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In Transit Blog: A Taste of M.F.K. Fisher’s Provence

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 30 Maret 2014 | 17.35

Fans of food and history will have the opportunity to see Provence as the legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher did in the company of her grandnephew, author and editor Luke Barr.

The trip, "Return to M.F.K. Fisher's Provence,' explores a particular period in 1970 when the food writer visited southern France along with a who's-who list of seminal American culinary figures of the era including the chef Julia Child; Child's cookbook collaborator Simone Beck; the  author and cook James Beard;  and others.

The itinerary includes a number of insider experiences, including a cooking class in Julia Child's former kitchen, shopping local markets beloved by the chefs and dining in restaurants they wrote about over nine days in Nice, Aix-
en-Provence, Arles and villages between.

In his new book, "Provence, 1970," Mr. Barr, who grew up in San Francisco and regularly visited his great aunt in Sonoma County, chronicled the pivotal moment when the culinary greats assembled in Provence before returning stateside to help revolutionize American cooking.

"The trip brings the book to life in the most beautiful place there is," Mr. Barr said in a telephone interview. "It's about Americans coming to France, falling in love with the food and having epic epiphanies that they brought back to America and taught people to cook."


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T Magazine: Travel Diary | Cynthia Rowley’s Spring Break in the Other Magical Kingdom

Few schoolchildren have gotten to experience as big an adventure on their March vacation as the one the fashion designer Cynthia Rowley took her daughters on earlier this month. Gigi, 9, and Kit, 14, who have already visited 35 countries and three of the seven wonders of the world, just returned with their mom and dad, the gallery owner and writer Bill Powers, from a 10-day trip to the Kingdom of Bhutan. Rowley says the journey was inspired by a life-changing trip she took to Tibet many years ago, and the familiar itch to find "that place again that was untouched and unspoiled and where the culture's preserved."

When she arrived at the faraway Uma by COMO resort in the Paro Valley, surrounded by the familiar Himalayan mountains, she says she burst into tears. "I couldn't handle it." The trip included nerve-racking experiences like driving at high altitudes on tiny, winding mountain roads and climbing 13,000 feet to a campground before taking turns carrying Gigi back down, piggyback style, thanks to a bout of altitude sickness. But it was just what she wanted in a family adventure. "In everyday life, you know, everybody's busy and they're ships passing in the night sometimes. And so when you travel like that, you really are together." Here, she shares a few family photos from the trip.


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In Transit Blog: A Free Ride for Hotel Guests on Branded Bikes

Hotels offering bikes to their guests as a way to see the local sights isn't new, but some are now taking the concept to another level with souped-up versions of standard two-wheelers.

At 45 Park Lane in London, for example, guests have access to Brompton bicycles in the hotel's signature purple color. Le Meurice in Paris has pistachio-green bicycles with green baskets and gold bike locks.

The Gramercy Park Hotel in New York recently introduced Lorenzo Martone-designed bikes that are all white with bright red chains and "GPH" license plates. Chebeague Island Inn on Chebeague Island, Me., has L. L. Bean-designed bikes, and Montage Kapalua Bay, opening this spring on Maui, will have Panama Jack bikes in different styles and colors — each one will also have touches like bottle openers.

Besides their good looks, the best part about these bikes might be that using them is free. Misty Ewing Belles, director of public relations for Virtuoso, the luxury travel network, says that upscale properties are putting effort into how their bikes look because of the growing popularity of biking and as a way to extend their brand. "With bike shares taking off in cities, there is a desire to be more mobile in that way," she said. "Luxury hotels are recognizing this and are offering it as an attractive amenity for their guests."

A version of this article appears in print on 03/30/2014, on page TR3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Free Ride for Hotel Guests on Branded Bikes.

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In Transit Blog: In Greenland, a Safari-Style Camp

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 27 Maret 2014 | 17.36

With few tourist facilities and an ice cap that takes up about 80 percent of its land mass, Greenland is not an easy place to visit. But Natural Habitat Adventures is building a new safari-style camp on Greenland's east coast, offering a comfortable way to experience the island's remote glaciers, icebergs and mountains.

Set to begin operation in July 2015, Natural Habitat's Base Camp Greenland,  about 40 miles north of Tasiilaq, will offer twin-bedded, solar-powered tents on raised platforms accommodating 12 travelers.

Campers will have en-suite composting toilets and, in a separate bathhouse, showers. A common lodge will house a kitchen and dining room.

The eco-camp is designed to be constructed and disassembled each year, with all waste hauled out.

The camp will serve as a base for exploring the Arctic wilderness in hiking trips in the mountains and on glaciers and kayaking excursions around the wildlife-rich Sermilik Fjord.

"It's one of the most wild shorelines in all the Arctic," said Olaf Malver, chief exploratory officer of Natural Habitat, who has visited Greenland 26 times and helped scout the base camp's location. "It's a huge, quiet wilderness only interrupted by cracking icebergs," he said.

Four-night stays at the camp are the centerpiece of nine-day trips that start and end in Reykjavik, Iceland. Rates start at $8,995 per person, double occupancy.


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In Transit Blog: A Charleston Hotel With an Interest in Building

When Belmond Charleston Place invites its guests to get plastered, they're not talking about hitting the bar.

The luxury hotel is offering a Charleston Building Arts Package that includes a two-night stay with a hands-on plaster lesson at the American College of the Building Arts and admission for two to the 1808 Nathaniel Russell House to see examples of plasterwork and other traditional building arts.

Guests will begin by touring the downtown school, billed as the only liberal arts college in the country teaching traditional building arts, to learn about each of the trades taught there, including plasterwork, masonry, stone carving, timber framing, ironworking and carpentry.

Then they'll join students for an opportunity to create plasterwork as it has been done for hundreds of years, making castings (pouring plaster into molds to create designs), creating and shaping intricate crown molding and even building a plaster souvenir to take home.

The arts package, starting at $380 per night, includes a plaster lesson for one (additional lesson at $150), admission for two to the Nathaniel Russell House, two nights' accommodation and breakfast for two daily.

Plaster lessons, and some additional college sessions, are available Tuesday through Thursday mornings until April 17 (fall package dates will become available.).


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T Magazine: Now Online | Spring Travel Issue

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 25 Maret 2014 | 17.36

This spring, T is all over the map. Our travel issue visits the sun-soaked Greek island of Hydra, a place of unspoiled and beauty and automobile-free cobblestone streets that seduced Henry Miller and Leonard Cohen, and that remains a refuge for artists and intellectuals. We head to the sleepy Uruguayan fishing village of José Ignacio, where a small group of locals and expats are preserving the area's small-town vibe despite its growing reputation as a beach-lover's paradise. Out of the sun, we share the charms of one-room hotels in four different cities and the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk extols the virtues of small museums, like his own Museum of Innocence, that offer an inventiveness and personality not found in mega-institutions. Plus, a writer visits barbershops from Beijing to Beirut searching for both the perfect shave and an unforgettable experience; a 18th-century French salon gets resurrected in San Francisco; and one extreme traveler shares pages from his ink-stained passports. See more from the issue >>


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In Transit Blog: In Sarasota, a Glimpse of Japanese History

Even a traveler who has visited Japan dozens of times would have a challenging time imagining life there at the end of the 19th century, when the country was insulated from the world.

And that is one reason to visit "Picturing Japan," the exhibition of photographs taken in that era that is now on display at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla.

A photograph of a rickshaw, for example, carries the explanation that there were more 40,000 rickshaws in Japan by 1872.

Most of the pictures are by unknown photographers, although a number of others were taken by Kusakabe Kimbie, who was active between 1880 and 1890.

Some of the loveliest images are of a sacred arched bridge and another of two young women, dressed in kimonos, whispering delicately to one another.

The photographs were collected by Dr. Helga Wall-Apelt, who has been a significant donor to the Ringling Museum and whose collection was featured in another recent Ringling show of photographs of Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, also at the end of the 19th century.

The current exhibition offers works that are a cross between art and photojournalism, records of life in a particular culture, including one photograph of a man assembling a parasol by fastening oiled paper to spokes of bamboo, posed with the tools of his trade around him.

The exhibit runs through April 6.


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In Transit Blog: Walkabout: Sept. 11 Museum Opening in May; Analyzing Faces at the Airport

Walkabout

A weekly capsule of travel news curated by our writers and editors.

Sept. 11 Reflection After several lengthy delays, the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum will open to the public at the World Trade Center site on May 21. (Associated Press)

The T.S.A.'s Big Test In an effort to identify would-be terrorists, the Transportation Security Administration has spent some $1 billion training thousands of officers to examine and identify particular facial characteristics at airports. A quiz accompanies the article, where readers can try their hand at spotting liars at the security line. (The New York Times)

From Beers to Sopranos The Wetherspoon pub in Kent, England, returns to its origins as an opera house — for a day. The owner notes a "massive change to the usual clientele." (BBC)

Travel Barriers Fall While most countries still mandate traditional visas for visits from nonresidents, the number has dropped over the last few years. (Skift)


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In Transit Blog: Oil Spill Delays Cruise Departures

Several cruises departing ports in Houston and Galveston have been delayed after a barge carrying almost one million gallons of bunker fuel oil collided with a bulk carrier ship in Galveston Bay, near Texas City, Tex., on Saturday.

A ruptured tank on the barge spilled around 168,000 gallons of oil into the water, according to a release from the United States Coast Guard, which is working to contain and clean up the area.

In the meantime, passage through ship channels in the region has been halted, leaving thousands of cruise passengers stuck in port and commercial vessels queuing up in long lines to exit the Gulf of Mexico.

Three cruise ships — the Carnival Magic, the Carnival Triumph and Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas — were led from the gulf through the spill and back to their ports on Sunday and Monday morning, in order to allow passengers to disembark.

But it is still uncertain when any future voyages, including that of Princess Cruises' Caribbean Princess, which has been waiting in Houston with 3,354 passengers aboard since Saturday, would be allowed to depart.

