Free childcare, free bus services, rent freezes on stabilised apartments and city-owned grocery stores – these are Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani’s signature proposals in the 4 November mayoral election. To anyone living in a Western European state, the self-professed democratic-socalist’s ideas probably sound entirely reasonable. But to many Americans, they’re wildly ambitious – radical, even. It’s easy to forget when you’re outside the country that in the US, the welfare state barely exists, and anything “free” is seen as borderline communist.

Still, wouldn’t it be nice if it wasn’t? New York is arguably the most expensive city in the country. Groceries are exorbitant (tariffs have certainly not helped) and rents are spiralling. The median rent in Manhattan hit $4,700 (€4,084) in July – up 9.3 per cent from last year. Apartment hunting has become warfare. Lines for places that are even remotely affordable snake around the block and bidding wars have become the norm. Without getting into the nitty gritty of how Mamdani plans to pay for it all, you can’t deny how refreshing it is to hear someone rally for an improved quality of life. 

It’s hard to picture a New York where everything isn’t outrageously priced. But imagine a city where people can actually afford to stay in their homes, where groceries don’t cost as much as eating out and where schools have more green spaces. Somewhere that daily life is less defined by economic anxiety.

Love him or loathe him, Mamdani is proposing some of the most progressive ideas the city’s seen in decades, in a country that appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Many New Yorkers find his campaign energising; others, understandably, are skeptical (not least because it sounds very expensive). The idea of a democratic socialist leading the financial capital of the US is, to some, terrifying. Critics worry that aggressive rent freezes will discourage new housing supply and that tax hikes will chase away businesses or high-earning residents. But the reality is also that inequality in the city is deepening and working-class families are being squeezed out. Something has to shift. 

Mamdani isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel: former mayors Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio pushed for free bus routes and more affordable housing. As for the idea of city-owned grocery stores (which would mean one subsidised shop in each of New York’s five boroughs), it hardly amounts to replacing Whole Foods. Europe shows that welfare programmes don’t turn a place communist. If Mamdani manages to pull even part of his agenda off, it would be transformative; not just for his city, but the entire US. He might be tackling uniquely New York problems, but if a metropolis of over eight million people proves that free buses, stabilised rent and subsidised childcare can work in an American context, it could provide a template for the rest of the nation, while reviving the Democratic Party. 

I’m generally averse to recommendation lists. Every city has been Google Doc’d and mapped to death, especially Tokyo. And yet there’s one longtime Monocle favourite where I always send visitors: Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama, better known as T-Site. Not only is this a design pilgrimage – Klein Dytham’s three-pavilion architecture is handsome – but it makes a convincing argument for what bookshops should be. The space itself tells you everything. There are generous proportions and sight lines that encourage wandering. An afternoon here doesn’t require purchasing anything. Lingering is the point.
 
Walk into any section and the depth is beyond considered; it’s obsessive. Not twelve books on Japanese ceramics but first editions, contemporary practitioners, historical surveys, exhibition catalogues and the design magazine profiling a specialised kiln town. Architecture doesn’t end at Tadao Ando monographs and cycling doesn’t stop at Tour de France photography: every interest gets treated with the sincerity of a specialist shop.

The magazine walls are a telling sign. Hundreds of titles serving micro-interests that elsewhere exist only as newsletters or Reddit threads. There are publications devoted to specific prefectures, particular menswear styles, individual craft traditions, niche sports and specific schools of graphic design. These survive in print because Japan still has an appetite for focused cultural production. There are razor-sharp editorial points of view, supported by actual advertising markets. Essentially, the internet hasn’t atomised everything.
 
Then there’s Anjin, the café. First editions are shelved as wall décor and there’s museum-quality mid-century furniture that you’re meant to use and sink into. It’s a common space, open to anyone, that depends entirely on this rare quality of ambient respect. There are no ropes, no defensive design, no “please don’t touch” placards. Just an expectation that people will behave properly – as the architects, designers and curators intended. Most Western cities would require guards or else it would be vandalised within a week. Here it simply exists, beautiful and accessible.

T-Site also stays fresh through rotating exhibitions and thematic collaborations. A corner featuring Scandinavian design some months ago now pivots to Japanese folk crafts. The space curates like museums do collections, understanding that a bookshop isn’t a fixed repository but an ongoing showcase.

