The perceived wisdom is that Washington is more divided than ever. The city’s social scene, however, tells a different story. Butterworth’s in Capitol Hill is booming. Even at 17.00 on a sweltering weekday when Congress is on its break, there’s a good-sized crowd. People in suits with sharp haircuts mingle with the city’s more outlandish characters over beef-tallow fries. 
 
In a town that voted 90 per cent Democrat and where some restaurants had ejected Republicans during the last Trump administration, embracing the Make America Great Again (Maga) crowd is a risky business. 

I’m making polite conversation with head chef Bart Hutchins when co-owner Raheem Kassam wafts in, waving his “hellos”. He makes a show of flicking through a glossy magazine, the latest to feature his Washington restaurant, before declaring the article “boring”. “I don’t care whether it’s positive, it just needs to be interesting,” he says before sitting down. 

The bar is high for being interesting here. I’m neither a cabinet member nor an eccentric in matching tweed with a libertarian podcast. I’m blonde but I can’t quite coax my locks into the bouffants beloved by the Republican power women seen propping up the bar drinking their French 75s. 

For a restaurant that opened in October, Butterworth’s has garnered an extraordinary amount of column inches. The main investor is Uber’s senior legal counsel, Alex Butterworth, but it is his co-investor who has become the face of the restaurant. Kassam, a well-connected Brit who was once adviser to populist politician Nigel Farage, set up the UK arm of Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News before moving to the US to launch his own conservative news outlet, The National Pulse. 

Bannon has hosted private events and interviews at Butterworth’s and, like a pied piper, prompted other conservatives to follow. The Washington Post took note and published a piece earlier this year, proclaiming that “Maga’s new hangout is for the weirdos and freaks”. Diners have included secretary of state Marco Rubio, FBI head Kash Patel, treasury secretary Scott Bessent and former national security adviser Mike Waltz. 
 
But Butterworth’s is interesting exactly because it’s not (just) a Maga bar. Kassam, despite having just offered me a caviar bump, likens the restaurant to the sitcom Cheers but where people can enjoy a drink regardless of their political stripes. “I meet people in here every night who say, ‘By the way, I’m left wing, don’t tell anyone,’” he says with an exaggerated whisper. “And I’m like, ‘So are those eight other people over there, so are the three at the bar – you’re totally fine.’” 
 
The restaurant, it should be said, is a hoot. One where 1980s hits and French synth pop thunder under a deer-antler chandelier. Head chef Bart Hutchins is a veteran of the DC-dining scene and on show is his nose-to-tail approach with a French-accented menu featuring bone marrow with escargot and lamb tartare with foie gras. 
 
Butterworth’s isn’t the first restaurant to mix eating and ideology. At Political Pattie’s, an ill-fated bar that actively branded itself bipartisan, the owners were wonderful: well-intentioned, eloquent and idealistic. The restaurant was awful, devoid of atmosphere and filled with preachy quotes on the walls and forgettable cocktails. It closed not long after opening. Butterworth’s, however, is proof that some Washingtonians prefer a well-cooked steak to the usual political beef.

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is a Monocle contributor who is based in Washington. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

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As the oldest company of Parisian bistro furniture, Maison Drucker produces designs that are not only ubiquitous in the French capital, they are inextricable from its vernacular. Since its foundation in 1885, the company has helped define the city’s terrasse lifestyle with its chairs made from curved rattan frames and colourful woven seats. It has even been recognised with a Living Heritage Company label for its contribution to French culture.

Founded by Louis Drucker, a businessman of Polish descent, Maison Drucker thrived with the discovery of rattan, a malleable climbing palm that was imported from French and Dutch Asian colonies in the mid-19th century. The proliferation of cafés in Paris created a demand for sturdy outdoor furniture and Maison Drucker’s custom-made designs quickly became part of the identity of many establishments. The Fouquet’s chair, for example, is the oldest design and takes its name from the historic high-end brasserie on the Champs Elysées, while Café de Flore still depends on red-and-green Drucker Chairs to furnish its famous terrace.