The Coast Guard said it was working to allow partial traffic through the area to resume.

"We're very sorry that this unfortunate incident has affected our passengers' vacation plans, and we are currently looking at various itinerary scenarios based on a number of possible departure times," Princess Cruises said in a statement on Sunday.

Princess also noted that there was no official estimate of when that ship, scheduled for a seven-day cruise to Cozumel in Mexico, Roatan in Honduras, and Belize City in Belize, might be able to leave.

"We will keep our passengers updated just as soon as we have anything concrete to share. In the meantime, they are on board the ship, which is operating a full entertainment, activity and dining schedule," the statement said.

Carnival Magic's next voyage, originally scheduled to depart from Galveston on Sunday, is now expected to leave some time Monday afternoon, the company said in an email. The seven-day cruise will be shortened by one day, and guests who choose to sail will receive a prorated refund equal to one day of their cruise fare.

The Carnival Triumph is being held at a cargo pier until the Magic departs, at which point it will shift to the passenger pier and commence debarkation.

Triumph's next voyage, a five-day cruise to Mexico, is scheduled to depart late on Monday and operate according to its regularly scheduled itinerary.

Royal Caribbean's Navigator of the Seas has already boarded passengers for its next voyage, which it expects will depart Galveston some time Monday afternoon as well, Cynthia Martinez, the director of the company's global corporate communications, said in an email. If there are further delays to the seven-night voyage, guests will be compensated, she said, but the nature of the compensation will depend on how their cruise is affected.


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T Magazine: Editor’s Letter | Sentimental Journey

Written By Unknown on Senin, 24 Maret 2014 | 17.36

My mother-in-law hates to travel. As a consolation, she's turned family trips into shopping trips that over the years yielded a staggering collection of quirky egg cups and flower frogs (those things that go inside vases to hold stems in place). The search for these oddities gave her a way to enter strange places on her own terms. They led her into local shops and outdoor markets, introduced her to interesting people and gave purpose to her wanderings when her husband and children decided to hit the second or third major museum of the day.

John Freeman, the former editor of Granta, writes about how he, like my mother-in-law, seeks out a singular experience in every locale he visits: a barber shave. When an expert takes a sharp blade to Freeman's neck, he momentarily joins an informal cabal composed of local characters and their conversations, customs and idiosyncratic styles of shaving.

Travel, of course, can open our eyes to the various high points of civilization and the course of world events. Even the names we use to talk about places reflect their political histories — Myanmar or Burma, St. Petersburg or Leningrad — as Liesl Schillinger points out in "The Geopolitics of Name-Dropping."

But just as the grand sweep of history leaves the ordinary moments and regular people of a place obscured, so too can spending too much time ticking off the list of national monuments and big museums. A huge part of the pleasure of travel is seeing how other people live and broadening our understanding of them and, in turn, ourselves.

The main feature this month is a plea of passion from the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, who has taken a belief in the value and profundity of the singular, personal experience to its most poetic extreme. He believes that truth is found in everyday objects, experiences and individuals, more than in the great and powerful expressions of culture in evidence at national museums.

Pamuk's 2008 novel, "The Museum of Innocence," traces a doomed love affair set in the 1970s through the detritus of regular life: cigarette butts, matchboxes, sneakers, stockings, billboard advertisements of the day, etc. "The Museum of Innocence" is a unique literary conceit, but also a physical place called the Museum of Innocence, which the writer opened in Istanbul in 2012. For years before he even began writing his novel, he painstakingly collected the banal and innocent objects that would pass through his fictional lovers' hands. In his museum, he has artfully arranged these objects, so that, liberated from the novel, the viewer experiences the narrative of loss and obsession in a more direct way.

In the years that he cultivated this idea, first collecting, then writing, then building the museum, Pamuk traveled the world, always seeking out small personal institutions and collections. Many of us know the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, or the Phillips Collection in Washington, or the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, but there are countless more less-discovered gems like these. Small, singular places created from an obsession, a longing and the particularity of one person's vision.

Pamuk has written a manifesto on behalf of small museums, in which he claims that places like the State Hermitage Museum or the Louvre glorify the nation-state over the individual. But for him, it is only the individual who holds the truth, and is capable of expressing the depth of humanity.

As quite likely the pre-eminent connoisseur of the world's small museums, who better to recommend some of the best ones out there?

A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page M218 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Sentimental Journey.

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In Transit Blog: In Paris, Pictures at an Airport Exhibition

The wait before boarding a plane can feel interminable, but those passing through Paris's Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport have a stimulating alternative to idle perfume-testing in the tax-free zone.

(Leave it to the French to offer a last gasp of art even as you're on the brink of departure.)

Espace Musées, a diminutive museum housed in the airport's Terminal 2E, just inaugurated its third temporary exhibition. Open since late 2012, the free showcases — in English, Chinese, and French — are accessible for passengers who have checked in.

This art-amid-transportation phenomenon exists in a handful of airports worldwide to lesser degrees: The Los Angeles International Airport held Influx, a public art festival in 2013, while Athens International Airport has a permanent exhibition related to Neolithic-era archaeological artifacts.

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has a sister permanent space at Schiphol Airport featuring Dutch masters.

Espace Musées, however, offers a rotating lineup of temporary exhibitions that shuffles every six months. It's an ambitious rhythm commensurate with any cosmopolitan cultural institution. Serge Lemoine, who was president of the Musée d'Orsay from 2008-11, heads up and plans the exhibitions.

For each show, Espace Musée teams with an individual Parisian art establishment.

The inaugural exhibit was in partnership with the Rodin Museum; the second with the Dubuffet Foundation.

The newest expo, "From Le Brun to Calder: Furniture from Louis XIV to Today," is a selection of furnishings and tapestries pulled from the Mobilier National collection. Historically, it was the institution commissioned to provide lavish fixtures and tapestries for the king and his court; today, it conserves thousands of both modern and centuries-old furniture and textiles. (It runs through Sept. 17.)

Twenty pieces compare works made over four centuries. A behemoth bronze-edged set of drawers used by Louis XIV (designed by André-Charles Bulle) is juxtaposed between bright abstract tapestries by Alexander Calder and Joan Miró.

The architect Le Corbusier is here shown in flat tapestry form, the nonfigurative silhouettes from his painting "Les Musiciennes" hanging alongside the painter Charles Le Brun's muted landscape, created almost three centuries earlier.

Jean Veber's fanciful world of fairy tale characters — sleeping gnomes, roaming giants, placid unicorns — is seen on seat backs and fire screens.


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T Magazine: In the Air | To Infinity and Beyond

This season, fashion looks to the heavens, taking inspiration from both space-age design and the wondrous immensity of the night sky.

The space race, which culminated in 1969 with Apollo 11's lunar landing (top left), sparked fashion's interest in futuristic colors and synthetic materials. Take Melvin Sokolsky's 1963 image of a helmeted model hovering over the Seine in a giant plastic orb (bottom left). The designer Hussein Chalayan unveiled a similarly bubble-heavy look (top right) in 2006, while Chanel's spring couture collection (center) delivered shiny retro-futuristic dresses with bejeweled sneakers, all of which would fit right in at Terminal 3 of China's Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport (bottom right), designed by the Italian firm Studio Fuksas.

At this spring's Christian Dior haute couture show, a translucent skirt resembled a series of half-lit moons (center), while the black diamonds that cover Pomellato's Sabbia ring conjure images of a lunar surface embedded with craters (top left). Although it's impossible to ever see the texture of the moon's landscape when it's fully illuminated (right), the German scientific photographer Julius Grimm achieved that very effect in his 1888 painting "Mond" (bottom left).

The sky's the limit when it comes to celestial-inspired fashion. The Greek deity Artemis is often depicted with a crescent-moon crown, and in 1816, a production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" showed its star-covered Queen of the Night suspended from a heavenly set designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (top left). The designer and muse Loulou de la Falaise later adapted the look at her wedding party in 1977 (right), as did Catherine Deneuve's character in Jacques Demy's film "Donkey Skin" (center left). Nothing, however, reflects the majesty of a shining star like jewels, such as the diamonds in Chanel Fine Jewelry's Comète collection (bottom left) and the rhinestone headpiece worn this spring at Schiaparelli couture (center right).

Ancient civilizations worshiped the sky while later cultures tried to make sense of the stars (top left). The great Jantar Mantar observatory in New Delhi, India (bottom right), was constructed in 1724 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, who believed that the instruments of that era were too small to precisely measure time or track the positions of the stars. The earliest such tool that we know of, a Bronze Age Nebra sky disc (bottom left), was discovered in Germany in 1999, and calls to mind Line Vautrin's moonlike mirror from 1965 (top right).

Visionaries have long been fascinated by the exploration and escape inherent in the cosmos. Bringing the fantasy of space travel back down to earth, this season Versace couture showed a fully embroidered evening dress straight out of a science-fiction film (right). Less tangible but altogether more real are flights leaving from Virgin Galactic's $209 million Spaceport America terminal in New Mexico (center) later this year — something that the English poet William Blake could never have predicted when he created his 1793 engraving "I Want! I Want!" (left).

In our video, Charlotte di Carcaci discusses the influence of space on the runway and off.
A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page M250 of the NewYork edition with the headline: To Infinity and Beyond.

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In Transit Blog: Sit Back and Soak Awhile in Natural Springs

Instead of pushing traditional spa services, several hotels around the world are focusing on expanding natural hot springs on-site as a way for guests to unwind. A recent renovation at Calistoga Spa Hot Springs in Napa Valley, Calif., for example, added four mineral pools with temperatures ranging from 80 to 106 degrees.

Dunton Hot Springs, a resort in Colorado's San Juan Mountains, has five natural sulfur-free hot springs and is working on creating a sixth. The new Nayara Springs in northern Costa Rica has natural hot springs running through it, and each of its 16 private villas has a plunge pool fed by their waters.

Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts has two properties in China where natural springs are a highlight: the Banyan Tree Chongqing Beibei in the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing has a 100-degree hot spring attached to its 107 rooms and seven additional indoor and outdoor springs as part of its spa. Angsana Tengchong Hot Spring Village (another Banyan Tree) in the Yunan province has 43 mineral-based springs spread over 180,000 square feet. Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs, Calif., is in the midst of an $11 million renovation that includes adding two hot springs to its current one. The pools will be heated to 104 degrees and each will be able to accommodate at least 20 people.

Susie Ellis, the president of SpaFinder Wellness Inc., an online service that connects consumers with spas, said that soaking in hot springs is an ancient practice that's finally coming into vogue because travelers are more interested in natural treatments. "They feel good, relieve stress, and there are a lot of them around the world which are finally being tapped into," she said.

Any health benefits aside, the biggest perk of hot springs at hotels might be their affordability; most properties don't charge their guests to use them.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page TR3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Trending: Sit Back and Soak Awhile in Natural Springs.

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T Magazine: Editor’s Letter | Sentimental Journey

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 23 Maret 2014 | 17.35

My mother-in-law hates to travel. As a consolation, she's turned family trips into shopping trips that over the years yielded a staggering collection of quirky egg cups and flower frogs (those things that go inside vases to hold stems in place). The search for these oddities gave her a way to enter strange places on her own terms. They led her into local shops and outdoor markets, introduced her to interesting people and gave purpose to her wanderings when her husband and children decided to hit the second or third major museum of the day.

John Freeman, the former editor of Granta, writes about how he, like my mother-in-law, seeks out a singular experience in every locale he visits: a barber shave. When an expert takes a sharp blade to Freeman's neck, he momentarily joins an informal cabal composed of local characters and their conversations, customs and idiosyncratic styles of shaving.

Travel, of course, can open our eyes to the various high points of civilization and the course of world events. Even the names we use to talk about places reflect their political histories — Myanmar or Burma, St. Petersburg or Leningrad — as Liesl Schillinger points out in "The Geopolitics of Name-Dropping."

But just as the grand sweep of history leaves the ordinary moments and regular people of a place obscured, so too can spending too much time ticking off the list of national monuments and big museums. A huge part of the pleasure of travel is seeing how other people live and broadening our understanding of them and, in turn, ourselves.

The main feature this month is a plea of passion from the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, who has taken a belief in the value and profundity of the singular, personal experience to its most poetic extreme. He believes that truth is found in everyday objects, experiences and individuals, more than in the great and powerful expressions of culture in evidence at national museums.

Pamuk's 2008 novel, "The Museum of Innocence," traces a doomed love affair set in the 1970s through the detritus of regular life: cigarette butts, matchboxes, sneakers, stockings, billboard advertisements of the day, etc. "The Museum of Innocence" is a unique literary conceit, but also a physical place called the Museum of Innocence, which the writer opened in Istanbul in 2012. For years before he even began writing his novel, he painstakingly collected the banal and innocent objects that would pass through his fictional lovers' hands. In his museum, he has artfully arranged these objects, so that, liberated from the novel, the viewer experiences the narrative of loss and obsession in a more direct way.

In the years that he cultivated this idea, first collecting, then writing, then building the museum, Pamuk traveled the world, always seeking out small personal institutions and collections. Many of us know the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, or the Phillips Collection in Washington, or the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, but there are countless more less-discovered gems like these. Small, singular places created from an obsession, a longing and the particularity of one person's vision.

Pamuk has written a manifesto on behalf of small museums, in which he claims that places like the State Hermitage Museum or the Louvre glorify the nation-state over the individual. But for him, it is only the individual who holds the truth, and is capable of expressing the depth of humanity.

As quite likely the pre-eminent connoisseur of the world's small museums, who better to recommend some of the best ones out there?

A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page M218 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Sentimental Journey.

17.35 | 0 komentar | Read More

In Transit Blog: In Paris, Pictures at an Airport Exhibition

The wait before boarding a plane can feel interminable, but those passing through Paris's Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport have a stimulating alternative to idle perfume-testing in the tax-free zone.

(Leave it to the French to offer a last gasp of art even as you're on the brink of departure.)

Espace Musées, a diminutive museum housed in the airport's Terminal 2E, just inaugurated its third temporary exhibition. Open since late 2012, the free showcases — in English, Chinese, and French — are accessible for passengers who have checked in.

This art-amid-transportation phenomenon exists in a handful of airports worldwide to lesser degrees: The Los Angeles International Airport held Influx, a public art festival in 2013, while Athens International Airport has a permanent exhibition related to Neolithic-era archaeological artifacts.

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has a sister permanent space at Schiphol Airport featuring Dutch masters.

Espace Musées, however, offers a rotating lineup of temporary exhibitions that shuffles every six months. It's an ambitious rhythm commensurate with any cosmopolitan cultural institution. Serge Lemoine, who was president of the Musée d'Orsay from 2008-11, heads up and plans the exhibitions.

For each show, Espace Musée teams with an individual Parisian art establishment.

The inaugural exhibit was in partnership with the Rodin Museum; the second with the Dubuffet Foundation.

The newest expo, "From Le Brun to Calder: Furniture from Louis XIV to Today," is a selection of furnishings and tapestries pulled from the Mobilier National collection. Historically, it was the institution commissioned to provide lavish fixtures and tapestries for the king and his court; today, it conserves thousands of both modern and centuries-old furniture and textiles. (It runs through Sept. 17.)

Twenty pieces compare works made over four centuries. A behemoth bronze-edged set of drawers used by Louis XIV (designed by André-Charles Bulle) is juxtaposed between bright abstract tapestries by Alexander Calder and Joan Miró.

The architect Le Corbusier is here shown in flat tapestry form, the nonfigurative silhouettes from his painting "Les Musiciennes" hanging alongside the painter Charles Le Brun's muted landscape, created almost three centuries earlier.

Jean Veber's fanciful world of fairy tale characters — sleeping gnomes, roaming giants, placid unicorns — is seen on seat backs and fire screens.


17.35 | 0 komentar | Read More

T Magazine: In the Air | To Infinity and Beyond

This season, fashion looks to the heavens, taking inspiration from both space-age design and the wondrous immensity of the night sky.

The space race, which culminated in 1969 with Apollo 11's lunar landing (top left), sparked fashion's interest in futuristic colors and synthetic materials. Take Melvin Sokolsky's 1963 image of a helmeted model hovering over the Seine in a giant plastic orb (bottom left). The designer Hussein Chalayan unveiled a similarly bubble-heavy look (top right) in 2006, while Chanel's spring couture collection (center) delivered shiny retro-futuristic dresses with bejeweled sneakers, all of which would fit right in at Terminal 3 of China's Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport (bottom right), designed by the Italian firm Studio Fuksas.

At this spring's Christian Dior haute couture show, a translucent skirt resembled a series of half-lit moons (center), while the black diamonds that cover Pomellato's Sabbia ring conjure images of a lunar surface embedded with craters (top left). Although it's impossible to ever see the texture of the moon's landscape when it's fully illuminated (right), the German scientific photographer Julius Grimm achieved that very effect in his 1888 painting "Mond" (bottom left).

The sky's the limit when it comes to celestial-inspired fashion. The Greek deity Artemis is often depicted with a crescent-moon crown, and in 1816, a production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" showed its star-covered Queen of the Night suspended from a heavenly set designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (top left). The designer and muse Loulou de la Falaise later adapted the look at her wedding party in 1977 (right), as did Catherine Deneuve's character in Jacques Demy's film "Donkey Skin" (center left). Nothing, however, reflects the majesty of a shining star like jewels, such as the diamonds in Chanel Fine Jewelry's Comète collection (bottom left) and the rhinestone headpiece worn this spring at Schiaparelli couture (center right).

Ancient civilizations worshiped the sky while later cultures tried to make sense of the stars (top left). The great Jantar Mantar observatory in New Delhi, India (bottom right), was constructed in 1724 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, who believed that the instruments of that era were too small to precisely measure time or track the positions of the stars. The earliest such tool that we know of, a Bronze Age Nebra sky disc (bottom left), was discovered in Germany in 1999, and calls to mind Line Vautrin's moonlike mirror from 1965 (top right).

Visionaries have long been fascinated by the exploration and escape inherent in the cosmos. Bringing the fantasy of space travel back down to earth, this season Versace couture showed a fully embroidered evening dress straight out of a science-fiction film (right). Less tangible but altogether more real are flights leaving from Virgin Galactic's $209 million Spaceport America terminal in New Mexico (center) later this year — something that the English poet William Blake could never have predicted when he created his 1793 engraving "I Want! I Want!" (left).

In our video, Charlotte di Carcaci discusses the influence of space on the runway and off.
A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page M250 of the NewYork edition with the headline: To Infinity and Beyond.

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In Transit Blog: Sit Back and Soak Awhile in Natural Springs

Instead of pushing traditional spa services, several hotels around the world are focusing on expanding natural hot springs on-site as a way for guests to unwind. A recent renovation at Calistoga Spa Hot Springs in Napa Valley, Calif., for example, added four mineral pools with temperatures ranging from 80 to 106 degrees.

Dunton Hot Springs, a resort in Colorado's San Juan Mountains, has five natural sulfur-free hot springs and is working on creating a sixth. The new Nayara Springs in northern Costa Rica has natural hot springs running through it, and each of its 16 private villas has a plunge pool fed by their waters.

Banyan Tree Hotels and Resorts has two properties in China where natural springs are a highlight: the Banyan Tree Chongqing Beibei in the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing has a 100-degree hot spring attached to its 107 rooms and seven additional indoor and outdoor springs as part of its spa. Angsana Tengchong Hot Spring Village (another Banyan Tree) in the Yunan province has 43 mineral-based springs spread over 180,000 square feet. Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs, Calif., is in the midst of an $11 million renovation that includes adding two hot springs to its current one. The pools will be heated to 104 degrees and each will be able to accommodate at least 20 people.

