A New Start

FT: Book touring in Beijing

Book touring in Beijing

By Simon Winchester

Published: June 20 2009 02:12 | Last updated: June 20 2009 02:12

Reading Room of the National Library of China in Beijing

It was when the elderly Chinese lady clambered up on to the stage as I was doing a reading and began a curious, undulating dance to music playing out of her cellphone, that I first started to think: book touring in China is very different from elsewhere and, in many ways, totally weird.

It all began with the sale of my most recent book to a Chinese publisher. I had written about the eccentric Cambridge biochemist Joseph Needham, whose adulterous love affair with a Chinese student in 1937 led to him writing what turned out be the longest English book on China ever written – 25 volumes and more than 4m words. In Britain, Needham is almost entirely forgotten beyond the confines of academia. But in China he is widely known and universally revered.

Before Needham, China was disdainfully regarded as quite peripheral. But since Needham, who catalogued China’s vast and bewildering array of achievements that proved without doubt how central the country was to the world, the view steadily changed to today’s mixture of awe, admiration and respect.

In addition to his having unintentionally engineered the sea-change, Needham was for all of his long life (he died in 1995, aged 94) a committed Marxist. So small wonder, perhaps, that when a Shanghai publishing company decided his story might sell in China, they were given immediate government permission to publish it. Last spring, they wrote to me: “Would I like to come over on tour?”

When I said yes, there came a blizzard of grateful and charmingly imperfect e-mails: “We are honoured and feel pleasure that you save one week for visiting China.” “We really appreciated the deep passion you deliver in the book.” And when I arranged to arrive in April: “We look forward to see you in China then, a month which we describe as paradise on earth in Chinese.”

These nice people in China seemed bent on making a fuss. They had booked me on the Air China non-stop service from Kennedy to Beijing – in business class. When I landed at Norman Foster’s staggering Beijing Terminal Three, there was Daisy, small, shy, bespectacled and unimaginably obliging, with a Mercedes, a driver, cold towels and bottles of iced jasmine tea.

It was a far cry from when I first landed in what was then Peking in 1979, a city of dust, strange silence and countless blue-uniformed workers grimly riding on a black cloud of bicycles. Here I was speeding in air-conditioned comfort down freeways, with BMWs and Buicks and Volvos on all sides, until I arrived at the very old Friendship Hotel.

This legendary place is a collection of a dozen old Chinese buildings where China has put up visiting dignitaries for the past half century. Back in the old days of Mao and Deng Xiaoping I remember it as grim, all smoke and spittoons: today it is languid luxury, aside from the importunate “masseuses” ringing to know when they might offer in-room services.

It was in the ballroom of Beijing’s St Regis hotel that, two days later, the book was officially launched. Comparisons pale. In Britain you might be thrown a lunch in the Mirabelle or a cocktail party at the Travellers Club; in America the kick-off will most likely be a speech at the big Barnes & Noble on Broadway and 84th Street, followed by dinner at the publisher’s penthouse. But in Beijing it was much more serious: a formal banquet for 300 people – no fewer than 50 of them being vice-ministers in the Chinese government.

A flurry of young women (all of whom spoke English) had come up from the publishing house in Shanghai, together with their bosses (all of whom did not). They came with gifts for me: a bright yellow silk tie with the Chinese character for “book” woven into the pattern; a series of jade chops with my Chinese name, “Wen Si-miao”; a calligraphy set with brushes and an ink-stone.

The following day they were keen to show me the sights – not so much the tourist sights that they knew I had been to before but the literary and cultural hotspots of their capital. There is a new National Library, for example – it was completed last autumn, a gleaming confection of steel and glass and pale oak, which manages to be both bustling and hushed at the same time. It is open to anyone 365 days a year from dawn until late at night, and has at its centre what looks like a vast opencast mine, hundreds of feet deep, with scholars and readers at rows of desks on every level, hemmed in by walls of volumes. I am an abiding fan of the new British Library, and have nostalgic longings for the old reading-room in Bloomsbury; but this new pit of learning, in the heart of Beijing, has now to be counted alongside the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.

It was here they had staged the first of the seminars – a series of unexpected, full-dress grillings by academics. I was introduced to an unsmiling young woman who was to be my interpreter – and then a pair of doors was flung open.

I was in a crammed lecture theatre, the audience standing and turning to applaud. They led me down, lamb-to-slaughter-like, to join three eminent Needham scholars at a table on the stage. I sat behind my name-card, the unsmiling lady took a seat behind me – and for the next two hours I was subjected to an interrogation on the human history of Chinese science. It was respectful, polite – and very intense.

And, on occasion, bizarre. For it was here that the dancer appeared. We were having a discussion about the human body – Needham wrote much about early Chinese anatomical charts – and I was reading a passage about the relative flexibility of Asian musculature, when the old woman climbed up, switched on her mobile phone and turned it to speaker-mode, cranked up some frightful tinny local opera and began to dance – to display the uniquely flexible nature of her body.

