This year’s Helsinki Design Week focused on design’s role in making cities more lively. The event, which finished at the weekend, included about 250 talks, exhibitions and showcases in venues across the Finnish capital. There were also interactive installations, such as “HDW Lab” on Helsinki’s main high street, Aleksanterinkatu. The project invited passers-by to share ideas for a better-designed city, which urban-development experts then discussed and used as starting points for new proposals. “What we are most excited about is our two-year plan in collaboration with the City of Helsinki on how to revitalise the city centre,” says Kari Korkman, Helsinki Design Week’s founder. “We want to make it more vibrant with the help of design.”

It’s that sort of thinking that sets this design week apart. It looks at design holistically, not just through new products. “We see design today not only as product-related,” says Korkman. “That’s how it started but today we are talking about services and how to solve urban problems through design thinking.” 

Another example was the Design Diplomacy showcase, for which embassies opened their doors and welcomed speakers to discuss their work and different design cultures. Among the highlights elsewhere was the Futuro House – a unique, UFO-like, futuristic Finnish building type that was first conceived in 1968; US architectural-heritage expert Jan van Dijs recreated it using long-lost original drawings, with Marimekko designing the interiors. “We wanted to speak to the future of living,” says Rebekka Bay, the Finnish practice’s creative director. “Instead of focusing on traditional living today, we sought to propose a vision where we can downscale and live with less, but with what’s important to us.” Equally monumental was the seven-metre-tall “Aalto Vase”, made from aluminium by Norwegian materials producer Hydro and Finnish design company Iittala.

Meanwhile, Habitare, Finland’s key furniture and interior-design fair, attracted more than 40,000 visitors during Helsinki Design Week. Unlike most fairs of its scale, the showcase is consumer-oriented and Finnish brands often record good sales there. “I don’t have a physical shop and this is the only place where people can touch, feel and see my products,” says Teppo Lakaniemi of Helsinki-based furniture brand Tebian, which launched a solid-oak chair called Buddy Jr. “I sell a lot here.” Other notable launches were the modular Pause lounge chair and sofa system by Hakola, and Pahka by kitchen brand Arkken, featuring wood bent by carpenters to create uniquely shaped cabinets. Reflecting Habitare’s growing focus on circular designs was Tyyne, an acoustic panel and space divider made from wooden side-stream materials by local studio Sistem with Finnish design brand Niimaar.

Though much of the fair was about showing these new pieces, it was also about driving broader discussions around furniture design. “We want to be in a real dialogue with the industry and young designers, sensing what is in the air,” says Habitare’s creative lead, Päivi Helander. “And we want to encourage prototyping, showing that not everything at a furniture fair needs to be finished.” 

It seems that in Finland, whether designing for the city or designing a seat, the focus isn’t just on what’s new but on using design to continually evolve and improve our lives.

Petri Burtsoff is Monocle’s Helsinki correspondent.

I’m now old enough that, when people say, “Ah, but they were different times” – meaning that different moral codes applied – they’re often referring to a period that I can clearly recall. And I’m pretty sure that those times weren’t all that different. I have been thinking about this in the wake of the promotional brouhaha for Tony, the biopic of the chef and TV personality Anthony Bourdain. When he was a little-known chef, Bourdain wrote an article that found its way into The New Yorker about his experiences working in a professional kitchen. He depicted this as a kind of cross between a Navy Seal boot camp, an episode of Master Chef and a crack den. The restaurants in which he worked were awash with drugs and booze; shifts involved abusive language, physical violence and dirty dalliances in equally dirty places. Women were mostly treated as servants or sexual objects. The general consensus, it seemed, was that if they couldn’t take the abuse, they should stay out of the kitchen. 
 
Bourdain showed us all of this and then, once he had left that world, built his brand around it. We were all expected to believe that this was how all kitchens had been during those “different times” and that everyone was fine with that way back in the 1990s.

Bourdain’s reputation took off in the early 2000s – along with various other horrendously behaved chefs, such as Mario Batali, Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White (note to any lawyers reading this: I realise that Batali is in a vastly different category). He helped to turn cooking into the new rock’n’roll and was a role model for young chefs. Male chefs, that is. Later on, Bourdain did try to row back on some of the attitudes and activities that he had glorified earlier in his career but, to me, he always seemed to be having his moral cake and eating it. In effect, he was saying, “I don’t endorse this behaviour now but it was actually kind of cool, lots of fun and there was nothing really wrong with it back then.”

