The Smart Traveller’s Wine Guide series is written in collaboration with Club Oenologique, with comprehensive listings of restaurants, hotels, cafés and bars, points of wider cultural interest such as art galleries and museums, which wineries you can visit, how to read a Swiss wine list, Swiss winemakers’ favourite restaurants and more.

Master printmaker Liu Chunjie is renowned for his beautiful woodcut art. Born to land reclamation workers in Heilongjiang Province’s 856 Farm, Lui began life in a remote part of China that was deemed to be a place of cultural exile. But it is here that a vibrant chapter in the history of contemporary Chinese printmaking, known as Beidahuang Prints, was born.

Living and breathing woodcut art, Liu takes the reader on a personal journey through his life’s work. Written in beautiful poetic prose, Liu describes how his art and the techniques he uses have developed over time, culminating in a stunning body of work that has made him the celebrated artist he is today.

Having experimented with coloured ink, installation art and mixed-media painting, it is the spirit of woodcut that remains the foundation of Liu’s art. Using ancient tools and materials, he creates works that embody modern concepts, elevating the essence of woodcut art to a new level.

Did you know that jewellery predates clothes? The oldest known piece is a set of 100, 000-year-old beads, made from Nassarius shells.

Liza Urla advises us not to look at the eyes when meeting a new person, but instead to look at their jewellery. She describes it as the ultimate means of self-expression, essential to our identification as humans. “Jewellery is our armour,” she says, “and precious stones our amulets”. In this book, she journeys from continent to continent, chronicling the pieces that capture her imagination and her heart.

Although many of the pictures are from the street, defining the wearer’s style on the day they were taken, Urla has been lucky enough to access people’s personal jewellery boxes. As she says, the best pieces are always in private collections. Urla’s favourite finds are presented alongside her own jewellery styling, in collaboration with various designers from the jungles of Brazil, the beaches of Mexico, or the streets of London, NYC, Paris or Moscow.

Whether buying gem-set jewellery or loose stones, you will be faced with a colourful array of beauty and value. With such a wide choice – from amethyst to zircon which should you choose? What is it worth, and how do you even know it is real? All that glitters is not gold, as they say, and all that sparkles is not diamond. Gemstones helps to answer these questions in simple and easy to understand terms. As well as diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires, over 100 gems are featured, with full descriptions, technical details, and tips on how to check for fakes; illustrated throughout with fabulous colour photographs to make identification easier. Technical terms such as refraction and fluorescence are explained and some basic identification tests are introduced. A helpful tour around the world details where gems are best available. Informative appendices include a glossary of terms, tables of specific gravity and refractive index, and the comparative value of different stones.

The clear, uncomplicated presentation makes this book a must for anyone interested in gemstones, whether as an investment or simply as a hobby.

Los Angeles Lost and Found is a collection of essays and photographs that explores Los Angeles as a city of constant reinvention, where history is often buried beneath layers of change. Experience designer Margaret Chandra Kerrison uses the lens of narrative placemaking to examine how LA’s physical spaces—its streets, neighbourhoods, and landmarks—shape both individual and collective identity.

What sets this collection apart is Kerrison’s deeply personal approach. She weaves her own story into the fabric of the city’s landscape, grounding cultural analysis in lived experience. Her reflections on the recent Los Angeles wildfires are especially poignant, revealing how natural disaster can strip a place down to its essence and reshape the stories we tell about it. Through these moments of vulnerability, she illustrates how loss and resilience are embedded in the urban environment. Blending memoir with observation, Kerrison highlights how overlooked spaces carry emotional weight and cultural memory. In doing so, she invites readers to view Los Angeles not just as a city of spectacle, but as a living, breathing narrative.

Los Angeles Lost and Found is both intimate and expansive, offering a portrait of a city that continues to inspire and challenge those who call it home—or dream of doing so.

Investigations by Sara Penco stem from the insightful finding of the absence of a key figure in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgement fresco. Prior to this illuminating research, Mary Magdalene was not unequivocally identified within Michelangelo’s masterpiece. Father Pfeiffer, with whom Penco establishes an inescapable dialectic, had already hypothesised the presence of Mary Magdalene in the fresco, but it is the scholar, for the first time in these pages, who convincingly justifies her identification. Mary Magdalene is closely connected to the salient episodes in the life of Jesus. The author rightly wonders, therefore, how it is possible that a figure so central to the biblical narrative and the Christian imagination could have been excluded from the depiction of the Parousia. This observation gives rise to an accurate reflection on the iconography of the saint and the Judgement, in relation to the sacred texts and in relation to Michelangelo’s poetics and production. Sara Penco traces Mary Magdalene in the tangle of figures on the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel, contributing to characterise the fresco – one of the best known and most appreciated works in the world – with an unprecedented theological message.