There were signings – held in one of the immense Xinhua bookstores found in city centres across the country. The store we visited near the old French Concession in Shanghai was eight storeys high. Each floor was beehive-busy, and the table where I was due to sit was full before I got there. Everyone had a book open at the title page, everyone had practised a little speech in English, each nervously and smilingly blurted it out: “Li Yue-se [the Chinese name for Needham] was a great hero – thank you for writing about him.”

And there was the interview, on CCTV-9 – held in China’s central broadcasting HQ, a building beside the Beijing military museum that had more security than Fort Knox. The young woman who interrogated me for 30 minutes for her programme, Dialogue, had evidently read every line of my book, and asked questions in perfect English with a formidable intelligence.

But perhaps the most memorable moment of the tour came on the evening in Shanghai, when I quoted a signboard I had seen in western China. It was outside the national space launch centre and it proclaimed: “Without Haste, Without Fear. We Will Conquer the World.”

There was a brief silence as the interpreter translated. Then she smiled broadly, and first the three professors beside me, and then the entire audience, stood up and began cheering. After a few seconds I realised it wasn’t me that they were cheering. It was China, and the future they all want for her, which all believe she is now on the verge of attaining and which a line from my book had happily confirmed.

‘Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China’ by Simon Winchester is published by Penguin

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Italy's entrepreneur with sole

Italy's entrepreneur with sole

By Vincent Boland

Published: April 22 2009 03:00 | Last updated: April 22 2009 03:00

Mario Moretti Polegato wants you to want holes in the soles of your shoes.

In one of several laboratories he has built at the headquarters of his Geox footwear empire, a bionic leg, known as a walkmeter and wearing a running shoe, is simulating a human taking 100,000 steps, or about 200km. The repetitive movement is aimed at testing the shoe's durability. Other machines are testing shoes for cracking, waterproofness and "breathability".

The tests, overseen by a team of engineers, are part of the Italian entrepreneur's obsession with getting us all to walk around with holes in our shoes. He wants to create the perfect shoe that will not make the foot sweat.

"The era of smelly feet is over," he says, seated at his desk in his wood-and-marble office at Geox's base in Montebelluna, in Italy's industrial heartland around Treviso. Perforations in the soles not only allow the foot to breathe but also make walking more comfortable.

Founder and chairman of the company, his belief in his unusual shoes has made him a billionaire and something of a lifestyle guru. Although founded only in 1995, Geox is the world's second largest lifestyle/casual footwear brand, after Clarks. He spends much of his time travelling and speaking about innovation, entrepreneurship and the environment.

The corridors of the Geox labs are lined with photographs of Mr Polegato addressing students at universities from Cambridge to Venice. Recently, he had lunch with Prince Charles, of Britain's Royal Family. A visitor to Geox is handed a list of "celebrities choosing Geox for themselves or their children". Names include Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama and Pope Benedict XVI. Indeed, Mr Polegato himself is something of a celebrity in Italy. In a country of entrepreneurs, he is clearly proud of his achievement and sees himself in the same league as other, better-known Italian designer-entrepreneurs such as Giorgio Armani. He also has the character to match.

At 56, Mr Polegato cuts an imposing figure - tall, broad-shouldered and dressed in an immaculate pinstripe suit with a bright yellow tie and a pair of the classic black men's shoes he invented, the basic components of which are leather uppers and rubber soles. Black-and-white spectacles add an eccentric touch he seems to relish.

Yet he seems to take it personally that only one Italian in 10 - to say nothing of the rest of the world - is wearing a Geox shoe at this moment. Ninety per cent of the world's shoes have rubber soles, he says, and it seems to jar that this should be the case. "Almost all of humanity walks this way, and it's not right," he says.

His conviction that conventional rubber soles are terrible for your feet, whether for walking or running, struck Mr Polegato one day in the early 1990s - he does not recall the precise date. The epiphany came in the desert outside Reno, Nevada. He was out jogging during a lull in a wine fair he was attending on behalf of his family's wine business, in which he was heavily involved. The solution to his bruised and sweating feet, he concluded after trying his own experiment, was holes in the soles, which would allow the foot to breathe. "At first I was thinking only of my own feet, and only later, after I had returned to Italy, did I begin to think about it as a business idea," he says.

"I went looking for breathable soles in sports shops all around Italy, and I couldn't find them. I thought, is it possible that nobody has thought of this idea yet? And nobody had," he says.

In the Nevada desert Mr Polegato tore holes in the soles of his running shoes with his hands. Back in Montebelluna, he began to refine his idea. "It's very hard to walk around with holes in your shoes because they let in dirt and water," he says. "So the problem I had to overcome was to make a shoe with holes in the soles that was also waterproof."

He patented his idea and began researching it. He found some answers in research carried out by scientists in Japan. Then he constructed a prototype, which he took to sports shoe makers in Italy, Germany and the US, all of which expressed scepticism. "I couldn't understand why they couldn't understand my idea, so I decided to begin making the shoes myself," he says. With backing from the Cassa di Risparmio di Treviso, the local savings bank (now part of the UniCredit group), he got enough credit to set up a manufacturing operation, which became Geox.

The company designs and manufactures mid-price casual shoes with tiny holes in the soles that can be worn with a suit. The shoes are made waterproof by a special membrane that keeps water out and allows sweat to exit.

