Alessandro Michele Is the New Creative Director of Valentino

The former Gucci creative director’s designs are popular with Harry Styles and Billie Eilish.

Article by T Australia

Alessandro Michele is the new creative director of Valentino. Photograph courtesy of Valentino

Alessandro Michele has been announced as the new creative director of Valentino, taking over from Pierpaolo Piccioli who announced his departure last week.

“It’s an incredible honour for me to be welcomed at Maison Valentino,” the Italian designer said. “I feel the immense joy and the huge responsibility to join a Maison de Couture that has the word ‘beauty’ carved on a collective story, made of distinctive elegance, refinement and extreme grace.”

Michele is the former creative director of Gucci, where he gained international fame with his maximalist and gender fluid designs, adored by performers including Harry Styles and Billie Eilish.

The first collection by Michele will be presented during Paris Fashion Week – S/S 2025.

Danielle of NewJeans is the New Global Ambassador for CELINE

The K-Pop singer was born in Newcastle, Australia.

Article by T Australia

Danielle of K Pop group NewJeans has been named as the new brand ambassador for CELINE. Photo: CELINE

Australian K-Pop musician Danielle, from the South Korean girl group NewJeans, has been named as the new Global Ambassador at CELINE.

Danielle Marsh, 18, was born in Newcastle, Australia to an Australian father and a Korean mother.

Last year she voiced the character Ariel in the Korean dubbed version of the live-action adaptation of “The Little Mermaid”. 

She also signed on as a global ambassador for luxury brand Burberry and a brand ambassador for YSL Beauty.

Prince Albert II of Monaco is on a Climate Crusade

Known for its high rollers, Hollywood connections and Grand Prix, Monaco is an unlikely poster child for sustainable living.

Article by Tony Davis

The Torres Strait Islander artist Alick Tipoti (left) met Prince Albert II of Monaco on Queensland’s Badu Island to discuss plastic pollution and rising sea levels.

The first thing to say about His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco is that he is upbeat and friendly. He laughs often as his American-accented voice pours down the phone line.

The second thing is that, despite the light tone, the subject he wants to address is deadly serious. When he gives interviews, which he does rarely, it quickly becomes obvious that the 65-year-old Prince is exceedingly focused, and near-fanatical about changing the way we live.

That may seem ironic. His Mediterranean principality is almost a byword for extravagance. It’s where many of the world’s wealthiest people park their money, their superyachts and their multimillion-dollar hypercars. It’s where they play the famed tables of the Casino de Monte-Carlo, eat at lavish restaurants and shop, shop, shop.

And yet Monaco is on track for a greenhouse gas reduction of 55 per cent by 2030, using 1990 as the benchmark, and should reach carbon neutrality by 2050 or earlier. That’s particularly impressive for a place with no industry to speak of and no agriculture beyond a few rooftop vegetable gardens. The improvements have almost all come from the way Monégasques live from day
to day.

“We just want to be a good player,” says the Prince. Sure, a tiny country makes a tiny impact. “But that doesn’t mean that, at our scale, we can’t make the necessary efforts.”

Where Monaco can punch above its minimal weight (a permanent population of about 39,000 and a land area of just over two square kilometres) is in advocacy, much of it done by its passionate head of state himself. Another area is environmental philanthropy. The Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation has initiated or contributed to some 780 separate projects, at latest count, including an operation to plant 10,000 trees and shrubs on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island and restore bushfire-affected wildlife habitats.

When we speak to him, the Prince has recently returned from COP28, the UN’s yearly climate change conference. It was held in Dubai and there he reiterated Monaco’s own targets, spoke about the importance of the ocean and argued the need to replace fossil fuels. “We are way behind schedule,” he told the conference. “We need to be much more ambitious, much more decisive and much fairer in everything that all the countries, especially the big countries, have to do.”

Monaco’s own decarbonisation has been achieved with technology, education and legislation. Many businesses have signed on to additional voluntary targets. “We’ve tried to build a culture of sustainability, and I think it’s worked quite well for us,” the Prince says, pointing out such things as a ban on heating oil instituted in 2022. “There are no buildings in Monaco that are heated with domestic fuel,” he continues, describing the creation of “thalasso-thermal loops” whereby “you recover heat energy from a certain depth in the sea”. The Prince adds: “We will soon have 50 buildings that will be hooked up on these loops.”

