The words “public art” can strike dread into the heart. The term has been bandied about to cover everything from expensive but bland trophy sculptures in corporate plazas to graffiti “art” despoiling yet another building. But don’t lose heart because Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson believes that public art, if done well, can make us better citizens, create a sense of community and allow us to think differently. He’s out to prove the point with his first permanent public artwork in the UK, which was recently unveiled at Oxford North – an innovation district focused on nurturing the nation’s science and tech players.

Titled “Your Planetary Assembly”, the installation features eight illuminated sculptures along a meandering park path, with colours inspired by planets including Mars, Neptune and Mercury. Each polyhedron, elevated on a giant tripod, is surrounded by a circular bench. It looks pretty but Eliasson has bigger ambitions for this project than providing an Instagram moment. He is an artist who has used his large-scale works to engage us in conversations about nature, climate and how we want to live. His 2002 Tate Modern show, The Weather Project, was visited by more than two million people. 

“If a space is well designed, it can reflect our unmet emotional needs,” says Eliasson. “If we feel comfortable, if we feel as though this is a space where there is a relative degree of safety, it means we could sit down and say to someone, ‘Hey, how are you today? I’ve seen you here before.’” 

The benches, he says, function as seats around a campfire. “Each planet is like a fireplace, a warm gathering space. And because they’re not in one row, unorganised and drifting in their own orbital reality, it provides an opportunity for you to question things.” How about being left to contemplate all of this after simply sitting down to have a Pret sandwich at lunch?

In the hands of an artist such as Eliasson, who famously works with a large team out of his studio in Berlin, the “public” element of his art becomes potent. He is not making pieces to hang out of view in an oligarch’s mansion or be hidden away in a Swiss art vault. He creates art that people can use, test, experience and engage with. And these are often monumental, such as the four “waterfalls” he erected in New York Harbour, including one under the Brooklyn Bridge, in 2008. 

“Public space belongs to all of us, to the people who intend to use it,” says Eliasson about the arena for much of his work. “It’s something that we must look after together, which hopefully represents our values. We could say that we want our public spaces to reflect our beliefs and our intentions for how we want to live.” 

For the artist, one thing that public art can deliver is the feeling of being anchored to a place. “Once you have a sense of belonging, when you feel acknowledged and you experience dignity in the way you can be in a space, then you have something truly unique. And, in that space, you can evolve, contribute and become part of a community. When you’re part of a community, you also become a stakeholder in its future, which will then encourage you to vote. In that way, art is an incredible asset. In fact, one of the greatest things that you can do with public funds is to put them into art. There is a return – it’s an investment with societal upside.”

To hear more from Olafur Eliasson, listen to the Thursday 23 October episode of ‘The Urbanist’. And, for more on the perils and pitfalls of public art, click here.

Read next: If public art is meant to inspire communities, why do cities often get it so wrong?

Examining recent and current events, you would be forgiven for thinking that the EU was pursuing expansion in the Western Balkans. On the surface, things seem to be moving in the right direction, from the recent tour of the region by the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, to this week’s high-level Berlin Process Summit of Western Balkan leaders in London. But haven’t we heard all this before? 
 
Two of the region’s six nations, Montenegro and Albania, appear close to joining the EU. But other countries are in troubled waters: Serbia has anchored mid-voyage; North Macedonia is struggling to leave port; Bosnia and Herzegovina must make its ship seaworthy; and Kosovo is landlocked. 
 
On matters of EU enlargement, Brussels has been leading these nations up the garden path for decades. It is a misguided strategy – if indeed it has been a strategy at all – that has damaged the EU’s image in the region and caused people in Western Balkan countries to lose faith in the European project.

These young democracies need help and encouragement from Brussels to enact reforms, particularly concerning the rule of law, corruption and media freedom. But they need to know that there is a genuine chance of EU membership at the end of the process. All the available evidence from the past two decades suggests that this is not a particularly safe bet. 
 
EU member states asserted that “the future of the Balkans is within the European Union” at the Thessaloniki Declaration in 2003. Since then, only Croatia has completed the accession process. For the other countries in the region, there has been little more than frustration as the EU moved the goalposts or placed fresh obstacles in the path of would-be member states. 
 
No country has made a more dramatic effort than North Macedonia. In 2019 it took the radical step of changing its name from plain old Macedonia to resolve a daft but damaging dispute with Greece. The prime minister who promoted the new moniker, Zoran Zaev, persuaded a reluctant electorate to vote for a name change on the promise of unblocking Nato and EU membership. The military alliance swiftly made good on that commitment. The EU, however, allowed Bulgaria to veto the process by raising an even dafter dispute over arcane identity issues. During Von der Leyen’s brief stop in Skopje last week, she took the usual Brussels line, telling North Macedonia that “the ball is in your court”. In other words, the EU is not going to lift a finger to help.
 