I have a theory that a lot of this alpha-male posturing – the flaming pans, the shouting, the banal sexism – is compensation for working in a job that requires the wearing of aprons, the drizzling of jus and the tweezering of chervil but we can perhaps take that on another time. No matter how much he dressed it up in iconoclastic, leather-jacket-and-Marlboro nihilism, the masculine aggression, the ill-treatment of subordinates and violence were always destructive.
 
While I never met Bourdain, several of my friends and colleagues did and invariably described him as kind, polite and, surprisingly, quite shy. Perhaps his kitchen-pirate persona was a bit of an act. He was Billy Idol to Pierre White’s Johnny Rotten, if you like: affecting an outlaw swagger when, really, he was a relatively privileged young man whose mother worked at The New York Times.
 
It would be nice to think that the adolescent chef-bro behaviours that Bourdain once depicted are gone but his influence lingers, largely thanks to his undeniable charisma and talent as a writer and presenter. Meanwhile, Ramsay is edging towards national-treasure status in the UK and Pierre White continues to peddle his cod-mafioso schtick. 
 
For all the greatness of his travel shows and his prose, Bourdain’s impact on the foodie world, for which I have so much love and respect, is regrettable. To me, restaurant kitchens, much like any workplace, should nurture creativity and excellence – not deliberately set out to push anyone to the brink. Claiming “different times” is a distraction: a smokescreen for behaviour that anyone could see was wrong, even at the time. 
 
How long will it be, I wonder, before people start talking about the extremes of influencer culture, the Tate brothers, Donald Trump’s corruption or even Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes as “different times”? I would give it a couple of years. But here’s an idea: let’s keep this approach for people a little further back in the past, shall we? The Vikings. The Romans. Genghis Khan. Those were “different times”. Social and cultural norms evolve but fundamental principles, common to most of humanity, have applied for quite a while now. 
 
At the very least, can we all agree that when we look back on the present day 20 years hence, we won’t use “different times” as an excuse for past behaviour – whether in kitchens, the media, politics or boardrooms?

Michael Booth is Monocle’s Copenhagen correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

One thing is clear: Germany’s firewall – the refusal of moderate parties to work with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) under any circumstances – has failed. After emerging as the largest party in this weekend’s elections with almost 44 per cent of the vote, the AfD gets first dibs this week on putting together a state government in Saxony-Anhalt. To prevent it from taking power there, quite literally every other party in the state – from the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to the far left – would have to form a coalition. But I’d argue that the best solution would be for Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his CDU to jump into the fray and join a coalition with the AfD while they still can.

Many historians and those on the left will retort that Adolf Hitler rose to power with the same concept. But despite the country’s history of liberal democrats allowing budding autocrats into government, hear me out: can the centre realistically hold the AfD out of a future government at this point? Waiting until they gain an absolute majority is far more dangerous.

Germany’s current right-left coalition between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats has failed to govern effectively. Along with Merz’s inability to implement reforms, two ideologically opposed parties – even those on relatively central ground – tend not to mesh well (try picturing Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in a cabinet together).

Voters tend to want bold plans and ideas, which is impossible when you’re forced to compromise with your ideological opposite. Merz came to power promising to take the wind out of the AfD’s sails, which was never going to happen while governing with a party that forced him to tack to the centre instead. Many voters have had no choice but to head to the fringes and, thanks to the firewall that protects it from having to govern effectively in a coalition, the AfD has been able to maintain its anti-establishment narrative for more than a decade now.

A coalition with the Christian Democrats would present a stark contrast to voters and test the AfD’s actual governing chops, tempering the far-right party’s instincts and distinguishing its own approach and policies more clearly. The left could then rebuild in opposition and present a viable alternative when the next election comes around.

An example of this strategy isn’t hard to find. Twice in the past three decades, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria was brought into government under the watchful eyes of the centre-right People’s Party. The country was excoriated for breaking a perceived political firewall and both coalitions ended in scandal for the FPÖ, whose popularity then plummeted as a result.

The trick – at least from moderates’ perspective – is to work with the extremes when the centre still controls the levers of power. It’s a strategy that only works before the far-right becomes powerful enough to govern on its own, which in today’s Germany is not a question of “if” but “when”. For now, other parties can still control the “how”. Perhaps Germany should try the Austrian method and let the foxes into the henhouse.

