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Anne Spencer was many things – Harlem Renaissance poet, civil-rights activist, gardener. She was also a singular decorator, well versed in using salvage, busy wallpaper and even her own lyrical stanzas painted on cabinets to brighten the Virginia home her husband had built in 1903. Now a museum, it stands as an ode to this remarkable woman’s work

This ode to the high-camp spirit of the Sin City spectacle features over 40,000 pieces amassed by the dancer, costumier and dedicated custodian, Grant Philipo

Trade in slaves and spices can be read in the massive wooden doors of Zanzibar’s historic merchants. As Tim Beddow shows, this dying Swahili art form is not just a load of old lintels

In the Roucas Blanc suburb of Marseille, a forgotten craft form born of the Rococo blends Portland cement with rural exoticism. The site in question, now run by the next generation of a family that’s overseen it for 40 years, has just been officially labelled a jardin remarquable by the French ministry of culture

Though the pink boiseries and Ottoman-style fumoir were down to men, feisty widows and orphaned daughters gave Este’s Villa Albrizzi its mystique, as Marella Caracciolo Chia reports

Nestled among the rolling Sicilian hills, one cookery school has become a centre for local food and culinary knowledge. Set up in 1989 by Anna Tasca Lanza, her daughter Fabrizia Lanza has taken on the family tomato-paste-making tradition

Nothing is wasted in India – in Rajasthan even cattle manure is used as fuel. Watching the locals store the cowpats in decorated bitoras, Laure Vernière discusses the turd way. First published: October 2016

Tucked away on a residential street in north London, the Dreamery has been thoroughly sweetened by artist Lucy Stein and her richly whimsical rice-paper paintings

On his first-ever solo trip, aged 16, Mr Bowles made a pilgrimage to Cecil Beaton’s Wiltshire home

Thanks to a grant and a large dose of creative imagination, Tim Jones and Meena Chodha turned a dilapidated shop into a home for themselves, and a vibrant, bijou gallery space for artists

Apprentices of the Hanseatic League in Bergen, Norway, had to sign over their lives to the god of money – and their notorious initiation rite was a diabolical test, as Laura Freeman reports

When one of Art Nouveau’s most illustrious architects, Victor Horta, was given free rein on a four-storey house in the centre of Brussels, his vision was perhaps a touch too ambitious. Nevertheless, Hôtel Solvay remains a feat of finely wrought design

Housed since 1921 in a Neoclassical rotunda in Porto, the Casa Hortícola is flourishing, having nipped an economic slump in the bud

French opulence meets classic Americana in the first overseas outpost of Bode, the cult New York fashion brand founded by Aaron Aujla and Emily Adams Bode Aujla. So expect faux bois, vintage bourgeois furniture and lots of antique fishing rods…