Town & Country April 2022

“The idea of building a Near Eastern house in Honolulu must seem fantastic to many,” tobacco heiress Doris Duke wrote in an essay for T&C about Shangri La, her beloved hillside Spanish-Moorish-Persian-Indian complex in Hawaii, which greeted visitors with this Moroccan-style entrance hall, sparkling with 16th-century Rhodian tile. Duke’s retreat has since been transformed into a museum for the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art. As we report on page 96, Hawaii has once more become a haven for eccentric billionaires, but its creative spirit still thrives too. This year’s Hawaii Triennial brought works by such artists as Ai Weiwei, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Theaster Gates to seven locations across Oahu. The pieces will be on view at the Hawaii State Art Museum through May 8.…

I was reminded of Town & Country’s 176-year history of getting inside people’s houses in two emails. The first bore the news that the Hôtel Lambert, the historic mansion built in 1643 on the Ile Saint-Louis that has hosted such visitors as Voltaire, Chopin, and Balzac, had been sold by the brother of the former emir of Qatar to French telecom billionaire and art collector Xavier Niel for $226 million. We like to keep track of old friends: T&C stopped by the Hôtel Lambert after it was restored by one Count Zamoyski in the early 1950s, and we went back in 1988 to see what the Rothschilds had done with it. The second email, from contributing editor David Netto, included the obituary of Mollie Wilmot, a Palm Beach hostess whose hospitality…

WHERE ARE WE GOING? Le Smoking, Rive Gauche, the safari jacket—Yves Saint Laurent never settled for the status quo. Years after his death, he’s still a revolutionary, and for the first time five storied Paris museums are paying joint tribute to the designer, exhibiting 50 of his pieces among their permanent collections. AT THE LOUVRE, MUSEE D’ORSAY, CENTRE POMPIDOU, MUSEE D’ART MODERNE DE PARIS, AND MUSEE NATIONAL PICASSO–PARIS THROUGH MAY 15. WHAT ARE WE WEARING? Saint Laurent created homages to the paintings of Bonnard and Mondrian in jersey and silk, and the craftsmen at Vacheron Constantin have also paid their respects to an important artistic era. Here, the Belle Epoque serves as horological muse, with the romantic floral motifs of the Art Nouveau movement rendered in black mother-of-pearl and diamonds—123 of them, to…

“My friends are probably sick of my ceramics by now,” Carey Lowell says from her Montecito pottery studio, with its view of the Pacific Ocean. She’s being modest. Her perfectly imperfect vases, bowls, and incense holders are not just beautiful but sought after, once sold at Barneys New York and collected from coast to coast by the likes of Lisa Eisner, Lauren Santo Domingo, Muriel Brandolini, and Jann Wenner. First, Lowell was a model for the photographers Peter Lindbergh and Bruce Weber, then a Law & Order actor. Now she’s a full-time ceramicist. She trained via Zoom and says she could watch pottery videos on Instagram all day long. She also loves to collect. “The first piece was from Morocco, where there are beautiful ceramics around Fez. Something from Japan. Now…

Before its $105 million expansion by Annabelle Selldorf, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego was practically devoid of windows. That’s not unusual for an arts institution, but it was given this one’s location: the tony enclave of La Jolla, California, practically hanging over the Pacific Ocean. For 80 years the flagship of MCASD (a satellite location opened in downtown San Diego in 2007) had gradually grown around the modernist home that Irving Gill designed for philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps in 1915. When she died, her concrete house was left to the city, and in 1941 it was turned into a modern art museum, one of the oldest on the West Coast. Expansions followed in the ensuing decades, but it wasn’t until five years ago that the stars aligned for the…

Anyone who plays pachinko—a mainstay of Asian gaming halls—knows it’s a gamble. But Pachinko, author Min Jin Lee’s epic 2017 novel, is a sure bet. The book, which tracks four generations of a Korean family over the course of nearly 80 years, was a New York Times best-seller and a finalist for the National Book Award. Given its scale and twisting plot, a TV adaptation was inevitable (indeed, a magnificent eight-part series is on AppleTV+ now), but the path to finding the right actress to play Sunja, the girl whose life the story is built around, wasn’t so straightforward. “This is the role of a lifetime,” says Kogonada, the mononymous director who helmed half the show’s episodes. “So many talented, well-known actresses auditioned. We weren’t out to find an unknown, but…