In Serbia, support for EU membership has hit an all-time low of 33 per cent. This is partly the consequence of Belgrade’s own equivocal attitude towards Brussels – and the West – under the country’s president, Aleksandar Vučić. But it also reflects the EU’s mercurial behaviour, dangling the carrot of a clear path to accession only for it to be snatched away when former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker declared that there would be “no further [EU] enlargement”. Serbia’s accession momentum never recovered. 
 
These are the most egregious examples of Brussels letting the Balkans down. Despite Von der Leyen’s cheer last week that “Montenegro can do it” and join the EU by 2028, there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical. Likewise, Albania should beware of her tepid comment that “we like [your] ambition” of completing membership negotiations by 2027. If the past two decades have demonstrated anything, it is that only a landlubber would expect smooth sailing from the Western Balkans to Brussels.
 
Guy de Launey is Monocle’s Ljubljana correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today. Further reading? Click here to see how Serbia’s foreign minister, Marko Djuric, could bring unity to the Balkans.

There are a lot of themes threaded through this issue – the potency of good design, legacy, our shifting perceptions of health and ageing – but when I looked at the final proofs, one word seemed to link many of the narratives that run across its pages: determination. This November outing of Monocle reads like a playbook on how to follow your own path, fight for your independence and ignore the naysayers.

Let’s start with the Expo. A few months ago I went to an exhibition at the Saatchi Yates gallery in London. It was the opening night and the space was rammed, guests spilling out onto the street to smoke and talk art. It was a cool crowd and, inside the gallery, the punchy, political canvases on show were being scrutinised by lots of twenty and thirtysomethings. These new works were not the creation of some fresh-faced enfant terrible but Peter Saul, an American artist who is still at the top of his game at 91. Later I spoke about the show with Sophie Monaghan-Coombs, who runs our culture pages. She pointed out that there is a whole host of artists in their eighties and nineties being championed by galleries and museums – many are women who are only now getting the recognition that they deserve. So Sophie put together a feature on seven in-demand senior artists who continue to push boundaries; who live through their work. It’s an inspiring tale of artistic determination.

Giorgio Armani, who died in September, ran an extraordinary business, not least because in an era when key luxury groups have come to control many of the most potent and important labels, he stayed independent – the sole owner of his empire. This allowed him to do things his way, whether that was telling models to smile and look happy or being the only spokesperson for the company. Our fashion director, Natalie Theodosi, was granted backstage access to report on the runway show for his final collection to see how his determination will live on. Her report is combined with the glorious photography of Andy Massaccesi.

A cultural shift is shaking up the health-and-fitness industry. Younger folk – well, a lot of them – see going to the gym less as a necessary evil to combat their daily excesses of food and booze, and more as a way of life. This cohort of clean-living Gen Z consumers will happily spend all day tending to their body’s needs. Enter the “super-boutique” gym, a place not just for taking a class but also for health tests, spa treatments, dining on virtuous meals and hanging out. For this issue, writer Grace Cook travelled to Brussels to meet entrepreneurs (and health advocates) Alexandre de Vaucleroy and Antoine Derom at their recently launched Animo Studios, a space designed to be the backbone of members’ fitness, social and even work lives.

Political, military and diplomatic determination also makes an appearance in this issue. In our Affairs pages, we head to Poland to see how the country is preparing to defend itself should Russia attack. We also sit down with former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas, who now, as vice-president of the European Commission, is in charge of the EU’s foreign policy (even if member states are hard to align). In an interview with our foreign editor, Alexis Self, she explains why she is determined to stand up to threats from the East and unwanted challenges from Washington.

You will also read about the doggedness of art sleuths, the firm focus of three Pritzker Architecture Prize-winners and how Noura bint Mohammed Al Kaabi, minister of state for the UAE, is unwavering in her belief that we need to listen to everyone, while maintaining red lines. I hope that this issue will harden your resolve, as you look ahead. It’s an issue that shows you how you can stick to your principles and do good too.

Though crafts that rely on the dexterity of your hands become more difficult as you age, your decades of learning and life experience can imbue what you create with depth and unique perspectives. Here, we visit the studios of seven artists who continue to paint in their eighties or nineties, still staging big exhibitions, selling work and finding inspiration.

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Isabella Ducrot
Rome, Italy

Isabella Ducrot’s craft is something of a patchwork. It incorporates textiles procured on her travels in Russia, Turkey, China, India and Tibet, and stories from her voracious imagination – Ducrot has been writing for far longer than she has been painting.

Born in Naples, Ducrot moved to Rome in her thirties, lured by the promise of freedom and anonymity. “Romans are indifferent,” she says. “They’re not particularly interested in each other. That’s a good quality.” In the Italian capital, Ducrot surrounded herself with intellectuals, including novelist Alberto Moravia and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

She picked up a paintbrush in her fifties and now, in her studio in the 16th-century Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, she paints on Japanese gampi, a fine, fibrous paper with a satin-like sheen and a fine weft. Made for etching, inking and painting, the delicate material is as recognisable a part of Ducrot’s output as her ochre, green and rust flower motifs, which are achieved with a brush tied to a stick.