We’ve all been there: the night before seemed like it would stretch on forever, fold itself into a dawn that might never come, holding every promise of the long night, the eternal party. And then it’s 09.03, and your alarms go off like crazy – phone, front desk, animal instinct – and suddenly you’re at the airport, beetle-browed, far too warm, eking through security and it’s now that you really have to ask yourself: what’s that in my pocket?

Airport security contains multitudes. For most travellers, it’s the necessary evil, the paint-drying minutes spent with arms tensely folded, one eye boring into the back of the nice lady who is being patiently asked about the Thermos of guandolo, flagon of water and gallon of breast milk in her carry-on. Oh and: “Is that a roller blind you’re carrying, madam?” The other eye, meanwhile, beadily regards the trays clattering down the conveyor. Perhaps yours contains the nice watch that you shouldn’t have had to remove but were asked to anyway, a cap from Lock & Co Hatters that looked so much smarter before it was just squashed by the flaps of the X-ray machine and a Montblanc pen which – who knows? – might yet have made it safely through. It’s still called “security”, though, so maybe it’ll be OK. It’s bloody awful, though, isn’t it?

Besides the sensible desire to inaugurate a secondary filter-lane next to Fast Track – perhaps (in the style of “EU” and “non-EU”) titled “Morons” and “non-Morons” – what should you be able to take through security that you are currently barred from transporting in the cabin of a commercial flight?

Well, you’ll have doubtless bought some regional produce on your holiday: Istrian honey, jam from Alentejo, olive oil from Patmos, a wheel of Reblochon from Haute-Savoie, some Chiang Mai massage oil, a small-calibre ivory-handled ladies’ pistol from Louisiana, some challenging German… magazines. If ever there was a more wholesome panoply of locally made acorn-fed goodness that, on making landfall in your home, instantly summons the magic and memories of your holiday, then I’d like to see it. But woe betide you bring any of that lot through security! Whoa there, slow down. Cool it.

You could politely look away and hope your exciting bags trundle through the scanner unmolested – but that only invites the slowest and most boring form of torture this side of filing a tax return. Your holiday haul would open the floor to medal-winning jobsworthiness masquerading as diligence. A man with a cotton wool swab, a pinched expression and a uniform that’s surely flammable will offer a withering look and ask: “Is this your bag, sir? Mind if I have a look, sir?” 

That sinking feeling is the worst. Everything removed, inspected, peered at, pored over. YES, YES, IT’S A JAR OF HONEY WITH A PLASTIC SEAL AROUND IT. NO, I DON’T TRAVEL WITH A VACUUM-PACKING MACHINE TO SEAL JARS OF SEMTEX DISGUISED AS WILD HONEY – IN FACT, I’D GO SO FAR AS TO CALL IT “TANGY” AND “COMPLEX”, A WORLD AWAY FROM THE STUFF AT SAINSBURY’S – is what you’re shouting on the inside while officer J Obsworth invites you to throw it all in the bin and purchase a €42 jar of similar from the shop that’s suspiciously-right-there in Departures. You almost miss your flight.

It needn’t be this way. On a trip to report on the winningness of Taiwanese pop stars some years ago, I bought and brought back a foldable bicycle – a Taipei must-have – as hand luggage. This was enabled by good old Eva Air not giving a toss and using the if-it-fits-it-fits stowage philosophy. I’ve brought quite big artworks back from Hong Kong, rugs from Morocco, a hoard of pokey Mezcal from Oaxaca. And more besides (is that root ginger in your luggage, sir? Why, yes!). 

I have friends who’ve done the whole bringing-home-a-poor-ickle-cat-from-Greece thing and it’s a bad idea – even if it were a dog. But, man alive, I’d love to usher a massive, bright-plumed, aggressively territorial parrot from Ecuador through an airport and home. I’d have started the language lab over in Latin America, teaching Cortez the macaw the basic linguistic repertoire of a Millwall football hooligan (so he fits in) and take it from there. It would obviously be cruel to put him in a cage in the hold, plus I need a profoundly rude emotional support parrot, so in he swoops to perch on seat 7B. With his suspiciously large, very padded collar. And what’s that in my pocket? Bird seed. Very fine bird seed. For God’s sake, give us a carry-on-baggage-shaped break.

Robert Bound is a contributing editor at Monocle. Read more from Rob here.

