I am treating my family to a special vacation in Alaska. My grandson, 28, and his wife are unable to join us; they are expecting a baby soon. I’m sorry they can’t come, but I was shocked when my grandson asked me for a cash gift equal to what I would have spent for them…
My professional encounters with meringue happened to follow a trajectory that took me from very small to extra-large. In my first job as an assistant to the pastry chef in a Michelin-starred French restaurant, I was helping with the petit fours. This involved piping minuscule meringue mounds onto tiny lemon tarts and then placing those…
LONDON — Sometime in the early hours of March 26, Paul McKeown woke up on the sidewalk for the second morning in a row. The 58-year-old retiree, an avid watch collector, had been sleeping outside the Carnaby Street store of the Swatch watch brand, waiting for it to start selling MoonSwatch, a new collection made…
For the last six months, Troy Barmore has left a precious keepsake at home in Brooklyn when he rides the subway into Manhattan — a stainless steel Rolex Submariner watch that once belonged to his father and was passed along to him as a college graduation gift. “I outright stopped wearing it on the subway,”…
“I feel so on my path right now,” the independent watchmaker Eva Leube said. “I’ve realized life is short, and I want to do something that resonates with me.” Over the years, her work in horology has taken Ms. Leube around the globe, from her native Berlin to jobs in Cape Town; Boca Raton, Fla.;…
TOKYO — Nineteen years ago, when he began working at a factory that made watch straps, Kunitaka Kojima thought they were just something that came along with a timepiece. “I underestimated watch straps,” he said. Now Mr. Kojima, 48, is an independent artisan who makes them by hand: “My wish is to make the most…
PARIS — Mellerio dits Meller has been creating jewelry and precious objets d’art since the Renaissance, giving it a plausible claim to being the oldest jewelry house in the world. Yet last month, it did something new: The company introduced a timepiece unlike any it had released before — the mechanical M Cut watch. “It’s…
It’s the key question in making any garden: How do you get all the plants you can’t resist and the ideas insistently flooding your imagination to coalesce on common ground? The makers of Sakonnet Garden, a private landscape in coastal Rhode Island that welcomes the public by reservation three days a week in season, have…
Of all summer’s pleasures, few are as irresistible as a getaway by the water, be it an ocean, lake or city harbor. You can swim, sail, fish and partake of the age-old tradition of lazing around. But a coastal vacation is also an opportunity for discovery. Maybe you’d like to learn how to tie fishing…
Three Rolex wristwatches connected with a Hollywood stuntman’s 1979 attempt to break the sound barrier on land are scheduled to be auctioned on Dec. 6 at Sotheby’s New York. But two of the watches, a GMT-Master and a Cosmograph Daytona, also have another claim to fame: Paul Newman gave them to the stuntman Stan Barrett.…