Most such shops optimised themselves into irrelevance – bestseller tables, Moleskine notebooks, corporate sameness. T-Site works because it takes seriously every aspect of what a bookshop can be. Transactional, yes, but also communal, curatorial, atmospheric and aspirational. It’s a place reflecting the density of urban interests rather than flattening everything to algorithmic popularity.
 
Here’s why it matters: most bookshops died because they stopped being interesting, not because people stopped wanting them. T-Site should be the standard.
 
Colin Nagy is a Los Angeles-based writer and strategist. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today. And if you’re after extra tip-offs in Tokyo, take a look at our City Guide.

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The vice-presidency of the United States is one of the strangest jobs in global politics. The holder of the office is all at once extremely close to awesome power, yet miles away from any power at all. So long as the occupant of the White House stays healthy and lucky, the vice-president is usually a ceremonial eunuch, sent on diplomatic visits to ghastly places that the president can’t be bothered with, engaged to speak at state fairs teeming with uncomprehending riff-raff or confined to their opulent quarters, wistfully reading biographies of John Wilkes Booth.

Many who have done the job have hated it. John Adams, the very first vice-president, griped that “my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” John Nance Garner, vice-president to Franklin D Roosevelt, legendarily growled that the position was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”; he might not actually have said “spit”. Thomas Marshall, vice-president to Woodrow Wilson, is credited with a joke about two brothers, one who ran away to sea, one who became vice-president, and from neither of whom was any more heard.

But Richard Bruce Cheney, who died today at the age of 84, was never going to be one of those vice-presidents. He was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on 30 January 1941 and raised substantially in Casper, Wyoming. He was a bright but wayward young man – smart enough to get into Yale, not disciplined enough to stay there and a repeat offender of traffic violations. He was, like many middle-class young American men, a serial dodger of the Vietnam draft – in his case by being an apparently perpetual student, then a married man before 26 and then a father. It was waspishly noted that his first daughter, Elizabeth, later a politician herself, was born nine months and two days after the draft was extended to married men without children.

Cheney’s ascent of the political greasy pole began properly in 1969. Having finally completed his political-science studies, he became an intern to Wisconsin’s Republican congressman William Steiger. Shortly afterwards, he began making himself useful to former Illinois congressman Donald Rumsfeld, the then-counselor to president Richard M Nixon.

Cheney acquired a reputation as an efficient functionary and survived his service in Nixon’s administration unscathed by its implosion following the Watergate scandal – so did his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, who had been serving as ambassador to Nato in Brussels. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, engaged Rumsfeld as White House chief of staff with Cheney as his deputy. When Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defence, Cheney inherited the chief of staff’s job – gatekeeper to the Oval Office.

Cheney did not keep it long. Ford lost the 1976 presidential election to Jimmy Carter but Cheney was not done with politics. In 1978 he won Wyoming’s only seat in the House of Representatives. He was re-elected five times and rose to become House minority whip and chair of the House Republican conference. In 1989, president George HW Bush named him secretary of defence, in which role Cheney oversaw the US invasion of Panama in late 1989 and the US-led eviction of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in early 1991.

Cheney’s progress in politics was interrupted by Bush’s loss of the 1992 presidential election. There was some vague talk of Cheney seeking the Republican nomination himself someday but three key factors always weighed against it. His health was rickety: he suffered recurrent heart attacks from his late thirties onwards; he would have a heart transplant in 2012. He was protective of his second daughter, Mary, a gay woman whose private life would have become public. And he was a notably dismal public speaker.

Cheney spent much of the 1990s making money, as CEO of the colossal energy-services multinational Halliburton. He was summoned back to public office by Texas governor George W Bush, seeking to bolster his own tilt at the presidency by putting an experienced heavyweight on the ticket. If Cheney, once Bush’s narrow victory was confirmed, had doubts about what he might make of the vice-presidency, events – specifically, the events of September 11, 2001 – clarified matters for him.

Significantly at Cheney’s urging, Bush presented the pair of them to the world – to the Middle East especially – as bad cop and worse cop. While Bush gave the jut-jawed speeches, Cheney seethed in an assortment of bunkers, scheming to vanquish enemies real, potential and altogether imaginary. He was a significant architect of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, amplifying intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which was widely believed dubious at the time and eventually proved entirely bogus. He was an aggressive enthusiast of the brutal – and debatably effective – tactics that became known by such sinister euphemisms as “enhanced interrogation” and “extraordinary rendition”.

