempted to improve the pipeline carrying the signal by improving the quality of […]

“Design is not form OR function—it’s the aesthetic synthesis of the two,” says Ferdinand A. Porsche. And when Porsche talks, we listen, for he knows whereof he speaks. He is the grandson of the creator of the Volkswagen Beetle and the son of the man responsible for the original 356 sports coupe that bears his […]