Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York on 20 October 1976. They lean so close that the rest of the room seems to disappear, their hands clasped between them. O’Keeffe smiles while Calder sp
For Gianni Versace, home was fashion made architectural: rooms as theatrical as a runway, composed in marble, mosaic, lacquer, velvet, gold and art. His visual language began in Reggio Calabria, where the remains of Magna Graecia made classical myth
Behind a courtyard on Rue Jacob, Nathan Baraness has created a Paris apartment that refuses a single period or style. Designed for himself and his partner, it came with all the awkwardness of a typical Left Bank interior: low ceilings, crooked walls,
Picasso was 89 when he finished Couple in Mougins on 25 June 1971, although dates inscribed on the panel reveal that he had been working on it since February. This is worth noting because his late paintings are so often described as products of pure
At Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s La Jolla home, art is not decoration added to the architecture. It is the centre of gravity. The couple acquired the Razor House, Wallace E. Cunningham’s cantilevered concrete-and-glass residence overlook
Few figures have shaped the visual language of contemporary luxury as completely as Ramdane Touhami @ramdanetouhami . The French-Moroccan creative director, designer, publisher and entrepreneur has spent three decades turning identity into total envi
Yves Saint Laurent’s apartment at 55 rue de Babylone was not simply the home of a couturier. It was the private architecture of his imagination, dense with colour, history and objects chosen for the emotion they carried. Created with Pierre Be
Walton Goggins @waltongogginsbonafide and Nadia Conners @nadiasomerset did not leave Los Angeles to create a polished country-house fantasy. They moved towards a different way of living, found in a 1920s estate built as a Scottish-style hunting lodge
Salvador Dalí at home in Portlligat, dressed in a leopard-print shirt, swimming shorts and traditional Catalan espadrilles tied around the ankles. It is a wonderfully relaxed image of an artist usually remembered in full performance, his moust
The Rome home of fashion executive Margherita Crotti is a lesson in how to renovate without erasing the life that came before. The two-level apartment sits within a 1937 Rationalist building by Ernesto Puppo in the Trieste district, its rendered and
High above Los Angeles, in his Hollywood Hills compound, David Lynch created the life he had imagined as a young man: long days in the studio, coffee, cigarettes, music and the freedom to make things. To reach the room, you left the main house and cl
Ryan Lawson @ryanclawson and Sean Robins’ @seanbrobins midcentury house in Rancho Mirage is no period piece. Its architect is unknown, but its character was there: angled timber ceilings, lake views and hard desert light. Lawson softened the g
Buqaqawuli Nobakada @buqaqawuli.nobakada paints Black women into futures they have too rarely been given the space to imagine. They recline beside swimming pools, move through gardens and inhabit grand interiors with complete ease. They are not visit
Happy 32nd birthday to one of my absolute favourite contemporary artists George Rouy @georgerouy In little more than a decade, he has built one of the most recognisable figurative languages in British painting, although “figure” is never
La Cuadra San Cristóbal is not simply one of Luis Barragán’s most photographed buildings. It is one of the places where his architecture becomes most complete: house, landscape, water, colour and the movement of horses conceived a
The greatest wealth transfer in history will also move an extraordinary quantity of art. Deloitte and ArtTactic estimate that $992 billion in art and collectibles will pass between generations during the next decade. The figure is already circulatin
In the last years of his life, Henri Matisse built a chapel where colour no longer sat on a surface. It came through the windows and travelled across the room. The Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence began with a nursing student, Monique Bourgeois, who car