Good morning!
It’s been a few weeks since our most recent Saturday newsletter, and that’s because I took off to Japan for a three-week honeymoon, during which my wife and I traveled around Tokyo, Hokkaido, Osaka, and Kyoto. Among the highlights—many extraordinary meals aside—were a visit to the Chiba studio of the ceramic artist Kazunori Hamana; pilgrimages to Isamu Noguchi’s Moerenuma Park, in Sapporo, and Kan Yasuda’s Arte Piazza sculpture park, in Bibai; a stop by my favorite building in the world, the Shokin-tei teahouse at Katsura Imperial Villa; and the Zen gardens at Ryōan-ji, Daitoku-ji, and Saihō-ji.
In the meantime, here at The Slowdown, we released an episode of Time Sensitive featuring the French Moroccan creative director, artist, entrepreneur, and occasional D.J. Ramdane Touhami. You may know him for the cult grooming brand Officine Universelle Buly 1803, which he co-founded in 2014 and which L.V.M.H. acquired in 2021. What excites me in particular about Ramdane’s work, beyond its playfulness and artistry, is how dedicated he is to shepherding centuries-old techniques forward and rescuing various pre-industrial craft skills. Ramdane has shown, time and again, how much craft matters, and that there’s a real demand for it in a world that’s become all too slick, efficient, and, in many respects, soulless.
Last week, we also made the exciting announcement—which I’ve hinted at in a couple of previous newsletters—that our team is overseeing the editorial direction of a multi-volume series of books celebrating The Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), to be published by the Phaidon imprint Monacelli. The first edition, Design: The Leading Hotels of the World, is now available for pre-order and comes out this fall. Delving into LHW’s rich design heritage and featuring a selection of more than 70 hotels, from the exquisite Yoshio Taniguchi–designed Okura Tokyo to the sleek, minimalist Botanic Sanctuary Antwerp, the book includes a foreword by the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger and art direction by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut and Laitsz Ho.
Perhaps fittingly—and staying on the Japan theme—the guest on our latest Time Sensitive episode is the Japanese photographer, artist, and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto, someone who, given his great wisdom and profound perspective on time, I consider to be an ancient among us mere mortals. As the art critic Roberta Smith has written, “His photographs have stretched and reshaped the concepts of time, space, and light endemic to the medium, and in the process they have altered our grasp of history, visual perception, and existence itself.” Perhaps my favorite of his many Yoda-like quotes during our conversation was this: “We came from somewhere and we disappear to somewhere, and life is in between.”
I first met and interviewed Hiroshi in 2012, when he collaborated with Hermès on an edition of 20 scarves, and I’ve wanted to have him on the podcast ever since we started it in 2019. As I hope is abundantly clear in the recording, it was an enlightening, joyful occasion.
—Spencer
P.S. I was recently featured in the “Worthy Five” column of one of my favorite newsletters, Kai Brach’s Dense Discovery. You can read it here.
