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Sails Pitch
Illustrator Craig Chapman and his partner, artist Mandy Moon, run a tight ship over in their Penzance antiques shop, perennially trawling for new nautical rarities. And the couple’s home just behind it is just as appealing
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The home of Anne Spencer, Harlem Renaissance poet and civil-rights pioneer
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
Author: Carol PrisantPhotographer: John Mark Hall
Dream Sequins: the Las Vegas Showgirl Museum is high camp
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
Author: Kira GoodeyPhotographer: Brooke Olsen
Zanzibar Doors provide a glimpse into Swahili heritage
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
Author: Tim BeddowPhotographer: Tim Beddow
Villa Santa Lucia’s rock gardens in Marseille humorously blend botany, geology and romance
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
Author: Harriet ThorpePhotographer: Harriet Thorpe

The storied legacy and charm of Veneto’s most unique villa
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
Author: Marella Caracciolo ChiaPhotographer: Simon Watson
Generation upon generation of successful women squeeze love and knowledge into their tomato paste in the Sicilian countryside
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
Author: Marella Caracciolo Chia
These decorated cow-dung huts in Rajasthan are finely crafted masterpieces
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
Author: Laure VernièrePhotographer: Anne Garde
Get the scoop: Lucy Stein tops off a north London ice cream parlour with fantastical murals
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
Author: Ariadne Fletcher
Hamish Bowles recalls flying the coop to Sir Cecil Beaton’s rosy Wiltshire refuge
On his first-ever solo trip, aged 16, Mr Bowles made a pilgrimage to Cecil Beaton’s Wiltshire home
Author: Hamish Bowles
Art of Glass: a former London greengrocer’s displays new artwork weekly from its one-window exhibition space
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
Author: Mary GuyPhotographer: Alice Inggs
A museum in Bergen details what happened in the Hanseatic League’s brutal apprentice system
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
Author: Laura FreemanPhotographer: Antony Crolla
Problem Solvay: this Art Nouveau hôtel complicates our picture of Victor Horta’s idiom
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
Author: Leendert de VosPhotographer: Alixe Lay
From the Archive: Multi-coloured and joyful, this immaculate little seed shop is flourishing
Housed since 1921 in a Neoclassical rotunda in Porto, the Casa Hortícola is flourishing, having nipped an economic slump in the bud
Author: Marie-France BoyerPhotographer: Ricardo Labougle
Bode in Paris: the cult New York fashion label opens it doors near the Palais-Royal
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…
Author: Donna Salek