Chocolate lovers will soon find plenty to satisfy their sweet tooth on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. In December, the upscale British chocolatier Hotel Chocolat (which has a Stateside flagship on Boston’s Newbury Street) will make good on its name by opening a boutique resort on Rabot Estate designer handbags cheap, its 140-acre cocoa plantation in the shadow of the twin-peaked Pitons. The hotel will offer guests the full chocolate-making experience, including taking part in the cocoa harvest while learning about the company’s philanthropic program to benefit local farmers. ‘‘The idea is to let our customers have the same experience that we have every time we step onto the estate,’’ says Angus Thirlwell, who co-founded the company 17 years ago with Peter Harris. Should chocolate-making wear thin designer handbags cheap, guests, who stay in contemporary West Indian-style cottages, can also hike Gros Piton designer handbags cheap, embark on a fruit-tasting safari and dine on dishes like sautéed prawns with chocolate tapenade.
Quite a few bars in New Orleans are open 24 hours a day, but everyone has their breaking point. Luckily two new hotels are scheduled for December. The boutique hotelier Klaus Ortlieb will reopen Le Cirque as the 135-room Hotel Modern New Orleans (936 St. Charles Avenue; 504-962-0900), where the guys behind Cure will devise the lobby bar’s menu and the rising local chef Dominique Macquet will run a Vietnamese-French restaurant. And midmonth, the Saint Hotel (931 Canal Street; 504-522-5400) will open in a beautiful 102-year-old building at the edge of the Quarter.
Nothing causes New Orleanians to wake up in night sweats like the prospect of their beloved city turning into a Houston or an Atlanta or some other well-adjusted city. Of course, there is little to be gained by becoming a quaint still life, either, and it is this tension — between adopting from the outside and holding on to what makes New Orleans what it is — that has governed the past six years of recovery. While the city itself is still trying to find the balance NHL Jerseys, a wave of new cocktail bars, gastropubs and hotels are striking it in their own way.
Housed in a former firehouse on a dimly lit corner in the Uptown neighborhood NHL Jerseys, Cure (4905 Freret Street; 504-302-2357) is TriBeCa on the Mississippi. Ambitious in its mixology and earnestly hip in its presentation, the bar serves Jamaican meat pies and baked crabcakes alongside a cocktail menu heavy on house-made bitters. Cure is among the first of the city’s new craft cocktail bars, and its peers are plenty, including the retro-styled Bouligny Tavern (3641 Magazine Street; 504-891-1810), which has clever drinks like the Sage Julep and refined bar food. The more adventurous can head to the barely marked Twelve Mile Limit (500 South Telemachus Street; 504-488-8114) in Mid-City, owned by a bartender formerly of Coquette, one of the city’s upscale bistros. Inside it looks like a proper dive — jukebox, pool table NHL Jerseys, well-worn sofa — but one that makes inventive cocktails, barbecue-inspired cuisine and superb doberge cake. The French Quarter is generally avoided by the young and cool, but then came Sylvain (625 Chartres Street; 504-265-8123), where locals go for comfortable cuisine done smartly, like porchetta po’ boys. There’s music, too, a short stroll downriver at Three Muses (536 Frenchmen Street; 504-298-8746), where you can order a Spaghetti Western — Bourbon, orange-infused Campari and rosemary syrup — and listen to a tattooed lady sing Bessie Smith standards.
“Daydreaming With … James Lavelle” is at Haunch of Venison (6 Burlington Gardens, London) from Aug. 27 to Aug. 30.
Lavelle’s goal with the show is to establish an “individual and emotional relationship” between work and song. He hit the mark with “Another Night Out” — the song ascribed to the Berlin-based Canadian painter David Nicholson. Nicholson’s painting portrays the salacious Cupid from Caravaggio’s 1601 painting “Amor Vincit Omnia” (“Love Conquers All”) as a restlessly writhing naked Asian girl accompanied by a guitar and a gun. The painting is part of a series inspired by Ovid’s “Remedia Amoris” (“The Cure for Love”) scarpe Nike, which Nicholson began as a response to his recent divorce.