Despite its deep roots in Paris, the company was failing when Bruno Dubois took over from the Drucker family in 2006. “Parisian cafés weren’t interested in rattan any more and wanted steel,” he says. “It was dying; we had to rebuild everything. But it’s an iconic Parisian object, so I knew that something could be done.” Dubois set up a base in Indonesia, where today 400 artisans work on large orders; custom pieces and the repair service are entrusted to a team of 30 craftspeople in Gilocourt, an hour and a half north of Paris by car. The structure of the chair is made using the age-old technique of heating the rattan and bending it into shape. The pattern on the seat and backrest is woven with strings of Rilsan, a bioplastic made from castor oil.

With dozens of models, motifs and colours, the possibilities are almost endless and Drucker has maintained its traditional Parisian identity while innovating with new designs. Over the past 10 years, Dubois has supervised collaborations with designers Mikiya Kobayashi, India Mahdavi and Christian Biecher, who have all brought their vision to the brand. The company’s almost 140-year-old archives are also a rich source of inspiration. “I found some old chairs at a flea market,” says Dubois. “And with that, we recreated an entire collection of 1920s armchairs.

The traditional bistro chairs are a mainstay of terraces across France but they have recently seen a surge in popularity abroad too. Today Drucker exports to businesses and interior designers in 52 countries who want a little piece of Paris for themselves. “Rattan came back into fashion about 10 years ago and we contributed to that,” says Dubois. “All trends fade away eventually but we can renew this one constantly and keep it alive for a very long time.”

Read next: Amid Paris’s everyday hustle, the city’s iconic Fermob chair is the perfect reminder to slow down – and take a seat

At any art summit or symposium, “the future of museums” is a guaranteed and hotly discussed topic. The challenges facing today’s contemporary museums are myriad and dispiriting – they include ageing visitors, funding cuts and even censorship. Institutions have responded in different ways. Many have programmed more interactive shows, incorporating other disciplines such as dance and music, focusing on (and sometimes attempting to repair) their colonial histories, and hosting events that draw in local communities. 

One demographic that’s getting more attention, especially from European institutions, is a broad one – children. At Berlin’s Gropius Bau, Radical Playgrounds – a sprawling outdoor installation that dubs itself a cross between an adventure playground and sculpture park – invited multigenerational crowds to wander through its colourful tunnels last summer. Inside the museum is artist Kerstin Brätsch’s interactive installation, BAUBAU: A Play Space for Kids. Children are invited to explore the vibrant space and play as they please, transforming draperies, tape, boxes, old telephones and keyboards into original structures. In December, Turin’s Castello di Rivoli opened The Enchanted Castle exhibition across the museum’s third floor. The year-long showcase features a variety of works, such as Paola Pivi’s whimsical “Free Land Scape”, a vast swath of blue fabric suspended like a giant hammock that visitors can enter. In London, Young V&A – an entire venue dedicated to art and craft for kids – reopened in 2023 after a major revamp, and it won the Art Fund Museum of the Year award in the UK in 2024. Elsewhere, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is showing art made by New York children until 19 October. 

Far from the boring activity corners that youngsters were once banished to while their parents looked at paintings in hushed museum halls, these shows are loud and fun. They’re intriguing to art-savvy adults too: the work is by well-known contemporary stars such as Florentina Holzinger and Tomás Saraceno, or greats from art history, namely Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. 

In mid-July, Haus der Kunst in Munich joined in, presenting the sweeping exhibition For Children: Art Stories since 1968. Spotlighting more than 20 artists from different countries (including Olafur Eliasson, Yto Barrada and Bruce Nauman), the show explores art made for children since 1968, a time when social structures were shifting rapidly in the wake of student uprisings and protests around the world. It’s also, according to Haus der Kunst director Andrea Lissoni, a way to explore new models in exhibition-making – a giant interactive floor drawing stretches across the main hall and the exhibits spill onto the museum terrace.  

These shows, curated with children in mind, don’t have to be watered down. As part of Radical Playgrounds, Céline Condorelli’s colourful artwork overlaid the lines painted on playing fields for different sports. Explanatory texts described the work’s message – an exploration of the politics of play – to adults and particularly inquisitive youngsters, while everyone else simply has fun running and jumping across the lines. 