Ducrot says that she came to painting so late because of an early education that instructed her to respect tradition and not make changes to the world around her. “It took many years for me to dare to begin this unusual adventure,” she says. Today, at the age of 94, her adventure continues.

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Peter Saul
Germantown,USA

“Except for occasionally talking about modern art to college students, I haven’t done anything but paint pictures since 1959,” says Peter Saul. Those pictures are hard to forget. Saul’s subjects bend, distend, wriggle and writhe across the canvas, transforming into colourful, twisted monstrosities along the way.

Those subjects have changed with the times too: the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump. American life – its vividness and its vulgarity – is a loose theme. That and, as Saul puts it, “bad guys”. “I have more freedom to distort, invent motivation or do anything I want to bad guys,” he says. “Whereas with ‘good guys’, the artist is supposed to follow the rules.”

Saul works from preliminary sketches that have a sense of “freshness”, which can be developed as he paints. As he adds his cacophony of colours, he thinks about how to make the painting interesting to the highest number of people. “The picture has to live in the world,” he says. Saul’s work has done just that for a long time but the critical response to it has become far warmer in recent years. While he is appreciative, the change has had little effect on his practice. “Unlike most artists I know, I don’t seem to respond much to encouragement,” he says. “As long as I’ve got the art supplies, I’m going to paint a picture.”

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Rose Wylie
Kent, UK

When a particularly big globule of paint falls off Rose Wylie’s brush, she’ll simply cover it with a sheet of newspaper to stop it getting on her shoes. “I’m not a precious worker,” she says as we stand in her studio. A soft layer of newspaper carpets the floor, paintbrushes stick out of cans stacked on chairs and colourful splatters obscure the skirting board. Wylie’s unruly garden has crept up the side of the house and into this first-floor room – a jasmine plant pushes through a window in one corner. “Mostly you’re criticised if you don’t tidy up,” she says. “But if you get through a certain threshold, it becomes iconic.”

Wylie’s artistic training went unused for years while she raised her family but, since returning to painting in her forties, she has become a critical and commercial darling of the art world. She is currently working on a painting that features a large, “nonchalant” skeleton. It will appear in her upcoming exhibition at London’s Royal Academy in early 2026, her biggest show to date.

Wylie’s bold canvases often combine text and figures from history, mythology or contemporary pop culture. And while Wylie’s process can be messy, she is exacting about her practice, regularly working late into the night wrestling with a painting. “Often it’s horrible, slimy, trite, pedestrian,” she says. “There are 100 things that can go wrong, particularly with faces, and then, for some odd reason, suddenly it’s alright.”

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Martial Raysse
Bouniagues, France

When Monocle meets Martial Raysse at his home in Dordogne, southwest France, the chill of autumn is creeping in, giving the light a quality that we can’t quite put our finger on. “In Paris, the shadows are blue but here they are pink,” says Raysse. “That’s what seduced me.” Though at 89 he is focused on painting “in strict obedience to the great masters”, the multidisciplinary artist can look back on a remarkably diverse body of work.

Raysse is cryptic about his artistic awakening but, according to his gallerists, he was already painting and writing poetry at the age of 12. By the time the Centre Pompidou put on a retrospective of more than 200 of his works in 2014, Raysse’s artistic expression had taken on dozens of forms, from poetry and painting to neon sculptures and cinema. “The interaction of these different forms enriched my artistic practice,” he says. “But I haven’t adopted any digital tools. I prefer pencil, which I think gets much closer to rendering emotions faithfully.”

Raysse is considered one of the earliest French champions of pop art. In 2011 his 1962 painting “L’année dernière à Capri (titre exotique)” fetched €4.8m at auction, for a time making him the highest-valued living French artist. But as a testament to his constant evolution, today he describes his association with the movement that made his fame as “a youthful error”, denouncing it as an “avatar of ready-made culture”.

Is creativity linked to longevity, we ask? “Unfortunately, creativity doesn’t extend your life,” says Raysse. “But with experience, what you do gain is progress.”

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Frank Bowling
London, UK

At 91, Frank Bowling is still searching for new ways to let paint speak for itself. “I’m always following my instincts,” says Bowling, who has painted, poured, sprayed, stained and stitched vivid colours onto unprimed canvases for more than 70 years. “There was a time when I didn’t have a dealer and museums weren’t buying,” he says. “Now, my paintings are in more than 70 museums around the world.” His work is currently on show at the Bienal de São Paulo 2025 – a full-circle moment for the South America-born artist in the bright throes of his twilight years.

A Bowling artwork begins on the floor. Every cotton-duck canvas receives its first colours in the form of drips of paint that fall from an earlier in-progress painting hanging above – a sort of artistic assembly line. “Then my assistant fills a bucket with paint and water and pours it down the canvas while I direct the flood,” he says.

