For more than two decades, Englishman David Linley had been crafting custom wood furniture for interior designers and their clients through his namesake retail shop in London (a second store opened in late 2005). Then, two years ago, he accepted his first commission to design an entire space. That space—a St. Moritz, Switzerland, penthouse in […]
While cleaning out her garage in Murrieta, Calif., last winter, Veva Haacke discovered a leather case containing century-old relics from the US Grant hotel. The items had been buried at the hotel 65 miles away in San Diego—as a time capsule by Ulysses S. Grant Jr., founder of the US Grant and the second son […]
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THE ITEMA handwritten letter that Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his wife, Mamie, on February 15, 1943. Eisenhower, who was then commander in chief of the European theater of operations and supreme commander of the Allied forces in North Africa, penned the letter four days after the War Department promoted him to full general. […]
Steuben Glass is renowned for the clear, brilliant, and flawless lead crystal that its glassmakers shape into vases, stemware, and decorative objects. Artist Jeff Zimmerman is not so finicky. The glass in his works—which include opaque trumpetlike forms that would befit a Dr. Seuss illustration and chandeliers that resemble dangling bouquets—often is marked by striations […]
During a September training session for what will be his most challenging competition, Gavin Kaysen was struggling with a crucial technique. Failing to nail it, he realized, likely would prevent him from ascending the victor’s podium. He therefore spent a day training with an expert to master the skill making a foie gras and chicken […]
After opening their 58-room Lodge at Woodloch in the Poconos town of Hawley, Pa., last summer, Ginny and John Lopis reminisced about the first American destination spas. Twenty years ago, when the couple established their consulting business, advising spa owners on everything from architecture and design to treatment menus, this country was home to only […]
Working his coa—a long-handled knife with a flat, moon-shaped blade—a jimadore hacks swordlike leaves from agave plants, revealing in each a 60-pound heart that resembles a massive pineapple. Dark from years of exposure under the hot Jalisco sun, the harvester ties the last of 10 of the piñasto a donkey before trotting the animal across […]
Throughout his visits to the Wilderness Safaris camps in southern Africa, says senior correspondent Jack Smith, he could not contain his primal sense of self-preservation. “I just found myself looking over my shoulders constantly, because you never knew where these things were coming from,” he recalls, explaining that lions, cheetahs, leopards, and other carnivorous predators […]
Many golfers have surveyed the glacial pace of play ahead of them and fantasized about building their own courses. Few have acted on the notion, and fewer still have done so on the elaborate scale wrought by businessman and auto-racing magnate Gerald Forsythe. Forsythe’s Canyata (a Native American word meaning “backwoods” and pronounced can-YAY-tuh) […]
Lorraine Schwartz arrived at a recent Christie’s jewelry auction in New York City wearing a long strand of large lavender jade beads, a chunky ivory bangle embedded with rubies, and a gray diamond floral-motif ring the size of a plum. Virtually all eyes in the room locked onto her jewels, and one admirer offered to […]
To demonstrate how well the Vectrix handles, Dana DeCosta weaves the electric maxi-scooter along a coastal road. “It’s very stable going side to side,” DeCosta, a project manager for the Massachusetts company building the vehicle, explains to me over his shoulder. “But,” he adds as he twists the throttle, “you get a pull going forward […]
It may be true that, as a BMW spokesman says, the M6 convertible will appeal to the car enthusiast who really appreciates performance, someone who also is an aficionado of airplanes, watches, and boats. Said person also might be a fan of sleeve tattoos and self-flagellation, for the M6 may be as smooth, powerful, and […]
In his Rancho Dominguez, Calif., office, Joe Gonzalez displays an exceedingly rare 1927 Packard that is one of only four surviving examples of its type. “Anyone who sees it stops and stares and doesn’t know what to say,” Gonzalez says. “This car belongs in a private collection or a museum.” It once belonged to a […]
The latest Mondial de l’Automobile—known outside of France as the Paris Motor Show—was genteel, distingué, très chic, and very French. The biennial event, which took place in October, seemed to include as many fashion models as automobiles, and they more than matched the cars’ sultry looks and sensual curves. Toutes les femmes, fresh from recent […]
Moments after the Concorde had swept past the tens of thousands of spectators gathered for the 1973 Paris Air Show finale, the similarly delta-winged and needle-nosed Tu-144 roared low over Le Bourget airfield. Suddenly the Soviet plane made a steep climb, then the nose dropped, the left wing broke off, flames flashed, and the rest […]
In the sky above the Kalahari Desert, near the Jwaneng diamond mine in south central Botswana, one occasionally may spot an airship the length of a football field. The South African company De Beers prospects for diamonds aboard the craft, an $11.5 million Zeppelin made by a subsidiary of the company that Count Ferdinand von […]
During the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet spacecraft returning from their missions landed in Siberia—and then the cosmonauts who had manned those vessels often left the sites strapped to the side of a boat. This was not just any boat. The brainchild of […]
In a building resembling an aircraft hangar, dozens of men clamber over an object as large as a house. They mount ladders and clatter across metal catwalks, carrying planks and tools and loops of wire; they kneel to sink screws or run pipes; they scrape and hammer amid the screech of sanders and the sizzle […]
