Great Escapes

  Valentine Reyes unlocked the massive rolling doors, shoved them open, and smiled. “There are a lot of memories in here,” he said. Once my eyes adjusted to the light, I blinked. Spread out before us was what could be called the world’s greatest barn find—or, to be more precise, warehouse find—comprising nearly two dozen […]

Michael Chiarello may be a native of Northern California, but he is a son of southern Italy. “I grew up in a household that spoke and lived Italian,” says the 47-year-old chef, who—in addition to cooking in his new Bottega restaurant in Yountville, Calif. (see “Grape Awakening,” page 86), cultivating grapes for his Chiarello Family […]

The key to the future can often be found in the past, as many of the world’s most illustrious jewelry houses demonstrate each time they open their archives in search of inspiration for new designs. Certain pieces of jewelry achieve classic status not because of their ubiquity but because of their enduring appeal to the […]

Rare-book collectors have made the wood-paneled galleries of Bauman Rare Books in Philadelphia and New York their preferred destinations for decades. Bauman now offers these collectors a new destination in an unlikely place: Las Vegas. Bauman’s latest gallery opened in February 2008 at the Shoppes at the Palazzo, alongside such retailers as Fendi, Guerlain, and […]

Only a handful of stores and tailors construct bespoke suits of the highest quality—suits tailored to fit the client like a second skin. This deficiency in the marketplace contributes to what Italian textile maven Luca Trabaldo Togna sees as a lack of men who truly appreciate the fine art of bespoke tailoring. He hopes to […]

When Le Cirque opened in 1974, it received immediate criticism. Its proprietor, Sirio Maccioni, was not “democratic” in his seating practices—ensuring that the best tables went mainly to the beautiful, the famous, and the powerful—and, as The New York Times reported, its fare was more bistro-type than fine French cuisine. At the same time, Le […]

Wink Hartman, a Wichita-based businessman who owns several energy companies and a health-care facility, logs many hours aboard his King Air 350, traveling from Kansas to operations in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Florida. “We use it all the time—up to 60 hours some months,” Hartman says. He has been so impressed with the aircraft since […]

The tropical rain oscillates between drizzle and downpour as Bill Tapia takes the stage, ukulele in tow. He steps dexterously over electrical cords to reach his stool and, after readying his instrument and voice, begins to play for the 1,000 or so guests at the reopening gala of Waikiki’s Royal Hawaiian resort. It is clear […]

“The lifeblood of a designer is to keep things moving,” says Frank Nuovo, creative director and designer for Vertu, the high-end mobile-phone brand he launched in 1998 when he was head of design at Nokia. For the last decade, Nuovo has kept Vertu and its product line moving forward, both creatively and relentlessly. His latest […]

The last of anything—a picture show, a Mohican, or an out at Yankee Stadium—is inevitably a cue for remembrance. Now so is the 2010 Bentley Arnage Final Series, a three-ton luxury sedan with mirror-matched woods and leathers chosen by caressing hands. It is the last such luxury sedan from the company that created the luxury […]

Watching master distiller Jim McEwan in Bruichladdich’s Islay bottling hall is not unlike observing a loving parent prepare to send his children out into the world. He is attentive and protective, yet shows no anxiety when the time comes to let his whiskies go. This is true whether the Bruichladdich offspring in his care have […]

Imagine a bowl of ramen that suddenly comes to life, its tangled squiggles rising up and taking the shape of a chair. Odd though it is, this was the idea behind Noodle, one of the latest offerings from Kenneth Cobonpue, whose eponymous design firm is based on the island of Cebu in the Philippines. Noodle […]

It’s easy to drive right past the headquarters of Farbio Sports Cars, the United Kingdom’s newest—and perhaps coolest—maker of exotic cars. A wooden plaque more suited to a nature reserve than a car-manufacturing plant marks the entrance. But such a subtle sign also seems appropriate, given the facility’s location in the rolling, green Cotswold Hills, […]

If the press now delight in deriding the devils of Wall Street—those bankers or hedge-fund managers whom the public deems responsible for the ongoing financial crisis—they derived equal pleasure in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from their pillorying of that peculiar district’s “witch” for her parsimony. The Manhattan papers dubbed Henrietta “Hetty” Howland […]

A little more than a year ago, the old stone building on Yountville’s Washington Street, between Starkey Avenue and Pedroni Street, resembled the excavation of a medieval tower. And like a zealous archaeologist, its owner, Michael Polenske, led a hardhat-clad group through the hollow shell to view its exposed beams and bare dirt floors, along the […]

While navigating a dirt road in the Madikwe Game Reserve, in South Africa’s North West Province, Greg Lederle receives a call on his open-top Land Cruiser’s short-wave radio: Two lions are lying in a shaded area only yards from the electrified fence that surrounds the Molori Safari Lodge property. Lederle, a field guide and the […]

The moment tom perkins first took the helm of Maltese Falcon marked the culmination of his quest to create a new breed of mechanically sophisticated sailing superyachts. In 1999, Perkins—a venture capitalist and a former director of Hewlett-Packard—declared that he wanted to build a sailing yacht that would employ the DynaRig concept, a square-rigged sail […]

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti’s relatively modest acreage required an immodestly long time to assemble. Although the vineyard from which the domaine derives its name was first planted by the Abbey of Saint-Vivant in the early 13th century, the man responsible for shaping the entity that many collectors now regard as the world’s greatest wine producer […]