The creative director Ramdane Touhami, co-founder of the beauty brand Officine Universelle Buly, is venturing into the literary world with his new Parisian bookstore, La Pharmacie des Âmes. Translating to “the pharmacy of souls,” the shop occupies a former 19th-century pharmacy — with all the original cabinetry preserved — in the Seventh Arrondissement (it previously housed the offices for his creative agency, Art Recherche Industrie). “The name of the shop is a way of saying, ‘come heal yourself with some new perspectives because you’re sick,’” Touhami said with a laugh. “In all seriousness, we’re here to instill a bit of doubt, to make people question their ideas on the world. It takes time but I think books have that power.” The shelves and display cases feature a selection rich in the classics, from Hugo and Balzac to Fanon and Césaire, as well as a significant offering on race, gender, politics and culture. There’s Dan Charnas’s “Dilla Time” (2022) alongside bell hooks and Maya Angelou books, lesser-known academic works like Rom Landau’s “Moroccan Drama” (1956), and new releases including those from Touhami’s own imprint, Les Nouvelles Éditions du Réveil. This spring, he’ll also launch Street Lit, a literary podcast that he says will be “free from the stiff, very white, very bourgeois style of literary criticism.” instagram.com/pharmaciedesames
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A Restored Farmhouse in Minorca
On the Spanish island of Minorca, a 19th-century farmhouse made of limestone, clay and wild olive wood has been transformed into a boutique hotel. It took five years for the hotelier Benedicta Linares Pearce, a Minorca native, and her husband, Benoît Pellegrini, to restore what is now Son Blanc Farmhouse. The couple tapped the Parisian architecture firm Atelier du Pont and the Mahón-based agency ARU Arquitectura to design the hotel and to create a 320-acre farm built on regenerative agricultural principles. The property is planted with hundreds of olive and almond trees, a medicinal garden and a fruit orchard. It’s also home to sheep, hens and bee hives.
The 14 guest rooms are furnished with pieces by Spanish designers including clay sconces by the Barcelona-based Danidevito Studio and upholstered headboards by the artists Mariona Cañadas and Pedro Murúa. For breakfast, guests can dine on the terrace of the Main House, which overlooks the sea. All other meals are served in the hotel restaurant situated in the farmhouse’s former boyera, or “cowshed.” Around a lava stone bar, chefs prepare wood-fired cuisine like chargrilled maitake mushrooms and smoked fish with pickled vegetables, with many ingredients sourced directly from the property’s garden. Son Blanc opens April 20; rooms from $195, sonblancmenorca.com.
Flowers are a constant element of Marni’s visual language, from the graphic prints on the founder Consuelo Castiglioni’s bold separates to the gender-nonspecific floral ensembles developed by the current creative director, Francesco Risso. This month, at Salone del Mobile in Milan, the Italian fashion label introduces its first foray into tableware, launched in collaboration with the Belgian design brand Serax. Titled Midnight Flowers, the 120-piece collection evokes botanical and bohemian themes through hand-drawn illustrations. Slightly asymmetrical in form, some of the delicate plates and cups feature loosely sketched anemones in deep pink and sky blue, while others depict strings of flower petals in a pastel palette or purple violets against a backdrop of milky porcelain. Midnight Flowers will be available to purchase in August; from about $28, serax.com.
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Bright, Breezy Beachwear From Givenchy
The couturier Hubert de Givenchy often spent his summers in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, a town on the French Riviera between Nice and Monaco. It was this vision of sun-soaked luxury that led the brand’s creative director, Matthew M. Williams, to create Givenchy Plage, a swim- and beachwear capsule rolling out at the end of this month. “I wanted to design pieces that were powerful yet effortless and joyful,” says Williams, who referenced images of the house’s first-ever swimwear collection and his own experience of California youth culture as he conceptualized the line. There are silk sarongs and caftans of trompe l’oeil pearls (a print from 1955 that’s been reimagined for the modern Givenchy muse) that can be paired with glossy rubber wedge sandals in new seasonal shades of lilac, pink and yellow. Layers of boxy cotton poplin button-downs, macramé dresses, Voyou basket bags and bio-resin rings sparkling with Swarovski crystals make for a more bohemian beach day. The Plage pieces also represent Givenchy’s focus on the future: Tags are printed with QR codes that share information about each garment’s materials and how to care for and repair it. givenchy.com
When the sisters Teveen and Lori Demirjian were growing up in Los Angeles, there was always a clay pitcher or pot on the dinner table. “Our mother made sure to pour cold water into the terra-cotta gooj we had for years from Armenia,” Teveen says, using an Armenian word for clay vessel. Gooj is now the name of the Demirjians’ ceramics brand, which they launched in February with the goal of honoring their heritage — their parents, descendants of Armenian genocide survivors, immigrated from Lebanon. “We felt that our culture played such a huge role in the timeline of ceramics, but there was no representation of it,” Teveen says. The pair collaborated with artisans in Portland, Ore., to produce handmade ewers and chalices, which can be used to serve drinks or as décor. Eventually, the sisters plan to create more pieces of clay tableware and “flameware” — dishes that can be used over an open flame, which, Teveen hopes, “will bring back the ancient way of preparing a strong cup of Armenian coffee.” gooj.world
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The Painter David Salle Curates an Exhibition of Unusual Pairings
The writer Janet Malcolm once described David Salle’s paintings as “full of images that don’t belong together.” Since the 1970s, he has appropriated and remixed styles and iconography from a vast array of seemingly unconnected sources including commercial advertising, cartoons and old masters paintings. A new exhibition that Salle has organized at the Hill Art Foundation in New York, called “Beautiful, Vivid, Self-Contained,” is dedicated to the memory of Malcolm, who died last year. Salle was given access to the private collection of the billionaire investor Tom Hill and his wife, Janine, in order to take the idea of what he referred to as “radical juxtaposition” to its unpredictable conclusion. For the exhibit, Salle has paired a Robert Gober sculpture with a Pablo Picasso charcoal drawing and Cy Twombly’s “Solar Barge of Sesostris” (1985-88) with a Renaissance-era bronze statue of the Roman god of war. Salle’s own work appears alongside that of Francis Bacon, a coupling inspired by a long-ago studio visit with the art dealer Joe Helman, who remarked that Salle’s paintings were like “Bacon for straight people.”
Merely listing the names of a few of the artists included here — some of whose works were lent from other private collections, or directly from artists — is enough to at least raise an eyebrow: Kevin Beasley, Cecily Brown, Willem de Kooning, Edgar Degas, Karen Kilimnik, Brice Marden, Henri Matisse. “What do these things have to do with each other, if anything?” Salle asked in an interview. He didn’t have an answer but added, “The idea is that paintings are like modifiers in a line of poetry, altering and stretching the meaning.” “Beautiful, Vivid, Self-Contained” is on view from April 21 to July 21, hillartfoundation.org.