Museums are catching on to the fact that children are not only their audiences of the future but also tomorrow’s decision-makers – the best art, after all, presents alternative ideas and innovative ways of thinking. Both are increasingly important in an age when attention spans are short and driven by algorithms. Exhibitions aimed at children also provide public space – a fast-dwindling zone in many Western societies – for communities of all ages to come together.

“Art is a foundation of democracy. We need people to question things, and artists do that,” says Rebecca Raue, founder of Ephra, a Berlin-based nonprofit connecting youths to art through studio visits and roving exhibitions. “Art is an essential part of our community. It needs to be joyful and, once children are involved, there’s joy.” Museums sticking to traditional white-cube curatorial methods should take note.  

‘For Children: Art Stories since 1968’ runs at Haus der Kunst, Munich, through 1 February 2026.

Fifty years ago there was an unprecedented coming together of leaders from East and West at a summit in Helsinki that laid down a set of principles. The Helsinki Final Act included commitments to respect territorial integrity, human rights and self-determination. The fact that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev backed the treaty at all was something of a surprise – former Finnish ambassador Mikko Pyhälä, a young attaché at the summit, tells me that Brezhnev joked until the very end that he wouldn’t sign it. In hindsight, acknowledging any rights of Soviet peoples wound up emboldening activists and arguably marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Five decades on, a more ruthless Vladimir Putin is smarter than to recommit to such pesky principles.

An attempt by Finland to recreate the Helsinki summit started back in 2021, when there might still have been some (misplaced) hope that a 50-year anniversary could be a moment of celebration. Instead, last week’s Helsinki+50 Conference was a relatively low-key affair, with a smattering of European foreign ministers and civil-society groups. There was much talk of reviving the Helsinki Final Act but little in the way of actual solutions to get us there at a time when countries are so clearly violating its principles. Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, described a generational moment similar to 1918, 1945 or 1989. Comparisons to, say, 1914, 1938 and 1963 might be more appropriate. 

Much like in the original iteration, there was emphasis on the need for dialogue, even between adversaries. Yet the fact that Russian and Ukrainian delegations were present at the conference was not heralded as an opportunity. Russia’s delegation was largely frozen out of proceedings. This might be appropriate given the country’s unwillingness to engage in serious negotiations towards a ceasefire in Ukraine. Nonetheless, it also felt as though it was a missed chance on all sides to begin the process of talking and asking hard questions that could lead us straight to a peace similar to that of 1945 – rather than into the start of another 1939.

Christopher Cermak is Monocle’s senior news editor. Monocle recently attended Operation Hedgehog, in which Nato troops joined the Estonian Defence Force to execute a series of large-scale defence drills amid rising concerns over the vulnerability of the Baltic region. Read the full piece here. 

It’s Friday afternoon in the heart of Lisbon and it’s 34C and perfectly cloudless. Mom has just returned from the salon sporting a bouncy coiff’ and I’m plating lunch, which was prepared minutes earlier by the café at the base of our building. Six storeys up, an outdoor lunch is quite manageable, especially with awnings out and a gentle, dry breeze blowing from the northwest. I pour some wine from a little vineyard in the Dão region and consult my phone. An email alert from Swiss informs me that my flight back to Zürich is going to be 45 minutes late, so I check the Meteoschweiz website (the federal government’s weather agency) to see if the delay is weather related. According to various Swiss news outlets, the nation is enduring a bout of summertime sadness due to rainy weather that has settled over much of the country and, sure enough, Zürich is a mix of wind, sun, rain and lightning. Not exactly the most promising forecast for the country’s national day. For the briefest moment I contemplate making up an excuse to remain happily perched on the terrace but my Lisbon stay has already been extended more than once and Mats has a welcome-home-meets-Swiss National Day dinner in full prep mode.