Text in English and Italian.

The architect Paul Tissier (1886-1926) turned his short life into a multi-faceted artistic adventure. A student at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where he founded the Association symphonique, he became president of the famous Quat’z’Arts ball. His talent as a watercolourist and draughtsman made him a witness to the ruins of the 1914-1918 war. Whether in the devastated regions or on the Côte d’Azur, he developed a unique catalogue of modular houses inspired by the region, combining traditional architecture with modern design. In 1923, Tissier was entrusted by the Société des grands hôtels de Nice with the organisation of exceptional festivities based on themes such as Russia, the Far East, Ancient Rome and Latin America, as well as underwater kingdoms and many other fantasies revolving around childhood, fashion and cubism. With his wife Gisèle, he was responsible for both the scenography and the staging: splendidly coloured painted canvases, extravagant costumes, spectacular dances, processions, naval jousts, fireworks and illuminations… A shooting star, Paul Tissier created almost 100 festivities across Europe in three years, before suddenly passing away. This first monograph draws on the 400 set elements and 2,000 graphic documents that survive in his archive, taking us to the heart of the excesses of the Roaring Twenties.

Text in French.

Back-lit in the morning, the olive tree differs greatly in appearance from in the afternoon or at sunset, each time offering new perspectives as well as new photographic collections. Jacques Berthet has long been interested in the olive tree. The idea of studying them came to him during a photography project which took Berthet all around the Mediterranean: from the Alentejo region in Portugal to the Pleistos Valley at Delphi, passing through Kabylia, Tunisia, to the Middle East, in Israel and the West Bank. In his photography, Berthet opts for black and white to distance himself from botany and move closer towards sculpture or drawing, opting for backlighting to single out the chosen tree against the backdrop of the olive grove which remains bathed in light.

The olive tree has remained a significant influence in the everyday life of cultures around the Mediterranean. In ancient poetry and writing, it is the most venerated of trees. The Greeks made it a sacred tree (particularly for its oil, used in lamps), and so have the people of Tunisia and Algeria in more recent times. In Islamic cultures, it is the cosmic tree, the centre and the pillar of the world, symbolising universal man. What sets the olive tree apart from many other species is that no two trees look alike, and its fate is closely linked with that of man.

Text in English and French.

The Jaguar Book is more than just a book about cars; it is a tribute to the heritage of one of the most important brands in automotive history. Under the direction of renowned photographer René Staud, you will experience an exquisite compilation of iconic Jaguar models, including the immortal E-Type and the stylish XK 140, but this carefully crafted coffee table book goes beyond technical perfection. It combines automotive elegance with impressive art and motorsport history.

This book will not only make the hearts of automobile enthusiasts race but will also appeal to design lovers and those interested in culture. At teNeues, we are proud to bring you a work that reflects the exquisite clarity and artistic values of the Jaguar brand. Discover the future of motoring through the lens of the past – an essential object for anyone who appreciates the world of fine cars and contemporary art.

Text in English and German.

For many flower lovers, the orchid is the epitome of luxury, grace and beauty. In the new book in the Floramour series Floramour: Orchids, author Anja Klaffenbach pays tribute to this queen of the flower world. She not only illuminates the filigree flower wonder with spectacular photographs and sketches, but also presents exciting background information, packed into and entertaining texts.
Orchid breeding has a long tradition and by now more than 28,000 species and more than 100,000 hybrids and varieties are known. And perhaps the diversity of these ornamental plants can also be explained from a historical perspective. In this colourful coffee-table book, Klaffenbach explores this question and paints a portrait of the orchid through the ages. The aesthetics of the flower were already highly valued in ancient China. It served as a symbol of purity and luxury. In Japan, it was the distinguishing mark of the noble warrior caste of the samurai and was found on the clothing and weapons of the fighters. In Hinduism, the lovely orchid is a representative of wealth and prosperity and a coveted offering at numerous religious festivals.
Europe has also become addicted to the tropical beauty. In Victorian England, there was a veritable run on the colourful flower. The flower was regarded as an unmistakable testimony to exquisite taste and classical elegance. The plants quickly advanced to become a high-class gift that expressed the high esteem of the bearer in perfect form.
Even today, the orchid enjoys a large fan community. For them, the coffee table book Floramour: Orchids is the perfect inspiring read to learn even more about their own favourite flower.

Text in English and German.