When Monocle visits his studio in South London, Bowling is directing his son, Ben – who’s armed with silver glitter-laced spray paint – from a wheelchair. “Brighter,” says Bowling of a long white streak that cuts down the canvas like a coastline, “all the way.” When Ben reaches a patch of empty space, Bowling reacts instinctively. “Put red in it,” he says. But the painting is still not finished. Later, it will appear “on the ceiling of my room”. Bowling’s imagination never rests. “I’m preoccupied with the search for something new in painting so I’m always working in different ways.”

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Inson Wongsam
Lamphun,Thailand

Inson Wongsam is a key figure in the history of Thai modern art and the scene’s evolution from staid and traditional to colourful and contemporary. The son of a temple goldsmith, he studied under influential Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci, who changed his name to Silpa Bhirasri.

“Professor Silpa once told me: ‘Inson, if you wish to be an artist, you must sketch and work every day,’” says Wongsam from his studio and private museum in Lamphun, a small city near Chiang Mai. Wongsam has been an artist his entire adult life, creating metal sculptures and wood carvings in the 20th century and, in recent decades, wood block prints and paintings. His days begin at about 04.00, drawing in bed with watercolours or red and green pens or pencils. This is followed by some stretching, breakfast and more drawing in his studio. “When I cannot work, such as on days when I must visit the doctor, I feel uneasy,” he says.

Wongsam celebrated his 91st birthday in September with an exhibition at Bangkok’s Nova Contemporary. “Age has never affected my determination because I believe that the spirit is more important than the body,” he says. “As I grow older, I aim to make my work even more vibrant – never dim or lifeless.” Wongsam is currently working on an exhibition that is planned for next year. “I have reached a point in my life where everything feels clear,” he says. “I don’t need to look elsewhere for inspiration. Ideas come from me, pushing my work forward.”

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Martha Jungwirth
Vienna, Austria

At 85, Martha Jungwirth remains as industrious as she was when she first appeared on the art scene in the early 1960s. Her belated recognition (she only began attracting serious attention and staging large solo exhibitions in the 2010s) and the attendant title of grande dame of Austrian art have not made her aloof. Instead, she is kind and inquisitive, asking as many questions as she answers. Jungwirth works in watercolour or oil on paper rather than canvas and her style is marked by colourful abstraction, with pinks and reds at the fore.

Jungwirth’s wanderlust has taken her across the world, though in recent years she has favoured Greece, which she first visited with her late husband, art historian Alfred Schmeller. “When you travel, you meet people, you eat differently and you feel that you don’t understand anything,” she says as she shows Monocle a series of watercolours from Bali, comprising her impressions of the custom of placing small, stylised houses outside homes. “That activates you again.”

In Jungwirth’s large, light-filled studio, pride of place is shared equally between her current works and her sources of inspiration: reproductions of baroque paintings (classical art has always moved her), alongside newspaper clippings and photographs scattered among countless paint tubes. “I don’t even know what colours are in them,” she says. It is this disorder that drives her to keep working and exploring.

“I always try to surprise myself. Otherwise, you stiffen up and get stuck.”

“When guests arrive, they should feel an Emirati welcome,” says Scott Richardson, the academic dean of Les Roches Abu Dhabi. We’re sitting in the sleek rotunda of the Swiss hospitality school’s new campus, where students in chef whites are bustling around us. Richardson’s phrasing distils a big shift in how the uae wants to present itself. For decades, luxury hospitality here was an import. It was delivered, sometimes falteringly, with European precision and Filipino and South Asian resilience – but rarely with a local voice. Things, however, are changing.

In a country known for building big and thinking bigger, a quiet back-of-house revolution is under way, complete with a well-choreographed turndown service. Abu Dhabi might be a capital more commonly associated with museum-scale statements but with Les Roches’ Middle East campus, it is betting on a different kind of soft power: fluency in five-star service, with an Emirati accent. Minutes by car from the Louvre and the forthcoming Guggenheim, the new campus is designed to back talent from within the region, not import it. While the original institution in Switzerland boasts alumni in top-tier hotels in cities from Singapore to New York, its UAE outpost is trying to localise leadership in an industry that has long been defined by transience.

“Being in Abu Dhabi is absolutely crucial to the success of this academy,” says its managing director, Georgette Davey. “Students can experience so much here.” She points to Abu Dhabi’s expanding cultural footprint – from global museum collaborations to the arrival of Disney – as part of a broader movement. “We’re teaching them about the diversity of the world of hospitality. It’s not just a hotel any more. It’s also about luxury retail and theme parks. It’s about corporate head offices too.”

Alumni and students are embedded across the capital and hospitality here is beginning to feel more elevated – and more Emirati. The next time a visitor checks in at a luxury hotel or enters a restaurant, the person greeting them might just be a local – fluent not only in service standards but also alive to cultural nuance. “We couldn’t just copy-and-paste a European model,” says Richardson. “Hospitality is cultural. It’s about how you make people feel.”