In 2008, Mr Polegato says, Geox sold 20m pairs of shoes. Italy ac-counts for 38 per cent of sales and other European countries for 47 per cent. The company has 940 stores and 3,600 employees, and had €893m ($1.2bn) in sales last year, and net income of €123m.

Geox has made Mr Polegato rich, but this is not a tale of rags to riches, since he comes from a wealthy family of winemakers. Geox is his first entrepreneurial venture, al-though the wine business founded by his grandfather was entrepreneurial in its day.

Nevertheless, the rapid success of Geox has added another layer of wealth to an already well-off part of Italy. The region around Treviso is home to Benetton, Diesel, Luxottica and other globally successful Italian brands - as well as a cluster of artisanal shoemakers. Geox was worth near-ly €4bn at the height of the stock market boom (it was listed in Milan on December 1, 2004), although the value has fallen to about €1.4bn today. Mr Pol-egato owns 71 per cent of the company.

He has entrusted day-to-day management to an executive team, which leaves him time to give talks about the experience of being an entrepreneur. "It's impossible to substitute an entrepreneur for a financier," he says. "A company is not just about money. It is necessary to connect all the people who work here, and only an entrepreneur can do that."

Warming to his theme, one of the lessons of the global crisis, he says, is "the need to change capitalism". Asked to define the company of the future, he pauses for a moment before highlighting four themes: "It must strive to change the world, it must innovate beyond the imagination of its clients, it must be globally integrated and it must demonstrate that it is not just generous but genuine," he says.

"Generous is when you look after your employees. By genuine I mean that a company shouldn't have anything to hide."

Desert dream: the afternoon jog that led to a Milan listing

The story of how Mario Moretti Polegato's run in the Nevada desert led to an epiphany about human footwear and a big international business has become one of the hoary myths of Italian entrepreneurship.

He was attending a wine fair in Reno - his family owns the Villa Sandi vineyard in Montebelluna, among others - and went jogging one afternoon. "Reno is a funny city," he says. "It's all cowboys and desert. You can get from the downtown to the desert in 15 minutes." During his run he had an overwhelming urge to cut holes in the soles of his shoes and so was inspired to experiment.

Several patents, innovations and a Milan listing later, he plans to expand Geox from shoes into clothing, involving the same waterproof breathability.

At the same time, the company is beginning to test a type of sports shoe that deals with the problem of perspiration.

"We don't want to compete directly with Nike or Adidas, but we are anticipating the future," Mr Polegato says. "We want to repeat the experience with sports shoes that we did with 'brown shoes' [non-trainers], but we're not in a hurry."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

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Just Plane Fun

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2009/mayjun/pc/icon.html

PURSUITS

Just Plane Fun

Kirk Hawkins's company gives sport flying a lift.

by John Maas

STYLE POINTS: Hawkins, with his prototype, credits Stanford for Icon's design philosophy.

Brad Hines

Kirk Hawkins’s invention has much in common with the European roadsters Hawkins has long admired. It has an elegant interior, leather bucket seats, and a sleek, aerodynamic design. Even its name, Icon A5, suggests a sports-car pedigree. But whereas a Porsche is merely fast, the A5 can really fly.

An amphibious airplane with a 34-foot wingspan and a 100-horsepower engine, the A5 is part of the first generation of a stylish class of “light-sport” aircraft designed for casual pilots. According to Hawkins, founder and CEO of Icon, the plane “allows people who were intimidated by aviation to say, ‘I can do this.’”

Hawkins, MS ’95, MS ’05, says the inspiration for the A5 runs back a long way. “I was a power-sports kid,” enthralled with ATVs and Jet Skis. His interest in motor sports led him to aviation: he spent eight years flying F-16s in the Air Force. Then, while Hawkins was a student at the Graduate School of Business in 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration introduced a “sport-pilot license,” allowing virtually anyone with a valid driver’s license and 20 hours of training to fly.

Hawkins believed that sport flying provided a viable business model for the plane he was dreaming up. Adventurous high-end consumers might become pilots if the right airplane could convince them to get certified. He recruited Steen Strand, whom he had met in a course in Stanford’s product design program, and the two incorporated Icon in 2006. Engineering began that same year, and a flying prototype took off in summer 2008. The company is looking for a permanent manufacturing facility, and expects to begin mass production soon after flight testing is completed later this year.

Hawkins’s flying experience shaped the A5’s functionality, but it was his exposure to the product design program that influenced the plane’s look and feel. Hawkins credits the program’s multidisciplinary nature and consumer-oriented approach for Icon’s product strategy. “We wouldn’t exist without Stanford,” he says. Strand, Icon’s chief operating officer, agrees, pointing out the company’s signature accent color. “That’s why it’s red,” he jokes.

IN DEMAND: Orders for the A5 are strong despite the recession.

Courtesy Icon

The FAA has 13 design stipulations for the planes sport pilots are allowed to fly: no more than one passenger in addition to the pilot, for example, and a relatively plodding top speed of 120 knots. Established companies and upstarts alike hurried to produce light-sport designs, although their approaches varied. “Most of the companies were making less-expensive versions of their current aircraft,” Strand says. “I wanted to make an airplane look cool.”