Tradition and precedent inspire invention, architectural drawing, and media practice. This issue presents a series of encounters with printed drawings, leading to their transformation and re-imagination in a series of new works. Archival media from the John Nichols Printmakers Archive, located at the a83 gallery in New York City, is the foundation for these new inventions by contemporary architects.

International contributors extend the discourse on architectural representation and its evolution through print media, offering critical reflections on specific pieces. The project and exhibition from which this issue stems concerns questions of the archive; modes through which archival materials may become activated; situated approaches to intricate material objects that allow them to be read in non-normative ways; media transformations; and issues of disciplinary indebtedness and influence. The writers have been invited to address and/or extend these concerns in their consideration of specific works.

During the three decades following the Second World War, and before the advent of personal computers, government investment in university research in North America and the UK funded multidisciplinary projects to investigate the use of computers for manufacturing and design. Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design explores this period of remarkable inventiveness, and traces its repercussions on architecture and other creative fields through a selection of computational designers working today.

Situating contemporary expressions of design in relation to broader historical, disciplinary, and technical frames, the book showcases the confluence, during the second half of the 20th century, of publicly funded technical innovations in software, geometry, and hardware with a cultural imaginary of design endowing computer-generated images with both geometric plasticity and a new type of agency as operative design artifacts.

Glass is a threshold material, serving as both a divider and an opening, for one can always see what is behind it. This is a unique phenomenon and it is confounding, as well as being alluring and enhancing, making the space breathe. Florian Lechner (b. 1938) has dedicated himself to this unique material. He explores its substance and formal possibilities through architectural works and sculptural objects. He also experiments with it in combination with the media of light, sound and movement. For him it is essential to forge his work single-handedly, because only unrestricted personal creative input and the development of one’s own, often innovative ways of working can ensure an authentic result. However, the concepts behind his works and their spiritual roots are always more important to him than the process of their creation. Intellectual significance defines Florian Lechner as an artist. He takes an intellectual and philosophically motivated approach, but the result is always a sensory experience and never dominated by dry theory.

Text in English & German.

“Forget the rural idylls. This sublime show recasts John Constable as the godfather of the Avant Garde, producing explosive, nightmarish paintings of a vanishing world.” – Jonathan Jones, Guardian

One of Britain’s greatest landscape painters, John Constable (1776–1837) was brought up in Dedham Vale, the valley of the River Stour in Suffolk. The eldest son of a wealthy mill owner, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1800 at the age of 24, and thereafter committed himself to painting nature out of doors. His ‘six-footers’, such as The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse, were designed to promote landscape as a subject and to stand out in the Academy’s Annual Exhibition. Despite this, he sold few paintings in his lifetime and was elected a Royal Academician late in his career.

With texts by leading authorities on the artist, this handsome book looks at the freedom of Constable’s late works and records his enormous contribution to the English landscape tradition.

The Padua School originated from the Istituto Pietro Selvatico in Padua. The distinctive features of this jewelry are the use of gold reminiscent of the goldsmith’s art in antiquity and a modern and abstract formal expression within the group. Mario Pinton, who brought the goldsmith movement international recognition and acclaim in the 1950s and ’60s, is credited with founding the experimental goldsmith movement in Padua. Francesco Pavan has enlarged the scope of the Padua School with his kinetic and geometric formal idiom.

The breakthrough on the international jewelry scene took place in the late 1960s with Giampaolo Babetto, under whose support the geometric and Minimalist tendency was most pronounced. Other distinguished artists in jewelry such as Graziano Visintin, Renzo Pasquale, Annamaria Zanella, Stefano Marchetti and Giovanni Corvaya continued along these lines or went their own highly individual ways by experimenting with the use of new materials including plastic. The work of these creative artists is beautifully displayed through color photographs, which serve to highlight their great talent.

Finn Geipel is the founder of two architecture and urban design firms: LABFAC, based in Paris and operating between 1987 and 2001, and Berlin- and Paris-based LIN, operating since 2001. Geipel focuses on finding adaptable and integrative solutions for architecture and urban development. LABFAC’s and LIN’s designs of varied scale always consider the ever-changing urban and ecological conditions. Both firms did and continue to collaborate with experts from other disciplines, such as climate and circular design, economics, mobility, ecology, as well as philosophy, art, and cultural studies.

This first monograph on Finn Geipel and his work with LABFAC and LIN features their key built and unrealised designs and research projects since 1985. The evolution of their working methods and thematic and research focuses is explained, supported by rich visual material. Contributions by fellow architects and teachers as well as personal friends, such as Hashim Sarkis, Joseph Hanimann, Riken Yamamoto, and Bénédicte Savoy, offer a critical perspective on Finn Geipel’s achievements in the context of current debates on architecture and urban design.