Cheney’s vice-presidency was a rebuke to that hefty lexicon of jokes about the impotence of the office: he made himself the most powerful person ever to inhabit it and, for the first eight years of the 21st century, one of the most powerful people on Earth. It is arguable that some of what he did with that power, even if furtively and unaccountably, made his fellow citizens safer but that presents the difficulty of measuring terror attacks that never happened. It is certain, however, that Dick Cheney played a key role in unleashing events that grievously and lastingly damaged America’s reputation and moral authority. He left office with an approval rating among his fellow Americans of 13 percent, probably not all that far in front of Osama bin Laden.

There are few cultural projects that have so perfectly captured both a nation’s ambition and its inertia as the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). Two decades in the making, more than $1bn (€870m) spent and several false starts later, the colossal complex at Giza has finally opened its doors, a stone’s throw from the pyramids and the Cairo ring road. The story, like the building, is monumental. Yet, as the first visitors wander through its marble-bright atriums and past the 3,200-year-old Ramses II statue, it’s worth asking: what does Egypt really want this museum to say? 

From its conception in the early 1990s, the GEM was always about more than archaeology. It was a gesture of modern nationhood, Egypt announcing itself as a cultural superpower with institutions capable of rivalling the Louvre, the British Museum or the Smithsonian. But the museum’s journey tells a more complicated story. Construction began in 2005, stalled after the Arab Spring, was revived with loans from Japan, then delayed again by the coronavirus pandemic. In many ways, the museum became a metaphor for modern Egypt: heavy with history, halted by politics and ultimately propelled forward by the stubborn belief that grandeur can substitute for good governance.

Designed by Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects, the building is suitably theatrical. Its vast triangular façade of alabaster and glass tilts toward the pyramids in a silent architectural dialogue with the ancient world. Inside, a grand staircase ascends through a procession of statues, sarcophagi and stelae. There is a sense of awe leading up to the full Tutankhamun collection (shown together for the first time). Though breathtaking, it also feels carefully stage-managed. Is this a museum or a national theatre? 

The guest list for the grand opening this weekend underscored this point. Egypt invited presidents, kings and crown princes from Europe and the Arab world. There were red carpets, drone shows and speeches about civilisation’s cradle reawakening. The message was not subtle: Egypt is back on the global stage. Yet such pageantry hints at a quiet insecurity. After all, Cairo’s other great museum, the dusty, beloved Tahrir building, told its story without ceremony or LED screens. This new iteration feels like it’s trying to prove something. 

Beyond the symbolism, the GEM forms part of a vast redevelopment of the Giza plateau with new roads, hotels, a planned airport and even manicured parks where there were once chaotic streets. Tourism accounts for about 12 per cent of Egypt’s GDP and the government hopes that the museum will boost arrivals by up to 20 per cent. It’s a tall order in a global economy that’s wobbling, with Egypt grappling with debt, inflation and youth unemployment. But the museum offers a different kind of investment: narrative. It allows Cairo to reframe the conversation from crisis to civilisation, from IMF loans to the legacy of the pharaohs. Indeed, who is this museum for? The ticket prices will certainly deter many Egyptians and the scale of the site feels designed for international tour groups rather than locals on an afternoon outing. This is spectacle as soft power. 

In a country where history is counted in millennia, the opening of a new museum should perhaps be taken with a pinch of desert salt. The GEM is an extraordinary achievement, yes, but it’s also a reminder that modern Egypt is still negotiating its relationship with the recent past. Whether it becomes a living cultural institution or another monument to ambition will depend on what happens when the world’s cameras leave and the red carpets are rolled away. Until then, Egypt’s newest wonder will have to wait to see if the 20-year process was worth it. 

Inzamam Rashid is Monocle’s Gulf correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today. Further reading? We caught up with Shirin Frangoul-Brückner, the CEO of Stuttgart-based design studio Atelier Brückner, who designed the galleries, Grand Staircase and atrium for the Grand Egyptian Museum. Read our conversation here.