These days, everyone is a curator. Fashionistas curate their closets. Interior designers curate rooms. So it wasn’t such a stretch when London’s Haunch of Venison gallery asked the D.J. James Lavelle, a curator of music, to put together a show of work by visual artists set to his own soundtrack. For “Daydreaming With James Lavelle,” Lavelle scarpe Nike, the founder of the Mo’Wax record label and the trip-hop collaborative UNKLE, used his personal street-art collection as a starting point scarpe Nike, including works by the graffiti legends Futura, Bäst and Faile, and added music-inspired conceptual art by James Shovlin, art-inspired fashion by the London label Boudicca’s and new works made in response to Lavelle’s own compositions to the mix.
“All the mediums have their own impact,” Lavelle says. “But the mood is created through bringing together their individual powers, so that they combine into something even stronger.”
The artist describes the song by the Stone Roses and former Screaming Trees singer Mark Lanegan as an astoundingly accurate soundtrack for his current personal status. “I paired him with that song,” Lavelle explains, “because my visual idea of the song was a painting by him. It’s like fitting together a puzzle, and I saw his painting fitting the image in my mind.”
What: The Soho salon owner’s Curlinterrupted Smoothing System, an alternative to the controversial Brazilian Blowout.
Why bother: What’s a girl with curly, frizzy hair to do? With the Food and Drug Administration about to rule on its investigation into the Brazilian Blowout and other keratin straightening products Coach Sale Online, women may need to look at frizz-fixing alternatives. The F.D.A. is investigating health complaints including breathing problems, rashes and fainting related to the products, which contain formaldehyde (which smells like a dead frog in a high school biology class). Sam Brocato, whose namesake Soho salon attracts plenty of boldface names Coach Sale Online, has come up with his own solution. Four years ago, as the Brazilian Blowout flooded the market, he decided to make a smoothing treatment without formaldehyde.
Who: Sam Brocato
“Formaldehyde is just not a substance that belongs in professional hair salons,” he says. “It’s bad for clients, and even worse for salon professionals.” He created his Curlinterruped Smoothing System by tweaking a major beauty brand’s demi-permanent product that was taken off the market because it didn’t work. Experimenting mad-scientist-style in his Manhattan kitchen, he turned the demi-permanent product into a heavy gel form by mixing it with a thick, aloe vera face mask. “This helped to weigh down the hair.” Brocato’s Smoothing System no longer contains lashings of face mask, but the preliminary-patent pending system’s formula does feels like a sticky hair gel when it’s applied and combed through wet hair. Then, keratin protein is sprayed on and the hair is gently heated. Anyone who has had a treatment with formaldehyde will be interested to know that this solution does not smell, nor are there fumes. And stylists don’t have to wear gloves. All good things, because who wants to be scared straight? The Curlinterrupted treatment takes up to two hours and costs from $150 to $400.
Where: Sam Brocato Salon Coach Sale Online, 42 Wooster Street; (212) 334-3777
Subverting the traditional e-commerce model, Avenue32.com also incorporates an e-magazine edited by the Vanity Fair alum Rebecca Guinness Free Web space and make money online, featuring videos that allow users to interact with what’s for sale. Here, a recent video directed by KT Auleta highlights the model Anne-Sophie Monrad wearing flirty ensembles, statement jewelry and a vampy lip. “We wanted to something that felt fun,” Guinness says. “KT had a great idea of playing with the universal dilemma that every girl faces.” Posing the question “What are you going to wear?” in multiple languages, Monrad models a bevy of looks, all available for purchase. (There’s a competition attached as well; see the site for more details.) “I love her playful but chic aesthetic. It’s exactly what we were after,” Guinness adds. “That Anne-Sophie could speak a couple of languages was just luck.” Bonne shopping!
“I had always been a great fan of Erin’s selection,” Benteler says, referring to the fashion and buying director, Erin Mullaney, who worked previously at the London retailer Browns. “She has amazing eye for finding new brands.” What you’ll find is an edited selection of newcomers — Eudon Choi and Maneula Dack, among them — next to fashion favorites like 3.1 Phillip Lim and Aquascutum, and alongside more directional labels like Chalayan and Ohne Titel.