Susie Ellis, the president of SpaFinder Wellness Inc., an online service that connects consumers with spas, said that soaking in hot springs is an ancient practice that's finally coming into vogue because travelers are more interested in natural treatments. "They feel good, relieve stress, and there are a lot of them around the world which are finally being tapped into," she said.

Any health benefits aside, the biggest perk of hot springs at hotels might be their affordability; most properties don't charge their guests to use them.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page TR3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Trending: Sit Back and Soak Awhile in Natural Springs.

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In Transit Blog: Biltmore, in Bloom

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 22 Maret 2014 | 17.36

Biltmore, America's largest privately owned home, will celebrate spring ceremoniously with more than 100,000 blooms coloring the estate gardens in Asheville, N.C..

The estate gardens were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (who also designed New York's Central Park) and commence with a three-mile Approach Road created to set the tone for the visit. Guests came to Biltmore using horse-drawn carriages in the late 1880s, but today any mode of transport — including capable legs — will do.

There are several gardens to take in, each with their unique varietals. The Walled Garden has the maximum concentration of tulips (around 60,000), and the Conservatory is filled with orchids from around the world. A large bass pond lies at the bottom of the estate's sloping lawns.

This year, a special glass-domed Winter Garden exhibit will open to the public for a limited time through April 6 and showcase 550 orchids inside Biltmore House itself.

Spring also kicks off a series of  activities including a big Easter egg hunt on the front lawn on April 20 (at 11 a.m. and  1  and 3 p.m.). Youngsters can tickle their feet at the weekend Grape Stomp held from 2 to 5 p.m. at Antler Hill Village. A new "Vine to Wine" tour for $85 per person gives an in-depth look into America's most-visited winery, including seasonal wines.

The "Ask a Gardener" stand in the Walled Garden during weekends can help with any flora-related questions; a "Moveable Feast" al fresco supper with live music is held to mark the end of spring on May 23 for $160 per person.

The gardens are dynamic in nature, with 60 estate gardeners using a Victorian-era technique called "bedding out" to constantly uproot flowers past their peak.

"We strive to maintain the original design that Vanderbilt wanted for his guests in the 1890s," said the director of horticulture Parker Andes, referring to George Vanderbilt. "And what he wanted was a garden of ornament. "

Admission to Biltmore during the spring celebration is $59; $29.50 for those 10 to 16.


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T Magazine: Editor’s Letter | Sentimental Journey

My mother-in-law hates to travel. As a consolation, she's turned family trips into shopping trips that over the years yielded a staggering collection of quirky egg cups and flower frogs (those things that go inside vases to hold stems in place). The search for these oddities gave her a way to enter strange places on her own terms. They led her into local shops and outdoor markets, introduced her to interesting people and gave purpose to her wanderings when her husband and children decided to hit the second or third major museum of the day.

John Freeman, the former editor of Granta, writes about how he, like my mother-in-law, seeks out a singular experience in every locale he visits: a barber shave. When an expert takes a sharp blade to Freeman's neck, he momentarily joins an informal cabal composed of local characters and their conversations, customs and idiosyncratic styles of shaving.

Travel, of course, can open our eyes to the various high points of civilization and the course of world events. Even the names we use to talk about places reflect their political histories — Myanmar or Burma, St. Petersburg or Leningrad — as Liesl Schillinger points out in "The Geopolitics of Name-Dropping."

But just as the grand sweep of history leaves the ordinary moments and regular people of a place obscured, so too can spending too much time ticking off the list of national monuments and big museums. A huge part of the pleasure of travel is seeing how other people live and broadening our understanding of them and, in turn, ourselves.

The main feature this month is a plea of passion from the Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, who has taken a belief in the value and profundity of the singular, personal experience to its most poetic extreme. He believes that truth is found in everyday objects, experiences and individuals, more than in the great and powerful expressions of culture in evidence at national museums.

Pamuk's 2008 novel, "The Museum of Innocence," traces a doomed love affair set in the 1970s through the detritus of regular life: cigarette butts, matchboxes, sneakers, stockings, billboard advertisements of the day, etc. "The Museum of Innocence" is a unique literary conceit, but also a physical place called the Museum of Innocence, which the writer opened in Istanbul in 2012. For years before he even began writing his novel, he painstakingly collected the banal and innocent objects that would pass through his fictional lovers' hands. In his museum, he has artfully arranged these objects, so that, liberated from the novel, the viewer experiences the narrative of loss and obsession in a more direct way.

In the years that he cultivated this idea, first collecting, then writing, then building the museum, Pamuk traveled the world, always seeking out small personal institutions and collections. Many of us know the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, or the Phillips Collection in Washington, or the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, but there are countless more less-discovered gems like these. Small, singular places created from an obsession, a longing and the particularity of one person's vision.

Pamuk has written a manifesto on behalf of small museums, in which he claims that places like the State Hermitage Museum or the Louvre glorify the nation-state over the individual. But for him, it is only the individual who holds the truth, and is capable of expressing the depth of humanity.

As quite likely the pre-eminent connoisseur of the world's small museums, who better to recommend some of the best ones out there?

A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page M218 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Sentimental Journey.

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In Transit Blog: In Paris, Pictures at an Airport Exhibition

The wait before boarding a plane can feel interminable, but those passing through Paris's Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport have a stimulating alternative to idle perfume-testing in the tax-free zone.

(Leave it to the French to offer a last gasp of art even as you're on the brink of departure.)

Espace Musées, a diminutive museum housed in the airport's Terminal 2E, just inaugurated its third temporary exhibition. Open since late 2012, the free showcases — in English, Chinese, and French — are accessible for passengers who have checked in.

This art-amid-transportation phenomenon exists in a handful of airports worldwide to lesser degrees: The Los Angeles International Airport held Influx, a public art festival in 2013, while Athens International Airport has a permanent exhibition related to Neolithic-era archaeological artifacts.

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has a sister permanent space at Schiphol Airport featuring Dutch masters.

Espace Musées, however, offers a rotating lineup of temporary exhibitions that shuffles every six months. It's an ambitious rhythm commensurate with any cosmopolitan cultural institution. Serge Lemoine, who was president of the Musée d'Orsay from 2008-11, heads up and plans the exhibitions.

For each show, Espace Musée teams with an individual Parisian art establishment.

The inaugural exhibit was in partnership with the Rodin Museum; the second with the Dubuffet Foundation.

The newest expo, "From Le Brun to Calder: Furniture from Louis XIV to Today," is a selection of furnishings and tapestries pulled from the Mobilier National collection. Historically, it was the institution commissioned to provide lavish fixtures and tapestries for the king and his court; today, it conserves thousands of both modern and centuries-old furniture and textiles. (It runs through Sept. 17.)

Twenty pieces compare works made over four centuries. A behemoth bronze-edged set of drawers used by Louis XIV (designed by André-Charles Bulle) is juxtaposed between bright abstract tapestries by Alexander Calder and Joan Miró.

The architect Le Corbusier is here shown in flat tapestry form, the nonfigurative silhouettes from his painting "Les Musiciennes" hanging alongside the painter Charles Le Brun's muted landscape, created almost three centuries earlier.

Jean Veber's fanciful world of fairy tale characters — sleeping gnomes, roaming giants, placid unicorns — is seen on seat backs and fire screens.


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T Magazine: In the Air | To Infinity and Beyond

This season, fashion looks to the heavens, taking inspiration from both space-age design and the wondrous immensity of the night sky.

The space race, which culminated in 1969 with Apollo 11's lunar landing (top left), sparked fashion's interest in futuristic colors and synthetic materials. Take Melvin Sokolsky's 1963 image of a helmeted model hovering over the Seine in a giant plastic orb (bottom left). The designer Hussein Chalayan unveiled a similarly bubble-heavy look (top right) in 2006, while Chanel's spring couture collection (center) delivered shiny retro-futuristic dresses with bejeweled sneakers, all of which would fit right in at Terminal 3 of China's Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport (bottom right), designed by the Italian firm Studio Fuksas.

At this spring's Christian Dior haute couture show, a translucent skirt resembled a series of half-lit moons (center), while the black diamonds that cover Pomellato's Sabbia ring conjure images of a lunar surface embedded with craters (top left). Although it's impossible to ever see the texture of the moon's landscape when it's fully illuminated (right), the German scientific photographer Julius Grimm achieved that very effect in his 1888 painting "Mond" (bottom left).

The sky's the limit when it comes to celestial-inspired fashion. The Greek deity Artemis is often depicted with a crescent-moon crown, and in 1816, a production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" showed its star-covered Queen of the Night suspended from a heavenly set designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (top left). The designer and muse Loulou de la Falaise later adapted the look at her wedding party in 1977 (right), as did Catherine Deneuve's character in Jacques Demy's film "Donkey Skin" (center left). Nothing, however, reflects the majesty of a shining star like jewels, such as the diamonds in Chanel Fine Jewelry's Comète collection (bottom left) and the rhinestone headpiece worn this spring at Schiaparelli couture (center right).

Ancient civilizations worshiped the sky while later cultures tried to make sense of the stars (top left). The great Jantar Mantar observatory in New Delhi, India (bottom right), was constructed in 1724 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, who believed that the instruments of that era were too small to precisely measure time or track the positions of the stars. The earliest such tool that we know of, a Bronze Age Nebra sky disc (bottom left), was discovered in Germany in 1999, and calls to mind Line Vautrin's moonlike mirror from 1965 (top right).

Visionaries have long been fascinated by the exploration and escape inherent in the cosmos. Bringing the fantasy of space travel back down to earth, this season Versace couture showed a fully embroidered evening dress straight out of a science-fiction film (right). Less tangible but altogether more real are flights leaving from Virgin Galactic's $209 million Spaceport America terminal in New Mexico (center) later this year — something that the English poet William Blake could never have predicted when he created his 1793 engraving "I Want! I Want!" (left).

In our video, Charlotte di Carcaci discusses the influence of space on the runway and off.
A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page M250 of the NewYork edition with the headline: To Infinity and Beyond.