Despite the pockets of storminess across Spain, France and Switzerland, we take off roughly at the same time as advised in the earlier alert but wait, what’s that smell? We’re barely wheels up when the Chinese family across the aisle pull out a massive McDonald’s bag and start unpacking their burgers, fries and other bits. It’s overpowering. Thankfully, the crew are on the case and collecting bags, boxes and Happy Meal wrappers as swiftly as possible. The rest of the flight is smooth and after about 90 minutes we start our descent just before Geneva. There are some menacing clouds in the area but the pilot keeps everything bump-free. As we make our right turn toward Zürich and line up for the approach, the National Day festivities come into view as fireworks light up over farmland, above apartment buildings and alongside small lakes. In the cab to the house the frequency of explosions starts to pick up as the sky darkens, dinners shift to drinks and extra-long Bic lighters click at the end of eager wicks.

Back home, the steaks are on the barbecue and the neighbours to the back of us are in full-party mode. Nextdoor a loud boom rattles our building and for a couple of minutes we’re treated to a very professional fireworks display. Then up the hill there’s the pfuff-pfuff-pfuff volley of rockets heading skywards and a cascading shower of gold and bronze. It’s a bit cold for dinner on the balcony but the light show is too good to resist as both sides of the lake look as if they’re launching an attack on some unseen flotilla. 

This being Switzerland, it should come as little surprise that there’s a national initiative calling for an all-out ban on fireworks. To date, more than 130,000 signatures have been collected, enough to trigger a referendum on the matter. While the conversation over banning fireworks is not particularly new, there’s surprise in some corners at how the “anti” camp has managed to rally so much support. With animal welfare and environmental concerns supposedly at the core of the initiative, there’s also an underlayer of the “silence majority” at play as well. You will be familiar with this particular tribe, who feel that there is no room for birthday parties to run late, children to make noise in parks or even dogs – threatened by fireworks – to bark before 08.00 or after 17.00. At the same time, there are no national initiatives in play to impose stricter fines (or sentences) on graffiti sprayers who continue to blanket the country with tags for football clubs or random causes. Noise pollution, bad – but visual pollution perfectly fine. 

The anti-fireworkers counter that they’re not looking to kill the fun since drones can also light up the sky and do so in silence. And if you’ve ever seen such a display, you’ll understand full well why they don’t exactly fill the eyes of young or old with any sense of wonder or excitement. Nevermind that most of them will soon be in landfill or repurposed as anti-personnel killers over Ukraine.

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

Singapore turns 60 years old on 9 August. To celebrate, 27,000 people will gather at the Padang, a downtown athletics field close to Parliament House, for the annual National Day Parade. As the country’s main event of the year, the parade is packed with two hours of pomp and pageantry, complete with aerial displays, elaborate props and epic fireworks. The highlight of the show for many Singaporeans, though, will be musicians Charlie Lim, Kit Chan and The Island Voices belting out this year’s National Day song, “Here We Are” – listen below:

Singapore has unveiled a new National Day anthem annually for almost three decades, ranging from infectious pop hits to stirring indie ballads. Local artists compete fiercely to land the coveted gig, with only one demo making the cut. “It’s like scoring the Super Bowl halftime show,” says Golden Melody award-winner Chan. The tradition blends career-making opportunities for homegrown talent with Singapore’s distinctive approach to nation-building.

The government began commissioning songs in the 1980s as one of many ways to unite a young nation made up of Chinese, Indian and Indonesian economic migrants. At that time, the city-state was undergoing major structural changes, with scores of citizens being moved from their existing communities into public housing, where they were suddenly made to live among strangers. “Community singing” was viewed as a key instrument in promoting unity and camaraderie, including Singapore’s founding father and first prime minister. “Lee Kuan Yew believed that there was something about singing together that drew out the spirit of people and enhanced the sense of community,” says Lim Siong Guan, the Ministry of Defence’s permanent secretary in the 1980s. 

Though the Culture Ministry’s Songs of Singapore project was meant to promote locally written and composed songs, the first tune that struck a chord with the country was written by Hugh Harrison, a Canadian creative producer working for McCann Erickson, the appointed advertising agency for the campaign. Released in 1984, “Stand Up for Singapore” went from being a commercial jingle to a surprise hit and an official national song. Harrison went on to pen two more National Day classics and his trio of tunes established a formula for a successful release: easy to sing along to, centred around building trust and, most importantly, multiple mentions of “Singapore”.