Dubai Design Week 2025, which begins today and runs until Sunday in Dubai Design District (D3), arrives at a moment when the city’s design ambitions are no longer being underestimated. What began a decade ago as a fledgling regional showcase has matured into one of the most credible stops on the global design calendar; an event that now attracts serious attention from curators, critics and creative directors who once confined their itineraries to Milan or London.

For this year’s edition, the festival’s 11th, international heavyweights such as Kartell, Vitra, and Roche Bobois sit comfortably alongside an increasingly self-assured roster of regional voices. The tone is confident and cosmopolitan – this is not a week for novelties or spectacle but for substance and dialogue. As the director of Dubai Design Week, Natasha Carella, explains, “Our approach is guided by a commitment to high-quality, original design that contributes meaningfully to the global discourse.” That philosophy is visible across the programme, from material-driven experimentation to urban commissions that rethink how public space can foster connection.

Across D3’s courtyards and waterfront terraces, there’s a hum of anticipation. Designers from Sao Paulo to Seoul are setting up installations alongside collectives from Manama and Muscat. The Abwab pavilion, curated around the theme “In the Details”, is among the standouts: Bahrain’s Maraj Studio has woven a delicate, embroidered mesh inspired by the thobe al nashil national dress to explain the fragile ecology of Nabih Saleh Island – a poetic intersection of craft and environmental storytelling.

Carella has resisted turning the festival into a single-theme spectacle. Instead, she’s building a framework where design is treated as a civic act as much as a creative one. “We look at design not only as a practice of innovation,” she says, “but as a social connector.” That ambition translates into the details: from low-carbon DuneCrete structures by ARDH Collective to collaborations between Japanese architects Nikken Sekkei and Emirati woodworkers, the work on display emphasises material intelligence and dialogue between cultures.

For observers, the significance of Dubai Design Week lies less in scale than in perspective. It reflects a city that has invested heavily in cultural infrastructure, museums, architecture schools, and public-art initiatives and is now seeing the dividends. The result is a festival that’s as much about exchange as exhibition – a meeting point between emerging nations and established design capitals, between institutional might and independent experimentation.

The first time I ate the smoked-eel sandwich at Quo Vadis I was alone and new to Soho. Tangy pink onions. The sharp slap of horseradish. And a buttery crunch, the kind that only exists when bread has been toasted in fat by a chef. You can order it late into the night and it pairs wonderfully with a martini. 

The dish was created by Quo Vadis’s chef proprietor, Jeremy Lee, a man so jolly that one bite can summon him like a genie to greet you at your table. It’s said that on one unremarkable day in the mid-1990s, Lee had “a load of smoked eel and Poilâne sourdough to use up” and, well, that’s the whole story. Born out of thrift, perfected by repetition and still presented with panache, that sandwich has been on my mind since 2013, and Lee’s menus for some 30-odd years. First at Blueprint Café, the restaurant that he ran at the Design Museum, and now at Quo Vadis.

But the smoked-eel sandwich is a symbol of a greater culinary question: in an industry with a novelty addiction, how do we celebrate the magic of what’s already here? Getting people into new restaurants is easy: algorithms reward it, the media ranks it, diners chase it. The refrain of “Have you been to…?”is a daily dinin my industry. Long-established restaurants are expected to reinvent themselves to stay relevant because diners are guilty of treating old favourites like old lovers: fondly remembered, rarely visited. 

And yet, many of London’s most beloved restaurants and dishes aren’t new at all. The steak haché at Brasserie Zédel, the fish-sauce chilli wings at Smoking Goat, the curry udon at Koya – none of them have really changed. They have simply remained excellent. Returning to them is akin to revisiting a favourite book: taking pleasure in familiar beats or perhaps introducing someone to them. 
 
What if the shortcut to joy isn’t constant change but repetition? Dishes needn’t be about surprise so much as return. The smoked-eel sandwich hasn’t changed much since the 1990s and nor should it. Its power lies in its delicious consistency: the joy of knowing exactly what’s coming and being transported back to that first bite. Of course, restaurants must evolve, whether through sustainability, provenance or sheer creativity. But there’s a difference between evolution and panic reinvention. Not everything has to be a debut.