Further reading:
– Cathay Pacific’s cargo hub at Hong Kong International Airport is a telling insight into the state of the global economy  

– Can building Africa’s largest airport turn Ethiopia’s fortunes around?

– When it comes to Dulles airport, Trump might actually have a point

Last week, the age-old wheeze of saying something is what it manifestly is not took an ominous turn. Such things can happen when perpetrated by the world’s most powerful man. 

In response to an executive order from Donald Trump, Apple Maps and the good folks at Google have faithfully renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” for US users. The cartographic chicanery follows strained trade talks with Canada and the choppy wake of the US president’s unilaterally boosterish renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.

Rewriting labels is surprisingly easy: ask the cities formerly known as Constantinople (née Byzantium), Peking and Bombay, for that matter. But making it stick usually takes consensus, not caprice – a proper plan, not pencil-and-rubber diplomacy. Some names resist the mapper’s hand for harder-to-explain reasons too. Take Manhattan’s Avenue of the Americas (or 6th Avenue, as it’s still stubbornly known despite a 1945 rebrand). Restoration and counter-restoration are also a regular battleground for culture warriors. Think of Mount McKinley in Alaska, which was renamed Denali to acknowledge an indigenous name under President Obama in 2015. It then boomeranged back to McKinleydom in 2025 by executive decree. A sign of the times and a parody of the pendulum of progress, if ever there was one.

The Lake Ontario furore (call it one-mapmanship?) is easier to navigate. While Trump is well within his rights to rule on US federal nomenclature, private companies such as Apple and Google are playing politics by going along with it. Would they wince if the White House decided to rename Greenland, Venezuela or Panama? Would things be different if China marched into Taiwan tomorrow with a fresh set of road signs? Maps are never fully neutral, and making them is a responsibility.

The summer’s hit novel, Land by Maggie O’Farrell, is a worthwhile read on this topic and a canny counterpoint to this kind of short-termism and self-indulgence. Starting in 1865, its elegant plot unspools around a family in the wake of the Irish potato famine (with moments of joy as well as the hardship). The British are mapping an island caught between cultures and landed between lexica. Charts and names – even those of fields, humdrum hills and a mysterious thicket around which much of the action unfolds – are inescapably political. The novelist’s deeper insight is in parodying the short-sightedness of plastering words onto places that will long outlast us. There’s something almost Cnut-ish (yes, you read that right) about Trump’s attempts to command the waters with his hollow call.

Now for the pragmatic part. Lake Ontario as a place and name is, of course, many orders of magnitude older than either of the nations that now bestride it. Literal millennia more ancient if you mean the geographical feature, and at least centuries older as a name. That will take more than a whim to alter. The lake is enshrined in history but also the present: family boat trips, memories and cross-border conviviality bred across shared shores.

Far from showing US strength, the new name gambit reveals desperation and might have fatally misread Canadians’ cherished connection to their history, nature and land. If you need to rename a lake to establish your importance, you may already be less important than you think. 

Long after the midterms, the ripples of this reactionary little episode will dissipate like the water’s surface momentarily disturbed by the passing of a lame, ungainly duck. And in a bout of poetic justice a novelist might relish, the last laugh might well be on the biddable, never-neutral mapmakers who toady to the politics of the day.

On a late summer afternoon, well-dressed women are walking in and out of a townhouse in London’s Mayfair neighbourhood. They’re here to pay a visit to Tibi, the womenswear brand that has taken over the 12-bedroom house to host styling appointments and meet-and-greets with founder Amy Smilovic. “We’ve had appointments with the most incredible women who come from every kind of industry,” says Smilovic, as she lays back on a chair after a long day welcoming customers old and new.

Smilovic didn’t always have such a direct line of communication with the women wearing her clothes. When she founded her brand in Hong Kong in 1997, she began by following the industry rulebook: multiple collections a year, large-scale fashion shows, trend-driven designs and hundreds of stockists around the world. 

When the pandemic exposed the cracks in the traditional system, Smilovic decided to reassess her definition of success: design only the clothes she wanted to wear and start talking to her customers directly through events and style classes. Her new book, Almost Reckless: A Creative and Pragmatic Approach to Taking Risks, charts the journey of rebuilding her business on her own terms. 

Here she shares some of the most valuable lessons with Monocle.