This energy can also power air-conditioning in summer, he notes, and, together with other new heating and cooling initiatives, can cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by more than 10 per cent. The year 2024 brings a ban on plastic for certain food containers, an expansion of the principality’s electric bus fleet and further negotiations with the French railway system to add more trains for commuters travelling in and out of the principality — “which is not easy,” the Prince says with a laugh.

Prince Albert with his wife and kids.
Prince Albert with his wife, Princess Charlene, and their children, Gabriella and Jacques, at Monaco’s National Day celebrations last year. Photograph by Michael Alesi Palais princier.

Prince Albert II is a famous product of the old and new worlds, of European and Hollywood royalty. He was born in 1958 to Prince Rainier III, the ruler of Monaco from 1949 to 2005, and his wife, Princess Grace, once better known as the Academy Award-winning actress Grace Kelly, who died in 1982.

In a previous interview with this writer, at a time when President Trump was in power, Albert II said that the Trump administration’s attitude to the climate crisis was disheartening and disappointing. Now? “When you look at President Biden’s administration, I think there’s been a very good renewed commitment to addressing climate change,” he says. The appointment of John Kerry as a climate ambassador “was a very, very strong signal and a very good one”. (Kerry has since resigned.)

“Beyond the US, the international commitment to address climate change that is now showcased by world leaders is a positive step forward. COP28 is the first ever global stocktake … a clear evaluation of where the world stands when it comes to meeting the goals of the Paris agreement. It is absolutely vital that we keep to those commitments.”

He says with a second Trump administration, the US’s commitments would come into jeopardy. “We have to hope that will not happen, or that he has drastically changed his mind, which can happen as well.”

The Prince says he doesn’t want to dwell on US politics, but knows it is part of the puzzle of addressing “the alarming signals of the planet and the situation of oceans and the cryosphere” and the fear the world’s temperature rise will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius. “We just cannot let that happen, because anything beyond that, no one knows the exact consequences, but it will include even more disruptions and even more catastrophic weather events and a lot of people will suffer.

“The time for rhetoric is over,” he continues. “It’s time for collective action, especially from major countries around the world.”

Prince Albert says his interest in the environment goes back to a National Geographic poster his parents gave him as a child. It’s titled “How Man Pollutes His World” and he has kept it all these years. His environmentalism intensified when he had children of his own.

In 2011, Prince Albert married Charlene Lynette Wittstock, who represented South Africa as a swimmer at the 2000 Sydney Olympics (Albert himself competed in five Winter Olympics in bobsleigh). Twins Gabriella and Jacques were born to the couple in 2014, with Jacques becoming the Hereditary Prince despite being born shortly after his sister. That’s how the succession works and Jacques is slated to eventually lead the House of Grimaldi, which took over Monaco in 1297.

“Basically, we try to make them aware of the natural world around us,” the Prince says of the now nine-year-old twins’ environmental education. “We are blessed with having not only wonderful children, but with having places that we can escape to, like our property just up the mountain above Monaco, where there is a farm.

“We’ve kept it as natural as possible, and they have spent a lot of time there,” the Prince continues. “We’ve taken them out on the boat on little cruises around Monaco but also around Corsica and around the Mediterranean and Caribbean.”

The Prince speaking at COP28.
The Prince speaking at COP28, the United Nations’ climate summit held in Dubai

The twins completed a diving course last European summer with multiple-world-record-holding freediver Pierre Frolla, a citizen of the principality. “They’ve done a water sport course at the Yacht Club twice already, so they’re getting their hands into what it means to connect with our natural surroundings,” says the Prince.

The children also participate in World Cleanup Day with their parents. “In September we went around Monaco and picked up what little trash there was, though there were a lot of cigarette butts,” says the Prince. “I’ve been able to tell them how we can’t let trash invade our cities or our countryside or our natural surroundings. They really understand that, I think, now.”

Albert II says COP28 left him with “reasoned optimism”. “The great announcement right off the bat there, at the beginning of COP, was the formal creation of the fund to help with losses,” he says, referring to the so-called loss and damage fund to assist poorer countries affected by climate change. “Several countries are contributing, and I think more are going to join in.”

The Prince says making changes is hardest for people who are already struggling economically, adding that this is where the loss and damage fund comes in. “It’s always the least advantaged who are hit the worst, hit the hardest. [The fund] is helping people recover from extreme weather events to other problems, like droughts or floods. They are going to happen more often and with more frequency and with different intensities as well, so we have to think of those people and think of the best ways to help them.”