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T Magazine: Feeling For | Old-Meets-New Accommodations at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 21 Maret 2014 | 17.35

Sybarites in need of an escape — and a spectacular pool to float in — should consider a visit to Copenhagen's Hotel d'Angleterre. The historic, centuries-old property was completely taken apart and reconstructed last spring, a two-year undertaking that restored many original details, including Art Nouveau cornices, fireplaces and corridors that were originally built wide enough for ladies in crinolines to pass each other comfortably. A vintage framed oil portrait of the young Queen Victoria, painted by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, hangs in the lobby, while a limited-edition Andy Warhol silkscreen of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark sits perched above the reception desk.

The guest quarters offer the same mix of old meets new. All of the rooms feature fluffy duvets and Bang & Olufsen sound systems. Many pay homage to cultural figures. (Don't miss the suite inspired by Karen Blixen, the Danish author of "Out of Africa," which comes with antlers on the wall and chairs upholstered in animal prints.) But the biggest draw is the 2,000-square-foot tile-and-marble pool, a stunning cerulean jewel nestled on the building's lower level, which was unveiled this winter. Part of the hotel's Amazing Space spa, it's a serene retreat for chilling out after taking in a treatment. A tempting choice there is the Nordic Space: a relaxing medley that involves a bath with sea salt, a body wrap and a warm Icelandic lava-stone massage with arnica and rosehip oil, followed by an invigorating facial. To which your body will say: tusind tak.

Kongens Nytorv, 34, 1050 København K, Denmark, +011-45-33-12-00-95; dangleterre.com


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In Transit Blog: Sierra Club Trips for Younger Travelers

In order to take more young people into the wilderness and bring them onto its membership rolls, the Sierra Club is offering trips (some with discounts) that it hopes will entice the 30-and-under crowd.

In addition to its usual lineup, the legacy environmental activist group with a long history of leading outdoor tours is publicizing a variety of domestic trips for younger participants, including backpacking, service trips, and multisport samplers.

Some are run by their "more youthful leaders," according to an announcement sent to members, or timed to coincide with holiday weekends, while others are tailored for anyone on a budget.

While in the past, the Sierra Club was the go-to organization for people of all ages looking to visit wild areas and learn backpacking and outdoor skills, more options are now available with sites like Meetup and the growth in the adventure travel market, said a Sierra spokesman, Jason Halal. As a result, he said, Sierra's demographics over the last couple decades have shifted toward retirees and baby boomers.

Along with younger leaders and lower prices, this year Sierra Club is offering a "Young Adventurers Fund," where those 18 to 30 can take $300 off of trips, such as a multisport sample in Hawaii and several hikes in California, including a 20s-and-30s-only outing to Yosemite that touts youthful camaraderie, vegetarian meal options, and happy hours.


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T Magazine: Small Museums

In the age of mega-institutions and competitive building, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk pays homage to the more personal places, like his own Museum of Innocence, whose character and content evoke a deeper experience.

My favorite museums tend to be small, the kind that showcase the inventiveness and the life stories of private individuals. Though I admire national museums like the Louvre or the British Museum, when I'm traveling and whenever I set foot in a new city, the first places I rush to see are not these institutions that fill me with a sense of the power of the state and of the history of its people, but those that will allow me to experience the private world and the vision of a passionate individual. I have so much respect for the efforts of those creative people who devoted the final decades of their lives to the task of turning their homes and their studios into museums for the public to visit after their deaths. These small museums are usually hidden on side streets just outside the center of large Western cities. They have the power to make us rediscover a feeling that the big national museums, looking more and more like fun-filled shopping malls with each passing day, can no longer make us feel, and that we have begun to forget. Museums must not confine themselves to showing us pictures and objects from the past; they must also convey the ambiance of the lost time from which those objects have come to us. And this can only happen through personal stories.

The newly reopened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for example, is a dazzling demonstration of the sophistication of Dutch culture and collecting, and of the creativity of contemporary museum design. But only places like the small and equally innovative Anne Frank House can be like novels in their ability to make our hearts beat faster with the emotional depth of a personal story. When we visit larger, grander museums, it is always with a commentary, a historical explanation running in the backs of our minds. But small private museums are more open to individual stories.

When I was little, I had no interest in museums. At the time, museums in Istanbul tended to look like cheerless government offices designed to exhibit and preserve archaeological artifacts, and the leftover splendors of the Ottoman era. These were boring places, little more than storerooms. During the 1990s, around the time when my books began to get published in the West, the first places I went to on my travels outside Istanbul were major museums like the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the State Hermitage. These massive and highly symbolic institutions did, of course, convey a sense of the creative energy and the wealth of history behind them. But it was only in the smaller museums that I was able to find the fragile histories of individual human beings, to experience the pleasures of that depth of meaning that results from the connection between objects and personal dramas and to feel that metaphysical sense of time that museums must be able to convey.

There is also a political side to the matter. Turning the Louvre from a private residence of the Bourbon royalty to a national museum for the people of France was a liberating transformation, both from a cultural and from a political point of view. This transformation had a democratic aspect, not unlike the move from epic histories describing the feats of kings to novels focusing on the lives of ordinary people. But in the more than 200 years that have passed since the Louvre's conversion into a museum, these large state museums have turned from catalysts for greater freedom and democratization to tourist destinations acting as symbols of state and national power. The massive, Louvre-like state museums that are being set up, at great expense, in non-Western cities like Beijing and Abu Dhabi, where individual rights and freedom of thought are often suppressed, do nothing to nurture the efforts of local artists and individuals. Instead, these monumental new structures seem to crush the area around them, overwhelming the nearby neighborhoods and the city itself, and acting as smokescreens for the crimes of authoritarian regimes.

The economic growth that we have witnessed in non-Western countries over the past 20 years has brought with it the formation of a middle class. In order to experience the personal stories that come from within these emerging, modern middle classes, what we need are not huge state museums, but small and innovative museums focusing on individuals. The ingenious developments we've seen in museums, in regard to curating and architecture over the past 20 years, can turn small museums into wonderful tools through which to investigate and express our shared humanity.

Gustave Moreau Museu, Paris

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) was an early starter among those who make plans to turn their homes into exhibitions of their own possessions. At 36, upon the death of his father, Moreau wrote across the bottom of a sketch: "I think of my death and of the fate of all those works and compositions I have taken such trouble to collect. Separately they will perish, but taken as a whole they give an idea of what kind of an artist I was and in what kind of surroundings I chose to live my dreams."

What makes this museum so unique is this sense of wholeness, that particular atmosphere that is generated from the coming together of Moreau's paintings with his sketches, his collection and his worldly possessions. This atmosphere draws me to the museum every time I go to Paris — more than his own Delacroix-inspired illustrations of mythological, historical and biblical scenes. On the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, no one will look twice at what is perhaps one of Moreau's most striking works, "Oedipus and the Sphinx," displayed there a few steps away from the van Goghs and the Cézannes. But here in Moreau's own museum, you might find that you can't get enough of his many preparatory sketches for "Oedipus and the Sphinx" and countless other drawings. In the 1930s, both André Breton and André Malraux used to go to the Gustave Moreau Museum for a taste of its particular ambiance.

Upon entering the rooms on the museum's first floor, where the painter lived with his mother and architect father for many years, we immediately become aware of a singular sense of isolation from the outside world. The writer J. K. Huysmans, known for his decadent sympathies, wrote that Moreau was "a mystic locked up at the heart of Paris." The walls are cluttered with framed paintings, photographs, family portraits, knickknacks and souvenirs, just as in the museum of Mario Praz, who was a fan of Moreau's. It is the same mood as that which characterized Napoleon III's oppressive Second Empire.

Moreau spent his last years fine-tuning his plans for turning the rooms of his home into a museum, and he also brought in copies of paintings, the originals of which were displayed in other museums. Climbing the impressive spiral staircase up to the new floors that were added when the house was turned into a museum, we reach the biggest exhibition room and experience a phenomenon that is also apparent in many of Moreau's paintings: the illusion that there is light pouring out of people and objects. The joys of smaller, personal museums don't end with the transformation of space into time, but also allow the opportunity of seeing artifacts and paintings in the context in which they were created and that brings forth their true significance. "Now that Gustave Moreau is dead, his house is to become a museum," Proust wrote, upon hearing the news of the bequest by the painter he had so frequently mentioned in his novels. "This is as it should be. Even during his lifetime a poet's house is never quite a home."


Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, Milan

When reading "War and Peace," we tend to forget that it is a historical novel. Tolstoy wrote the story slightly more than 50 years after its starting date of 1805, relying on other authors' memoirs and history books. Part of the reason why we hardly notice the 50-year gap while reading the book is that Tolstoy was very much in his element when writing scenes set in ballrooms, in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy and inside people's homes. We could say the same about the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in the center of Milan, between Via Gesù and Via Santo Spirito. This museum took on its current appearance of a 15th- or 16th-century Renaissance mansion during the 1880s, when two wealthy aristocratic brothers decided to furnish and decorate their family home in the style of a Renaissance prince's mansion. The brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi, who continued to live in the mansion with their families throughout this process of transformation, didn't merely collect Renaissance-period paintings, sculptures, tables, doors and swords, but also found and put to use all sorts of objects, from scissors and nutcrackers to candleholders, cutlery and stools. The rooms are a testament to the truth that what makes a museum unforgettable is not just the collection it houses, but also the ambiance envisaged by those who set it up.


