In this week’s newsletter, we celebrate the launch of our new book project with The Leading Hotels of the World and the Phaidon imprint Monacelli, learn how the curator Glenn Adamson gets his imaginative gears going, drop in at Daniel Boulud’s new Manhattan steakhouse, and more.
Good morning!
At last, this week marks the publication of Design: The Leading Hotels of the World, the first book in a multi-volume series celebrating the 420-plus member collection of independent luxury hotels, to be published by the Phaidon imprint Monacelli, with editorial direction by The Slowdown. Two years in the making, this collaboration has been (and with the ongoing series, continues to be) an absolute dream for me and the team here to work on—and is exactly the kind of big-picture storytelling work our editorial studio is primed for.
The whole thing began, as so many of the best partnerships do, with a casual, fortuitous conversation. In December 2022, I was standing at the champagne bar at LHW’s holiday party at The Greenwich Hotel in New York and struck up a dialogue with the person next to me. We spoke about our travel affinities—for me, an under-the-radar island in Greece and an off-grid cabin in Colorado—and after 20 minutes or so, I asked her about her connection to the event. With a smile, she (Shannon Knapp) said, “I’m the president and CEO.” Our quick bond, in some sense, eventually became this book—actually, five books. (Props here to Michael Fragoso, LHW’s peerless senior global brand manager, who has masterminded this project from Day 1.)
It goes without saying that the world doesn’t need another brand book. But, as I said last week on Monocle’s The Stack podcast, this publishing effort is not that. Instead, I’ve been brought in as an independent editor-auditor-author, with the trusty Cynthia Rosenfeld as my right-hand travel-industry guru, to help reenvision LHW as it reaches its 100th anniversary in 2028. Sure, these titles are handy travel guides, but they’re so much more, too. Highly crafted, tightly curated objects, they evoke the elegant essence of LHW and—just as these exceptional hotels do daily—actively seek to redefine luxury in the 21st century.
In a world awash in blah-blah, same-same hotel aesthetics and C.F.O. value engineering (you know it when you see it), LHW’s properties—many of them family-run and multigenerational—stand out for their culturally attuned, site-specific approaches to hospitality and design, and for their exquisite service. This is a book series, then, about craft and care as much as it is about hotels and travel, with the theme of Design as a very on-point jumping-off point.
Some LHW properties (Ritz Paris, say) go back more than a century and could be considered, in their own ways, the O.G. “design hotels.” They aren’t stuck in the past, though—they’re decidedly of the now, too. As I note in the book’s introduction, the LHW portfolio could be considered a veritable A to Z of many of today’s, well, leading architects and designers. Among the 70-plus hotels included in the book are three by Norman Foster (Capella Singapore, The Dolder Grand in Zurich, and Kulm St. Moritz), one by Eduardo Souto de Moura (Bairro Alto Hotel in Lisbon), and two with Axel Veervoordt penthouse suites (the aforementioned Greenwich Hotel and Bayerischer Hof in Munich).
With art direction by Michael Bierut (the guest on Ep. 81 of Time Sensitive), a foreword by the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger (the guest on Ep. 119), and contributions from writers and photographers around the world, this first book was a Herculean effort and, in the end, is a beautiful reality. And there’s so much more to come: We’ll be revealing the theme of Book No. 2 in January, and it will come out next summer.
I hope my enthusiasm for this book and the entire series excites you enough to consider picking up a copy.
—Spencer
“Time is elastic, it is responsive, and the more you tap into that, the more you squeeze out of life.”
Listen to Ep. 120 with the artist and lighting designer Lindsey Adelman at timesensitive.fm or wherever you get your podcasts
“Following Space: Thaddeus Mosley & Alexander Calder” at the Seattle Art Museum
When the artist Alexander Calder began making mobiles in 1931, he transformed the trajectory of sculpture by dialing down its mass and taking it off the pedestal. “The idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form,” he said in 1951. This approach to sculpture was foundational for the Pittsburgh-based artist Thaddeus Mosley (the guest on Ep. 111 of Time Sensitive), who first encountered Calder’s work in the 1950s. Over the course of Mosley’s seven-decade career (he’s now 98 years old), his composite organic forms have further developed through the study of African carvings, notably by Dogon, Senufo, Bamum, and Mossi makers. Juxtaposing 17 sculptures by Mosley and five works by Calder, chosen in consultation with Mosley, “Following Space” (on view through June 1, 2025) serves as a meditation on form, weight, and balance, bringing to light energetic forces beyond human perception.
Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space (Chronicle Books)
The newly released book Building Culture, by the art and architecture critic Julian Rose, probes the ideas of public space and museum culture, ultimately asking the questions: How are museums conceived and designed, and how do the resulting structures shape the ways we view art? Accompanied by 80 captivating images and containing conversations with 16 architects who have designed many of the world’s greatest art museums, the compendium reveals highly disparate backgrounds and philosophies and the ways in which they materialize in space. Frank Gehry, for example, reveals how a half century of dialogue with the visual arts influenced his breakthrough Guggenheim Bilbao; Kulapat Yantrasast describes his novel conception of exhibition design and how he incorporated it into his new galleries for the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Walter Hood (the guest on Ep. 103 of Time Sensitive) shares how his longheld interest in improvisational techniques in music informed his design for outdoor performance spaces at the Oakland Museum.