Ulysse Nardin received an early, though not immediately apparent, head start in the watch industry’s recent technology race. That advantage came in 1998, when longtime collaborator Ludwig Oechslin presented CEO Rolf Schnyder with a modified antique carriage clock. Oechslin had fitted the foot-tall portable clock with an escapement of his own design, which ultimately prompted […]
If BMW motorcycles were cars, they would be Porsche 911s. Both are high-end, high-priced forms of transportation that are made in Germany and powered by horizontally opposed engines, but the comparison alludes more directly to the stubbornness of their respective makers. These days, no engineer setting out to create a great sports car would begin […]
What a difference pressing a button can make. One jab of the index finger upon the simple gray device that BMW has mounted on the steering wheel of its newest and most exclusive vehicle launches you into one possible future. It transports you to a time when you will be able to drive a car […]
Something about this Pershing 90 is different. The original 90, a black and silver convergence of a speedboat and a luxury yacht that debuted in September 2005, dazzled with its speed and aggressive-looking design. Here was a boat that produced 4,900 hp and reached 51 mph, while its combination of straight lines and soft curves […]
Venus Rising In the 1880s, in Sarnico, Italy, Ernesto Riva became the first boatbuilder to fit piston engines to boats. As the years passed, the Riva family company continued to introduce technical and design advances, first as a raceboat maker, then as a builder of pleasure boats that were embraced by jet-setters of the 1960s. […]
An interview with Nicola Bulgari cannot be contained to a q uestion-and-answer format. With his enthusiasm and candor he instantly engages me in an impromptu, fast-paced conversation. He becomes excited, he pounds the table, his blue eyes light up, particularly when I mention one of his greatest passions: American automobiles from the early 20th century. As […]
Only a truly incredible stone is given a name to mark its place in gemological history. Two years ago, a miner in Sri Lanka uncovered such a gem, a 600-plus-carat sapphire. Bulgari purchased the raw stone and delivered it to an elderly gem cutter, whose shop was by the banks of the Irrawaddy River in […]
Not far from Vumbura Plains, a posh safari camp in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, Grant Harris is wheeling his Land Rover through a herd of a dozen elephants that have emerged from behind a stand of trees. “The main thing to keep in mind is, you don’t want to get between a baby elephant and its […]
During a group visit to Kiton’s Naples, Italy, factory in 2001, one of the guests questioned whether the suit being shown was among the world’s finest. Company founder and president Ciro Paone rose from his chair and, with an air of indignation, pointed across the room at the offender before launching into a testimonial for […]
Ruckomechi Camp, Zimbabwe The grunts of hippos can be heard all day at Ruckomechi Camp, which is nestled in a large grove of acacia and mahogany trees overlooking the Zambezi River and Africa’s Great Rift Valley. The river attracts such feathered favorites as Livingstone’s flycatcher, the red-necked falcon, and the yellow-spotted nicator. The camp accommodates […]
As the lights dim at Disneyland’s Honda ASIMO Theater in Anaheim, Calif., a blue curtain rises to reveal what appears to be the set of a sitcom. A living room connects to a home office, stairs lead to a second-story hallway, and a doorway opens to an imaginary world outside, from where ASIMO, the show’s […]
In 1913, Kohler hired Frederick Jr. and John Olmsted, sons of the designer of New York’s Central Park, to devise a 50-year plan for the company’s namesake village in Wisconsin. Their blueprint for the community, which was one of the first planned garden villages in the country, called for limiting development and protecting the village […]
Sitting in a private study in the corporate offices of the company his grandfather founded in 1873, Herbert Kohler Jr. appears very much the magnate of modern industry that he is. Nevertheless, the 67-year-old chairman, CEO, and president of Kohler Co. has about him an air of a genial 19th-century burgher. “We often move slowly,” […]
Big Ben Roethlisberger no doubt wishes he had been wearing a helmet when his Suzuki Hayabusa sport bike famously met the business end of a Chrysler New Yorker last summer. But had the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback been cruising helmetless on a Honda Gold Wing—the first motorcycle equipped with an air bag—his face might not have […]
Five years ago, Honda Motor Co. engineer Michimasa Fujino wrote a technical paper in which he described a small jet with a bizarre design. At the time, engineers agreed that a jet’s engines could be mounted on its tail or beneath its wings, but you could not put them atop the wings, because they would […]
Our archetypal image of a radical is often at odds with reality, as early American history demonstrates: Revolution on this continent was fueled, initially, not by ideals heated to a fevered pitch in the murky cauldron of the proletariat, but largely on the tidy acreage and in the orderly minds of farmers, some of whom, […]
Hype suffuses the hospitality business, but the Keating hotel in San Diego is indeed—as its promoters claim—unique. The 35-room property, housed in an 1890 Romanesque Revival building in the city’s Gaslamp Quarter, is the first hotel conceived by Pininfarina Extra, the Pininfarina Group company that designs just about everything except cars. The hotel is a […]
Ciro Paone’s face beamed as he posed between a double-breasted marine blue navy suit and a morning suit that once belonged to Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor. Almost a year from the day that he acquired the duke’s suits (and other wardrobe items) in a 1998 Sotheby’s auction, Paone displayed them at the Excelsior […]
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