The World of Interiors

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The World of Interiors

Contributors

Editor’s Letter • January 2024

ANTENNAE

What’s in the air this month

Longues Awaited • Daydream of daybeds, as David Lipton enjoys the thrill of the chaise

Candied Portraits • To think of cake-top flowers is to picture perfectly piped symmetry: nature neatened. This was not Natasja Sadi’s project, however, when she set about sculpting her own floral confections. Instead, the Dutch bridal-wear designer sought to capture her countless cultivars as truthfully as possible – and at all stages of vitality, from buds and brash blossoms to petal-dropping decay. The (miraculously edible) results are as rich as any Golden Age still life, reckons Tania Compton.

Stars of the Screen World • The very best room dividers should perform brilliantly and look beautiful too, either as top-of-the-bill pieces of furniture or as extras in the background. With that in mind, Gianluca Longo holds an epic casting session in Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology, where sundry celebrated Greeks and Romans provide solid cameos.

Head of the Family • Supreme in the allium clan, nubby, unprepossessing garlic has many talents: a magician in the medicine cabinet, a comforter in the cocotte and a saviour in the salad bowl. Chop it and it dances, roast it and it mellows. Daisy Garnett gets to the heart of this mercurial vegetable, and peels away the layers of its mystique.

Clove Troves • These pretty containers will keep your bulbs of garlic dark and aerated. Just as they like it, says head teacher Rose Eaglesfield

Touched by an Angel

Hang Fire

French Cuisine’s Forgotten Queen • Food writer and television personality the Countess de Toulouse-Lautrec – or Mapie, as she was affectionately known – held housewives in her thrall through the 1950s and 1960s thanks to an outspoken manner and appealing recipes for the home cook. Enjoying her camp charisma, Mitchell Owens raises a glass of vin rouge to the unjustly neglected author of the kitchen classic Good French Cooking

Root and Branch

Network • Clare Holley chooses the best merchandise and events worldwide

VISITOR’S BOOK

THE GREAT ESCAPIST • In an evocative piece of palazzo on Venice’s Giudecca Canal, Gian Carlo Bussei has imagined his rooms as the digs of a Napoleonic military officer. Indeed, ever since some 40 years ago he first employed the great decorator Renzo Mongiardino, whose fictive interiors were a calling card, this industrialist and poet has been constructing loose fantasies about his living quarters. ‘I always pretend,’ he tells Mitchell Owens.

HELICAL VEHICLES • Crawling with spiral-shelled gastropods, two Mercedes vans ply their trade along Tangier’s seafront, selling spicy snail soup to hungry locals drawn by twinkling fairy lights. Marie-France Boyer watches as (let’s call them) gastronomes shovel in these morsels coiled.

LITERARY CIRCLES • Designing the National Library of Kosovo in Pristina in the early 1970s, Andrija Mutnjaković deployed the dome as one of his fundamental forms in order to mark the Ottoman empire’s impact on the region. The architect also drew on Byzantine and Romanesque elements to conjure a distinctively Balkan take on Brutalism – and a building that divides opinion, as Bekim Ramku reports.

CITIZEN CANE • Sugar casters, matching...