1. Spend time getting to really know your customers
You have to be present and part of these conversations. It just keeps you on your game. You’re constantly coming up with new ideas when you talk to your customers: women who wear Tibi started cryptocurrency funds or they’re heads of boards of finance companies. We’ve created our own mini Davos [during our styling days]: in one room you have more than 30 industries being represented. We don’t even have a merchandiser at Tibi anymore – what would a merchandiser be able to tell me from a spreadsheet that I don’t get by just sitting in these rooms and hanging out with these people? Our conversations help me to make sure that with every new collection, I’m fulfilling their needs: maybe there’s a new mum who needs to feel cool again, or maybe someone needs a jacket for travel. It helps me create storylines for the product to meet different audiences. 

2. Ideas aren’t developed overnight
I called the book Almost Reckless because I like taking big swings but doing things pragmatically is equally important to me. I understand that everything is a slow build-up. When we started doing these styling days, we did one per year and assessed what worked and what didn’t. Only then did we start increasing their frequency.

3. Design your business according to your lifestyle and your principles 
In 2020 we came very close to shutting down Tibi. We decided to keep the business but only if we could run it exactly as we wanted. One thing that you can do is define your core principles. Mine was agency: having control over my own life, working with people who shared my mindset and being allowed to be creative. You then need to think about how much money it would take for you to always have those elements in place and also be able to take care of yourself in an emergency, such as a catastrophic illness. 

We were a $70m (€60m) business looking to be a $150m (€129m) business so that we could sell it to become a $300m (€259m) business. But to live by our principles, we didn’t need to generate $70m in sales anymore, so we downscaled. I can be completely happy and content at $25m (€21m) in gross sales. When the bar is clear, you have nothing to lose and things begin to work out because you decide what works out for you [and] that gives you a tremendous amount of confidence.

4. Write your own definition of success and don’t follow pre-existing rules 
Right now, I think we are wildly successful – even if a venture capitalist would disagree if they came in and looked at our ebitda [operating profits]. Everything is subjective: what I find reckless might seem completely safe to someone else. 

People believe that we’re part of an industry but in reality no one can even articulate what that means. I mean, what is the fashion industry? Is it Walmart or is it LVMH? Who’s writing the rules? I hated being beholden to the fashion industry. We shouldn’t convince ourselves that there are set ways of doing things and set levels of achievement.

5. There are opportunities in operating outside the mainstream
You might think that you can follow the same systems as those who came before you and use your product as the main differentiator. But brands are more than products. It has always been about so much more: retail, people, stories. 

At the moment, the market is conducive to entrepreneurs who want to run smaller businesses, meaning those under $100m (€86m). The door is wide open for people to do things in their own way. But for big businesses, it’s impossible for them to be on the pulse of things or create real communities made up of people who don’t just share similar bank accounts but also similar mindsets. 

Many entrepreneurs have been conned into this concept that if you are not in pursuit of scaling at all costs, you’ll die. I used to say that if a shark stops swimming, it will drown. That was my mantra: to surge ahead. But I don’t believe that anymore. There’s something beautiful about just staying healthy and small.

6. Friction makes room for creativity and unexpected opportunities
I have a chapter in the book called “Lead with a compass, not a GPS”. That’s the beauty of a compass: it lets you feel your way out and you don’t know exactly where you’ll end up. We often fall into the trap of comfort, thinking that all knowledge is now all available online. But you have to go out and research. If you’re on a train, look around you or, if you’re on a plane, talk to strangers. 

7. Get to know yourself 
When something feels right, take a moment to codify it, to put it into words. It helps to be able to describe yourself in a few adjectives. It has worked for me: knowing deeply who I am creates a through line when I’m designing. It’s not easy but it certainly is less nerve-wracking than it used to be. If I’m designing something that I want to wear, I know that I’ll find a way to sell it to someone. It can only go wrong if I start looking at trend reports.

Donald Trump has said that the most beautiful word in the English language is “tariff”. But recent evidence suggests there is another noun with a more lyrical quality that might have supplanted it in his affections: “ballroom”. Barely a speech goes by without the president musing about the wonders of the vast construction project rumbling on where the East Wing of the White House used to stand. He has even described the constant noise in his backyard as “music to my ears”. A $400m (€344m) vanity build is not, however, music to the ears of many Americans in a country grappling with a cost-of-living crisis and an interminable war overseas.
 