Harrison’s final song, “We Are Singapore” (1987), begins with the line: “There was a time when people said/that Singapore won’t make it, but we did/there was a time when troubles seemed too much/for us to take but we did.” As the country had come out of an economic recession, these uplifting songs hit all the right notes. 

But it was Dick Lee’s 1998 masterpiece, “Home”, that truly captured hearts. Written while homesick in Hong Kong, this tender ballad about longing for Singapore remains a poignant tribute to the country. The single, performed by Chan, transformed the annual tradition from feel-good anthems to deeply personal art.

The melancholic tune, which begins on a downcast note (“Whenever I am feeling low/I look around me and I know/there’s a place that will stay within me”) before swelling to a rousing chorus, was nothing like the typically upbeat nationalistic numbers. Rather, the song shared more in common with the Canto-pop tunes being produced at the time in Hong Kong. Chan, who, like Lee, was working abroad, shares why it resonates so deeply. “Two homesick people captured the perspective of someone who’s not in Singapore but loves the place and feels connected to it.” 

Timing was also important. “Home” was released in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis – a turbulent time for many countries in the region. It became the first National Day song to be translated into Mandarin and was even performed during Lee Kuan Yew’s funeral in 2015. 

Chan will take to the stage again on 9 August to partner with Lim and The Island Voices on “Here We Are”. In a polarised world, Singaporeans will be urged to see how “our differences will make us whole.” Compared to the syrupy, propaganda-laced lyrics of the 1980s, this year’s anthem is a marker of how modern Singapore has moved on from nation-building to allow musicians the space to grapple with the complexities of identity. 

“I tried to capture the zeitgeist of where we are amid the tensions and heartbreak in the world, while balancing this with a sense of pride,” says Lim, who co-wrote the song with musician Chok Kerong.

When the verses of “Here We Are” ring out around the Padang on Saturday evening, backed up by a chorus of dignitaries and guests packed into temporary stands, one word will be noticeably absent. This year, “Singapore” isn’t mentioned in the song – not even once.

As Monocle’s Tokyo bureau chief recently noted, no one should be surprised about exquisite fruit costing premium prices. In the Hamptons, some melons are selling for $400 (€349) and trays of mushrooms are a hallucinatory $17 (€14). While this has shocked some of those who have read about it in clickbait headlines, I am unmoved. I’ve been living in the vicinity of Washington for two years and nothing about prices in the US shocks me anymore – least of all berries imported from Japan.

I look back with nostalgia on a day soon after my arrival, when I approached a stall at a farmers’ market with an onion in hand, only to be told: “That will be $5, please.” Then there was the small baguette that my young son had commandeered as a sword at a local bakery, which I sheepishly put back on the shelf upon learning that it cost $9 (€7). And I can’t forget the $69 (€60) quiche that I assumed would feed a gathering of 12, only to open the box and stare at a ham-and-cheese tart the size of my outstretched hand (no doubt pleading for its $69 back).

The cost of living across the US has soared in recent years, with consumer prices on average 24 per cent higher than they were in 2020. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election came, at least in part, on the back of promises to make life more affordable. But costs remain stubbornly high. Inflation is at 2.7 per cent and economists worry that Trump’s tariffs will only augment that figure.

But the quest to eat decent food also fosters creativity and camaraderie. I have learned to make my own bread. I have a small but thriving herb garden. And at every social gathering, no matter the earning powers of its attendees, we share conspiratorial tips about where to snag the best deals. 

A group of us have even banded together to purchase fresh and affordable produce delivered from an Amish co-operative in Pennsylvania. A supermarket cashier recently lavished praise on me for shaving $56 (€49) off a shop using points and coupons. I felt a warm glow of pride. Perhaps I’ve finally made it in America.

