Aflame: Learning From Silence (Riverhead Books)
Over the past three decades, the English-born essayist and travel writer Pico Iyer has paid more than a hundred visits to the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a small Benedictine monastery situated along the winding cliffs of Big Sur, California. Connecting with his inner stillness during these various sojourns—and through pivotal, weighty life changes, including a house lost in a fire, the death of a parent, and his daughter being diagnosed with cancer—Iyer has found himself utterly transformed. In these periods spent in silence, he has discovered ineffable joy in remembering what is most essential and, in his new book, Aflame: Learning From Silence, he offers a rare outsider’s view of monastic life. Sharing personal revelations alongside wisdom from other non-monastics who have learned from parallel experiences of adversity and inwardness, Iyer perhaps most profoundly demonstrates how silence and solitude can serve as modes of fostering community and companionship. (A quick plug here: Iyer also contributed the foreword to the forthcoming book Culture: The Leading Hotels of the World, out this summer from Monacelli and the second in a multivolume series celebrating exceptional luxury hospitality, with editorial direction by The Slowdown. He will also be a guest on our upcoming season of Time Sensitive, running from March through June.)

Knoll Showroom and Retail Store
251 Park Avenue South, a standout 1910 Renaissance Revival building at the corner of Park Avenue South and 20th Street in New York’s Gramercy Park area, has long been circuitously linked to Herman Miller and, now, the mega-company MillerKnoll. Once home to George Nelson & Co. in the 1970s—in the years immediately following Nelson’s long tenure as design director for Herman Miller—it later served, starting in 1992, as the main base of the textile company Maharam, acquired by Herman Miller in 2013. Fittingly, last week, Knoll unveiled a new retail showroom inside the historic address, as well as a contract showroom. The light-filled space brings the company and many of its partners and brands under one roof, housing a remodeled Herman Miller retail store; contract showrooms for several MillerKnoll brands, including Knoll, Muuto, DatesWeiser, and Geiger; and rotating exhibitions. “It may sound controversial, but Knoll is not a furniture company,” says Jonathan Olivares, Knoll’s senior vice president of design. “From the start, it was conceived as an interiors brand. To demonstrate this, the Knoll New York workplace showroom and retail shop are envisioned as interiors, where the furniture contributes to the total environment. In layout and in color, the interplay between the room and the furniture is what Florence Knoll would call a ‘total job.’”

“Naoto Fukasawa: Things in Themselves” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Perhaps best known for his work as design director of the Japanese “anti-brand” consumer-goods company MUJI, the designer, author, and educator Naoto Fukasawa is revered for his approach to functional design that prioritizes ease of use, aesthetic simplicity, and careful attention to the ways in which mundane objects and environments both serve and respond to our daily habits. Since launching his namesake studio, in 2003, Fukasawa—who’s also a co-director of 21_21 Design Sight, Japan’s first design museum, and the director of Tokyo’s Japan Folk Crafts Museum—has designed in both industrial- and craft-forward spheres, from electronics for Samsung to small-batch furniture created in collaboration with artisan firms, all with the goal of cultivating an essential “fit” among objects, people, and space. Presenting fully realized production designs alongside working sketches and models from the past 25 years of his career, “Naoto Fukasawa: Things in Themselves” (on view through April 20) sheds light on Fukasawa’s singular language of form, as well as his design ethos, which prizes longevity, accessibility, and subtle humor over novelty and blatant commercialism.

What do you get when you combine a former intensive-care nurse, a trained architect turned real estate developer, a medieval hospital, and one of Europe’s most design-driven cities?

The answer—Botanic Sanctuary Antwerp—is a true urban oasis set alongside municipal gardens at the edge of the city’s historic center. Opened in 2022, this 108-room hotel—the vision of local developer Eric De Vocht and his wife, Maryse Odeurs, the aforementioned nurse—includes six restaurants (already awarded four Michelin stars among them), two bars and a by-invitation whiskey cellar, a spa with 10 treatment rooms, an apothecary, a historic chapel, a theater, 18 conference rooms, and three organic gardens. The couple set out to celebrate Antwerp, a city historically known as the capital of the world’s diamond trade, by creating a sophisticated platform to show off its best—from the trove of Flemish Old Master works at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp to up-and-coming jewelry designers such as Elliott & Ostrich—while making everyone feel welcome.

Whether guests come for traditional afternoon pancakes at the “Hansel and Gretel”–like, Michelin-starred restaurant Het Gebaar; post up for a night in an entry-category, 269-square-foot Classic Room; or opt for an extended stay in the 1,507-square-foot Botanic Suite, a genuine sense of welcome pervades the property. To help achieve it, the couple made the decision to eschew handing over management to a luxury hotel operator, ardently believing that remaining independent would be key to their project’s success.

De Vocht and Odeurs’s passion—and resources—fueled extensive negotiations with the city, which owns the land (their IRET Development firm holds a 66-year lease, with discussions underway to extend it to 90 years), followed by four years of painstaking restoration, construction, and interior design. De Vocht had long admired the motley complex of historic buildings and gardens in Antwerp’s historic Theaterbuurt, or “Theater Area,” so-called for its proximity to both the French and Flemish opera houses.

Antwerp’s oldest document, dated 1226, granted permission for the first hospitale infirmorum to be erected in the vicinity of what is now the deconsecrated Cathedral of Our Lady, served by laypeople who later adopted the monastic rule of Saint Augustine. A larger hospital, named after Saint Elisabeth of Hungary, opened in 1238. Today, the oldest buildings on the hotel’s grounds are the Romanesque-style chapel, erected around 1400 (and extended between 1442 and 1460), and the Gothic infirmary—Europe’s oldest—dating to 1460. In the 16th century, a medicinal herb garden was established adjacent to the hospital, the precursor of the city’s present-day Botanical Garden. After the religious institution was dissolved, in 1797, the hospital was placed under the administration of the predecessor to the current Public Center for Social Welfare, which enlarged and remodeled the compound over the ensuing centuries, until 2017, when De Vocht and Odeurs stepped in to restore the buildings and reinvent the site.

AIDarchitecten co-founder Kristl Bakermans Le Bon and her partner, Gerd van Zundert, had much to unravel in the summer of 2017, when their Antwerp-based architecture firm was hired to figure out what to do with the assortment of historic buildings and drab modern additions. Stripped of their superfluities and ad hoc patching, the original stonework and structures emerged, as did the site’s beauty and potential.

Over four years, five architects worked on the site full time, occasionally even digging up the ground with spoons alongside archeologists. They adapted historic building techniques and repurposed materials including wood—some of it 400 years old—and stone, as well as original door hinges. Buildings were restored wherever possible while respecting their original functions: Two former monastery kitchens became private dining rooms, while the monastery’s 19th-century pharmacy now serves as a botanical apothecary. For every newly built element, the architects opted for a wholly contemporary design, even while prioritizing historical craftsmanship.

To walk around the Botanic Sanctuary is to appreciate the magnificence of its reinvention. Both van Zundert and Bakermans Le Bon compare the project to the slow, methodical progress of fitting together pieces of a puzzle. Most of all, they credit Odeurs for her consistent eye and commitment to hospitality and care, and De Vocht, true to his architecture training, for always opting for quality and long-term solutions. In every aspect of this Edenic refuge, the couple’s devotion is evident.

This is a condensed and edited excerpt of a text by our editor-at-large, Cynthia Rosenfeld, published in the new book Design: The Leading Hotels of the World (Monacelli), with editorial direction by The Slowdown.