It’s no surprise that Trump loves a construction project: he did make his fortune in real estate. On Monday the Supreme Court ruled that the ballroom construction could continue, overturning an earlier federal appeals court ruling that ordered building work to stop because it did not have congressional approval. 

But his overwhelming obsession with a building that most Americans couldn’t care less about is befuddling Republicans who are battling to keep or win seats in the November midterm elections. The Pew Research Center asked voters which issue they would like to hear midterm candidates talk about the most: the economy came out on top, with 29 per cent of respondents listing it as their top concern, and the cost of living came second at 15 per cent. The word “ballroom” did not make the list. 
 
The Politifact fact-checking website has crunched the numbers and found that Trump has mentioned his various Washington construction projects at 84 public events since January. He has devoted nearly 45,000 words to projects such as the ballroom, the Reflecting Pool and the Arch de Trump, compared to 41,655 words on foreign policy and just 39,744 on the economy. Only Iran got more air play, with almost 56,000 of his words dedicated to the war in the Middle East.
 
The motivation behind the 8,360 sq m behemoth that will dwarf the White House keeps changing. Trump has long been obsessed with building a ballroom, in the same vein as his gold- and chandelier-bedecked hall in Mar-a-Lago. Early in the planning phases, Trump claimed that the White House needed a larger venue for hosting foreign dignitaries and events. After a foiled attack on the president at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, he then said it was a security necessity. And now, designed for both cocktails and bunkers, he has taken to calling it “the greatest military-complex-slash-ballroom anywhere in the world”.
 
While the exact details of what is being built on the site are classified, Trump has said that the ballroom will go six storeys deep, complete with bomb shelters and medical facilities. The roof will be drone-proof, with measures to protect against missiles and biohazards, though little of this has convinced the electorate. In July, a poll from The Washington Post and Ipsos found that 65 per cent of respondents were dissatisfied with the ballroom and the other prominent vanity projects.
 
Trump’s approval plummeted to a record low of about 33 per cent in August and, with no end in sight for the Iran War, it makes sense that the commander-in-chief is looking for distractions. As the conflict drags on and pulls the US economy down with it, Trump is desperate for things he can control – and what can be more comforting to a luxury real estate magnate than bricks and mortar and marble and gold? Then there’s his legacy. Barring any attempt at a third term, Trump has some two years left in office and, with his domestic and foreign policy legacy looking precarious, he wants to make sure that a physical reminder of his presidency will stand long after he has departed. 
 
On Wednesday evening, Trump finally reassured Republicans that he would get on the campaign trail and speak in key battleground seats ahead of the midterms. They’ll just be hoping that he manages to stick to the script and doesn’t drop too many b-words.

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is a Washington-based journalist and regular Monocle contributor. For more from her, click here.

Are you one of those people who are prone to post-party depression? Or are you more the type who can celebrate a grand event, collapse, recover and get on with whatever’s lined up next? On this particular Saturday afternoon, I feel wedged between the two. A couple of hours ago we officially wrapped up our Quality of Life Conference in Lisbon (see more details in Andrew Tuck’s column yesterday). As I said my goodbyes to speakers and delegates, I was overcome by a certain melancholy as I descended the stairs at Lisbon’s Museu do Design. 

To say that our annual global gathering is intense not only undervalues the sheer amount of energy generated over 48 hours but also doesn’t quite capture the depth of the connections formed within the varied group of participants. As this was the 10th edition of our conference, matched with the countdown to our 20th anniversary, we looked back at the founding of Monocle and the people behind the scenes – on page, on air and at events – who have built a truly unique, extended, far-flung family. I was about to use the increasingly overworked word “community” to define our crowd but they’re so much more than that – the most loyal and engaged among them are more like first cousins or a dear auntie or uncle. Over the years, you learn about people’s stories in depth. Conversations about fresh ventures and opportunities missed, starting out in a new city or a Monocle story that sent someone off on a new trajectory not only inform how we shape our editorial agenda but also creep up as constant, real reminders of who we’re speaking to and the lives that they’ve lived. Whenever we host a party or summit, I want to speak to as many people as possible and attempt to make connections between those who I feel need to know each other. We’re very proud that we’ve helped form business alliances and been responsible for some long-standing romances, thanks to a couple of extra glasses on a terrace or just one more cigarette on a balcony high above terracotta roof tiles. 