Read next: Our Tokyo bureau chief’s dive into Japan’s exquisite premium fruit bowl

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Initially, it was quite amusing. I would get tagged in a photo on Instagram by someone keen to congratulate me on my skills with a skillet, the delicacy of my soufflé or the tastiness of my barbecued pork – I would just smile to myself at their foolish error. One time, I did find the mistaken post and commented that they had the wrong “Andrew Tuck”, that my kitchen skills had yet to go much further than the boiling of an egg. And as for my delicate soufflé, well, nobody has seen that since the summer of 1994. But annoyingly, the other Andrew Tuck’s chef stardom was on a roll (and no doubt on many other baked goods too). But it was only when I saw him on TV that I became suspicious that the influx of butchers and bakers on my Instagram account were not looking for me after all.

This week things got worse. Someone sent me a message asking if I had Googled my name of late – and suggesting that perhaps I should. “Andrew Tuck”, the AI-generated response confidently declared, “is a prominent figure in two distinct fields: journalism and culinary arts, known as the founding editor of Monocle magazine and a celebrated chef recognised for his expertise in open-fire cooking and his appearances on the Great British Menu.” Tuck and Tuck have been combined in some monstrous concoction whereby one minute we’re grilling an interviewee, the next a sirloin steak.

I mentioned the AI-human cocktail confusion to the other half, who did a quick Google himself and assured me that the risks of being mistaken for one another were rather slim. “One, he’s much younger than you are. Two he’s better looking.” That’s the last boiled egg he gets from me. Someone else suggested that the reference to “prominent” must be an allusion to my forehead. It has not been the best of weeks.

There have been a slew of stories in recent days about the salaries being offered to the world’s best AI engineers – apparently job offers of a billion dollars have been touted and declined. You can buy an awful lot of hoodies for that sort of money. And the world is certainly giddy for all things AI but you are also seeing the refuges from the excesses of this world appearing. I hope that Monocle can be one of them.

I had lunch this week with a woman who is writing a report on the impact of AI. When she started talking about brands’ increasing desire to distance themselves from a very technical term, “slop”, I started to cheer up. While AI might change companies and become a valuable tool in various trades, when it comes to telling their stories, brands are increasingly reticent about social media. There’s just too much slop being served; unchecked AI nonsense that makes cut-through for genuine and deep engagement impossible. Legacy media has an opportunity to be the new media. 

Let’s see. I am sure that AI will progress apace and no doubt in the near future my digitally conjoined other half will retrieve his own identity and me, mine. But, anyway, I’d better sign off as I have decided to make the most of this mayhem and have 20 people round tonight for a flambé dinner – I just hope they like open-fire eggs.

Click here to explore the full collection of Andrew’s past columns.

We sometimes make assumptions about cities that shape the ways in which we view them – but these are often wrong. Lomé, the capital of Togo, isn’t usually considered architecturally interesting. But the city centre is home to a fascinating array of brutalist buildings. Some are still in use, while others are in disrepair.

In the West, modernist architecture tends to be celebrated. That’s not the case in West Africa. The region’s postwar heritage is either completely overlooked or dismissed as outdated and cumbersome. Togo’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale is our way of introducing this underappreciated and little-explored inheritance to the world.

Our research started a few years ago, when we became interested in the country’s attempts to forge a new national identity. Togo was under German control until 1914, after which it was administered by the UK and France, before gaining independence in 1960. The architecture of those eras has been well documented by institutions in these countries. Even in Togo, people use colonial-era buildings as a reference point for the nation’s architectural identity. Yet there’s a dearth of information about Togolese modernism.

Our exhibition forgoes the better-known colonial examples in favour of the ancient vernacular and post-independence modernism. We look at Nôk cave dwellings, Tata Tamberma earth castles and Afro-Brazilian structures built by freed slaves who returned to Togo from South America. We want to draw parallels between these buildings and what came later. We want you to ask yourself, “What is Togolese architecture?”

In our exhibition we showcase 13 of Lomé’s most iconic modernist buildings, some still in use, some renovated, some abandoned. One of our favourite landmarks is the Hôtel de la Paix, a 1970s-era five-star property that was abandoned in the 2000s. The hotel plays a major part in Togo’s pop-culture scene – many music videos have been filmed here – but it is constantly under the threat of demolition. Some modern gems, such as the Hôtel Sarakawa and the Boad bank, are still in use.