The A5 design team saw the restrictions as an opportunity. The plane’s low operating speed demands less aerodynamic precision and therefore allows greater aesthetic freedom. Thus, features like the crease on the nose that Strand points to as a choice made purely for appearance’s sake.

Strand, when asked about the design inspirations for the A5, rattles off Ferrari, Aston Martin, Porsche and BMW. Many Icon designers first worked in the auto industry, and it shows in features like the A5’s instrument panel—an easily readable set of dials more like a dashboard than the intimidating array of knobs and gauges in a traditional cockpit.

• Icon Aircraft: Sport Flying Revolution

The A5’s wings fold flat against the fuselage, making it small enough to store in most garages, and it can be towed behind a car or truck—in an Icon-designed trailer.

One might assume the biggest barrier to success for the fledgling company would be the cost of the airplane—$139,000—at a time when even wealthy potential customers have been hammered by the recession. And the potential market is relatively small—although growing, the number of licensed sport pilots is less than 5,000. Yet Icon’s order book continues to fill, and Hawkins and Strand report strong interest, especially from overseas. At press time, Icon held deposits on more than 300 planes, enough orders to carry the Los Angeles-based company from the first delivery in late 2010 through 2013. And Icon has no immediate plans to move beyond the light-sport category. “There are so many to be made and sold,” Strand says. “Why bother?”

As for Hawkins, the tough business climate is just another challenge to relish and overcome. “We set extremely high bars for ourselves,” he says. “You’re always pushing it.”

JOHN MAAS, ’08, is a freelance writer in Berkeley.

FT: Andy Warhol’s paintings at Grand Palais

Andy Warhol’s paintings at Grand Palais

By Jackie Wullschlager

Published: March 27 2009 23:25 | Last updated: April 1 2009 17:35

In 1979, an exhibition of Andy Warhol’s portraits, ranging from Chairman Mao, Jimmy Carter and Golda Meir to Yves Saint Laurent and Liza Minnelli, occupied an entire floor of New York’s Whitney Museum. At the champagne opening, many of the subjects – Truman Capote, Lord Snowdon, Sylvester Stallone – turned up as guests, confirming the show as a microcosm of 1970s society. Critics panned the lot as shallow, boring and brutalised, and the works have not been exhibited together since.

At the tail end of the hippy era, the dizzy spiral with which Warhol abandoned 1960s austerity images such as soup cans and Brillo boxes for shameless glamour was reckoned a moral as well as an aesthetic outrage. “The faces are ugly and a shade stoned, if not actually repulsive and grotesque,” wrote The New York Times. Warhol responded only that the canvases were the same size “so they’ll all fit together and make one big painting called Portraits of Society. That’s a good idea isn’t it? Maybe the Metropolitan Museum would want it someday.”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Arts - Nov-24

Or maybe not. Instead, 30 years later, in Le Grand Monde d’Andy Warhol, Paris’s prestigious Grand Palais commemorates the series, placing it in the context of Warhol’s long, uneven oeuvre as a portraitist from the 1960s to the 1980s. The sweeping style with which some 100 paintings are displayed, across vast galleries linked by a belle-époque staircase, would surely have made Warhol delirious with snobbish glee. His best works – “Red Jackie”, “Silver Liz”, laconic 1963-64 self-portraits in dark glasses, interleaved with paintings of a glittery dollar sign and an electric chair – have never looked more seductive or more classical. Warhol, New York soup can prince of conceptualism, becomes in Paris an opulent society portraitist in the tradition of John Singer Sargent or Kees van Dongen: master of colour, texture, clarity, precision, ravishing yet chilly, flattering even as he anatomises triviality and brittleness.

The show opens in 1962, when Warhol discovered the silkscreening technique that would define his portraiture. Months later Marilyn Monroe killed herself, and the romance of her death charged him to exploit silkscreening’s potential fully. Choosing a black-and-white publicity shot, he outlined the shape of Monroe’s head and shoulders on canvas, painted in a background, adding eyes, lips, face, before stencilling on the photographic image. “Peach Marilyn” typifies the garish result: brilliant yellow hair, chartreuse eye shadow, deep red lips, face a pink mask set against clashing orange ground.

“Twenty Marilyns (Marilyn in Colour)”, and “Marilyn Monroe in black and white (twenty-five Marilyns)” repeat the image. Misprints and clogging lend variations in tone, look, intensity, the smudges and blurs recalling, Warhol said, out-of-focus television sets. In contrast, “Gold Marilyn”, a single image silkscreened on to a gold field, emphasises Warhol’s roots in Byzantine iconography. Fame, beauty, death, terror are made at once more banal and more majestic through repetition as Warhol hit on an original expression of themes that had obsessed him since, as a sickly child convinced of his unloveliness, he had quivered with joy and fright at Saturday movies and, on Sundays, before the icons at the Byzantine Catholic church of his Slavic immigrant parents.

