Culture

Like many Provençals, Magali Mille-Montagard’s family started making santons strictly for nativity scenes. But over the decades their roster expanded to include charming characters generally not thought to have been at the original event

Momu, Antwerp’s cult fashion museum, explores the relationship between dressing and decorating, from the 19th century to today

Is this a platter I see before me? Este Ceramiche’s table wares are piled with cheats, not eats. Since the 1770s, the playful trompe-l’oeil dinnerware derive from designs in the company’s historic archive, rediscovered in the 1950s

As the founder of the avant-garde publication WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, Leonard Koren has a lot of time for bathing. In his book, Undesigning the Bath, he details how bathing is best experienced when left to nature. Amy Sherlock soaks in its wisdom

With the May 2025 issue comes a special selection of the very best in kitchens and bathrooms, from a public loo on New Zealand’s North Island to an outdoor kitchen replete with panoramic views. Elsewhere, we marvel at groovy short-term lets in Paris, and travel to Mongolia at the invite of a family balancing technology with tradition

Ahead of her debut exhibition, discover how Sienna Murdoch conjures frankly weird (and wobbly) pieces for television and film using her own jelly like invention, Geline.

Mementos that celebrate the maternal bond are for life not just Mother’s Day – and have a precious history dating back to antiquity

Charlie Porter’s latest novel, Nova Scotia House, takes inspiration from the humanist architecture of Berthold Lubetkin’s modernist estates, Horace Gifford’s queer, carefree homes on Fire Island and the riverside warehouses Derek Jarman occupied in the 1970s

In the rare self-portraits showing the photographer at home, Peter Hujar’s East Village loft strikes the eye as a rather solitary space, with the lone lensman cast adrift – literally, in one case – amid the flat’s sparse holdings. But don’t rely on snap impressions: in fact, the pad played host to myriad meet-ups and tender shots of his starry milieu

Few designers have taken their love of marine biology underwater, but then not many have been as resourceful as the late Susan Williams-Ellis, who scuba-dived the world’s oceans armed with tracing paper and wax crayons. These motifs wash up on the ceramics the polymath created for Portmeirion pottery