Perhaps the trick – for diners and creators alike – is to resist the reflex to chase the new for its own sake. To be confident and let the classics shine. Because sometimes, what we need isn’t the next big thing but the same crunchy, horseradish-laced sandwich that has been waiting at the bar all along. Martini in company. As perfect as ever.

Emily Bryce–Perkins is a London-based writer. In London and in need of a few suggestions? Be sure to consult Monocle’s City Guide. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

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Were school buses ever part of your academic routine? Were you packed off to the end of the driveway with your lunch, books, overstuffed pencil case and sports gear in your backpack to be picked up by a functional vehicle (in my case yellow) rammed with schoolmates of varying ages and occasionally a monitor to keep things in check? Did you have a friend who saved you a seat? Were you a loner who sat at the front? And did you make faces at the drivers when you pulled up at stoplights? Or perhaps you were so bold as to press your bum up against the window? I believe that might have been called a “pressed ham”. I didn’t have many years of school buses but I look back at those chilly mornings in Hudson, Quebec, with a certain fondness as the 20-minute circuit to get to campus created a certain camaraderie that wouldn’t have happened if we’d all been shuttled by our parents. 

Four decades on, and it feels a bit the same when I fly in and out of Zürich on home carrier, Swiss. With an out-of-proportion airport compared to its population (Zürich proper has around 500,000 inhabitants), it’s perhaps the best-served city in the world when it comes to both short and long-haul connections – yet it also remains familiar and cosy. Swiss isn’t Air France or Cathay Pacific when it comes to the size of its long-haul fleet but with 30-odd Airbuses and Boeings (and 10 new A350-900s inbound) it does a good job of touching down in most of the places that I need to go. 

North America is best served, there’s a highly profitable route to São Paulo that some days connects on to Buenos Aires and I mostly fly its routes to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. I’ve been doing these jaunts for quite a while now and it’s almost a given that I’ll be familiar with at least two crew members in the cabin, will have met the captain a couple of times and likely know one or two passengers seated nearby. This is when one of their Boeing 777s starts to feel a bit like a school bus for grown-ups. 

On my return from Tokyo Narita the other day, one of the Japanese crew came by toward the end of the flight, clutching a crisply folded shopping bag from Books Kinokuniya and a black pen. She introduced herself as Maya-san and said that she was a fan of not just Monocle but my Monocle on Sunday radio show. “When we couldn’t fly during the pandemic, your show was my connection to Switzerland and the world,” she explained. “I would be most honoured if you signed my copy of the magazine.” There are many perks that come with this job but a ‘Maya moment’ ranks at the top when you realise that all of the paper, ink and airtime does have a proper point of connection with exactly the kind of people we all imagine (hope!) that we’re writing and producing for. 

As the flight was on a Saturday, Maya showed up the following morning to watch the show live from our studio at Dufourstrasse in Zürich, and across the two hours also met other contributors, readers and listeners. Yesterday, I boarded the LX180 to Bangkok and, as I was settling in, a gentleman across the cabin nodded and waved. A regular at Dufourstrasse, he was on his way to meet his partner in the Thai capital and as drinks were poured and orders taken the captain came round to introduce himself and discuss the route, the jetstream over the Himalayas and the belly full of cargo. “Watches heading to boutiques in Bangkok?” I asked. “I couldn’t possibly say,” he winked. At that point, the café regular popped over to show me a picture of a vehicle on his phone. “It’s a 1950s Ferrari and I need to convince the other half that it’s what we need. What do you think?” he asked. In an instant I was back on the school bus in Hudson, except that I would have been looking at a Corgi Toys catalogue with my friend Peter and he would have been showing me the cars that he was hoping Santa would bring for Christmas. “You need to convince her that the car is a must,” I said. “And I’ll happily assist when we get to Bangkok, if a drink is required.” 

Brands can get carried away with fancy new cabins, destinations and menus but an Airbus is still an Airbus, a Boeing a Boeing. Leadership needs to remember that it is people, both staff and passengers, that define a brand and cosy proportions are far better than the impersonal and oversized.

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

Taiwan’s government has promoted household preparedness for years – a consequence of existing on the Pacific Ring of Fire and across the Taiwan Strait from mainland China. Public awareness and follow-through have varied but a recent combination of increased seismic activity, typhoons and a more belligerent Beijing has created genuine demand – and the private market has been quick to capitalise.