Frederic Marès Museum, Barcelona

The Catalan sculptor Frederic Marès (1893-1991) was a truly extraordinary collector. The ground and first floors of his museum in Barcelona hold his collection of religious sculptures from old Spanish churches, which Marès assembled during the first half of the 20th century, and which I will not claim to understand. I would recommend that visitors go up as quickly as possible to the second and third floors, though, which hold a vast and stunning array of day-to-day paraphernalia and which, in today's academic discourse, would be described as a "poetic museum." Throughout his lifetime, Marès assembled incredible collections of a wide variety of objects from daily life in Spain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including playing cards, hand-held fans, scissors, matches, cigarette holders, snuffboxes and pipes. Displayed in thick-set wooden frames like cabinets of curiosities, the assembled objects — various restaurant menus, Christmas cards, photographs, postcards, views of Barcelona, miniature portraits, bouquet holders, lighters, ashtrays, calling cards — result in a stunning creation that Marès aptly termed a "sentimental museum." The unique aura created by these everyday objects and the cabinets in which they are displayed hints to a future where the efforts of passionate, visionary collectors could, through the medium of small museums, preserve the richness, the beauty and the complexity of the way we live today.


Rockox House Museum, Antwerp

Nicolaas Rockox (1560-1640) came from a wealthy Flemish family, and was a patron of the arts and a collector of artworks and coins. He was mayor of Antwerp for a time, as well as a humanist and a friend of Peter Paul Rubens, who painted portraits of him as he was posing in his house among his collections of objects, paintings and furniture. When I entered this house museum for the first time, what affected me most was the strange sense of another time. I could hear the noises of the city, the sound of a tram turning a corner and children in a nearby primary school, but at the same time, as my gaze would travel over the objects, the paintings, the furniture, the rooms, I would also feel as if I were in a completely different time. His tiny, wonderful museum, situated on a side street a stone's throw from Antwerp's main square, was not, of course, conceived as such during Rockox's lifetime. But today, this well-curated space, displaying a passionate art lover's collection in his own home, among the objects of his day-to-day life, his ornaments and his furniture, provides visitors with a deep insight into a particular culture and era, and into the private world of a man who happened to live during that period.


Mario Praz Museum, Rome

If you happen to be walking along Via Giuseppe Zanardelli in Rome, at a slight remove from the crowds of tourists in the Piazza Navona, you will come upon the Mario Praz Museum, which tends not to draw much attention from passersby, but which is a very special place that will surely figure prominently in the pages of any future book on the history of small museums.

Mario Praz (1896-1982) was a historian of art and literature. Among literary scholars and art historians, he is best known for a book translated into English as "The Romantic Agony." It is an erudite and sensible study of themes of death, sexual idiosyncrasy, Satanism, sadism and other horrors in romantic literature. In one passage Praz discusses "The Picture of Dorian Gray," claiming that Oscar Wilde failed to construct an atmosphere of anguish in that novel. This is because in the middle of the book's most horrifying passages, Wilde suddenly forgot about the plot and started to describe nearby objects — a pair of lemon-yellow gloves, for example, or a gold-latten matchbox. Praz sees this approach as decadent and superficial, and points out that the author's main interest is "decorative." Ironically, Praz's other well-known work is titled "An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration." This book is one of the best examples of the kinds of books that address the need to discover the ties that bind artists and thinkers to the places in which they live. Praz takes great pleasure in guiding us on an illustrated tour of the inner worlds of artists and writers, exploring the rooms and objects that surround them, and never failing to entertain us, to educate us and to arouse our curiosity.

He does the same in his autobiography, "The House of Life." What makes this book, which Edmund Wilson considered to be Praz's masterpiece, so unique among autobiographies is that it doesn't tell its story chronologically, but rather through the furniture and paintings that occupied the apartment where the author lived for 30 years. As the narrative moves from room to room, object to object, painting to painting, the book fills the reader with the same sort of pleasure that is to be had in a visit to a small museum guided by the sensitive and knowledgeable voice of the person who set up the museum in the first place.

In 1969, Praz moved his home and his collection from the Palazzo Ricci to their current location on the third floor of the Palazzo Primoli, and spent the rest of his life painstakingly curating this apartment that he envisaged as a posthumous museum. Those who have read his autobiography will know the sentimental value behind each object; they will remember the author's love stories, his changing emotions and how he put together his collection, piece by piece. But this wonderful museum, this wunderkammer of sorts, has the same effect on those who are unaware of the author's other works when they first set foot in the apartment, just as I was on my first visit. As we wander around its rooms, we are reminded that a museum is, above all, a place where paintings, objects, stories and sentiments engage in conversation with one another. In all museums, and not just small ones, the atmosphere that this conversation creates — the museum's overall ambiance — is much more important than the individual significance of each object.


The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul

Between 1995 and 2005, while visiting some of the small museums I have been describing in this piece, I was also nursing a dream of setting up a small museum of my own. When I first began to work on the museum, I had the same enthusiasm of people who discover novels for the first time, and are so taken by this fantastic medium that they go on to read as many more novels as they can, dreaming all the while of the novel they will one day write themselves.

Instinctively, I started collecting objects from day-to-day life in Istanbul in the 1960s and '70s, buying them from flea markets or taking them from friends and acquaintances, with the excuse that "someday I might make a weird museum out of it." An old DDT pump for mosquitoes, manufactured in Turkey; a meter like those that used to be near the left rear-view mirror of Istanbul taxis; a large, thick brass tap, of the kind I'd last seen in childhood; a locally made toy train set: All of these objects and more filled my office and my home, but while I boldly told my close friends that these things would become part of a museum collection one day, I still wasn't entirely sure who or what should be the subject of this museum.

Those inventive museum-makers who spend the last years of their lives turning their homes into museums provided the answer. In 1999, I purchased an aged and frayed four-floored little 19th-century house on a back street near my office in the poor neighborhood of Cukurcuma. If this house was going to be a museum, then the imaginary people who lived in it should use the objects that were now piling up in my office. So I began to imagine a story that fit in with the street the house was on, with the neighborhood itself, and with the objects I had collected. Over the course of eight years, this story evolved into a novel, rewritten over and over again as I found new things to display in the museum, until it was finally published in Istanbul in 2008, and in English in 2009 under the title "The Museum of Innocence."

At first I picked up things from nearby markets and used bookstores because they caught my eye. But later, I saw in my mind's eye a love story that would connect all of these objects. Kemal Basmaci, from the Nisantasi neighborhood where I was born and raised, and from a well-off family similar to mine, is soon to be married to the right kind of girl, until he falls in love with Fusun, a girl who wants to be a film star and who is the daughter of a distant relative who works as a seamstress. As this love turns into obsession, Kemal spends the next seven years visiting Fusun — who is married to someone else — and her family in their home, which he will eventually transform into a museum dedicated to her.

The fundamental difference between the Museum of Innocence and the other small museums that have inspired me is the fact that, unlike Gustave Moreau or Mario Praz, the people whose objects and images we look at in this museum are not real, but fictional. I love to see visitors tricked by the reality of the imaginary characters' slippers, playing cards, cutlery, ID cards and even their cigarette butts, to the extent that they forget that the characters in the novel are invented. And whether they've read the novel or not, I'm always glad to see visitors discovering firsthand that what is being displayed in this museum is not simply the plot of a novel, but a particular mood, an atmosphere created by objects. And when they ask me why I've set up this kind of museum, I respond that it is because I love small museums that bring out our individuality.

Text translated by Ekin Oklap


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T Magazine: Art Matters | The Thing About Noah and the Ark

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 20 Maret 2014 | 17.35

Darren Aronofsky explains why he decided to take on the fantastical Bible story in his new film and curate an art show about it.

When I asked Russell Crowe to star in "Noah," I promised him one thing: I would never shoot him standing on the bow of a houseboat with two giraffes sticking up behind him. That's the image most people have of Noah and the ark and I didn't want to give audiences what they were expecting. I wanted to break the clichéd preconceptions we have from children's toys, adverts, 1950s biblical epics and even much of the religious art of the last two millennia: the old man in a robe and sandals with a long white beard preaching in some Judean desert. I wanted Noah's story to feel fresh, immediate and real. So when my team and I started to imagine how to bring the prediluvian era to life, we threw away all the tropes and returned to the Bible.

In Genesis we found many hints of a world very different from what is commonly portrayed. For instance, giant fallen angels called the Nephilim walked the planet. How would we bring them to life? There were no rainbows before the floodwaters drained, so how do we know the sky was even blue? Men could live so long that Methusaleh was 369 years old when his grandson Noah was born but didn't die until hundreds of years after Noah's birth. Later in the Bible, mighty beasts, leviathans and behemoths ranged over land and sea. This didn't sound like ancient Judea. It sounded like something much grander and less familiar. Here was a mythological world potentially as distinct as Middle Earth: a biblical, fantastical world.

We realized that if we listened to the original text we would find a blueprint for a Noah story that was unique and unexpected. For instance, returning to the ark: When you look in Genesis, you find exact measurements for a big rectangular box, a giant coffin. It makes perfect sense. The ark didn't need a curved hull of planed wood with a pointed bow and stern. The world was entirely covered with water and there was no need to steer and nowhere to go. So we created the rectangular-shaped ark for the film, biblically accurate down to the last cubit.

Next we had to answer, what did the first rainbow look like? How do you truly represent the cornucopia of the animal kingdom? And how do you unleash the "fountains of the deep"? These visual challenges inspired us to dream big for the silver screen.

I was curious what other minds would come up with if they tried to represent the original story. So I decided to reach out to my favorite artists and ask each of them to return to Genesis and create something in his or her own medium. The response was overwhelming. It was interesting how most turned their backs on the comedic, folk-tale-like rendition of Noah and found the darkness in the story. I guess that is because, after all, it is the first apocalypse story. Even though it is a story of hope, family and second chances, it is also a story filled with great destruction and misery: For every pair that survived, there were countless other creatures on the planet that drowned during the deluge, innocent and wicked alike.


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T Magazine: Legacy | If These Walls Could Talk

The restoration of a storied French neo-Classical salon reveals as much about polite society as it does about high design.

An extraordinary scene has been playing out at San Francisco's Legion of Honor museum over the last year. Through a window installed into a temporary wall, conservators in lab coats can be viewed as they minister over the disassembled pieces of one of the finest examples of French neo-Classical interior architecture anywhere: the Salon Doré, originally constructed in 1781. The $2 million restoration of the roughly 25-square-foot room — four walls of gilded and light-gray-painted paneling — is now nearly complete; and when it is done, one of the most remarkable chapters in its rather eventful, nearly 250-year history will conclude as well.