COP28 was derided by some, and several world leaders — including Joe Biden — didn’t attend, citing domestic issues or wars. It was also widely noted that COP28 was presided over by Dr Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and that the fossil fuel industry had sent many lobbyists. “It raises concerns,” says Albert II, “but I think, hopefully, what this COP will do is to have all these oil-producing countries think in a more sustainable way.” He adds that that might be wishful thinking, but that the COP meetings are having a bigger influence each year, with more than 90,000 people attending COP28 — and very few of them oil lobbyists in his estimation.

“Of course, we’re not going to do away with fossil fuels from one day to the next, but if everybody understands the science and the figures and the data, well, anyone in their right mind will know that we have to turn to a more sustainable way of living,” he says. “It has to make economic sense as well. And that’s why renewables have to become more attractive.

“If you invest more in renewables and if there are more renewables around, they will be more attractive,” continues the Prince. “It’s what the market dictates, unfortunately.”

Albert II believes that in many cases renewables are simply better. Monaco residents receive healthy subsidies to make the switch from petrol to electric cars. “Then there’s the great promise of hydrogen, although it won’t be tomorrow that we’ll see huge fleets of hydrogen vehicles on our roads, but it is stepping up,” he says. “Also, in the maritime transportation industry and yachting, there’s an Italian shipyard that has produced a hydrogen propulsion yacht.”

But what about the Monaco Grand Prix? The race cars are hybrids, he says, and, ironically, the air is cleanest on race day because only 20 cars are running. The traditional GP has been supplemented by a Formula E electric grand prix.

The year just past was the hottest on record, according to climate experts, and added to the trend of an increased rate of warming. The Prince says the effects are very much felt in Monaco. “The last few years we’ve had very mild winters and very dry winters … and then it seems to bypass spring and goes straight into summer-type weather. We’ve had a record number of days over 30 degrees Celsius. The temperature always used to drop in the evenings, too.” Now, “it doesn’t drop that much, and that is the concern”.

Last summer the principality came close to introducing water rationing. “There were shortages around us,” says the Prince. “So we are feeling it like everywhere else in the world, and the worrying thing is that it’s happening not only year after year, but it’s happening for longer periods during the year.”

On a more cheerful note, Monaco’s research ship, Yersin, will travel to the Solomon Islands in 2024 and possibly return to the Great Barrier Reef, in keeping with Monaco’s special interest in coral research (the Monaco Scientific Centre works closely with the Australian Institute of Marine Science). The Prince hopes to join the voyage somewhere along the way. He last visited Australia in 2018, and his work with the Torres Strait Islander artist and environmental activist Alick Tipoti became the subject of a documentary film.

The Prince says his children have been learning about Australia in their geography classes. “They’ve already asked me, ‘Daddy, when are we going to visit there?’ So that’s an extra incentive.”

If not 2024, he has been invited to watch the Australian tour of the British & Irish Lions rugby team the following year. “So we could try to make that a double whammy: environmental and then probably a little rugby as well.”

This is an extract from an article that appears in print in our seventeenth edition, Page 72 of T Australia with the headline: “The Green Prince”.

Rio de Janeiro Is a City Above It All

Rio de Janeiro is a city built on top of a jungle. Now, several local firms are creating dwellings that respect the terrain below and around them.

Article by Michael Snyder

A kitchen looking out to the jungle.The kitchen and dining area of the architect Juliana Ayako’s 2022 project Casa na Arvore (House in the Trees), which overlooks a small conservation area in a development outside Teresópolis, Brazil, 97 kilometres north of Rio de Janeiro. Photograph by Pedro Kok.

For at least half a decade, Juliana Ayako has been fascinated by a strange, slapdash house on a bare hillside that she passes when she drives from her home in Rio de Janeiro to her partner’s family farm on the outskirts of Teresópolis, a small city roughly 97 kilometres to the north. It’s nothing special, the 31-year-old architect says, at least not in any traditional sense — just a sagging prism of faded timber with a pitched roof and a narrow verandah raised over a precipitous slope on slender wooden stilts.

Still, when the opportunity arose during the pandemic to design a country house near Teresópolis, she referenced that structure. Called Casa na Arvore (or House in the Trees), Ayako’s 120-square-metre project likewise consists of a rectangular volume, built here in blush-coloured brick, with an enclosed verandah attached to its back by a rhythmic procession of slender wooden pilasters. Inside, the verandah becomes a hallway, its north-facing windows shaded by woven-palm blinds. Sliding doors lead to three bedrooms that overlook a dense tangle of fig trees and lianas — a small patch of native forest, conserved by local authorities in an otherwise cramped development. More dramatic is the house’s relationship to the ground: set on a heavy concrete platform, the dwelling juts out over the steep incline of its narrow plot; in time, Ayako says, shade-seeking plants will creep in, creating a river of green under a bridge to nowhere.