A first commission followed immediately: from collector Robert Scull, for a portrait of his wife Ethel, who, designer-dressed, expected to trip off to Richard Avedon’s studio to be photographed for the silkscreen. Instead, Warhol, jangling $100-worth of coins, pushed her into a Photomat machine with instructions to “watch the little red light”. Warhol poked, joked, jostled Ethel into hundreds of dynamic poses, then chose those with the strongest light/dark contrasts, to make “Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times”. It was, said Metropolitan curator Henry Geldzahler, “the most successful portrait of the 1960s. It was a new kind of look at a single human being from 36 different points of view, obviously influenced by the cinema and television. He was creating an image of a superstar out of a woman who could have been any one of a series of women.”

Soon Geldzahler – bulky, intellectually solid, camp, overdressed, with piercing eyes and a massive cigar – sat for his own double portrait. A shock-blond, eagerly curious young David Hockney in pink and green, an aged Georgia O’Keeffe, a lanky, disorientated Jean-Michel Basquiat in the pose of Michelangelo’s “David”, and Joseph Beuys peering insistently through Green Party camouflage colours are among the artists depicted here. Strict, perceptive Dominique de Menil, nicknamed “Mother Superior”, eyes darting as if in conversation, set against abstract panels, and her emotionally lacklustre opposite, Baroness von Thyssen – all glitz: face flattened; ice-maiden eyes, embellished with turquoise and full sensual mouth exaggerated; lustrous hair melting into near-expressionist rose and violet brushstrokes – are acute portraits of leading collectors.

Warhol’s women are usually more interesting than his men. “He admired women. He wanted to be one. He wanted to be involved in their creation,” suggested Geldzahler. Among political portraits, the greatest are the 16-panel mourning canvas “Jackie”, based on newspaper shots taken hours after Kennedy’s assassination, painted in the blues and greys of civil war America, and the spectacular, shifting, Technicolor images of Mao, imbued with sexual ambiguity and a sinister play on the link between eroticism and power.

Understanding this relationship lay at the root of Warhol’s voyeuristic genius. “He cringed from physical contact. It was that celibacy that gave him enormous manipulative power over the magnificently beautiful people he brought together,” recalled his Factory friend Gerard Malanga. Detachment, the aestheticising stare of the ascetic as well as the dandy, determined the neutrality with which Warhol fixed the materialistic, spiritually bankrupt mood of western late capitalism, co-opting even Mao into his vision of psychedelic emptiness.

The repetitions of the silkscreen process were his double weapon here. “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?” he asked. Repetition was a lesson in looking – every individual, every face, every expression, was different. But Warhol also believed, according to his biographer Viktor Bockris, that “repetition was the bane of existence ... that people never changed and that his own problems would repeat themselves throughout his life”. Frivolous in appearance but deadly serious in intent, his mechanical repetitions put painting in its place, within a continuum of the 1960s media of mass production – particularly photography – only to exalt it again by the conviction and beauty of his painterly surfaces. This is an utterly enjoyable show which illuminates the artist’s lifelong concerns, methods and his discomforting, prophetic take on an epoch that continues to shape our own.

‘Le Grand Monde d’Andy Warhol’, Grand Palais, Paris, to July 13. www.grandpalais.fr

FT: Armchair psychology

Armchair psychology

By Emily Backus

Published: April 4 2009 01:34 | Last updated: April 4 2009 01:34

Emily Backus, pictured above with her family, thinks her apartment falls between Makno’s definition of a hearth home and a forum house. The 4Cs test revealed her to be a reformer

What does your home say about you? I started thinking seriously about this after a visit to an elderly neighbour’s flat a few years ago. She lived below us – in a space identical to ours in terms of square footage, ceiling height and other architectural particulars – and I’d gone down to inspect a leak from our kitchen into hers.

Our own apartment was sun-filled, open and recently renovated. Its main room served as a foyer, living room and home office, while a spacious kitchen doubled as an informal dining area, TV room and children’s crafts space. Our walls were white, punctuated by modern artwork; our furniture was colourful, eclectic and mostly minimalist; and we co-existed with toys and clutter.

Our downstairs homologue was, by contrast, a dark, heavy hybrid of Bavarian mountain chalet and 1960s bourgeois aspirations, its layout sliced into conventional compartments that shut out light and closed in space. Impeccably maintained fittings and furnishings – velvet drapes, lacquered wooden furniture and baroque-framed figurative oils – spoke of dwellers that preferred sombre solidity over cheer or whimsy. One bedroom bore traces of a young adult who had left 15 to 20 years previously. The kitchen, which had a footprint mirroring our own, was a nearly vacant service space, with a small Formica table, a white enamel sink and other ageing basics. When my neighbour despaired about how hard it would be to touch over the concentric brown water stains in the ceiling, I had to agree; the white paint would be impossible to match as it had turned sepia.

How could our two flats be so different? Matteo Abis, director of research for Milan-based Makno Consulting, has spent the past few years investigating such issues. His term for the sort of static, conservative preserve occupied by my neighbour is casa bunker, or bunker home – a place sheltered from the outside world, open to only a few close relatives and friends. And, apparently, the type is far more common in Italy than a morphing, multipurpose nest like mine.