As with most families, there are always pleasantries and basics to cover. But perhaps because they can choose to opt in to the Monocle family, the conversations can be far more candid and raw than they might be with a brother in Oslo or an aunt in Phoenix. Just before I left our farewell brunch, I was approached by a gentleman who wanted to offer a word or two of thanks and a small story. He started by telling me that his partner had died suddenly, that he had the support of friends and family but as he searched for comfort and some kind of perspective, he needed something else to turn to – perhaps a little lift. “I’m here because I started listening to your radio station and I immediately felt connected to the voices, the music and the stories,” he explained. “I really appreciated the type of music you were playing and how you were looking at the world. It was a bit later that I became a subscriber and that’s how I came to be here. I just wanted you to know that.”

I haven’t been able to get this exchange out of my head. It’s why I feel a bit heavy in the heart on this sultry Saturday, as the light fades over Lisbon and I gear up for what feels like official back to school from Monday. I want to say thank you to this most elegant gentleman for telling me his story. It will accompany me as we move into our third decade of heading up this family called Monocle.

Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns.

What would happen if the developers, architects, engineers and electricians building an apartment complex were all women? Visit Reina condos at 689 The Queensway in Toronto, and you will discover that it leads to generous design decisions, wise consideration of the risks of loneliness for at-home parents and the mother of all stroller parks.

Reina has been designed by Heather Rolleston, principal at BDP Quadrangle. But this project started when her client, Taya Cook of Urban Capital, read an article in Toronto Life about the “Condo Kings” – the 20 men who were said to be transforming the city’s skyline. Cook thought to herself, “I’ve been working in this industry for many years and it’s time for this conversation to change.”

So along with Sherry Larjani from Spotlight Development, she pulled together a women-led team and, after a competition, Rolleston joined as lead architect. Monocle’s Andrew Tuck spoke with Rolleston about how this flipping of the bird to this male-dominated industry led to many wonderful outcomes but also a heavy sense of responsibility. Listen to the full conversation on The Urbanist.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Could you take a step back for us and explain how this project came about? What decision was made that said: we need an all-women team on this project?
A client of mine, Taya Cook of Urban Capital, was reading an article in Toronto Life magazine called “Condo Kings”. It was about men who had been building a lot of condos, transforming Toronto’s skyline, and she thought to herself, ‘You know, I’ve been working in this industry for many years and it’s time for this conversation to change’. She and Sherry Larjani from Spotlight got together and brainstormed this idea of having a women-led team. That was the impetus for the project and I was interviewed with other female architects and ended up winning the job.

Reina is a polite two fingers up to the world of male-dominated business in the city. The building is beautiful. Tell me the scale of the building and what you’ve designed.
It’s a U-shaped courtyard building. It’s a mid-rise and it gently terraces down towards the adjacent low-rise established neighbourhood. It’s on a main street, The Queensway, and it feels like a well-established neighbourhood. There’s a public school to the west and a vibrant shopping street. Ironically, this project replaced a gentlemen’s club, so that was a great topic when we had groundbreakings and other events on site.

It’s fascinating that you have this [all-women] team – of construction workers, engineers – working on this project. How did that change the decision-making process? What kinds of things did you implement?
We were surprised by the amount of attention that this topic and project got; we were unprepared for that and we were feeling the pressure from the very beginning. We wanted to come at the condo from a different angle but the kind of attention that the project got forced us to think differently. A lot of that came from doing outreach. We had to meet all the same parameters as any other condominium with respect to efficiency, affordability and suite sizes that were great for everyone. But we were aiming higher than that on this project, [so] we started to have conversations with the community. Our client hosted a giant brainstorming session talking about the pain points that people experienced in condominiums.

Tell me about the tenant mix. I hear there are 30 to 40 young children who live there with their families?
There is a wide variety. There are a lot of families, a lot of teenagers. We also designed some intergenerational suites on the ground floor so there are people living here with their aging parents or with their kids in their late twenties. There are single people with dogs. There’s a great sense of community and the amenities that we designed attract like-minded people.

Among the things you’ve added is a stroller park. You go into many nice condominiums and people have to drag the buggy up to their apartment or they’re left in hallways. It’s a simple thing but you thought: let’s sort that out.
When we asked about people’s pain points, that was one of them. For a long time, condominiums aimed to [offer] a kind of a hotel lifestyle but now it’s a different time. A place to put your stroller in an underutilised place in the building, having a shared library so that you can sign out the Kitchen Aid mixer that you only need a couple times a year instead of having it take up space in your linear kitchen. All of these things were suggestions by people [we spoke to]. We planned the ground floor so that people could work out in the gym [while] watching their children play safely. These aren’t difficult things to think about. But when someone suggests it, it’s like: yes, why isn’t it like that?