The Active House B10 is situated in the heart of the famous Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart. It is a research project exploring how innovative materials, constructions and technologies can sustainably improve our built environment. Owing to an ingenious energy concept and self-learning home automation the building produces twice its energy requirement. The surplus thus gained powers two electric cars and an adjacent building designed by the architect Le Corbusier (home to the Weissenhof museum since 2006). Prof. Werner Sobek is the founder of a globally active association of planning agencies for architecture, support structure planning, facade planning, sustainability consulting and design. Based on award-winning experimental buildings such as R128, H16, F87 and now B10 he analyses how new materials, structures and technologies can radically change our built environment.

Text in English and German.

Also available: Residentials by Werner Sobek ISBN: 9783899862355 Werner Sobek: Light Works ISBN: 9783899862218

Slow Wine Guide USA is a new and revolutionary guide to the wines of California, Oregon, New York, and Washington. Thanks to the help of a handful of expert contributors, we’ve selected the best wineries from each state and reviewed their most outstanding bottles.

The idea behind Slow Wine is simple: it acknowledges the unique stories of people and vineyards, of grape varieties and landscapes, and of their wines. The awareness that wine is more than just liquid in a glass helps wine lovers make better, more conscious choices and enhances the very enjoyment of this beverage. Since its beginnings in Italy twelve years ago, Slow Wine has combined its tasting sessions with equally important moments of exchange and debate with producers. The direct contact with winegrowers and winemakers allows for a genuine, authentic, and always up-to-date report on what’s happening in America’s vineyards and cellars. Each winery receives a review divided in three sections: the first one is dedicated to the people who live and work at the winery, the second to the vineyards and the way they’re farmed, and the third to the finest wines currently available on the market.

The very best wines are awarded the Top Wine accolade. Among these we have the Slow Wines — which beyond their outstanding sensory quality are of particular interest for their sense of place, environmental sustainability or historical value — and the Everyday Wines, representing excellent value at prices within $30. The most interesting wineries on the other hand are awarded the Snail, for the way they interpret Slow Food values (sensory perceptions, territory, environment, identity) while offering good value for money; the Bottle, to wineries whose wines are of outstanding sensory quality throughout the range; the Coin to those estates offering excellent value for money.

“It is a rare species, but it exists,” as ’60s art critic Pascal Renous pointed out on the subject of artistic couples. This designer-decorator duo of Janine Abraham and Dirk-Jan Rol met at Jacques Dumond’s studio in 1955. The couple shares the same love of precision, line and plain colours. Their earliest joint creations were first exhibited at the Salon des artistes décorateurs, in Paris. Their furniture, made of wicker, wood and aluminium, twice won prizes at the Salon des artistes décorateurs (a sideboard in 1956 and an armchair in 1958), garnering notice from the public and professionals alike. Jean Royère did not hesitate to use their emblematic Soleil armchair (gold medal at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair) in the decoration of the palace of the Shah of Iran, in Teheran. Their light and functional designs are available today, re-edited by Yota Design. Abraham & Rol were also interior designers and intervened in this capacity for both individual clients and large corporate clients, such as Yves Rocher and Saint-Gobain, with the same precision and sense of composition that define their furniture pieces. Finally, the couple also expressed their creativity through architecture, their mastery of this discipline enabling them to design some twenty houses from the 1960s through the 2000s in the Île-de-France region. Their homes are genuine inhabited sculptures, of which certain have become truly emblematic. Text in English and French

Born into the American aristocracy, Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux abandoned high society to pursue an artistic career. Starting her training with Constantin Brancusi, she then arrived in Paris in 1919, following her marriage to French diplomat and writer Pierre de Lanux. She soon met the designer Eileen Gray. Eyre took over Gray’s research on laquer and continued experimenting with innovative materials not previously used in furniture, namely cork, amber and linoleum. With Evelyn Wyld, she created a literary universe in which the poetry of her rugs, blended with furniture and lamps in totally new ways, all in an environment of muted shades and modern comfort.

An ambitious artist in the Surrealist Paris of the interwar years, she wanted to believe in a peaceful future. But the crash of 1929 and World War II sounded the death knell for the career of this fresh new talent, ensuring that her creations became the rarest of objects. A bridge between the pioneering Eileen Gray and the rational Charlotte Perriand, like them, Eyre de Lanux drew inspiration from Japonism. Neither poor, nor stripped bare, her rare architectured interiors have remained secret until now.

Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux is a recognised name but a forgotten talent. With Eileen Gray, Eyre de Lanux, Charlotte Perriand and Maria Pergay, the four cardinal points have now been identified.