Over the past decade, Makno has surveyed thousands of people in Italy and western Europe in order to categorise homes and chart aesthetic tastes and consumption patterns. It then sells the findings to appliance makers, furniture manufacturers and residential developers, offering them not only a look into our collective drawing rooms but also an insight into what we want to buy.

HOME TRUTHS

Theatre or bunker? Aspirer or explorer?

Makno’s Housing Evolution study identifies seven types of homes:
Bunker A dwelling stuck in time and closed to all but a few close relatives and intimate friends that provides protective shelter
Hearth A functional, affordable, dynamic, intimate family space with warm, traditional furnishings and liberal use of pastel colours
Forum A house groomed for aesthetics as well as function with social kitchens, distinct private spaces, outdoor areas and decor in muted, natural tones with splashes of intense colour
Office A collection of rooms used by different people for anything from work to recreation to relaxation
Theatre A stage-set that prioritises aesthetics and personal considerations over function or economy with contemporary design and technology plus antiques and art for effect
Tent A perfunctory, undecorated set-up for the young and highly mobile
Commodity An anonymous dwelling occupied by a professional whose real home is elsewhere
www.makno.it

Young & Rubicam’s Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation lists seven types of people:
Reformer An independent thinker, craving harmony and authenticity
Explorer Someone desiring discovery, challenge and new experiences
Succeeder A goal-oriented organiser who needs control
Aspirer A materialistic seeker of status
Mainstreamer Someone in search of security, belonging and routine
Struggler An escapist who lives for today but is often viewed as a loser
Resigned Someone focused on survival and nostalgia with long-held values
www.4cs.yr.com

According to the company’s ongoing Housing Evolution study, 31 per cent of Italians, or about 18.6m, live in bunker homes. These are typically elderly people with limited means so the last house refurbishments date back to a more prosperous time, with correspondingly dated decorative details and colour schemes. (The prevalence of such properties might testify to Italians’ fiscal conservatism and sputtering fertility. Most are reluctant to run up debt; four in five own their homes; and people aged 65 outnumber children under 15 by more than 40 per cent.)

My own apartment appears to be closer to Makno’s definition of a casa focolare, or hearth home, with some attributes of its wealthier relative, the casa forum, or forum house. (I can’t be sure because I didn’t take the test, which would have required a home visit and long interview.) According to the study, 26 per cent of Italians, typically young families, live in the former category of functional, affordable, dynamic, intimate spaces with warm, traditional furnishings and pastel colours. The forum, accounting for 15 per cent of Italian residences, is what the hearth becomes if a family climbs a few socioeconomic rungs and cares about entertaining.

Another 15 per cent of Italians live in what Makno refers to as an office house, a place for doing things. Take the small apartment in Milan that Francesca Maggioni shares with her doorman husband, two adult daughters and a grandson. “We pursue a thousand hobbies in this house,” says the 56-year-old housewife. “I sew, knit, stencil, bake cookies. My husband and I often sit in the kitchen together; he’ll read while I might work on a wreath.” The toddler plays and their daughters spend much of their time on computers.

The next most popular category of homes in Italy – at 13 per cent – is the theatre home, a stage-set through which wealthy owners express themselves and their status, often with help from architects and interior decorators. Last are marginal categories: the tent house – a perfunctory space, easily set up and taken down, like a bivouac for students and highly mobile young adults – and the commodity house – a step up in terms of cost and stability but still an indistinctive dwelling occupied by a professional whose real base is elsewhere.

Although Makno has not conducted such a detailed study outside Italy, it has surveyed 3,000 people across six European countries to evaluate how they feel about, use and decorate their dwellings. Satisfaction with one’s home was viewed as a primary indicator of emotional investment and, by this measure, Spaniards ranked highest, with an average score of 7.7 on a scale of one to 10, compared with ratings at or just over 7 for the UK, France and Germany. Russians felt the lousiest about their homes, ranking them a 5.3, and also reported living in the smallest quarters, just 65 sq metres on average. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the content Italians and Spaniards enjoyed the roomiest spaces, with an average of 108 sq metres and 103 sq metres, respectively. The study also found that Italians and French are most likely to express themselves through their homes and open them to guests, while Spaniards and Russians use them as family gathering places. UK homes scored high on receiving guests but their furnishings were conventional; and in Germany, where more than 50 per cent of people rent, residences tend to be functional and insular, places where people eat, sleep, work and rest.

As a whole, Europeans favour warm colours, traditional furniture and soft lines, like arched doorways, over the cold, minimalist fare displayed in interiors magazines. Even in Italy, the world capital of contemporary design, 70 per cent of domestically sold furniture is classical in style, Abis notes. Only the Spanish and the French actually like sleek, designer kitchens.

Predictably, many home-focused manufacturers find such data invaluable. “This research not only deepens our understanding of lifestyles but allows us to ‘enter’ homes,” says Graziano Lazzarotto, the Italian head of marketing for appliance maker Electrolux, which helped finance Makno’s study. The company has, for example, developed more products with rounded lines because the research showed that “cold, rational environments belong [only] to a wealthy niche”, Lazzarotto says.

“Most people [by contrast] tend to recycle the environments of their childhood in later homes. First homes tend toward white laminate [kitchens] but when people no longer feel the need to escape the past, they recreate it.”