In recent years, projects like Casa na Arvore — formally simple, modest in scale, transparent in construction and reticent in their relationship to the terrain — have proliferated in and around Rio and its hinterlands, a surprising shift for a city still best known for its monumental experiments in Modernism. Beginning in the late 1930s with the construction of the Ministry of Health and Education (one of Latin America’s first large-scale Modernist buildings), Brazil, and particularly its glamorous beachfront capital, stood at the vanguard of global architecture. For the Carioca School, as Rio luminaries like Lúcio Costa, Affonso Eduardo Reidy and Oscar Niemeyer were collectively known, anything seemed achievable. They made spiral stairs float like streamers; summoned neighbourhoods from the sea (as in Copacabana, built over landfill in the 1970s); and even, in under five years in the late 1950s, conjured a new capital city, Brasília, from the dusty interior plateau, some 1,165 kilometres to the northwest. Not even the landscape could impede their vision.

But after Brasília was inaugurated as the capital in 1960, Rio slipped into crisis. It also gradually transformed into an architectural backwater, overshadowed by the brash, tectonic urbanity of São Paulo, by then the nation’s largest city. Dreamed up by the Cariocas themselves, Brasília, says the 35-year-old architect and historian Francesco Perrotta-Bosch, was more or less “the apotheosis and swansong” of Carioca architecture. By the early 2000s, he says, “the attitude in Rio was, ‘The last person to leave the city, please turn out the lights.’ ”

A prototype for pine cabins at a therapeutic retreat in Areal.
A 2022 prototype for pine cabins at a therapeutic retreat in Areal. Photograph by Pedro Kok.
Ayako's Casa na Arvore.
Ayako's Casa na Arvore, which projects out over its steep, narrow plot on a concrete pier. Photograph by Pedro Kok.

Now, a new generation of Carioca architects, most of whom are in their 30s and early 40s, are espousing a bare-bones style that looks to vernaculars both old and new, to contemporary structures from around Brazil and Latin America and even, at times, to those Modernist heroes whom their teachers would have had them forget. Builders like Ayako, Carlos Zebulun, Ana Altberg and Vitor Garcez — as well as offices like Gru.a (short for Grupo de Arquitetos), Venta and Gávea Arquitetos — increasingly work in brick, stone and wood, relying upon exposed materials and humble forms that defer to the landscape, rather than dominate it.

“There’s a phrase, ‘To step lightly on the ground’, that we like to borrow from Ailton Krenak,” Ayako says, referring to the 70-year-old activist and intellectual who recently became the first Indigenous thinker inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Letters. “That [doesn’t] necessarily mean delicate buildings or light structures,” she adds. “For me, it’s about paying attention to where you are.”

Krenak’s exhortation entered the Carioca lexicon, like so much else, through the 47-year-old architect Carla Juaçaba, whose first buildings, in the early 2000s, reinvigorated the city’s architectural scene. After Brasília, says João Masao Kamita, an architect and historian at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, “architects didn’t understand their own city anymore”. In the 1980s and ’90s, as the city invested in infrastructure, builders for the private market imported the pink granite and reflective blue glass of American postmodernism. At that time, the designers of luxury houses fell into pastiche or replicated the sweeping, seamless grace of classic Carioca Modernism.

Juaçaba’s work, by contrast, was plain yet potent in its attention to detail. Take her 2008 Varanda house in the rich Rio suburb of Itanhangá, which consists of little more than a 93-square-metre prism of glass lifted over half a metre off the ground on steel joists, its gabled metal roof split by a skylight that runs the house’s length, filling the interior space with shifting shadows. “That’s the intelligence I love in her work — the gesture that mobilises the [landscape] as part of the project,” says Pedro Varella, 36, a co-founder and a partner at Gru.a, along with his childhood friend Caio Calafate, also 36. “She leaves room for the imagination.”

A hammock inside Cabana Zero.
A hammock inside Cabana Zero, which overlooks land being replanted with native trees after years of damage from cattle farming. Photograph by Pedro Kok.

In one of their firm’s first projects, 2015’s Videiras Pavilion — an extension of a pre-existing country home in a valley 100 kilometres from Rio — a 36-square-metre structure seems to levitate over a gentle slope. Built principally from brick, metal and cumaru wood, the house looks more like a diagram than like a solid architectural object; its pitched metal roof, attached by slim steel brackets to six sturdy columns, seems like it might slip off at any moment.

