London: Design Grows Out of the Gritty East End
If you’re looking for cutting-edge design in London, look east. Such formerly sketchy neighborhoods as Shoreditch and Bethnal Green have, over the past few years, attracted adventuresome artists and designers. Check out the experimental furniture by German Franz West at Whitechapel Art Gallery. You can lounge on brightly colored couches and geometric lawn chairs–but don’t forget to peruse the “East London Focus map,” which highlights other galleries you won’t want to miss: Modern Art Inc., Interim Art and White Cube.
Since London is such a seriously old and seriously dense city, much of what’s new and hip has been insinuated into what was once aged and worn. Take the bar/hangout Shoreditch Electricity Showrooms. It’s been created in old industrial space, in this case–surprise!–a former electricity showroom. In Bethnal Green, hot young architect David Adjaye built a house for two artists and treated it with dark anti-graffiti paint to make it less noticeable. Instead the residence, which was originally a 19th-century timber mill, became one of London’s most talked-about edifices, the Dirty House. The big daddy of all reclamation projects has to be the Swiss architectural firm of Herzog and de Meuron’s Tate Modern Gallery carved from a humongous old power plant. While their latest building, the Stirling Award-winning Laban Dance Center, may not have been wrested from an old building, it’s located in gritty Deptford. A plastic surface of polycarbonate allows multihued light to pour into the building during the day, and at night makes it glow as if lit from within.
–Rana Foroohar
Every Night Is a Party
Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnam turns its face to the West
The vibrancy of Vietnam’s southern capital is best sought out at night, when you’re more likely to encounter the city’s languid charm than any sign of its tortured past. To sample some of Ho Chi Minh City’s new Western style, try the Underground. Located in a basement on Dong Khoi Street, the bar contains high wooden stools and shows English football matches on TV. Theme bars are also popular; the salsa club Carmen is housed in an old-style Spanish cantina, where young Vietnamese listen to a six-piece band while they sip Margaritas. Though not quite as much of a scene, the Rex Hotel’s rooftop bar is the best place to get the full feel for Saigon’s changing esthetic. It offers stunning views of some of city’s most beautiful buildings: the mammoth French-colonial Post Office and the 19th-century neo-romanesque Notre Dame Cathedral, as well as some more recent glass-and-steel additions. At the nearby Highlands Coffee Cafe, patrons sip coffee and chat on cell phones while they recount the previous night’s adventures.
There’s plenty of shopping in the city center, too–and not just at recently arrived boutiques like Gucci and Versace. On Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street, art shops sell a variety of modern and traditional landscape paintings. The food, always good, is now served in trendy settings; Quan an Ngon restaurant blends colonial, art-deco and Vietnamese architecture, and invites customers to lie on cushions to eat their pork balls and sweetened sticky corn. That way they can rest up for another night on the town.
–Joe Cochrane
Going Back to the Future
Los Angeles: The Search For Atomic Age Antiques
In L.A., it’s hard to believe that tail fins on cars are almost a half century old. The city seems still locked in the ’50s. Not the conformist, togetherness-obsessed'50s, but the Elvis-y, greasy-pompadour, Atomic Age drive-in side of the decade. Very hip, very young people prowl the groovy stores of West Side Los Angeles searching for pink and turquoise artifacts from the doo-wop days. They slip into OK to find a perfectly edited collection of ’50s dishware. LA Eyeworks offers hundreds of the hippest frames on earth. But they’re nearly upstaged by a piece of white floor-to-ceiling plastic vacu-form art. At Modernica, shoppers discover re-issued Eames chairs and chaises longues. And if they’ve got a bit more cash, they venture north to Blackman Cruz. While BC does indeed sell Eisenhower-era goodies, they tend to be superchoice, like a chandelier designed by architect John Lautner or a pair of bright yellow rubber chairs from a New York sanitarium. Before the happy shoppers head home, they often pick up some wine and Fossier champagne biscuits at Diamondstar Liquors. To celebrate their trophies? Perhaps. But it’s more likely because Diamondstar is located in a refurbished Richard Neutra building, circa 1961.
–Tara Weingarten
A Knack for Having Fun
Tallinn: At the Crossroads Between Cool and Shocking
Perched between Russia and Scandinavia, Estonia tends to combine cool Finnish clarity with Slavic shock value. Nowhere is that edgy mix clearer than in the capital of Tallinn, home to nearly one third of the country’s 1.4 million people. While boasting a perfectly preserved medieval Old Town, Tallinn is also humming with spiky new high-rises and high-tech innovation. In the Public Reading Room of the Estonian Parliament building, the lounge offers New Age chairs fused with computer monitors. The chairs are supple and inviting, but designer Martin Prn fears their future will be limited. “The computer people say they don’t make chairs, and the furniture people say the chairs are too technological,” he says.