Charles Jones, head of marketing at Whirlpool, another appliance maker, agrees that analysing how people use their homes and ferretting out cultural differences is critical to his company’s success. In India, for example, Whirlpool boosted its market share from third to first place in three years by developing festive, expressive products, including pink refrigerators, following a survey of Indian families that included a question about their favourite colours. “Within the company, there was scepticism. ‘A pink refrigerator? Give me a break,’” he says. “But we convinced the mother organisation to put out a small number of these refrigerators [and we sold] half a year’s worth of product in less than 30 days.”

Like Makno, advertising agency Young & Rubicam conducts lifestyle research to give its corporate clients a window into our lives. Using a conceptual framework, it calls the Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation, or 4Cs for short, that is based on work by the late US psychologist Abraham Maslow, it has categorised 1.5m people across 48 markets by seven dominant needs, which determine personality and lifestyle.

Although the system has yet to be applied to domestic spaces, Charlotte Mordin, head of Y&R’s 4Cs programme, believes it could be. In the home of an intellectual, anti-materialistic “reformer”, for example, “I would expect individual items chosen for their own character; a mixing of shabby and new; natural fabrics; good-to-feel textures; investment in colour, whether rich or subtle; lots of books”, she says. “Reformer furnishings fit around your life and way of living, a kind of organic growth rather than an organised plan. Reformers are at ease with some degree of chaos ... They hate to be confined and would love a place with big windows and high ceilings, light and space, lots of cupboards.”

Anna Bottasso, an Italian economist living in Milan, took the 4Cs test, scoring strongly as a reformer, and the two-bedroom apartment she shares with her neurologist husband and son uncannily fits Mordin’s description. It has large windows, numerous built-in wardrobes and a mix of rustic and refined furniture, none of it branded. Upholstery is in pony or leather; a side table is improvised out of crafted steel cubes and raw planks of wood; the dining room table, based on a 1918 geometrical design by Charles Rennie Macintosh, was made by “a man in La Spezia for about half the price you would normally pay”; and vividly coloured abstract art hangs on the walls. The only missing element is a trace of chaos.

Some companies reject the sorts of generalisations that stem from studies like the 4Cs and Makno’s, however. Valerio Di Bussolo, spokesman for Ikea in Italy, sees home trends seeping from one part of the world to the other, spreading between cities where lifestyles coincide. He says his company’s success depends largely on such cultural convergence, since it only varies its product offering by 10-15 per cent among geographic regions. The challenge it faced upon entering Italy 20 years ago was consumers failing to accept its signature natural wood finishes, articulated indoor lighting, fixed upholstery and simple kitchen tools. But its fortunes improved as Italians began to appreciate a more northern European aesthetic and when other markets adopted furniture covers and elaborate food preparation. Today, he says, “a house in Milan is more likely to resemble a house in Hamburg or Barcelona than a house in Rome”.

I, too, see something problematic about reducing people and their homes to type. Characterisations are seductive but how far can you trust them? In Makno’s terms, my flat, which I share with my real-estate consultant husband and three small boys, seems to fall between categories. But Abis might say that’s fitting given our place in cycles of life and work. With respect to the 4Cs, Bottasso’s apartment had many reformer elements to it but so do the homes of almost everyone I know, including my own. Then again, perhaps my friends are all reformers, attracted to like-minded people. In fact, when I took the 4Cs test, that’s how I scored.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Time: Building Materials: Cementing the Future

Thursday, Dec. 04, 2008

Building Materials: Cementing the Future

By PETER GUMBEL / LYONS

French architect Jacques Ferrier is a big fan of concrete. He has used it extensively in his latest work, including the French pavilion he has designed for the 2010 World Fair in Shanghai, and believes it has strong aesthetic appeal. "It has a sensuality," he enthuses. "It evokes images of white minerality." Most of all, Ferrier praises concrete for its environmental properties. One of his concept projects is Hypergreen, a showcase tower with a curved concrete lattice façade, designed to generate enough energy to meet most of its own needs.

Yes, concrete. Not the cheap, gray, easily cracked, soulless stuff that gave urbanization a bad name when it was slathered over Western cities in the 1960s, but newfangled, bright — and still relatively expensive — concrete that has come onto the market this decade. High-performance or ultra-high-performance concrete, as it's known in the industry, is up to 10 times stronger than regular concrete. Although, pound-by-pound, it costs several times as much as regular concrete, industry officials say price comparisons are misleading because the high-tech versions have different properties that make them more comparable to materials such as stainless steel or aluminum — which are often more expensive still. The latest concretes have other advantages, including setting much faster. That's giving architects, engineers and builders far greater flexibility to use the material's long-lasting, thermal and acoustic properties in everything from pedestrian bridges to bus stations — and, in turn, contributing to big energy and other environmental savings. Some of the innovations are startling: the white concrete used by American architect Richard Meier for the Jubilee Church in Rome contains titanium dioxide, which keeps the concrete clean at the same time as destroying ambient pollutants such as car exhaust.