You’ve created a building where the end users are the key focus. Normally when a building gets made, there’s an investor or a developer who wants to make sure they maximise their profit. Things like ‘let’s have ample space for parking strollers’ or ‘let’s put aside additional space for children to play while mum or dad goes to the gym’ – those things often get engineered out very quickly. Is this an example of when women are in charge of the process, you realise you don’t need to do it in the same old way?
It is a little bit of that. It was just taking more time in the design process, knowing that this was going to be more of a community building from the beginning. We wanted to make a mark with this project. It was about designing from the inside out, which is something that has fallen out of favour recently. Architecture lately has been a bit more about ego – what things look like from the outside – and what’s going to sell in different countries. This was not that. I’m proud to say that the building is beautiful. We didn’t sacrifice any of the beauty in that process of designing from the inside out.

Ah, Saturday morning. Looks like we made it – and in some style. As you read this, the 2026 edition of the Monocle Quality of Life Conference is in its final stages, wrapping up with a host of special-access city tours and a farewell breakfast on the rooftop of the Museu Do Design. But yesterday was the biggie – a day of talks, discussions and entertaining interludes – set within the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, surely one of the most beautiful museums in the world. Throughout the day we heard from pioneers in everything from architecture to foot health, industrial design to fashion, and they all had lessons to impart. Here are 10 of them.

1.
Artist and designer Joana Astolfi was tasked with explaining Portugal in 10 objects (she ended up bringing 20 – we forgave her). And one key theme that became evident as she spoke was that this is a country where soul matters, where taking your time is considered a good thing (“we enjoy being a little late at times”) and where a love of poetry is the norm.

2.
Lisbon is a city where tolerance endures. The city’s mayor, Carlos Moedas, talked us through the urban projects that are helping to transform his city. He also explained how Lisbon is special because of intangible elements – one of which is tolerance. The city has welcomed 200,000 people from around the world and the mayor explained how quickly they feel at home. He also stressed that for this to endure, new arrivals need to participate in the city’s rich cultural life.

3.
The creators of Amble One – a Portuguese electrical vehicle that looks like a souped-up prestige golf cart – revealed that they took orders for more than 3,000 vehicles during the debut model’s first few weeks on sale. Made in Portugal might be reaching beyond clothing, furniture and wine by driving deep into tech but, staying true to its roots, Amble One has a nice cork steering wheel.

4.
How do you fix the shopping mall model? Paul Sirisant – the CEO of a multi-use development called Cloud 11 in Thailand – said his company thinks beyond the ding of cash registers and focuses on delivering cultural value. In his case, this has included providing recording studios and spaces to hang out.

5.
Architect Manuel Aires Mateus explained how design can change your life – and your health. He gave a good example: cutlery, which he designed in the form of a lightweight set that encourages you to eat slower (and perhaps a little less).

6.
Nicolas Gabard, owner of Parisian tailoring house Husbands, spoke eloquently on the power of making an effort, on why having an image is not superficial. His session encouraged everyone to embrace the joy of getting dressed. “It should be fun,” he insisted. 

7.
Many people dream of changing careers and we happened to have many perfect case studies on stage. One of the best was Pedro Oliveira, who left a successful career in finance to open a jewel of a hotel in Lisbon, Das Amoreiras. He’s a man who cares deeply about design and hospitality but perhaps the key lesson he imparted was that sometimes you have to change course if you want to be truly happy.

8.
We had a great panel on foot health and why walking can fix not only your balance but your mind too. Courtney Conley, the founder of Gait Happens and the author of Walk, shared numerous lessons. Here’s one takeaway: when you take your shoes off, the widest part of your feet should be your toes. If you can’t splay them, you need to think about your toe strength. Oh, and barefoot is best.

9.
António M Feijó, the president of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, talked about the challenges of extending the institution’s museum, with the recent addition of a new wing designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. How do you add to a building that people already see as a masterpiece? One of the ways that they triumphed in stitching it all together was through planting. The resident ducks definitely approve.

10.
A final lesson: if you missed the 2026 outing, you need to join us in 2027.

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