Davey agrees. “In our first intake, about a third of the students were uae nationals,” she says. “Now it’s closer to 95 per cent. We’ve even had requests to launch summer camps for 15-to-17-year-olds.”

Among those leading the shift is Abu Dhabi native Tahnoon Al Qubaisi. “As Emiratis, hospitality runs in our blood,” he says. “From an early age, we are taught to welcome, serve and honour our guests as a reflection of who we are.” Now on placement at Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental, Al Qubaisi says that he sees hospitality not only as an industry but also as a cultural inheritance.

Richardson has plans to have more Emirati professors. “Up to this point, local professors were in engineering and petroleum but things will change,” he says. “We already have an Emirati professor teaching our hospitality culture course. He teaches respect for elders, open-door policy and being welcoming.”

There’s a business case for this shift in emphasis. “Abu Dhabi wants to provide 178,000 tourism-related jobs by 2030,” says Emirati student Mohammed Al Hammadi. “I want to see at least 78,000 of those being filled by Emiratis.”

“We’re already seeing the ripple effect,” adds Al Qubaisi. “Emirati and non-Emirati students are gaining experience at top five-star hotels, government tourism entities, museums, historical attractions and more. This is the beginning of something truly powerful.”
lesroches.edu

There are hotels and there are institutions – and Kämp in Helsinki is among the latter. Since opening in 1887, the country’s first grand hotel has been a discreet stage for diplomats, composers, artists and statesmen. Kämp didn’t just offer comfort: it introduced Finland to an entirely new vision of civility and cosmopolitan life. Beneath its soaring chandeliers, Helsinki’s high society gathered in the Mirror Room. Kämp housed one of Finland’s earliest cinemas, its American-style bar brought cocktail culture to the nation and its suites were the backdrop to cultural breakthroughs and political meetings that changed the course of history: including the founding of the newspaper of record and being a HQ for resisting the Soviets.

More than two decades since its last overhaul, Kämp is preparing for its next act. The €100m renovation isn’t simply a matter of upgrading rooms or adding floor space (though it will do both). “This is about staying relevant without becoming a museum,” says Tuomas Liewendahl, Kämp’s general manager. “It’s the setting, not the story itself. But, for it to serve people today and tomorrow, it needs a face-lift and a bit of modernisation.”

The renovation, which began in late 2023 and will continue in phases until 2026, is being overseen by Finnish architecture studio Sarc 1 Sigge, with interiors led by Helsinki-based Fyra and London’s Archer Humphryes Architects. The building will remain open throughout the revamp – no small feat when all of its 179 guest rooms, along with the public spaces, are being reimagined. The most visible change so far is the new extension into the adjacent Helander House, a historic building that will contain 22 suites and rooms and a new entrance to Esplanadi park. “This is where the city breathes,” says Liewendahl of the boulevard that cuts through central Helsinki. Kämp’s original entrance faced the bustling thoroughfare but, in recent decades, the hotel has been using other doors on the quieter Kluuvikatu street. This is now being reversed. A restored grand entrance, complete with a new reception, will open later this year.

The Helander House suites are notable not only for their size and views but also for the ways in which they accommodate modern travel trends. Four include kitchenettes, spacious wardrobes and cocktail stations with shakers and recipe cards. “We’re seeing longer stays, more private chefs, more people who treat their suite as a personal residence – so we designed for that,” says Liewendahl. Kämp will also offer a new spa, including two pools, a well-equipped gym, treatment rooms and – this being Finland – three saunas. The ambition is not just to pamper guests but to enhance their long-term wellbeing – an aim aligned with the global shift towards holistic travel. “We’re thinking about how people want to feel, not just what they want to see,” says Liewendahl.

The dining areas are also being upgraded. Kämp’s bar will be moved to make way for a new reception hall. An improved restaurant offering will anchor the ground floor, while a breakfast space on Kluuvikatu will serve as a florist and deli by day. The terrace spaces are being kitted out for year-round use too.

The hotel’s guests might include heads of state and international pop stars but it’s the personal connections that give Kämp its resonance. Staff members such as Anders Sjöblom, Kämp’s guest-relations manager, have worked here for more than 20 years. Liewendahl’s grandparents once danced in the Mirror Room; a photograph of the space was presented to him when he hosted a party in the same space. “There aren’t many hotels where the staff, the guests and the city all feel invested,” he says. “But Kämp has always been more than just rooms and keys.”
hotelkamp.com

Stay at Ansitz Layshof, a new guesthouse in Merano’s Maia Alta neighbourhood, and you might well find the owners’ three children playing football on the garden lawn behind the historic property with new-found friends lodging for the weekend. “It’s a family-like atmosphere as it always has been,” says Christa Klotzner, who runs the place with her husband Andreas. “But now it’s for everyone.”