For Cabana Zero, a prototype built last year at a therapeutic retreat in the hills of Areal, 48 kilometres northeast of Videiras, the architects Alziro Carvalho Neto, 42, and Felipe Rio Branco, 44, of Gávea Arquitetos, incorporated similarly elemental construction techniques. A wooden scaffold supports a pine box just big enough for a bedroom and bathroom (with no electricity or hot water), next to a 12-square-metre balcony that extends over the forest floor. Made largely from recycled timber left on-site by the previous owners, the external structure is rich in detail, featuring puzzlelike junctions of banisters and beams. Deep frames around unglazed windows double as outdoor seats. The black paint used in parts was inspired by the natural patina acquired by Indigenous palm-thatch dwellings, a resilient typology throughout Brazil that most architects, until recently, wouldn’t have considered architecture at all.

Grupo de Arquitetos’ Videiras Pavilion.
Grupo de Arquitetos’ Videiras Pavilion, completed in 2015, contains a bathroom, a sauna, a kitchen and dining and seating areas within its compact frame. Photograph by Pedro Kok.

Like most designers of their generation — like anyone who came of age in the late 20th century, amid the threats of diminishing ozone and rising sea levels — Varella and his peers know that even concrete and glass are ultimately ephemeral. You can pull a beach from the ocean, but there’s no guarantee the ocean won’t take it back. As he points out, “There’s no such thing as permanent architecture.”

In 2022, an artist and her restaurateur husband hired Gru.a to renovate a 344-square-metre apartment in the wealthy district of Gávea. In a topographical anomaly impossible virtually anywhere but Rio, the fifth-floor penthouse opens directly onto the mountainside, surrounded by forest. On their first visit to the site, Calafate and Varella were drawn to a retaining wall built against the slope, which reminded them of the school where they’d met as children — not its pompous central building but the embankment of stone and raw concrete, overgrown with maidenhair and moss.

In Gávea, the architects built a pair of walls from stone and cement that will, with time, capture seeds and spores in their craggy surfaces. They laid a pair of steel beams atop the walls that, in turn, supported a thin slab of concrete to shelter a dining table and outdoor kitchen.

From the outside, every material makes its purpose immediately known. But then there’s a single gesture that interrupts the structure’s straightforward clarity — a 1.5-metre circular aperture cut in the longer of the two walls, framing a patch of the original retaining wall, garlanded with ferns, that creates a portal between the built and natural worlds. It’s a view, however small, that demands attention.

This is an extract from an article that appears in print in our seventeenth edition, Page 40 of T Australia with the headline: “Above It All”

A Night With New York’s Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League

At the invitation-only art world games evenings, painters, gallerists, collectors and assistants mingle and compete on a level playing field.

Article by Julia Halperin

The Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League playing games.Games underway at the Valentine’s Day edition of the Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League, or L.B.B.L., held at Bortolami Gallery in New York’s TriBeCa neighborhood. Photograph by DeSean McClinton-Holland.

New York City is full of urban legends. There are the alligators that supposedly stalk the sewers. There’s the pirate who’s said to have buried treasure on Liberty Island. And then there’s the Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League.

“I’d heard whispers of this game for so long,” says the photographer Kate Owen, 35. For a year, she’d wondered where the mysterious tournament was held and who exactly was behind it. Then, on Valentine’s Day, she saw an Instagram post by the queer collective GayJoy calling for “a few more artsy gays to play backgammon” that evening. At 7:30 that night she optimistically made her way to the third floor of Bortolami, the contemporary art gallery in TriBeCa, where she’d been directed after responding to the post. “I wasn’t sure if this was going to be the game,” she says. “But as soon as I walked in, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. This is it.’”

New York’s Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League

A few dozen women, along with a handful of men and nonbinary folks, were milling around the airy space, sipping wine and rolling dice. Candlelight illuminated rows of backgammon boards atop long tables; Kylie Minogue and Destiny’s Child played in the background.

The Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League — known as L.B.B.L. for short — formed in 2017 after Ellen Swieskowski, 35, the founder of the gallery-guide app See Saw, struck up a conversation with Hester Hodde, 36, an interior designer, at the West Village lesbian bar Cubbyhole. Swieskowski had been introduced to backgammon the previous summer and had the zeal of a convert; growing up, Hodde played with her family on ski trips. “It was a fun, jokey idea to bring people together,” Swieskowski says.

The art dealer at New York’s Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League.