SafeTaiwan began selling evacuation kits last year, tapping into growing demand for well-designed, ready-to-go supplies. The start-up’s best-seller remains the standard adult pack: a waterproof backpack stocked with items including thermal blankets, gloves, saline, a whistle and gauze. But there’s a new product on sale: the pet kit. It’s a quirky entry point into the otherwise serious trend of disaster preparedness. Inside are items such as collapsible bowls, a water feeder and a kitty-litter scoop. “About one in three or four households in Taiwan keeps a pet,” says founder Bonny Lu. “For many people, their animals are like their children.”

Lu, a former pet-food entrepreneur, ventured into the disaster-prep market after failing to find a ready-made kit suitable for earthquakes. Taiwan experiences frequent tremors and last year saw its strongest quake in 25 years. “I couldn’t find a complete emergency kit that met my needs,” she tells Monocle from the company’s Taipei headquarters. “So I tried assembling one myself. I hadn’t expected the process to be so troublesome.” The inconvenience became a business opportunity; one that now supplies kits to households, schools and corporations.

Sales rose steadily before surging this summer when the American Institute in Taiwan – Washington’s de facto embassy – urged residents to prepare their own “go bags”. SafeTaiwan’s sales jumped eightfold as households prepared themselves, their children and their animals for disaster. “At the beginning, most people imagined emergency scenarios only as earthquakes,” says Lu. “But starting last year, more people became concerned about political conflict and other types of disasters.”

The company’s fortunes now rise and fall with the news cycle: a major quake in the Asia Pacific region sends demand for earthquake kits rising; military flare-ups abroad or Chinese navy drills in the waters around Taiwan put war top of mind; and news of a super typhoon brewing in the South China Seas dials up the number of customer enquiries about flood-proof gear.

And it’s not just coats, blankets and bags flying off the shelves. Radios, the classic standby of any emergency kit, are also enjoying a renaissance. Taiwan-based Sangean, one of the country’s best-known radio manufacturers, reports strong demand for its crank-powered, solar-ready emergency models – built to withstand blackouts, storms and even electromagnetic interference – which has now become its global bestseller.

The trend is a convergence of function and form that has become a hallmark of Taiwan’s small but nimble preparedness sector. Its kits resemble commuter bags rather than bulky military gear and many of the designs look disarmingly cute for such a bleak concept. The entry-level items of thermal blankets, flashlights and water filters are practical but not intimidating. Some are even sweet. “We tell people to focus on having the basics first and then improve from there,” says Lu. “The important thing is simply to start.”

By framing preparedness as a sensible precaution rather than wild paranoia, SafeTaiwan makes its kits an easier sell. Far better to have a bag by the door packed with supplies for everyone, including a litter scooper for Kitty and a bowl for Fido, than to be caught short in the next big storm. For an island where uncertainty is a constant, preparedness has quietly become both a mindset and a market.

Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque might steal the spotlight in Muscat but it’s the smaller, clean-lined Bab Al Salam Mosque that signals a new direction for Omani design. Surrounded by family homes on the city’s outskirts, the building was designed by Altqadum, a design studio and collective founded in 2017 and led by brother-and-sister architects Marwan and Najd Al Balushi, together with artist Abdulrahim Alkendi.

Altqadum’s practice centres on studying Omani culture, from researching the typography of ancient Quranic inscriptions to documenting Muscat’s waning modernism and reinterpreting it through projects spanning architecture, interiors and furniture design. In 2024, Altqadum earned the Urban Commissions prize at Dubai Design Week for TukTukDum, a community table inspired by the Gulf’s musical traditions. It also unveiled its signature Bariid chair at the Design Doha Biennial by slowly melting a large block of ice that encased it.

Work continues apace for the trio and their latest recruit, a onetime intern drawn back by Altqadum’s experimental spirit. Alongside projects in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and a new Dubai office, the firm is developing a book that encapsulates its cultural research. Monocle met with Najd Al Balushi and Alkendi in Muscat to learn more.

What defines your design ethos?
Abdulrahim Alkendi: All of our designs are research-based and there’s a reason behind every detail. In the early days when we were not so busy, we had a Thursday tradition of visiting architectural sites around Oman to gather ideas. Human experience is central to our work, so we speak with people to better understand their connection to buildings, spaces and furniture.