The beautiful, traditional South Tyrolean house – a stone’s throw from the Dolomites – can trace its history back to 1254 and has been in Andreas’s family for more than 150 years. Until recently, though, it was a private farmhouse. Even today, the tractor parked in a dark-wood barn round the corner from the main building points to Andreas’s main job, tending nearby fields. Hailing from the fifth generation of apple farmers, he grew up in the home with his five sisters, parents and nonna. “There was always family in the house visiting my grandmother,” he says.

With the passage of time, it became clear that the house needed work – and was too big for the family’s changing needs. “We got to a situation where we had to decide whether we wanted to go somewhere else to live or refurbish it,” says Christa. The couple, who took over the farm in 2013, decided on the latter, embarking on an ambitious two-year project that converted part of the space into a guesthouse. The work retained the beautiful wooden beams, old doors and stucco ceilings that date to the 18th century, focusing on much-needed structural updates such as restoring the roof and stabilising the structure. Happily for Christa, who jokes that she was always cold when she first moved in, there is now central heating throughout.

The five spacious guest apartments – all with kitchens and one with a private rooftop sauna – are set over the first and second floors, with the owners living at ground level. The rooms mix tasteful contemporary oak parquet with original pieces from the family, including traditionally painted Tyrolean cupboards and sturdy wooden beds.

At one point during the thorough renovation, the couple understood that they needed a designer’s magic touch. “When the work was almost done – and we had wanted to do a lot ourselves – we realised that we needed some help,” says Andreas. The couple drafted in a designer who grew up in Maia Alta, Harry Thaler, the man behind the Monocle Design Awards trophy, who had gone to school with one of Andreas’s sisters.

Thaler’s flourishes take Ansitz Layshof to the next level. As well as turning his attention to all the room lamps, he designed a mezzanine level in the “Weyer” apartment and advised on the rooms’ armchairs. But it’s his work in the firstfloor communal area that stands out the most. The huge, sculptural copper chandelier hangs from the ceiling above a circular sage-green sofa – also Thaler’s work – juxtaposing wonderfully with old paintings and a grandfather clock set against a wall. “When we saw how beautiful the restoration was,” says Christa, “we knew that we wanted to share it with others.”
layshof.com

In the raw beauty of Portugal’s Costa Vicentina natural park, the ochre buildings that make up Vale Palheiro Earth Resort don’t just complement the surroundings – they were literally built from the earth beneath it. To erect the dozen structures perched on the verdant hillside, the hotel’s founders, Madalena and Pedro Rutkowski, turned to rammed-earth construction, a sustainable but labour-intensive method once popular in Portugal but long in disuse. “Very few people know how to build like this today so we needed specialised hands who started working on this project 12 years ago,” Madalena tells Monocle. Combined with dry-stone walls of local schist, and brick roofs and floors from the region’s still thriving pottery industry, this rural retreat feels as though it has always been there.

The attention to provenance carries through to the interiors, which have been designed by Lisbon’s Arkstudio. “The goal was to create comfort with these organic materials,” says Arkstudio principal Margarida Matias, who went through an exercise of her own to uncover regional materials and crafts suited to the terrain. Natural cotton fibres woven on traditional looms upholster generous wooden benches, with clay amphorae decorating tables and outside spaces. Thick, textured tapestries by artist Rita Sevilha adorn walls, where unpainted patches show the layers of the earth within. Meanwhile, windows open onto views of the surrounding valley, with whitewashed houses of nearby beach town Aljezur climbing the hill at a distance. “It was very important that everything felt integrated into the landscape,” says Matias. The result is decor with a rustic charm but an open, uncluttered feel.

Spread across 60 hectares, the accommodation is split between selfsufficient villas with kitchen and dining areas, and smaller but equally comfortable suites with high-domed ceilings. Vale Palheiro also has a pool, a wellness centre and a farm-to-table restaurant that draws on the estate’s hives, orchards and chicken coop, as well as seasonal ingredients from the surrounding region. Shaded porches invite slow afternoons with a book; games rooms come with fireplaces for cooler nights; and the rooftop terrace, equipped with firepits, is designed for stargazing. “We wanted to create plenty of space for contemplation,” says Matias. “Somewhere to read, draw and dream.”

Halfway down Italy’s Adriatic flank, inside a bustling factory in the municipality of Montegranaro, car parts are zipping off the production line. Stacked on moveable shelving while awaiting the next step, every piece will be shifted around an open-plan space to different workstations. In one area, people wearing masks are spraying a blue adhesive that will be used to bind the leather upholstery to the panel through a combination of heat and pressure. This plant, which was founded four years ago, might seem like a car manufacturer’s home base. But it actually belongs to Poltrona Frau, a storied design brand that dates back to 1912 and is better known for furnishing living rooms than the insides of sports cars.

