Guest Edits
Setting the backdrop to a beautiful life is the Spanish couple’s family business, dating back generations. In just over a decade, they launched their interior-design studio, Casa Muñoz, and opened Madrid’s first contemporary design gallery and store, Machado-Muñoz. Muñoz, whose family founded Casa & Jardin and Darro, leads the firm’s architectural vision, while Machado, who began his career assisting Mario Testino, is creative director. For them, the holiday spirit is the scent of quince wafting over a table set with silver, and eating Roscón de Reyes from La Duquesita in Madrid with hot chocolate, preferably while wearing Anderson & Sheppard robes
Photo: Condé Nast/Getty Images (Veruschka holding frame)
The artist, filmmaker, and self-titled “conceptual entrepreneur” has exhibited at MoMA, directed the feature-length film The African Desperate, collaborated with Prada, and shot Rihanna for a Louis Vuitton men’s campaign. Syms co-founded Golden Age, a book store, and started Dominica, an artist-book imprint. Her prolific work offers sharp, self-aware commentary on Black identity through humor, theory, and pop-culture and Internet references. Syms grew up in Altadena, California, and is based in Los Angeles. She likes her holidays laced with cyanide and lip balm
Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images (modeling Dalí eye watch)
The Buenos Aires–born creative director travels the world year-round producing photo shoots, campaigns, and zines for clients including Loewe, Range Rover, and Interview magazine. When he’s not globetrotting, Fecchino splits his time between New York City and the Connecticut countryside. For him, nothing says “the holidays” like firewood, the smell of barbecue, and a Speedo
Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/Classicstock/Alamy (swan dive)
The chef behind Comal, a Mexican-inflected restaurant on N.Y.C.’s Lower East Side, shares his secrets to a successful holiday menu, including warm plates, Mexican chilies, and love
Photos: TV Times/Future Publishing/Getty Images (Hitchcock stirring pot)
Photo: George Hurrell/John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images (Crawford)
The former fashion designer channels his artist’s eye into Somerset House, the interiors firm he co-founded with his wife, Haley Loewenthal, in 2020. This week, they open a new, 10,000-square-foot showroom in Long Island City’s Metropolitan Building, originally constructed in 1909 and now being restored as a creative hub. Part vintage gallery, part design studio, part restoration workshop, Somerset House’s new space embodies Eckstein’s eye for contrast: Italian and Danish modern alongside primitive and baroque, all under vaulted skylights and 15-foot ceilings. Here, he shares his style obsessions.
Mary Giuliani has stories. After 20 years of literally catering to New York society and Hollywood’s inner circle with her company, Mary Giuliani Catering & Events, she has seen things go down. She has the celebrity NDAs to prove it. The author of three books, including her memoir, Tiny Hot Dogs, currently being adapted for television, recently opened Storied, an aptly named event space in the former West Chelsea studio of Annie Leibovitz. Here, Giuliani shares her picks for a stylish and entertaining life
Sisters Alexandra Niakani and Davitta Niakani-Bartlow, along with her husband, chef Ryan Bartlow, opened Ernesto’s on the Lower East Side in 2019. Their fresh interpretation of classic Basque dishes created an improbable combination of neighborhood restaurant and destination dining, earning a spot on The New York Times’s Best NYC Restaurant list. Five years later, the trio is trying something similar in the West Village, where they opened Bartolo, a Madrid-style taverna, over the summer. Davitta has a design background; Alexandra, hospitality experience. Together, they shape Ernesto’s and Bartolo’s front of house. Here, the sisters share their must-haves.
Originally from Tucson, the New York City–based author writes about fashion, fame, technology, the performance of life, and other plagues of relevance-seeking modernity. She has written four books, including Surveys, Sleeveless, Artless, and the just published Grand Rapids, a novel set in early-2000s Michigan, where the narrator lives with her rich Christian aunt, works at a nursing home, and falls in love with her best girlfriend. Stagg also has a Substack called Selling Out. Her picks for of-the-moment style include a Lemaire skirt, a bottle of Pimm’s, Astier de Villatte incense, and a pair of Burberry Check slides
Photo: James Emmerman
An American from rural Virginia and a Russian from Moscow bonded over their shared love of gemology and jewelry at Phillips auction house in London. In 2016, Atherton Hanbury, the American, and Shyfrin, the Russian, founded Le Monde Béryl, a collection of shoes inspired by the traditional Venetian gondolier slipper, the riding boot, and the ballerina flat. Their designs reimagine comfortable, practical flats with an arty, modern touch. Their love of jewelry carries on in the brand’s name—beryl is the family of gemstones to which emerald and aquamarine belong. Last week, Le Monde Béryl opened its first pop-up, in Paris. Here, Atherton Hanbury and Shyfrin share their style dispatch
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