Over the years, the league has grown to include a range of art-world figures as well as start-up founders, architects and people from other creative industries. Every mega-gallery in New York is often represented by at least one staff member at the gatherings, which are organised via WhatsApp and typically held every five or six months. The artists Jennifer Packer, Jenna Gribbon and Sable Elyse Smith are regulars. (At an L.B.B.L. session last summer, the room was buzzing over the appearance of the then newly coupled artists Nicole Eisenman and Ambera Wellmann.)

In the highly stratified art world, L.B.B.L. is refreshingly nonhierarchical. It’s the kind of place where the influential art adviser Amy Cappellazzo, 56, might compete against a Chelsea gallery’s receptionist. Or where Kel Burchette, 26, the gallerist Larry Gagosian’s former second assistant, faces off with the prominent art dealer Stefania Bortolami, 57. “There are so many parties and events in the art world — we all dread them but we have to do them,” says Bortolami. “This is a way in which people can socialise and there’s zero pressure.”

The artist and the director of finance at the Lesbian and Bisexual Backgammon League.

Backgammon, the rules of which are explained below, is one of the world’s oldest table games. In 2004, archaeologists uncovered the earliest known version — complete with an ebony board and bone dice — in southeast Iran. King Tut was buried with a precursor to the game. In the 12th century, the Crusaders brought a version to Europe, where it became a favoured pastime for clergy and nobility. It had a resurgence in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, when Hugh Hefner held backgammon parties at the Playboy Mansion.

“There’s Turkish-style backgammon, there’s Italian,” says Ellie Rines, 35, the founder of the gallery 56 Henry and a co-organiser of the latest event (there’s no official host among the group and the responsibility rotates on an informal basis). “What straight men find really funny is the idea that lesbian backgammon is some different playing style that they don’t have access to.” While there aren’t actually any special rules for lesbian backgammon, Rines maintains that it “is kind of a perfect lesbian game — it’s very empathetic. You match the energy of the person across from you and respond to their moves.”

The founder of 56 Henry Gallery and a co-host of the tournament.

The hosts:

The evening was co-hosted by two friends who happen to be exes, Rines and Bortolami; they dated between 2017 and early 2020. In the league’s early days, Rines says she brought Bortolami to L.B.B.L. tournaments “as part of my courtship process.” On Valentine’s Day, Bortolami — who’s regarded as one of the league’s most formidable players — hung back to let a handful of original members steer the evening. After someone whistled to get the attention of the crowd, the venture capital investor Nicole Ripka, 31, laid out the rules. Players marked their progress on a printed bracket taped to the wall.

The gear:

Backgammon boards come in all shapes and sizes, from cloth versions designed to be unrolled at the beach to large wooden ones. (Burchette says she “impulsively bought a $400 board from Jonathan Adler” after she won her first game.) The board is composed of four quadrants, each with six tall triangles, or “points,” in alternating colors. The two players each get 15 checkers, called “pips,” as well as two dice and a dice cup.

A backgammon board.

The rules:

You don’t  have to be queer to attend L.B.B.L. (Rines clarifies that she is “not a lesbian anymore” and another guest was overheard saying she was “too poor right now to date women.”) To enter the tournament, all you need is an invitation from someone in the group and $30. The game is part luck and part skill, which makes it ideal for newcomers. The goal is to move all 15 of your pieces around the board, into your home quadrant (the section of the board closest to you) and then off the playing surface entirely — the first player to clear all their pieces off the board is the winner. You can move two pieces per turn and you roll the dice to see how many points forward each piece can go; if you roll two of the same number, you get to play each die twice. Players must move their pieces to an “open” point — one that is not already occupied by two or more of the opponent’s pieces. There is a certain level of gamesmanship required: It’s possible, for example, to blockade your opponent or bump one of their vulnerable pips onto the central bar between the two halves of the board, a kind of purgatory.

The betting:

At the most recent tournament, the central pot was worth $570. But side bets abound. During L.B.B.L.’s early days, Bortolami won an upgraded subscription to Swieskowski’s app See Saw worth $500. On Valentine’s Day, one backgammon neophyte, who requested to remain anonymous, asked Hodde, one of L.B.B.L.’s founders, to sweeten the pot. Hodde agreed to throw in free interior design services — but if the first-time attendee lost, she had to buy her a new pair of shoes. “We both agreed, being New York City girls, that all shoes are like $1,000 at this point — if you go to Bergdorf,” Hodde says. She won.