“The company has transformed in the past few years,” says senior designer Luca Bellomarì as he takes Monocle on a tour of the buildings. Bellomarì is talking about Poltrona Frau’s In Motion business, which provides pristine leather-wrapped products, including seat covers, for high-end vehicles. While Poltrona Frau is a household name as a maker of sofas and armchairs, collaborating with such design luminaries as Gio Ponti and Pierluigi Cerri, In Motion has been quietly – and rather successfully – working away from the limelight.

Founded as a standalone business division in 1985, In Motion’s first automotive project was on the Lancia Thema, which had a Ferrari engine. Today the business’s client list includes Range Rover, McLaren, Pagani, Lamborghini and Ferrari. But glance inside the leather interior of a Ferrari and you won’t see a Poltrona Frau logo anywhere, even though it has decked out all of its vehicles since 1998. And though automotive is its biggest segment, In Motion also has a footprint in the yachting and aviation sectors.

As Monocle passes workers dressed in Poltrona Frau T-shirts, some of them wearing sweatbands and gloves, Bellomarì explains that In Motion’s biggest shift has been its decision to start supplying what he calls “systems”. Rather than just upholstering pieces sent to Poltrona Frau, the business now makes everything from headliners – a car’s inside roof – to door panels. “We co-design with the original equipment manufacturers,” he says.

Though there’s plenty of powerful machinery at the plant, it’s clear that In Motion fits out vehicles in the same way as the rest of the Poltrona Frau business approaches furniture. That means it wouldn’t be anywhere without skilled artisans stretching, smoothing, cutting and checking the quality of the hides by eye. Red lasers projected onto the leather might help stitchers to maintain a straight line but technology is only intended as an aid to those carrying out the work. “We still work with our hands,” says Bellomarì. “This is something that often doesn’t get contemplated in the automotive industry.”

Later in the day of our visit, Monocle leaves Montegranaro for the brand’s headquarters, a short drive away in Tolentino – home to a brand museum designed by Michele de Lucchi. On hand to meet us in its café is Giovanni Maiolo, the general manager of Poltrona Frau In Motion. Maiolo joined the company in 2019 and has been responsible for much of its recent success. “Before our change of business model, we were just the last step in the value chain,” he says. “We have completely transformed our approach and started to work with the customer at the beginning of a project.”

In Motion has the advantage of servicing a luxury car industry in which the vehicles are often limited editions and maintain or increase their value over time. This makes the business largely recession-proof. Demand in the segment outstrips supply and Maiolo says that while there was a global slowdown in the furniture market last year, In Motion has been moving in the opposite direction, with an expected turnover of €120m this year. “We have increased turnover by 100 per cent in five years,” he says. “We are now considered a pillar of the group.”

In Motion is clearly a well-oiled machine – and it has to be in a business where a competitor doing something better or more quickly could lead to the loss of a vital contract. Its leather needs to behave in a different way to furniture upholstery too. Designer Bellomarì talks about it being more rigid and “having a completely different characteristic”. In the boating, car and aviation worlds, Poltrona Frau must strike the right balance between craft and performance. Exactly how hardy it needs to be becomes apparent at a testing lab, where leather is exposed to temperatures ranging from -30C to 115C and put through a stress test of being repeatedly tugged for as many as 100,000 cycles – an attempt to cover all bases for the sorts of extremes that the leather might be exposed to in its lifespan.

Daniele Gardini, the R&D leather manager, says that In Motion has about 10 leather collections and can provide the client with everything from digital printing to microembroidery to complete a custom look. The search for innovation is constant. Gardini says that metallic leather is a recent addition, something that has clearly been borrowed from the fashion-accessory world. One major breakthrough has been Poltrona Frau iBreathe, a product that came out of development in 2024. “We have been working on the lightness of leather,” he says. “Removing 10kg from the weight of a vehicle is a good saving for speed and fuel consumption.” It weighs less because there are wider spaces between the fibres in the fabric. Aesthetically, however, you wouldn’t know the difference.

Innovation is crucial to In Motion’s survival. If a declaration of intent were needed, it came in June 2024 when it bought a majority stake in KJ Ryan, a UK company based in the city of Coventry that makes high-end automotive components. It was Poltrona Frau’s first overseas acquisition. With Italy and the UK producing more than 80 per cent of the world’s luxury cars, it was a shrewd move from In Motion, which has worked in the country since 2007 and has clients including Rolls Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin and Range Rover. “The UK was already a market that we knew in some way,” says Maiolo. “But what we were missing was all the rest – everything connected with the culture.” The plan is to eventually shift more production to Coventry for local clients.

With more than 600 employees now spread between Italy and the UK, In Motion continues to move through the gears, even if its touch, in many ways, remains light. Poltrona Frau doesn’t make a song and dance about the work that it does at In Motion but Maiolo jokes that he needs to start talking about it to keep winning more clients and ensure a resilient future – which he has started to do more now that the “hardware” of the business model is airtight. With it, he hopes that the work of In Motion will soon be as recognised and requested in cars as a Bose stereo or a Brembo braking system. “Our goal is that in five years’ time, when you shop for a luxury car, the first thing you ask when looking inside it is, ‘Is this made by Poltrona Frau?’”