There are well-conceived examples of French period rooms in this country at the Getty in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and, most notably, the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But the Salon Doré is different. The room will be presented by the curator Martin Chapman as a complete environment, furnished as it originally was when new, rather than simply as a backdrop for important objects. Used in the 18th century as a salon de compagnie — a receiving space for guests — it was specifically designed as what was essentially a stage for conversation conducted in a state of high alertness on small, leggy upright chairs arranged in a semicircle. There was no question of being offered a drink or told to make oneself comfortable, as in the basic rites of entertaining today. The idea of "comfort" did not enter the social life of the French aristocracy for almost another hundred years (when it did so in the form of the deeply tufted upholstery of Napoleon III). Like the plan of a church — with nave and side aisles laid out to support a liturgical program — a room of this sort was arranged to allow nobles higher in rank (and senior in age) to be received by the hostess and seated closest to the fire. New arrivals — who understood the protocols on sight — greeted the assemblage and took their position, or perhaps remained standing. In this room you were expected to know your place, sit up straight and converse like Molière.

Neo-Classicism as a style made its real debut in the 1760s after several stillbirths. At first a chunky and awkward experiment in the resurrection of Greek and Roman forms, inspired by archeological discoveries like the temples of Paestum in southern Italy, it was equally a response to the relentless curves of the Baroque and Rococo that had been in style for decades. By the late 1770s, neo-Classicism had evolved into the graceful iteration we see in the Salon, and with its references to the classical world acquired a new and somewhat unanticipated meaning in the bargain: It gave form and image to democratic political ideals.

This was the architecture Jefferson so loved when he lived in Paris as the United States ambassador in the late 1780s. He was fascinated by the Hôtel de Salm, which, in a curious twist of fate, was both the residence of the brother of the original owner of the Salon Doré and the prototype for the museum that now houses it. The fact that this architectural vocabulary was given its most perfect expression by a society that toyed with it as stage design for Bourbon court life — yet was about to be swept away by the very principles to which it paid homage — was an irony not yet manifest.

The Salon is easy to recognize as a beautiful interior of art-historical significance, but to fully appreciate its poetry, you also have to understand the journey it has made to end up in Northern California. The paneling was given to the Legion of Honor by Richard Rheem, a Bay Area manufacturer of HVAC equipment, in 1959. Rheem had bought it from the art dealership Duveen Brothers under the impression that it came from the Hôtel de Crillon — an important but entirely spurious provenance. Duveen had purchased it from the widow of Otto H. Kahn after the financier's death in 1934. Kahn's residential portfolio is legendary — he was, after all, the prototype for the Monopoly Man — and the room had been a jewel at the center of his house in New York, which still exists today as the Convent of the Sacred Heart girls' school. How and from whom Kahn acquired the Salon Doré is not known for certain, but he was its first owner in the New World.

While still in Paris, the Salon Doré was rescued from the demolition of the Hôtel d'Humières in 1905. This event attracted great attention at the time; after all the losses incurred by Haussmann's urban reconstruction of the 1870s, one of the most important surviving 18th-century townhouses was being destroyed to construct an apartment building. (Many assume Paris has always appeared as it does today, but this was one of their Pennsylvania Station moments.) In looking at archives in the Rothschild country house Waddesdon Manor, where much of the other paneling from the Hôtel d'Humières now resides, architectural historian Bruno Pons discovered the Salon's true origin in the long-vanished Hôtel de La Trémoille — which was demolished in 1877 to accommodate an extension of the Boulevard St.-Germain. So the Salon Doré escaped destruction in the Revolution of 1789, emerged unscathed from Haussmann's boulevard-cutting swath of 1877 and was not damaged by the profiteering apartment-house developers of 1905 — twice faring better than the buildings that housed it. All before leaving for America, where it continued to move at least four more times. The room is not only a masterpiece, but a remarkable survivor.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page M286 of the NewYork edition with the headline: If These Walls Could Talk.

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In Transit Blog: A New Cruise on the Loire

Europe's booming river cruise industry has set its sights on the Loire in France, where the M.S. Loire Princesse, the first riverboat with overnight cabins to cruise this river, will launch next year.

Though the Loire's shallow waters have kept larger vessels from being able to navigate the river, CroisiEurope recently unveiled plans to build a sleek new paddle-wheel boat, which requires less draft, to circumvent the issue. It will be the first paddle-wheel to join the company's fleet of almost 40 riverboats.

The 300-foot, three-deck cruiser is to feature a contemporary, ecologically friendly design, with space to accommodate almost 100 passengers, along with a full-size dance floor, lounge, restaurant and balconied cabins.

The company also plans to outfit the ship with amenities like Wi-Fi and individually operated heating and air-conditioning units in each cabin.

"CroisiEurope has been in business for almost 40 years and is constantly trying to innovate new itineraries to add to its repertoire," Michel Grimm, the company's international sales director, said in an email.

And though it did have to meet many new technical and environmental requirements, the company was compelled to build a vessel that could operate in the Loire overnight in order to make the region's specific "cultural experiences" available to its clients, he added.

The ship's six- to eight-day cruises will travel the Pays de la Loire region of France beginning in April 2015, making stops in the communes of Ancenis, Saumur and Bouchemaine, as well as the cities of Angers and Nantes, to visit historic chateaus and Unesco World Heritage sites.


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In Transit Blog: North Carolina Beer Month Is Near

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 19 Maret 2014 | 17.35

North Carolina Beer Month, celebrating the state's 100 breweries and scheduled for April, is going to get an early start.

On March 29, White Street Brewing in Wake Forest hosts NC Brewers Collaborative, featuring barrel-aged and wild ales from breweries around the state, plus panel discussions on barrel-aging and the latest trends in the state, which is ranked 10th nationwide in the number of breweries, with the most of any state east of Texas and south of Pennsylvania.

Events planned throughout April include beer dinners, new brew releases and lodging specials, along with mountain getaway discounts in Brevard, to the west.

In Kinston, in the eastern part of the state, Beer Weekend, April 3 to 5, features a beer dinner at Chef & the Farmer with Mother Earth Brewing, a Brews Cruise down the Neuse River, and a downtown Barbecue, Oysters & Beer Bash.

Two celebrations take place April 26: the all-local Brewgaloo Festival in Raleigh and, a few hours to the west, Hickory Hops hosts some 55 North Carolina microbreweries and the Carolinas Championship of Beer.

At the end of the month, the winner of the Brewmaster Experience Sweepstakes will get two nights at Aloft Charlotte Uptown, a $500 Visa gift card and two days working with staff at NoDa Brewing Co. to create a 10-gallon batch of beer for its NoDable series.


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T Magazine: By Design | One-Room Hotels

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 18 Maret 2014 | 17.35

When it comes to providing the experience of a home away from home, very little can go a very long way.

LONDON From its improbable timber perch above the River Thames, A Room for London, Living Architecture's bookable, one-bedroom "boat," offers unparalleled city views. It's equipped with a small kitchenette containing David Mellor dishware, a library filled with travel-centric titles (including a few versions of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," the project's inspiration) and a logbook that reads like a who's who of international culture. The musician Imogen Heap wrote and performed a song onboard, and the Scottish poet Ryan Van Winkle will host one-on-one readings there in July. From $500 per night.


SHANGHAI Tucked away in a former police headquarters in the bustling Jing'an district, D.R.Home is a minimalist's dream: an airy 2,153-square-foot suite outfitted with antique candelabras, a Philipp Mainzer bed and an iconic BD Barcelona table. The colonial red-brick building, extended with glass and steel, also houses shops and a buzzy tapas bar designed by the Chinese architecture duo Neri & Hu. The room is typically reserved for events, but can be booked for private occasions. Upon waking up, a resident chef will come and cook breakfast. From $8,195 per night.


COPENHAGEN Between its two floors in the hip Vesterbro district, each measuring a mere 130 square feet, the Central Hotel & Cafe encapsulates the uniquely Danish concept of hygge (loose translation: coziness). The hotel's only room was originally built in 1920 as a shoemaker's garret — his workshop has since been reborn as a five-seat bistro at ground level — and while it opened last summer equipped with a flat-screen TV, a minibar and an iPhone, its charm lies in the old-meets-new details. Its co-owner, the former film set designer Leif Thingtved, handcrafted the furnishings from salvaged oak, adding vintage English wallpaper along with locally made Geismars linens. From $330 per night.


PRAGUE A Communist-era TV tower isn't the likeliest site for an exclusive lodging, but that's precisely what the One Room Hotel, by Tower Park Praha, has become: a spacious, concrete-and-steel cabin fitted out with Vitra furniture and a Philippe Starck tub that hovers 230 feet above the City of a Thousand Spires. Floor-to-ceiling windows? Twenty-four-hour butler service? A bottle of Moët upon arrival? Check, check and cheers. When the complimentary minibar doesn't cut it, there's room service from Oblaca restaurant, serving upscale Czech food one level down. For those enticed by the bird's-eye vista, a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz CLS comes with the package. From $900 per night.


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T Magazine: In Fashion | All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

With a bit of patchwork, some lace and a pair of exceptionally matronly shoes, the quirky charm of the noble eccentric is only a stop away.


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In Transit Blog: A ‘Frozen’ Suite at an Ice Hotel

A suite at Quebec City's Hôtel de Glace brings aspects of Disney's animated movie "Frozen" to life.

Modeled after the central characters' bedrooms, the "Frozen Suite" was designed and supervised by Michael Giaimo, the film's art director.

Loosely based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale, the movie focuses on the story of sisters Anna and Elsa and how their mythical town, Arendelle, unexpectedly turns from summer into an arduous winter. This concept fit Hôtel de Glace's overall "Myths and Legends from Around the World" theme for 2014.