La Tête d’Or
Just the other day, the chef Daniel Boulud (the guest on Ep. 38 of Time Sensitive) celebrated the unveiling of his latest restaurant undertaking: La Tête d’Or by Daniel, located at 318 Park Avenue South in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. Boulud’s first steakhouse, named in tribute to the stately park in Lyon, La Tête d’Or aptly bridges his two homes of New York and France. The result is an alluringly rich menu offering New York steakhouse classics—beef steaks, seafood plateaux, veal and lamb chops, a whole grilled lobster—each elevated with a masterly French twist, as with the “Prime Rib Trolley,” where Scharbauer Ranch American wagyu rib eye is sliced to order. As Boulud put it at the opening, “It is quite a simple, universal pleasure, an excellent steak and a great sauce, but it needs to be executed with precision, and it needs to have soul.” With interiors designed by David Rockwell of Rockwell Group, the restaurant is sumptuous and inviting, featuring plush velvet banquettes, deep-blue tones, and dark wood in the 120-seat main dining room, with softly padded walls to offset the soaring ceilings.
The curator, historian, and scholar Glenn Adamson—author of the new book A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present (Bloomsbury)—gravitates toward unsung makers, subversive thinking, big ideas, and what he calls “material intelligence.” He brings this sensibility to his role as curatorial director of this year’s Design Miami fair—the 20th edition in its hometown location, on through tomorrow, Dec. 8—choosing the theme “Blue Sky,” an optimistic celebration of bold leaps of imagination in design. Through the fair’s trademark line-up of collectible design galleries, “Curios,” special projects, and collaborations, Adamson’s presentation considers design as an experimental, risk-taking, and ultimately positivity-building venture. “In devising the theme ‘Blue Sky,’ I wanted to emphasize the importance of ongoing imaginative thinking, despite, or even because of, the challenges of the present moment,” says Adamson, who was the guest on Ep. 50 of Time Sensitive, in 2021. “Design really requires optimism, and I guess the same is true for us all.” Here, he speaks with us about the media landscape that stirs his mind.
How do you start your mornings?
When my partner and I are in London, as we are now, we wake up to BBC Three, and then one of us walks our dog, Annie. We also spend time in the Hudson Valley, in a house built by postmodern potters. When we’re there, the morning is all about the forest, the light, the quiet. Annie walks herself there. She seems to like the city and the country equally, and I would say the same.
Where do you get your news?
As a historian, my relationship to the news is perhaps a little unusual, as I’m usually involved with some research project or other, and my instinct is always to take the long view. So while I do read The New York Times, I’m often thinking about, say, the 1920s or the 1960s, and my mind is back there most of the day. One advantage of this approach is that it puts what’s happening now into a context, which is helpful on an emotional level.
Do you have any favorite newsletters?
Indira Allegra’s Dear Mercury. Allegra is a weaver, poet, and theologian who poses idle questions of the cosmos and then reports back on what they’ve heard. Also, from a different universe, the design historian and critic Sarah Archer’s Cold War Correspondent, the facts and foibles of the midcentury era written with great verve and insight.
Do you have any favorite podcasts?
So many! I have serious reservations about the proliferation of digital content, but I make an exception for podcasts. My twin brother, Peter, has been hosting A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps since 2010. He’s done hundreds of episodes on European, Byzantine, Indian, Africana, and now Chinese philosophy. I’ve listened to every one of them; I feel like I have a Ph.D. in the subject. I’m also a great admirer of Sarah Marshall’s You’re Wrong About and The New Yorker’s Fiction podcast. And, of course, I never miss an episode of Time Sensitive.
What are your favorite magazines?
I am a cover-to-cover New Yorker reader. In addition to supplementing my news intake, it’s been a big influence on my own writing. Their best essayists—Jill Lepore, Louis Menand, Anthony Lane, and others—have a combination of pace, economy, and depth that I’ve tried to absorb and adapt in my own work.
What book or books are you currently reading?
I just finished Roberto Bolaño’s epic novel The Savage Detectives. He conjures a Mexico City of the 1970s, populated by avant-garde poets and bohemians, whom he portrays as absurd and extraordinary by turns. There’s an element of autobiography to the book—it feels true, and lived—but also some of the magical thinking associated with other Latin American authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, and Gabriel García Márquez.
What exhibitions have you visited recently or look forward to visiting?
It’s been amazing to witness the art world pivot to figures once associated with the studio craft movement, and at last give them the attention they’ve long been due. This fall I was able to visit the “Olga De Amaral” exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, just so powerful and assured. Also worth mentioning are a small but perfectly formed show of Magdalene Odundo’s ceramics at Thomas Dane Gallery, and a presentation of Toshiko Takaezu and Lenore Tawney at Alison Jacques Gallery.
Any guilty pleasures?
I don’t know how guilty I feel about it, really, but I do spend a lot on concerts—especially chamber music, and especially at Wigmore Hall, a venue so perfect I can imagine happily sitting there even in total silence.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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