Estonia is even shaking off half a century of Soviet occupation with grace. Tallinn’s new Occupation Museum chronicles Nazi and Soviet atrocities in a sleek glass-enclosed space, complete with solid iron doors that once slammed shut on inmates. And the city has gotten so good at enjoying itself that it’s fast becoming a destination for European “party tourists.” Who wouldn’t want to dance at a Vibe party, staged in one of the city’s vast deserted factories (and sometimes held in conjunction with the Supernoova fashion design contest)? Diners love to chill out at Bocca, with its hyperelegant interior and luscious Italian food, or the more bracingly bohemian Noku. Tucked away on one of the Old City’s loveliest back streets, it serves up hearty mock-Nordic peasant fare like fish-and-smoked-cheese sauce or pork in plum sauce. It’s supposed to be a members-only hangout, but thanks to Estonian warmth you’ll find yourself on the inside just as soon as someone with a key shows up.
–Christian Caryl
Dolce & Exclusivo Shopping
Milan: Now home to the sleekest boutiques in Europe
Since way back in the'70s, this industrial town has embraced–and flaunted–a polished modernity. Now the city’s high-end retail shops, as well as its products, are headliners. Take the “concept” emporium Corso Como 10. It has couture and home furnishings on the ground floor, a gallery and book shop upstairs, a cafe in the courtyard and some retro-’60s hotel rooms included for good measure. You can wake up in your Commes des Garcons sweater and pop right over to Gianfranco Ferre’s new Total Lifestyle Store (which includes a spa). You can probably start a fight by wearing something from competitor Dolce & Gabbana’s menswear shop–designed by Ferruccio Laviani (best known for his modern lamps) but housed in an 18th-century palazzo.
Shopped but still not dropped? Try designer Antonio Citterio’s B&B Italia, a vast glass box of a store that sells ultramodern Milanese furniture along with Australian Marc Newson’s much curvier chairs. (If you wait until spring, you can visit another Citterio project, the Hotel Bulgari.)
For a little pick-me-up, step into Cavalli Cafe, Robert Cavalli’s ultratrendy restaurant and disco, in the curving-glass and metal Branca Tower in Sempione Park. The interior features teak floors, multicolored mini-spotlights and Cavalli’s eclectic mix of animal prints, fashion photos and a winding steel bar. Outside, the Just Flower Garden offers a luminous respite: sofas, cushions and chairs under a canopy of oak trees, lit only by torches and candles.
–Dana Thomas
Reinventing Spaces
Beijing: Preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics
Caught between past and present, Beijing is constantly reinventing itself. Take Factory 798, a ’50s-era weapons factory that has been transformed into China’s coolest creative enclave. It houses artists’ lofts, studios and offices, as well as the cavernous art gallery 798 Space and the ultra-hip At Cafe, where art shows have been planned on a napkin during a caffeinated after- noon. One installation artist recently launched a show by firing artillery blanks at a wall that still reads “Long Live Chairman Mao.”
Elsewhere in the capital, Alice-in-Wonderland meets feng shui at the Green T. House restaurant, where the chairs are so tall they create private space around each table. In preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing is building its futuristic National Stadium–dubbed “the bird’s nest.” Visitors can look forward to staying in Beijing’s innovative hotel complex, Commune by the Great Wall, which uses indigenous materials. The Bamboo House, utilizing glass, bamboo and eiderdown, twinkles at night like a constellation.
–Melinda Liu and Craig Simons
Tech and Techno
Bangalore: Spiking the Old with the New
For decades Bangalore was a quaint city of red-tiled bungalows and green open spaces. But the tech boom of the 1990s turned it into India’s “Silicon Plateau.” Now, boxy glass and steel towers are rising beside old Greco-Roman facades. The software giant Infosys has built a majestic campus on the city’s outskirts, with manicured grass lawns skirting a tinted-glass facade.
With the influx of tech jobs have come young dot-commers–and a crop of nightclubs to entertain them. The owner of Spinn preserved his building’s colonial facade but gutted the interior to make way for a disco floor, a terrace restaurant and a bar bathed in dim blue light. At 13th Floor, patrons gaze out from a terrace while sipping vodka and rocking to a techno beat. For a more soothing night, head to one of Bangalore’s exquisite new tea bars, like Infinitea, which offers oolong on the rocks or setting saffron, a frothy cold brew. The drink, like the city itself, is a bit of old spiked with the new.
–Sudip Mazumdar
Eating Around the Big Apple
New York: Next, architects take on restaurants
A guide to New York design in a few hundred words? We’d only leave you hungry for more. But if you’re going to be famished, best to get yourself to one of these edgy new restaurants. In the cobble-stoned meatpacking district, Ali Tayar has designed Pop Burger, a cleverly configured beef-patty joint and stylish bar. By the pool table stands a porn booth–a tongue-in-cheek reference to the district’s sex-club past. The burger counter is framed by a backlit aluminum panel proclaiming “firm fries warm buns creamy shakes,” so maybe you should leave Aunt Nellie at home.
A bit farther downtown, in the shadow of Richard Meier’s two new luxury condo buildings in sea-green glass and concrete, sits the bar West–where only booze is served with your sunset. At Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s nouvelle-Chinese 66, Meier has designed not just the neighbor’s house but the whole interior, from the airy, Zen-like dining room to the giant fish tank. On the Lower East Side there’s the Andre Kikoski-designed Suba, a new eatery featuring a subterranean dining room surrounded by water; submerged lights cast reflections of waves onto exposed brick walls.
For a midtown meal, it has to be the just-opened Lever House Restaurant, designed by Marc Newson and across from the staid Four Seasons. Patrons walk down a jetway to enter a spaceship-like dining room. A few lucky customers get to sit in an elevated “control room” and gaze at diners below. And that’s the true New York visual pleasure: looking at other people.
–Anna Kuchment
Rooms With Quite a View
Tokyo: Roppongi Hills looks outward–and in
Standing on top of the sparkling 54-story Mori Tower in the sprawling commercial-residential complex of Roppongi Hills, commanding a view of the city at night, just might be the ultimate Tokyo experience. After the ear-popping elevators have whisked you to more than 244 meters above the bay in a mere 35 seconds, the Tokyo City View floor affords (along with a bar) an unobstructed 360-degree spectacle of twinkling lights. The floor opens at 9 a.m. and doesn’t close until 1 in the morning. Viewing the night skyline has become so popular that travel agencies now offer hotel packages called Twinkle Night and Room With a Night View.
Roppongi Hills looks pretty good inside, too. Sprinkled with outdoor sculptures (Louise Bourgeois’s 10-meter-tall spider is a popular meeting place), it aspires to be not just a high-class shopping mall but “a theme park of art,” says developer Minoru Mori. To top it off is the new Mori Art Museum (designed by American architect Richard Gluckman), which recently opened on the 52d and 53d floors of the Mori Tower. Its inaugural show features works by Picasso, Warhol, Yoko Ono and Jeff Koons, and runs through Jan. 18, 2004. So after looking outward, you can turn around and enjoy artists looking inward.
–Kay Itoi
Midnight’s Children
Paris: Art Lovers Stay Up Late and a Super-Chic Shop is Entirely Draped in White
Time can be re-designed, too. Museums–and Paris is practically a city of them–used to be open not much more than banks. But for the hip, art-hungry kids of Paris, that just won’t do. So ever since contemporary showing space Palais de Tokyo–designed by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal–opened in January 2002, it has stayed open: noon to midnight every day except Mondays. You can traverse spaces marked off by barbed wire, and navigate at night by way of dangling rice-paper lanterns.
The epicenter of cool is Colette, Paris’s first “concept” store. It has opened the door for “luxury bazaars” like the funky Surface to Air, and pushed designers to redo their boutiques. Belgian designer Martin Margiela has completely wrapped his store in white cotton cloth, including the chandelier. Push this trend a millimeter, and these shops might end up exhibits at the Palais de Tokyo.
–Alison Brooks
Cardboard Furniture
So Paulo: It May Not be Pretty but it’s Interesting
So Paulo has been called a lot of things, but no one ever called it pretty. Who would have thought that beneath the city’s ugly skyline lies one of Latin America’s most exciting design cities? A good place to start is the Pinacoteca. The museum, located in the hulking downtown, is a stately 19th-century building that has been impeccably preserved on the outside–and utterly reinvented within–by Paulo Mendes da Rocha, perhaps Brazil’s best living architect. It’s the setting for a comely collection of colonial and contemporary paintings. Next stop, Vila Madalena, Brazil’s version of Greenwich Village. One of the trendiest addresses here is Santa Gula, a restaurant-cum-bazaar with a candlelit corridor leading to a homey salon. For after-meal shopping, go to Brothers Campana, the source of some of Latin America’s most creative furniture: chairs made of scrap wood, cardboard sofas, tables tiled with shower drains. Pretty? Perhaps not. But interesting? Yes indeed.
–Mac Margolis
A Clear Sense of History
Beirut: Cocktails where the bullets once flew
Not even 14 years of civil war could keep the Lebanese from having a good time. Now, as downtown Beirut is rebuilt, the capital is developing a sophisticated sense of style. There is no more telling venue than B-108, a nightclub named after the apartment where a Lebanese musician and friends used to gather during the war to listen to music. Built near the docks, where a massacre took place early in the war, The club has a sliding roof that retracts to reveal the starry Mediterranean sky, peaceful and clear. Another restaurant, The Centrale, is located in a bullet-pocked building, until recently abandoned. A bar fitted into what looks like a pipeline, and tasty French food, has attracted hundreds of Lebanese. For more intimate fare, head to Le Chef. Cooks and diners are grouped together in one big room, with the kitchen separated by a couple of steps. Traditional home-cooked Lebanese meals are served by a father, uncle and son.
–Reem Haddad
