Monocle Weekend
Edition: Saturday

One by one the world’s top fashion brands are reclaiming their former assets. Just as Dior regained some of its history a few years ago by acquiring Le Château de la Colle Noire – the historic house of Christian Dior – now Chanel’s Alain and Gerard Wertheimer have purchased La Pausa, the villa Coco Chanel built, designed and decorated in the early 1930s. Perched above Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, the villa once received Chanel’s friends including the Duke of Westminster, Misia Sert, Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dalí. Now the Wertheimer brothers are planning to restore La Pausa to its original spirit.

Souq Karakoy is a fixture in Istanbul’s retail calendar but after this weekend’s edition, the hitherto monthly market will set up permanently in its up-and-coming neighbourhood. Since March 2014, founders Yaprak Aras and Alican Tezer have been inviting small workshops, textile ateliers and designers to pitch up in a former ice-cream cone factory every month. Aras also began inviting bigger brands such as Beymen Club to create pop-ups. “As Karakoy is becoming a more lively neighbourhood day by day, we thought we could operate more like a store,” says Aras. “We will have more than 60 designers and brands in the new souq and most will be producing collections just for us.”

New Yorkers will be heading to Queens for the fourth edition of Greater New York at Moma PS1, which has just opened. The show, which takes place every five years, began in 2000 and originally surveyed emerging artists from the city. This year it will focus on nostalgia for a grittier version of New York, namely images from the 1970s and 1980s and the era’s experimental practices. Curators and art historians have brought together more than 400 works by drawing on a wide selection of home-grown talent. And to top it off, entrance is free to all NYC residents.

A popular Chinese alcoholic drink is making a splash across the Pacific Ocean. Baijiu is a clear spirit distilled primarily from the sorghum grain but making its pungent smell work in a cocktail is tricky; some even call it “the sweat of Satan”. Yet a number of New York’s most progressive bartenders have risen to the challenge and baijiu is now the ingredient du jour. It can be found in cocktails served at some of the city’s trendiest bars and restaurants such as RedFarm, JakeWalk and Lumos. The people rejoicing most at its rising popularity in the US are China’s baijiu producers; the drink was previously a must at official Chinese banquets but annual exports of $23bn (€20bn) have been hurt by the Chinese government tightening its purse strings.

In this special edition of Midori House we are live at Frieze art fair in Regent’s Park. We talk to Charlotte Burns from ‘The Art Newspaper’, get the insider secrets from art adviser Lisa Schiff and find out what gallerist Maureen Paley is showing in her booth. Plus: we take a tour of the Frieze sculpture park with curator Clare Lilley.

In the first of two films to celebrate the publication of The Monocle Guide to Cosy Homes we visit the residence of Knud Erik Hansen, managing director of Carl Hansen & Søn and grandson of the company's iconic founder. Hansen has transformed an impressive Danish estate into a comfortable family home, filling it with beautiful furniture and preserving the property’s charm.