The Beauty of Small, Enclosed Spaces

Sorry for the drought of post­ings of late. Things get in the way. There’s a unique concept hotel open­ing at Gatwick in July. Modeled on the com­pact sleep­ing spaces that I have always asso­ci­ated with Asia, they provide what they term ‘cab­ins.’ The Yotel provide upscale, high qual­ity space designed around human dimensions.

Munich 1998

As the weather­man fore­casts that the tem­per­at­ure will reach its hot­test thus far this year (28C is warm enough for me), I am link­ing to the rem­nants of a trip journal to Munich dur­ing winter 1998. The HTML is a wee bit broken, but its largely there — badly scanned pho­tos and campy commentary ;-) …

How to Make an old Schloss New

(if this image is just a pretty palace, click refresh to reload the anim­ated gif and enjoy a quick look at the rebuild­ing of the schloss) I am always both fas­cin­ated and charmed to see an older build­ing lov­ingly restored and doubly so when its role is thought­fully recon­sidered and cre­at­ively re-purposed. The mag­ni­fi­cent ducal …

A Little Experiment

Answer­ing the ques­tion, what’s up with the weird look to Ran­do­mos­ity today…I am try­ing a strange Word­Press theme today using simple ASCII charters. Its actu­ally a rather com­plex theme and its sur­pris­ingly dif­fi­cult to actu­ally make Word­Press look so low-tech. The theme is called ASCII and is designed by <a href=“http://www.ensellitis.com/wordpress/asciiwp-theme/” target=“_blank””>n.design stu­dio Chris Ensell …

Memory Feedback

I happened to stumble upon (lit­er­ally — I was using the new Stumb­leThrough fea­ture of StumbleUpon) this won­der­ful Flickr col­lec­tion. In this set, Michael Hughes cap­tures a vari­ety of pop­u­lar tour­ist sites and super­im­poses souven­irs in photo in situ. What a neat concept. I am sure this opens up all sorts of won­der­ful ques­tions for …

Rumi Rocks!

When in Montreal, one must savour the fine eat­ing oppor­tun­it­ies and I am thrilled to report a gem of a spot. Rumi is a Persian/Sufi res­taur­ant loc­ated in Mile’s End at the corner of Hutchison and Fair­mount. It has a charm­ing ter­rasse and abso­lutely stun­ningly yummy food.

Classical Creativity

Down the line of totally cool fur­niture comes this rather unique objet d’something. Its called Obelisk and come from Jane et cie. Its simply cool — a set of four chairs and a table that, when stored forms a rather intriguing obeliskish fea­ture for the well turned out living room.

Jardin du Palais Royal

The Gar­dens at the Pal­ais Royal are dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent from those at the Lux­em­bourg. A grand urban court­yard, the Pal­ais Royal have been a pub­lic garden from imme­di­ately prior to the Revolu­tion. The Pal­ais Royal was owned by the Duc d’Orleans, an aris­to­crat who sought pop­u­lar appeal. As today, the court­yard was sur­roun­ded by cloistered …

The Slow Pace of Bercy Village

There’s a neat spot, a little off the beaten track, in Paris that I have some fond memor­ies of. It’s an oasis, small in scale and slow in pace. It’s not the sort of place that you find in the tour­ist dir­ect­or­ies and its not envel­oped by the legend of Paris vaca­tion­eer­ing. Bercy Vil­lage is …

The Magnificent Luxembourg Gardens

I have long wanted to jot down some thoughts about some of my favour­ite places in Paris. Mean­ing to even­tu­ally present these as an appro­pri­ately geor­e­fer­enced set with appro­pri­ate nav­ig­a­tion, for now I thought I would add them as simply blog entries. When I thought about where to start, it took me all of a …