When it comes to retail therapy, Australian businesswomen and entrepreneur Karine Bulger knows a thing or two. She recently founded LA Experience, an Melbourne-based boutique travel consultancy that offers shopaholics a personal shopping tour of the City of Angels.
One of my favourite things about luxury hotels is the seemingly endless supply of designer toiletries – soaps, gels, lotions and shampoo – all in a conveniently compact, travel-friendly size. In fact, over the years I’ve amassed quite a collection in my own bathroom at home.
Zheng and his collaborators in the Yangjiang Group, Sun Qinglin and Chen Zaiyan,use Chinese calligraphy and alcohol to occupy exactly this space – the unconscious mind seething up through the cleft created when you know vaguely what it is you’re trying to say, but you’re so bladdered on the local Zhujiang Beer you can barely hold an ink brush.
Hotel art is so often synonymous with mass-produced prints, thoughtlessly arranged in carbon-copied rooms. But there a few emerging boutique properties who are celebrating artistic expression and embracing artists, both locally and on a global scale.
There’s an old adage that money can’t buy happiness. But the proven health benefits of retail therapy have almost completely dispelled this old proverb into oblivion. Retail therapy embraces a similar logic, namely that impulse buying can curb feelings of sadness and despair and bring on a sense of frivolity and delight – and I, for one, am a firm believer.
When I meet Ben Quilty he looks and smells exactly as I imagined. He’s dressed in a flannelette shirt, jeans and sneakers, with scruffy hair and a beard that’s fiercely thick. He smells of oil paint and I can see it still jammed under his fingernails. Sitting in a leafy courtyard at the National Art School, Quilty disarms me with his warm and welcoming presence despite the obvious emotion he displays as we start discussing his latest exhibition.
An unsettling, architectural gem of a building, it is a clutter of wood paneling, pictures and paranoia. So visually overpowering that if it weren’t for the immediate mugging by fabulous Mediterranean and Cornish aromas, you could easily miss lunch, altogether.
One of China’s leading fashion photographers, Chen Man, will showcase her unique vision at Bangkok’s Metropolitan by COMO hotel in just over a month.
They have been dubbed the Dad’s army of the sea, but this old rust bucket is being repurposed as a modern day Letter of Marque – the first in more than two decades.
It’s easy to see where America’s greatest illustrator took inspiration from as we pull into Stockbridge, a small, New England town in the Berkshires. Norman Rockwell, considered by many America’s most popular artist of the 20th century, made his home here in 1953. He became so attached to the community, he established a trust while he was still alive, ensuring his works would be left to the Stockbridge Historical Society, who later created the Norman Rockwell Museum.
A report to be released later this month will uncover the most visible boutique…
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Perched atop the Metropolitan Tower, overlooking Suzhou's heritage-listed gardens, famed Grand Canal and the majestic Taihu Lake is the Shangri-La…
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