What’s the best way to protect architecture of note? One solution is to seek heritage listing, which would help to prevent demolition or unsightly additions. “Often protected buildings are made into museums,” says Mauri Tommila, who established Tommila Architects in Helsinki in 1984. But Tommila decided to take a different approach when he and his wife, Aila, bought Villa Ervi in 1990.

The building was looking somewhat tired and didn’t reflect its status in design circles: the former residence of prominent mid-century Finnish architect Aarne Ervi, it’s a notable example of the country’s postwar residential modernism. Mauri, now 74, says that if the structure had been listed or turned into a museum, small alterations to make it liveable would have been almost impossible. “There would always have been someone looking over your shoulder,” he adds, explaining that, without any interference from a heritage body, he has been able to maintain the building’s original function – that of a residence and architecture studio.

The first part of the structure was built in 1951, the year when Mauri was born. Ervi wanted the site to function as both a family home and a studio (an office annexe was added in 1962). Amid a maritime landscape in the Finnish capital’s Kuusisaari neighbourhood, the villa has a white, plastered façade that is softened by lush vegetation, and is positioned to take advantage of sea views. The roof is made from clay brick and stone tiling appears on the thresholds, where large windows open onto a garden planted with alpine roses and a Japanese maple, with the water visible beyond.

When Monocle visits, Mauri and Aila are waiting at the wide wooden front door – their usual spot when welcoming guests as they reach an entrance hall that has curved ceilings rising high overhead and natural light flooding in from skylights. Elements such as oak cabinetry with patinated brass handles feature in the foyer, which has a floor lined with handmade Italian tiles. The effect is both ethereal and earthy.

From here, the interior unfolds in a sequence of staggered, interlinked spaces: the living room, the dining room, the kitchen and the bedrooms. Each has large windows with views of the garden, sky and sea. Natural materials and a connection to the elements are prioritised. The living room has a central, open fireplace; in the kitchen, you’ll find sapele mahogany cabinets; bedrooms can be closed off by sliding timber doors and feature the original oak cupboards; the bathrooms are defined by deep-green tiles. Transitions are marked by columns wrapped in rattan cord and doors provide direct access from the kitchen and living room to the garden.

Mauri tells Monocle that the building still works well as a home, decades after its construction. It is human in scale, delivering comfort without ostentation. “Villa Ervi was built to be a home and should be used as one,” he says. The kitchen and living room, with an original Aalto table and a smaller side piece by Ervi, are still where most of the family’s everyday life takes place. The long and welcoming dining table is surrounded by 1950s Fanett chairs by Ilmari Tapiovaara, with Paavo Tynell’s lighting fixtures and Unikko-patterned Marimekko textiles dotted throughout the space.

Meanwhile, the garden is used during summer, as is the swimming pool, whose form echoes the staggered footprint of the office annexe. The sauna, an anchor of Finnish life, is in regular use, thanks to a 1995 renovation that restored its original patinated iroko-wood façade.

The office annexe now serves as the home of Mauri’s architecture practice. As in the residence, there is a strong focus on embracing the site and the use of natural materials. “It’s the most Japanese building in Finland,” says Mauri, as he walks Monocle through the low, long structure, which is defined by a Oregon pine façade. Its proximity to the home means that work often overlaps with personal life; staff meetings take place in the garden and over long dinners at the weekend.

It’s a situation that has benefited Mauri and Aila’s daughter, Miia-Liina. Now the CEO of Tommila Architects, she was immersed in her father’s practice while growing up in Villa Ervi. “I was surrounded by it all and it shaped how I think about space,” she says, recalling how she used to look into the garden, perching on the building’s broad windowsills and noticing how the changing light would alter the appearance of the walls and wood grain. “It made me an architect because I understood the value of good architecture early.”

The family-run practice now works on strategic planning, and regeneration and repair projects – architecture that’s not just about building but also maintaining and evolving an environment. Its approach is partly a response to what Mauri and Miia-Liina see as a tendency among developers to demolish old buildings, even when they still have plenty of life left in them. “We should preserve the layers of architecture in our cities,” says Mauri. “They are layers of our culture.”

It’s this outlook that continues to inform Mauri and Aila’s hopes and dreams for Villa Ervi. With their children grown and no longer at home, the scale of the residence exceeds their daily needs. As such, the property has been put up for sale, though not aggressively. The couple is particular about potential future owners – and for good reason. The property’s future custodians will not only inherit walls and windows but a way of being, an architectural legacy of care and a collection of historically significant buildings that remain in constant use. It’s not, according to Mauri, architecture to be preserved as an exhibit – it’s to be lived in.

“If it sells, it sells,” he says. “If not, we’ll stay. What matters is that this place continues to be used – not turned into a museum.”