Inside the suite are Anna and Elsa's queen-size illuminated beds, tapestry etched into snowy walls, an ice fireplace and two sculpted armchairs. A public area in the hotel features an "activity cave" with an ice slide as well as a mural with the cast of characters carved on a wall.

The suite was created in a week by two sculptors and their assistants, with "Walt Disney Studios working with the Hôtel de Glace to determine what was feasible to build in ice and snow," Alicia Rochevrier, the hotel's communications manager, said in an email. Ms. Rochevrier said that the beds' special headboards were the most complicated to craft because the ice and snow were quite heavy to form into an awning.

The hotel offers 17 suites and 27 standard rooms, and accommodations include complimentary cocktails served in glasses made out of ice, a warm breakfast and access to the hotel's outdoor spa baths and sauna. Visitors need to bundle up: the ambient temperature is a constant  23 degrees, and sleeping bags are provided on beds.

Like Elsa's spell on Arendelle, the Ice Hotel does not last forever: it will be dismantled on March 23 and rebuilt from scratch the next year.

Room rates for the Frozen Suite start at 850 Canadian dollars  for weekends and 625 dollars during the week with accommodations for two adults and two children.


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T Magazine: Yes, Please | The Razor’s Edge

A trip to the local barbershop, from Beijing to Beirut, gives one man an entree into the customs and people of each country he visits — as well as a smooth shave.

Ten years ago, I began dating a woman from Lebanon. The first thing she did when I moved in was to throw out my seersucker. The second thing was to ask me to grow a beard.

In the Middle East, a man without hair on his face is a boy, and given that I was also 13 years younger than her, the need for some growth was doubly pressing. I did my best and grew out a bit of stubble. But now what? There's a fine line between intentional growth and looking unkempt or hung over. I bought clippers. All of them broke, or turned on during cross-country flights, sounding suspiciously like another electronic item.

On a trip to Barcelona, I passed by a barbershop and, on an impulse, ducked in. Spaniards know a thing or two about how to keep a permanent 5 o'clock shadow. Within minutes, they'd sorted me out. I discovered that it was easy enough to learn the verb "to shave" in many more languages, and there's nothing quite like exposing one's neck to the knives of the world to experience the thin blade of civility that unites us.

I've been tipped back on rubber chairs in London. I've been plunged into the sort of debate that rages in salons de coiffure in Beirut, when my barber seemed to be taking a poll of his other customers about where my neckline should stop. During the shave, which took an hour, he drank four espressos. A gentleman of 60 sitting by the door caught sight of a remaining ear hair and pointed it out triumphantly. In Turkey, barbers take their time. Within a stone's throw of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, my girlfriend and I nestled into a tiny shop perfumed with talc and tonic. One man was relaxing into the ear depilation that in that part of the world begins not long after puberty. The barbers politely rippled at the presence of a woman.

The swarthier a place, the better its barbers will be, and vice versa. In Beijing, my barber mowed my face like a lawn. In Norway, the cleanshaven guy discussed waxing. You never know what the perks will be: My Uzbek barber in Manhattan serves me vodka with my shave. My Bulgarian barber advised me where to get a sandwich, and in São Paulo, I was told where to go dancing.

Way up in the Atlas Mountains, two hours from Marrakesh, in a food market taking place on a carpet of severed lambs' heads, I once found a tent and several gentlemen plying their knives at beards much more impressive than mine. I drew a small crowd of onlookers when I took my seat. A long discussion in Arabic revolved around how the blade had been sanitized — with alcohol, my Moroccan friend assured me in English, but his eyes were worried. I closed mine and soon felt the barber's breath on my temples. I emerged unscathed, but for two palmprints of sweat I'd nervously left on my thighs.

There's an intimacy to being barbered that I find oddly reassuring when far from home. A good barber will push and knead at your face before beginning, as if it is dough. He will lean in close and occasionally stroke the area he has just shaved, in a sort of appreciation. Most of us have not been touched this way since we were babies.

But taking a private ritual and making it public isn't supposed to make the world your living room or kitchen or toilet for that matter. It's meant to make the world seem more familiar and to give us a foothold when traveling. This is why we go out for coffee or get a drink at a bar. Knowing that so many others have these needs, and that they can be satisfied, even with a bit of style, is reassuring.

When I moved to London five years ago to start a job, my first order of business was to find a new barber. I lived in Notting Hill, on a blocklong row of limestone townhouses so tidy it made one think no one in history had ever had to shave. To get to a barber, I'd go to Shepherd's Bush, where evidence of London's teeming multiplicity was everywhere: Moroccan tagine joints, Iranian beauty parlors, a century-old market where you could buy anything from a freshly slaughtered pig to saris to one of the best falafels in the city.

After a few failures, I found my place. It was a small shop with three Kurdish guys working under the name Jazz's Barbers. The walls were made of a fake varnished wood and the barber sheet they tossed over me was bright orange. No matter. For a fiver, I could get an excellent whisker trim while a 1950s radio played 1980s hits. I visited London recently and, out of nostalgia, went back to Jazz's. As always, the main barber nodded toward the bench, where I could wait. Another smiled. Now there was a woman barber too! But otherwise it was as if I had never left. Life at Jazz's was going on much as before.

This lack of sentimentality, and the getting on with it, has always seemed to me the epitome of manliness. There's comfort in the silence that surrounds necessaries. For these reasons, I would take 45 minutes in a barber's chair over an hour on any therapist's couch. There's so little we can actually control in this world, but even the unruliest beard can be managed. When I want to feel fresh and ready to tackle something new, I go in for what's known in the trade as a wet shave, which includes the works: hot towels, foam, straight razor. At the end of my last London trip I went to Pall Mall Barbers' swank Fitzrovia shop. Tucked just off the square where Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw once lived, it was everything you'd expect a luxury London barber to be.

The tiles were gleaming white, the countertops granite and the barber's brush was made of badger, not horsehair. My barber looked a lot like Stanley Tucci, but spoke with a South London accent. Happily, he stopped talking once he began shaving. All I could feel was the gentle sweep of his blade, his occasional request for more hot towels. Time slowed down. I no longer had my long-lost seersucker, but all else was right with the world.


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In Transit Blog: Orient-Express Hotels Gets a New Name

Written By Unknown on Senin, 17 Maret 2014 | 17.36

Orient-Express Hotels, more than decade old,  and with  45 luxury hotels, as well as trains, safari camps and river cruises in its collection, got a new name this week: The London-based brand is now called Belmond.

The purpose of the relaunch, according to president and chief executive John Scott, is to bring more awareness to the group as a single portfolio. (The new name is derived from words for "beautiful" and "world." )

"When I became C.E.O. in 2012, I realized that travelers associated with our individual properties such as Cipriani in Venice or Copacabana in Rio but didn't identify with the overall brand," he said. "We were missing the opportunity for guests to know us as a whole and needed one voice."

The makeover includes new websites for each offering, which have a cleaner and more contemporary look, and, unlike before, when the Orient-Express logo was a small footnote, the Belmond logo will be prominently displayed on the sites' home pages.

Mr. Scott said that the change will be financially advantageous for the company but will also benefit its guests. "We will connect with our customers as a collective and be able to do more to build and manage relationships with them," he said.

Belmond said it has spent $15 million on the initiative, which includes the sites, social media and its first large-scale international advertising campaign in magazines, newspapers and online.


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In Transit Blog: Brand Placement Moves to the High Seas

If your cruise ship makes you feel more at home than ever, it's not just the comfortable cabins. The expansion of familiar brands on the high seas is showcasing American pop culture.

Cartoon characters are a staple of many family-focused ships, including the new 4,028-passenger Norwegian Getaway that launched this year with a Nickelodeon-themed water park headlined by SpongeBob SquarePants. Last week, the Cat in the Hat, Sam-I-Am and other Dr. Seuss characters were aboard the 4,914-passenger Carnival Splendor. The new Dr. Seuss program includes a Green Eggs and Ham Breakfast, storytelling time and a character parade on each cruise. The line plans to expand its Seuss programs to all 24 ships by next year.

For music lovers, Holland America Line is in the midst of expanding its B. B. King's Blues Club from one ship to five. The B. B. King Blues Club Bands play in one of the ships' lounges on a special stage modeled on the original Memphis club five nights each week aboard the Westerdam, Noordam and Zuiderdam, and is coming soon to the Eurodam and Nieuw Amsterdam.

On the high end of partnerships, Celebrity Cruises links with the destination spa Canyon Ranch to offer SpaClub at Sea on 10 of its 11 ships by April 14. Its new shipboard treatment menu will include Reiki energy therapy, Pilates, acupuncture and chiropractic therapy. Frequent cruisers might already by acquainted with the spa; Canyon Ranch operates on Cunard, Oceania and Regent Seven Seas ships.

A version of this article appears in print on 03/16/2014, on page TR3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Brand Placement Moves to the High Seas.

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In Transit Blog: Orient-Express Hotels Gets a New Name

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 16 Maret 2014 | 17.35

Orient-Express Hotels, more than decade old,  and with  45 luxury hotels, as well as trains, safari camps and river cruises in its collection, got a new name this week: The London-based brand is now called Belmond.

The purpose of the relaunch, according to president and chief executive John Scott, is to bring more awareness to the group as a single portfolio. (The new name is derived from words for "beautiful" and "world." )

"When I became C.E.O. in 2012, I realized that travelers associated with our individual properties such as Cipriani in Venice or Copacabana in Rio but didn't identify with the overall brand," he said. "We were missing the opportunity for guests to know us as a whole and needed one voice."

The makeover includes new websites for each offering, which have a cleaner and more contemporary look, and, unlike before, when the Orient-Express logo was a small footnote, the Belmond logo will be prominently displayed on the sites' home pages.

Mr. Scott said that the change will be financially advantageous for the company but will also benefit its guests. "We will connect with our customers as a collective and be able to do more to build and manage relationships with them," he said.

Belmond said it has spent $15 million on the initiative, which includes the sites, social media and its first large-scale international advertising campaign in magazines, newspapers and online.


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