A Holistic Skin-Care Range to Inspire Wanderlust
At Aman Resorts, pampering goes far beyond high-thread-count sheets and elegant slippers: The luxury hotel group is known for offering treatments in the settings of spa fanatics’ dreams — a private safari tent on the outskirts of an Indonesian rain forest, an onsen overlooking Japan’s majestic Ago Bay. Now, on the occasion of its 30-year anniversary, the brand is releasing a holistic skin-care line, its debut collection of take-home beauty products. Inspired by indigenous ingredients found at its 30-plus destinations around the world, and a sense of living in harmony with nature, the line is split into three distinct ranges: Grounding is intended to calm the mind and body with earthy remedies like a maca-root cleansing powder and smoked amber-infused body butter; Purifying is formulated to cleanse, with an algae-and-marine-extract mask and energy-clearing palo santo salve; and Nourishing aims to heal and replenish with a hydrating silk face cream and an aromatic, tuberose-rich body balm.
Each item in the 30-piece collection is delicately scented with sandalwood oil — often used in Ayurvedic medicine for its soothing and balancing properties — and comes in a striking vessel: Designed by Kengo Kuma, an architect and professor of architecture at the University of Tokyo, the line’s bottles and jars take inspiration from the natural shapes of Japanese porcelain. For a fully immersive experience, guests at Aman Resorts hotels can book new spa treatments, from body wraps to facials, that incorporate the in-house elixirs. aman.com — KARI MOLVAR
A Celebration of Food — and a Friendship Triangle
“I prefer the term ‘pop-in,’ ” says the chef Lauren Gerrie of the (very) temporary restaurants that she occasionally stages inside of permanent ones. “It’s like you’re popping by a friend’s place — which I guess you are — and becoming a part of the world they’ve built,” continues Gerrie, who was until recently Marc Jacobs’s personal chef and is now focused on the creative culinary company that she runs with the chef Flannery Klette-Kolton, Big Little Get Together. While Gerrie has orchestrated several food-centric evenings inside of the restaurants of pals, including the Lower East Side spots Scarr’s Pizza and the now-closed Hemlock, her next event is an excuse to get in the kitchen with a friend whom she has never met in real life.
For Project Honey’s, a brunch pop-up set to take place this Sunday, Gerrie will partner with the London-based chef Katja Tausig, with whom she enjoys a robust internet friendship. The two follow each other’s Instagram accounts and share many friends in common — including the chef Tara Norvell, who works at the Bushwick bar and restaurant Honey’s and will also be in the kitchen at this weekend’s event.
The three women cook with an ingredient-driven, improvisational attitude. Their plan is to use produce from the space’s rooftop garden as well as leftovers from Tausig and Norvell’s foraging trip to coastal Maine earlier this week. The menu is still a work in progress. Items under consideration include congee with crispy mushrooms and soft eggs; griddle cakes with lemon verbena-infused syrup and homemade sunflower butter; as well as a salad with tomato, cucumbers, and donut peaches. “We’re all kindred spirits, and I’m excited to work with Katja,” says Gerrie. “It will be less awkward than meeting her over coffee.” Project Honey’s, Sept. 23, 12-3 p.m., 93 Scott Ave., Brooklyn, $30, tickets sold at the door. — LAUREN MECHLING
Subtle Shoes Dreamed Up in Los Angeles
I had a chance to meet Emme Parsons this past New York Fashion Week. I had seen her sandals on a handful of discerning young women over the summer and through some sleuthing learned to my surprise that no, the tasteful shoes they were wearing weren’t from Céline or Manolo, but Parsons, who launched her eponymous line in 2017. A former graphic designer who has worked for Lucky magazine and Theory, Parsons is based in Los Angeles and her sandals possess that understated sensibility that is so appealing and so rare in fashion these days. Made in Italy, with thick soles for added comfort and durability, they’re also of excellent craftsmanship. Even though the selection is still fairly small (the original collection featured just three styles in three colors), the new fall collection has several appealing options, including a new flat thong sandal, a discreet flat rounded-toe mule and a tasteful block-heel sandal, all in multiple colors. As summer slips into fall, Parsons’s shoes offer a similar sense of subtle transition. Because the remarkable thing about Parsons’s designs is that they are so unremarkable — they are the shoes that go with anything, but at the same time, don’t ever look accidental. It’s a hard line to walk. emmeparsons.com — THESSALY LA FORCE
An Artist’s Alluringly Ugly Household Objects
A few years ago, while living in Berlin, the multimedia artist Piera Bochner found herself ogling grocery store shelves stacked with Romanesco broccoli and bitter melon. Taken by the vegetables’ fractal patterns and lumpy textures, she began making molds to create wax sculptures. Now 24 and living in New York, she has channeled her passion into a line of offbeat candles — which also take the shape of gourds, squash, zucchini and sugar apples — dyed shades of chartreuse, violet and pink and rendered with irregular textures. “I’m less interested in perfecting the science of candle making than in using my hands to respond to the materials in front of me,” says Bochner, whose work is available at the online home-ware store 12thirteen, the Bedford-Stuyvesant boutique Sincerely Tommy and now the Manhattan pop-up shop Cafe Forgot.
As a student at Oberlin College, Bochner encountered the work of the German-American artist Eva Hesse, whose archive is rich with sculptures made of wax and textiles. “She’s always been this mythical character in my life — a guiding spirit for sure,” says Bochner, whose father, the artist Mel Bochner, knew Hesse from the ’60s downtown New York art scene. Inspired by Hesse’s conceptual treatment of everyday materials, Bochner also incorporates rope, fibers, weaving and knitting into her practice. Her favorite medium, though, is wax, and her motivation to create candles comes from what she calls “a desire to make something functional but that has the potential to change form.” With her line of alluringly ugly household objects, Bochner has created the most covetable anti-status candle imaginable. Through Sept. 30 at Cafe Forgot, 165 Duane St., New York, cafeforgot.com — ANNA FURMAN
Restoring a Shrine to British Eccentricity
On Google Maps, Sir John Soane’s Museum in central London appears as: “Former home of eccentric art collector.” This is true, to an extent. Soane, who decreed that his home become a museum after his death, in 1837, was a legendary collector of antiquities, and his house — a wide Regency with an unusual stepped stone facade overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields — is, by most definitions, eccentric: Visitors to the museum can see a mourning ring containing a lock of Emperor Napoleon’s hair and the sarcophagus of Seti I, an Egyptian king. But Soane was most famous in his day as an architect. A pioneer of neoclassical design, he built the Bank of England and the surprisingly modern-seeming brick-fronted Dulwich Picture Gallery.
No space in Soane’s home better embodies his maximalist and far-ranging tastes than his drawing office, on the top floor, whose every surface is clustered with relics and plaster casts of treasures from classical antiquity. This room is the only surviving example of a complete 19th-century architect’s work space in England and, on Sept. 26, the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation will host its annual benefit to raise funds for its much-needed restoration. The night’s honorees will be the Hall of Architecture at The Carnegie Museum of Art, as well as Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, of the New York design firm Roman and Williams, whom the foundation will recognize for their outstanding contributions to their field and their own use of historical objects within their practice. To bolster funds for the restoration project, Alesch has created an artwork that will sell at auction: an earthy, gothic watercolor on canvas — a work inspired by Standefer and Alesch’s own recent visit to the Soane Museum. — ALICE NEWELL-HANSON
