The World of Interiors

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The World of Interiors

Editor’s Letter • September 2025

ANTENNAE

What’s in the air this month

Pour Things • Time to cosy up to a new teapot? David Lipton blesses the vessels that’ll make your oolong belong, your assam awesome and your darjeeling more appealing

Deck the Walls • Finding the wallpaper that steals your heart can be a gamble – do you pick a floral, bet on an abstract or break suit and roll with a stripe? Worry not: your luck is in – there are choices in spades, and none of these diamonds is paste. As ever, wallcover lover David Lipton plays a winning hand.

Armchair Traveller • Books can be transporting things. Physically, sure, you may be stretched out on a towel at the lido, but A Study in Scarlet, say, will drop you in a puff of pipe smoke into a fireside wing-back. Swapping out station benches for silk-lined ottomans, hay bales for sci-fi settees, lectiophile Gianluca Longo lines up reading chairs to gel with any genre.

Beier’s Market • Ten years before Nigeria’s civil war, an expat academic waved the flag for African writing by launching the Black Orpheus journal. From 1957 to 1967, German émigré Ulli Beier united a clamour of voices in different tongues, bound beneath strikingly graphic covers. Kólá Túbósún has poured much of his energies into preserving this precious legacy

Voulez-vous Boucher avec moi? • After its facelift, the Frick Collection in Manhattan has never looked so ravishing, exclaims Hamish Bowles, as he guides us through its rehung art and refreshed rooms

Spines that Shine • The belief that books do furnish a room has long been held at the heart of bourgeois aspiration. But, as Eva Wiseman observes, in our new age of anxiety, the practice may also reflect a search for permanence in a shifting world

Ticket to Write • Blithely oblivious to the crush of commuters, Will Ashon found that nothing gets the creativity flowing quite like a packed Tube train and a dinky early-noughties gadget. That’s precisely how, pressed against a window, the novelist wrote his first experiment in Underground literature. Who needs a garret when a touch pad and tunnel vision will see you through to the final destination or chapter?

Woofers and Tweeters

I Am the Black Gold of the Sun

Recessive Jean

Marshall Lore

Network • Clare Holley chooses the best merchandise and events worldwide

VISITOR’S BOOK

FOREWORD ROLE • One of Italy’s top publishers of art books and catalogues, Massimo Vitta Zelman has somersaulted from strength to strength, shepherding his imprints to prominence and personally overseeing many of the landmark exhibitions they document. No surprise, then, that the collection he’s arranged beside the Breuers and Mackintoshes at home in Milan is equally extraordinary – over 20,000 strong and rife with spidery dedications from the cognoscenti. Lee Marshall jumps for joy.

MURALLY UNAMBIGUOUS • There’s no missing the work of KG Subramanyan at Kala Bhavana art college, his alma mater in West Bengal – it envelops an entire building in stark white-on-black, like so much bone inlay, then spreads around the tiled walls of another next door. A disciple of the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the institution’s founder, he deliberately left the wall paintings’ meaning open to interpretation. But this much is clear,...