The venue:

Bortolami hosted the proceedings on the third floor of her gallery in TriBeCa, which is decorated with work by artists she represents. A mounted piece by the Brooklyn-based sculptor Virginia Overton made from two halves of a willow tree trunk filled one wall; a striped composition by the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren occupied another. The sophisticated setting is a far cry from the league’s original gathering place: the back of the now-shuttered East Village dive bar RPM. When art-market figures like Bortolami and Cappellazzo started coming to the sticky-floored joint, Swieskowski recalls, “Hester would have to talk to the bartender in advance and say, ‘Hey, we are having some serious people coming tonight, any chance you guys can clean the bathroom a little bit?’”

A poster showcasing the betting system.
A bowl of popcorn and some bread.
The food is typically designed for “expedience,” said Bortolami, so as not to distract from the game. Photograph by DeSean McClinton-Holland.
Bread on a board and some focaccia.
The snacks on offer included tortillas from the SoHo tapas restaurant La Boqueria and bread from the TriBeCa farm stand Rigor Hill. Photograph by DeSean McClinton-Holland.

The food and drinks:

When it comes to sustenance, “expedience” is the name of the game, according to Bortolami. On Valentine’s Day, tortillas from the SoHo tapas restaurant La Boqueria and bread from the TriBeCa farm stand Rigor Hill were on hand to soak up alcohol and keep players focused. Popcorn and chips were available for nibbling, while mezcal, La Croix, natural wine and kombucha flowed freely. Although the space is generally well stocked, the evenings are technically B.Y.O.B.B.B. — bring your own beverage and backgammon board.

The finals:

The recent tournament came down to four people: Ripka, Swieskowski, Bortolami and the architect Koray Duman, 46, one of the few men in attendance, who grew up playing backgammon in his native Turkey. In a cruel twist of fate for L.B.B.L., the man won — but he promised to spend at least some of his winnings buying drinks for his lesbian friends. Rines, speaking over the phone after the event, shared a theory about why backgammon is so beloved by the art world, or at least this corner of it: “It’s kind of the same as art dealing,” she says. “It’s about risk, placement, trying to project into an unknown future. You can travel easily with it. It includes money. It’s quick and sexy.”

A New York Apartment With a Garden in the Kitchen

When an Australian entrepreneur and their partner took over a SoHo loft, they were attracted to its classic stripped-back look, but they also aspired to make it their own.

Article by Max Berlinger

NYC Apartment with a gardenThe living room of Brock Forsblom and Jeremy Heimans’s New York apartment, renovated in collaboration with the firm Ideas of Order. The green-and-red sconce is by Gaetano Pesce, and the sculpture is a puppet from Mali wearing a gown made by Forsblom. Photograph by Blaine Davis.

When Brock Forsblom and Jeremy Heimans first saw their future apartment, “it was the SoHo loft fantasy,” says Heimans, 46, an Australian entrepreneur and nonfiction writer. With nine and a half-foot ceilings covered in mouldering pressed tin, exposed brick walls and 3,000 square feet of open living space, it evoked a bygone era in which the New York neighbourhood was a vibrant, if dilapidated, artists’ enclave. The previous owner had, in fact, lived in the apartment since 1979 and was a sculptor and, for a time, a curator at the Noguchi Museum in Queens. The rest of the former factory building, which was constructed in 1900 and at one time produced long underwear, is still inhabited by “septuagenarian artists,” Heimans says.

The couple, who met in line at an East Village coffee shop in 2009 and married six years ago, bought the place in early 2020. Though the space was “beautifully spare and minimalist” when they took it over, says Heimans, and they hoped to honor its heritage, they also wanted their new home to reflect their own personalities and preferences, which skew more maximalist. In the pair’s previous apartment, a West Village rental, almost every surface, including the curtains and bathroom ceiling, was decorated with a vibrant pattern. “The energy there was that I had a thousand ideas,” says Forsblom, 38, who until recently worked as an interior designer. To help realize their vision, Forsblom asked an old college friend, Henry Ng, 38, who was then working as an architect at the firm Foster + Partners, to oversee the renovation. Ng brought in his colleague Jacob Esocoff as a collaborator — eventually resulting in the launch of their own firm, Ideas of Order, in late 2021.

Not long after Forsblom and Heimans closed on the apartment, the pandemic hit, slowing the pace of the project. “We could really marinate in this beautiful way,” Heimans says. Forsblom and Ng would meet over Zoom to discuss their inspirations, which included the meditative feel of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto, Japan, and the colour-saturated simplicity of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán’s work. They also spent time considering the home’s spatial quirks. “It’s strange because it’s almost 200 feet long, and it was all open,” Ng says. The couple wanted some separation between different areas, while maintaining the unconventional spirit of the place. As a couple with no children, says Heimans, “We could make some decisions that were really cool and that you couldn’t make if you were being ruthlessly practical.”