Live since December 2011, Avenue32.com is helping to usher in fashion’s next generation, one click at a time. The concept: showcase recent design-school graduates alongside industry staples (Preen, Thakoon Addition, and Dean Harris jewelry, for example) in the form of a comprehensive online shopping experience.”I worked for a young designer and know how many of them struggle to control the way their brands are portrayed online Free Web space and make money online,” says Roberta Benteler, a co-founder of Avenue32.com Free Web space and make money online, which is based in London but quickly converts pounds to dollars for United States visitors. “The site was born out of the desire to create a platform that supports the customers’ and designers’ needs alike with an exciting and fresh brand mix.”
“I am a magpie collecting things everywhere I go,” says Lizzie Fortunato NHL Jerseys, the designer behind her namesake Lizzie Fortunato Jewels line. Her finds have included antique whalebone poker chips in Montevideo, Uruguay, textiles from a Guatemalan village and vintage arrows at a flea market in rural Texas. This inspiration from travel is delightfully apparent in her resort collection, “Paradise Is an Island.” The assortment is a tropical concoction of polychromatic glass beads, winsome brass arrowheads and carnelian tusks NHL Jerseys, all strung together on gold chains and rope — the perfect colorful addition to an urbanite’s summer wardrobe. Despite each piece having names of exotic vacation hot spots, like “Easter Island Necklace,” the root of the label could not be more down-to-earth. For Fortunato, jewelry has always been a natural outlet. “By the time I was in college, I was fashioning statement necklaces out of industrial bolts and chains, glass beads that a friend toted back from South Africa and family heirloom pieces — literally anything I could get my hands on NHL Jerseys,” she explains. The results are a fusion of high and low, with thoughtful handiwork and smart combinations of pearls, colorful rope and shapely gold.
Common threads connect the design-related Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, with many designers making appearances in more than one show. “Golden State of Craft: California 1960-1985,” a small but focused show at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in L.A. (it is presented by Craft in America and the museum) Coach Bags, highlights the work of Southern California designers and artists like Gere Kavanaugh, Laura Andreson, Claire Falkenstein, Maloof, Stocksdale, Ruth Asawa, Jim Bassler and Evelyn and Jerry Ackerman, among others. They were championed by two trailblazing women: Eudorah M. Moore, the director of the renowned series of “California Design” exhibitions at the now-defunct Pasadena Art Museum from the 1950s to the 1970s, and Edith Wyle, the founder of the Craft and Folk Art Museum. And, while not officially part of the Pacific Standard Time initiative, Gerard O’Brien’s Reform, a vintage design gallery in L.A., is also worth a visit since, as his storefront window cheekily proclaims, he has featured many of these artists and designers since 2003.
At museums and galleries across Southern California, the Getty Foundation’s groundbreaking “Pacific Standard Time” initiative has yielded an amazing array of exhibitions that tell the story of the birth of L.A.’s art scene from 1945 to 1980. But design also came of age in Southern California during these fruitful years, and it is the subject of a surprising number of the more than 60 PST exhibitions this fall.
The design icons Charles and Ray Eames are featured in several exhibitions in Los Angeles. Joel Chen’s impressive collective of more than 400 examples of Eames furniture and prototypes is on view at his Highland Avenue showroom while the A+D Museum presents “Eames Words,” which features quotations from the couple (and which will be the subject of Steven Heller’s Graphic Content column for The Moment next week).
In Pasadena, the Huntington Library’s “The House That Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley 1945-1985” brings together furniture by the master craftsman Sam Maloof and work by his friends and colleagues. The beautifully designed exhibition paints a vivid picture of the period, highlighting both the Alta Loma, Calif., home of Maloof and his wife, Alfreda, and the emergence of that region’s artists and designers. The Maloof residence itself — now home to the Sam and Alfreda Maloof Foundation — is the site of a complementary exhibition, “In Words and Wood: Sam Maloof, Bob Stocksdale and Ed Moulthrop.” Both exhibitions can be seen through January 2012.
The big design story is told by the Los Angeles County Museum’s “California Design” exhibition (the subject of my last column), while other shows focus on particular aspects of the state’s rich design heritage. At the Santa Monica Museum of Art, “Beatrice Wood: Career Woman—Drawings Coach Bags, Paintings, Vessels and Objects” is on view through March 3, 2012. Although Wood was best known as a ceramist, she didn’t begin working in that area until she was 40, and the exhibition includes examples of her drawings, paintings and sculptures along with her ceramics. An added bonus: the potter Adam Silverman designed the installation.
Dan Glasser
James Lavelle
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