So what sets these buildings apart from modernist structures in cities such as Marseille and Melbourne? In the 1970s one of the first architecture schools in French-speaking Africa opened in Lomé. Togolese architects designed many buildings in the capital, including the Bourse du Travail, which also features frescoes, mosaics and artworks by Paul Ahyi. The Hedzranawoe market, by Da-Blèce Afoda-Sebou, was built in the shape of a three-leaf clover, the Togolese national emblem. The West African Development Bank is a striking brutalist building designed by French architecture firm Durand Ménard Thibault in collaboration with local architect Raphaël Ekoué Hangbonon. Research suggests that he provided the idea for the cylinder forms on the building’s exterior, which resemble the Tata Tamberma, an ancient type of Togolese earth architecture.

Togo’s modernist buildings are often discussed in unflattering terms and depicted as concrete monsters. But a closer look reveals that they are subtly – and beautifully – adapted for the climate, from their orientation to ventilation features such as brise-soleils. We can, of course, question the use and volume of concrete in these projects. Even so, they look more advanced than many of today’s designs. We live in a time when we’re building glass skyscrapers without any consideration for the environment. Such structures lack identity, no matter whether you’re in London, Dubai or Lomé.

For us, this exhibition is a call to action. Lomé still has a particular architectural character but it’s at risk of disappearing. Love them or hate them, these buildings make the city what it is – and this matters. We must take notice: when they’re gone, they’re gone.

Etihad Airways’ first Airbus A321LR enters commercial service today, 1 August, debuting on the Abu Dhabi-Phuket route before expanding to Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Copenhagen, Milan, Paris and Zürich.

The aircraft represents a bold step for the company, being the first single-aisle jet in the world to feature a dedicated first-class cabin. It introduces long-haul features such as lie-flat beds and private suites into shorter-distance markets previously served by more basic cabins. The move is a calculated bet on the future of luxury travel.

Monocle’s transport correspondent Gabriel Leigh joined the Middle Eastern airline on the passenger jet’s delivery flight from Hamburg to Abu Dhabi, and Georgina Godwin on The Globalist to report on the “premium-heavy” onboard atmosphere.

“They’re trying to give premium-level passengers a seamless transition from long-haul widebody flights to these new routes, where they still get lie-flat beds, privacy – even closing doors in first class,” he says. “It’s a very beautiful aeroplane on board.”

The A321LR, which is part of the A320neo family, is configured with two private First Suites offering wireless charging, Bluetooth pairing and space for a guest. Business class is comprised of 14 herringbone seats that convert into lie-flat beds – a layout usually reserved for the likes of the A380.

The airliner’s long-range capability allows companies to operate longer and fly less conventional routes that wouldn’t have been practical before. “Airlines such as Etihad can experiment a bit,” says Leigh. “They couldn’t fly to many places – say Krabi, Medan or Phnom Penh – with wide-bodies, but this aircraft lets them reach those destinations and see how the routes perform.”

Aviation experts agree. Paul Charles, CEO of the PC Agency and former director at Virgin Atlantic, says the move signals a shift in how high-end travel is delivered, and a big step ahead of competitors. “Etihad is saying, ‘This is the new battleground for us,’ and they’re determined to make it a success, especially with rising competition from new carriers such as Riyadh Air. The food quality is superior too.”

The new jet arrives amid the air carrier’s growth spurt, with 27 new routes launched or announced in 2025 alone.

The UAE airline’s gamble is clear: that premium passengers will pay for comfort, even on mid-length flights. “Most travellers don’t even think about aircraft type,” says Leigh. “If the seat, space and privacy feel the same, Etihad may convince them that single-aisle luxury can match long-haul expectations.”

If customers are willing to pay more for a better experience, even on shorter routes, Etihad is making sure that it meets the mark. Will other airlines rise to the pressure and catch up? 

Listen to the full report from 51:10, below: