One place, taken apart: how it’s put together, what was decided, and whether it holds.
Watching In the mood for love on New Year’s eve
It is level 3 in Seoul which means restaurants are only open for take-out and entertainment is all but nil. So when I found out that movie theaters were open (with capacity limits) on New Year’s eve, that’s how I was going to spend the evening in this oddest of the odd years. I was afforded two choices – Wonder woman 1984 or (to my surprise) digitally-remastered, Wong Kar Wai’s In the mood for love. It made for trouble-free decision making. If you’re a reader of these pages but haven’t seen In the mood for love, you have definitely suffered…
Loving (Kim Hwan-gi) in the time of pandemic
The Pandemic reduced my mobility to a radius of inches, not hrs in flight time. Greatest challenge I had to endure is the oppression of the mundane. Groundhog Day in this uninspiring Punxsutawney urban living in Seoul (since lockdown in Singapore I left to Seoul, first to maternal comforts of three hot meals during 2-week quarantine and then hunkered down in a service apartment). Little did I foresee this hunkering down to become months-long hibernation. ‘This great pause needs to become the great recalibration’ I heard someone say. Are you for real? ‘Relishing the day-to-day mundane’ is something we say…
K House
Way beyond Galle and past Ahangama and Matara in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka is K House, a secluded beach front property surrounded by lush Indian Ocean flora and open ocean views. It is where minimalist architecture of two villas effortlessly blend into nature and stand in comfortable distance to provide intimate privacy within. I was in Sri Lanka over an extended weekend to visit and talk-shop with the proprietors of four boutique hotels in Boosa, Galle and Ahangama but my real intent was to get to K House with as much weekend left to take in the architecture…
Yakumo Saryo – in cloud eight
My taxi ride is getting longer, going deeper into nondescript residential neighbourhood. I pass by some oppressive modernist gymnasiums of 1960 Tokyo Olympics era … and then it keeps going again. Finally I’m dropped off curb side in front of a gated residence (again nondescript) and I wonder “is this going to be another sit and eat what I’ll give you” in an underwhelmingly minimalist restaurant. I walk up the steps through a small courtyard and greeted by Sugimoto-san, in perfectly bleached chef’s robe with a mild, forced smile. I’m here on a field trip of sorts to prepare for our…
Hotel KOO – collection of seven rehabilitated machiya’s in Ootsu
KOO is a collection of seven rehabilitated machiya’s (traditional Japanese townhouses) refurbished with modern furnishings, some as private villas and others with two or three separate guest bedrooms creating 13 units in total. Japanese machiya’s are small – typically around 1,000 sq. ft – and split into two levels. Insisting on key features such as […]
Human scale of Sydney Opera House
The first time I saw Sydney Opera House was in 2000 during my first visit to Sydney and the obligatory walk down to the rocks. I still remember my first reaction at the time – ‘it’s not as a big as I imagined…’ but no less awe inspiring’. Many times had I seen the images of the UNESCO World Heritage Site which to most people around the world is the icon of Sydney. It was wildly modern – curvature of the shells floating on linear platform like large white sails contrast to deep blue waters it stood upon. So many…
Tsingpu Retreat – The Walled, Yangzhou
Sun sets and the contours of this horizontal modernist compound come to life. Architectural up-lights raise lit columns along the perimeter, down lights flush the layered brick walls and guest rooms and dining hall become punctuating light boxes. I don’t know quite how to describe Tsingpu Retreat The Walled as a hotel. It’s certainly a modernist architectural marvel which reinterprets Chinese brick housing into a low-rise, flat roofline compound walled into grid formation hotel rooms. Lyndon Neri tells me the introverted grid scheme was part of a solution to the development restrictions to preserve the structural footprint of houses that existed there. Real…
Trunk Hotel, Shibuya
It’s a common misconception for would be travellers to Tokyo that this city of super abundant creativity and modernity has numerous well-designed, boutique hotels. Well … there aren’t. There’s probably many reasons and this blog isn’t meant to be for real-estate finance mundane so I’ll curb it to a couple of inter-related reasons: prohibitive land/development cost (which forces to build ‘up’ – read many 100’s of room count) and developer’s (most of them being large real estate firms with salarymen punting risk free ideas) formulaic development approach. Resulting phenomena are either Four Seasons on top of metro stations or what…
House of Finn Juhl, Hakuba Hotel
It’s a wet late fall day in Hakuba and rain drizzles as the temperature falls in the valley. Hakuba, the site for 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, is not known for beautiful lodging options – in fact far from it – so I’m particularly delighted that a new, design minded lodge quietly opened its doors. House of Finn Juhl is usually a name given to Finn Juhl showrooms but this showroom is a hotel kind. The smallish five-room (six if you include Owner’s Room which is reserved for the four partners of the estate) lodge is a shrine to Finn Juhl…
Road to Capella di Vitaleta
Unexpected yet direly needed relief from punishing summer heat, cool northern breeze moves in on a cloudless day. Val D’Orcia in mid-summer is an utterly beautiful expanse of golden wheat fields where harvest just completed and hay rolled up neatly doting the valley. Drive up north from Bagno Vignoni and veer off right just south of San Quirico D’Orcia is three kilometres of meandering dirt road with picture perfect Tuscan mis-en-scene on either side to Capella di Vitaleta. Various shades of wheat fields are marked by cutting and subsequent ploughing and the remaining stubble and open soil create crisscrossing patterns…
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