That experimental approach is perhaps best expressed in the kitchen, which sits at the centre of the home. While it has elements of classic loft design — the brick walls have been painted white, brushed aluminium cabinets from the Danish company Reform highlight the apartment’s industrial past and exposed pipes run across the wood-beamed ceiling — at one end of the room is something far less expected: a small rock garden populated with moss, fluffy, low-lying ferns and a tall, slender Ming aralia tree. And above this is a large square window through which a person relaxing in the soaking tub of the primary bathroom next door can gaze at the greenery. (The couple share a love of bathing culture; Heimans, who is half-Lebanese, says it’s part of his Middle Eastern heritage, and Forsblom frequents the nearby Russian and Turkish Baths in the East Village.)

A GARDEN INSIDE A NY APT
In the kitchen, Azul Aran granite was used to create an indoor garden. Photograph by Blaine Davis.
The owners of the NYC apartment with a garden inside
Heimans, left, and Forsblom. Photograph by Blaine Davis.
Hidden behind a built-in couch made by Ideas of Order and Forsblom is a Murphy bed. A pair of 1970s Orlandini Paolo and Lucci Roberto for Elam armchairs are covered with leftover fabric from Marc Jacobs’s fall 2019 collection. Photograph by Blaine Davis.

At the east end of the apartment is a flexible dining room, office and guest room — decorated in shades of mint and bright yellow — that can be closed off by drawing a curtain that hangs across the hallway to the kitchen. A dark green marbled coffee table and a centuries-old Florentine planter have both been fitted with wheels so they can be rolled away, allowing a Murphy bed, hidden behind the built-in couch, to drop down and accommodate overnight guests. And a long wooden table can be used for work or a group dinner. In one corner, a seven-foot-tall traditional wooden sculpture from Vanuatu — Heimans’s father made a documentary about the South Pacific island nation in the 1970s — guards the door to a guest bathroom finished entirely in white tiles that suggests the interior of a space station.

The main bedroom, on the other side of the kitchen, is in a different register: decadent and moody. The walls and ceiling are covered in an emerald green wool twill salvaged from Marc Jacobs’s fall 2019 collection (most of the textiles in the home, Forsblom says, are leftovers from that collection discovered at the New York supplier Mood Fabrics). And a large rectangular window looks into the living room; with the pull of a sliding shutter — mirrored on the living room side and upholstered on the other to match the bedroom’s walls — the room becomes a dark, padded cocoon. “Given how open the rest of the apartment is,” says Heimans, “we needed at least one space that’s closed off and soft and safe.”

The NYC Apt with a garden inside.
The bedroom’s walls are upholstered in another Marc Jacobs fabric, while the headboard is covered in a textile from Dedar. The bed spread and rug were designed by Forsblom. Photography by Blain Davis.
The NYC Apt with a garden inside.
A mask by Elizabeth Garouste hangs in the hallway. The ceiling is painted in Ultramarine Blue Y3 from the Swiss company KT Color. Photography by Blaine Davis.
The NYC Apt with a garden inside.
The indoor garden, by Takata Nursery, fills the space between the kitchen and primary bathroom. Photograph by Blaine Davis.

The living room, at the home’s western end, is large and airy, bathed in shades of Barragán’s beloved vivid pink, which appears on the rug and upholstery. Wooden built-in units line the room’s perimeter, serving both as bookshelves and seating. When Forsblom and Heimans entertain, often hosting Sunday dinners for friends, the benches give the room the feeling of a 1970s conversation pit.

On the room’s south wall hangs the couple’s growing art collection, which features works by people in their social circle, including the painter Louis Fratino, Forsblom’s friend the painter Sophie Larrimore and Heimans’s brother, Ralph, a portraitist. An abstract cast-wax sculpture by the apartment’s previous owner, which she left behind as a gift, is also on display — a reminder of the home’s past. But this place is now unmistakably a testament to its current residents’ eclectic tastes and adventurous spirit: an ancient Roman mosaic welcomes guests in the small foyer, and handmade ceramics, wooden masks and other objects brought back from the pair’s travels are arranged across tables and surfaces, and even hidden among the rocks in the garden. Should they choose to leave a keepsake for a future owner one day, there’ll be no shortage of good options.