How did this inform the Bab Al Salam Mosque?
AA: We drew inspiration from Samail – a small town known for its farms, with mosques scattered throughout, open to everyone without boundaries. There, everything is surrounded by an Omani irrigation system called a falaj, which, combined with the trees, helps cool the air. All these elements are present in Bab Al Salam. We designed it in a way that allows people to walk in and out easily, and we planted native, low-water Omani trees around it, using a system that reuses ablution water for irrigation.

What guided the interior concept?
Najd Al Balushi: To make it timeless and free of distractions, we used minimal elements, built-ins or concealed tech. To maintain a column-free space, we made the roof more lightweight with hollow-core slabs, which also reduced the amount of concrete. Walls and windows harness wind to decrease AC demand and we studied the sun’s movement to minimise artificial lighting and create an ethereal brightness. The carpet is designed with a gradient, leading worshippers toward the illumination of the mihrab.

Outside its religious function, how does the mosque serve the wider community?
AA: A mosque is, above all, a gathering place. From day one, we saw Bab Al Salam grow into a community hub, with children playing, residents tending the trees and men breaking the Ramadan fast together. There’s coffee and dates for everyone and people congregate to talk about the neighbourhood. The nearby university often sends architecture students for site visits too. Here, most landmark buildings are designed by foreigners, so seeing Omanis create such projects offers a new model for younger generations.

“Are you going to Margate?” messaged Ben. After not seeing each other for some years, Ben had invited me to a private viewing during Frieze week and now it looked as though our paths would cross again because my answer was an emphatic “Yes”. Seconds later, my phone pinged again as he forwarded me a series of old photographs. Even back then, 25 years ago, before people had camera phones, Ben had been the one documenting the moment with the aid of disposable film cameras. And here they were, pictures from the London launch party of Counter Editions, the now celebrated publisher of limited-edition artworks. I am not sure that I was sporting my best outfit but there I am looking a little goofy standing alongside artist Tracey Emin and photographer Johnnie Shand Kydd. A fleeting moment captured on film. As I stared at those pictures and thought of that day, the time came into focus.

Back then I used to go and see my hairdresser in a rickety Georgian building in Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley. James, the man with the scissors, had a room on the first floor and liked the fact that the only people who came had made an appointment, had been vetted. He’d previously had two salons and a product range but had tired of the staff and what he called “tyre-kickers”, people who poked their heads into the shop and then walked off grumpily when they heard his prices. I learned to put aside ample time for a haircut as sometimes James would want to have a beer first and show me a book he had found. We became and still are friends.

Ben – curator, art commissioner, clever clogs – had the office next door and would often sit on the sofa while I had my haircut, giving me updates on the art world, telling me what I needed to see. It was hair salon as artists’ salon.

One day, Ben told me that he was helping out on a project that was going to shake up the world of artists’ multiples (think etchings sold by fusty Mayfair galleries). Two of its founders, Carl Freedman and Matthew Slotover, wanted to work with the likes of Tracey Emin, Christopher Wool and Gary Hume to produce affordable yet high-quality numbered editions. I was an editor at The Independent newspaper at the time and he thought that we would be a good partner. We were. Over the coming months we profiled the artists and offered readers a chance to buy the works. Soon my house began to feature editions from Gary Hume, Rachel Whiteread, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Tracey Emin (all still in situ).

The gallery, now solely owned by Carl (Matthew did OK – he co-founded Frieze art fair among many other ventures), moved from London some years ago to Margate, where it now prints all the works. To mark its 25th anniversary last Saturday, Counter Editions launched a monograph and exhibition of key works from across the years. There was a celebratory lunch in its converted factory.

As a journalist you are always a bit of an observer, a bit of an outsider. But there was a point, when I was standing with Ben, Carl, Matthew and gallerist Kate MacGarry, who I had also first met at the start of Counter Editions, that I felt a flicker of pride that I’d lent a helping hand back then and also that I have met so many good people across the arc of my career.

I came back to London with Ben and, as the train rattled through the countryside, we talked about the past and present. We charted the paths that our lives had taken, recounted our histories, diversions taken, peaks reached and, like hikers unfolding maps, revealed the contours of experience that make us who we are.

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