High-tech concrete is just one of the products that has emerged from the research and development labs of cement, steel and chemicals firms this decade, and it signals a growing commitment by heavy industry to the notion of "sustainability." As public pressure has grown to reduce energy use and carbon emissions — and in general tread more lightly on the environment — companies in these industries have poured money into R&D efforts. Much of the work has focused on internal processes, especially on the critical task of finding out how to cut down on emissions during manufacturing. But in their labs, scientists have also been playing with the materials themselves, swapping around molecules and gazing at atomic structures through electron microscopes in the hunt for new, "greener" variations. The idea is to improve the entire life cycle of the product — not just how it's made, but also how it's used. A heightened sense of social responsibility isn't the only motive; as firms are quickly finding, innovations that are good for the environment can also give them a competitive advantage.

Cleaning Industry
At the research and development labs of steel giant ArcelorMittal in Belgium, researchers are trying to develop thinner, stronger steel that can replace plastic in washing machines and other appliances. They're also experimenting with coatings that are both environmentally friendly and more effective in fighting corrosion. Dulux Trade, the paint subsidiary of Netherlands-based chemical firm AkzoNobel, this year started selling Ecosure, a type of paint with much reduced amounts of embodied carbon and other volatile organic compounds. And at the R&D center of French cement firm Lafarge, director Pascal Casanova waxes lyrical about Ductal, a super-resilient product the center has developed that he calls the "Formula One" of concrete. It's what architect Ferrier intends to use in his 807-ft. (246 m) Hypergreen tower, a project that could not be built with regular concrete.

Of course, the beneficial environmental effects of such new products are still dwarfed by the sheer volume of emissions that heavy industry spews out. Yet the time and money being spent on cutting-edge research shows that many companies are paying far more than just lip service to the notion of cleaning up their act. "Heavy industry in general faces some of the biggest problems because of what it does, but it was also the first sector to recognize that it had a problem," says Peter Madden of the London-based ngo Forum for the Future, which worked together with Dulux on the Ecosure product.

As the world economy falls on hard times, one of the big questions is whether these research efforts may be cut or curtailed. Björn Stigson is president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, an organization of about 200 companies committed to smart environmental policies. Some cutbacks are inevitable, he believes, but "sustainable development is now an integrated part of doing business. It's not a question of environment versus business. It's a business issue, and if companies don't address it, they will have problems with their license to operate and grow." His business council has been working with most of the leading players in the cement, metals and mining, and electric-utility industries to define specific targets for such things as CO2 emissions and responsible use of fuels and materials that the firms then commit to meet.

To get a sense of how technological progress is translating into environmental gains, take a trip to Lafarge's research campus, just outside the French city of Lyons. The world's largest cement company, Lafarge has set itself a goal: by 2010, it will cut its net CO2 emissions for every ton of cement it produces to 20% below the 1990 level. But it is also steaming ahead with research into smarter, stronger and less polluting products, including ultra-high-performance concrete. Research director Casanova traces the path of innovation back to the 1980s, when the first big gains were made in increasing the resistance, or strength, of concrete. In the two decades since, researchers have figured out how to increase that resistance by a factor of 10. "There has been a very important revolution over the past 20 years, and it's not over," Casanova says.

Stronger concrete translates into significant gains for the environment because it can be used more thinly, consuming considerably fewer raw materials than regular concrete. Moreover, concrete has some properties that make it intrinsically energy-efficient when used in buildings. It insulates well because it doesn't let in wind and water. Its density also means it stores heat during the day and releases it at night, enabling savings on air conditioning and heating; architects including Ferrier are playing with such possibilities as they design their new buildings. And the ultra-high-performance concretes can be put to surprising uses: in a showroom on the Lafarge campus is a concrete table so thin and elegant that from a distance you might think it was made of marble.

Lafarge is by no means alone in focusing on innovation. Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says "there's not one single cement company that isn't looking at ways to improve the resistance of concrete." The next step, he says, "is to achieve materials with higher strength, but which use the same amount of initial material."

Back in Paris, architect Ferrier acknowledges that some clients are skeptical when he proposes concrete. But "the environmental advantage is clear: zero maintenance, zero painting and a very long life," he says. As soon as the price drops, he says, "we'll be able to explore more."

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FT: Live, work, shop

Live, work, shop

By Tracey Taylor

Published: December 13 2008 00:15 | Last updated: December 13 2008 00:15

For the past five years Christmas shopping has not been a problem for photographer Frank Anzalone. He simply rolls out of bed and walks out of his apartment directly into an open-air mall with 70 high-end shops, including Burberry, Sur La Table and Bang & Olufsen. His home is in Santana Row, a surburban retail-residential community that is increasingly being replicated around the US and the world.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Modern metamorphosis - Dec-06

It’s hammer time - Nov-29

Rich men’s playgrounds - Nov-14

Eclectic avenues - Nov-10

Safe as houses? - Oct-31

Different skies - Oct-25

“I enjoy this time of year when the lights sparkle and there is a fun holiday energy at the Row,” Anzalone says. “It feels more like a small hometown community than a bustling shopping mall and I really enjoy talking to the different merchants. It’s nice when you’re on a first-name basis and not treated as just another sale. People are friendly and the atmosphere is safe and comfortable. I hope to be here for another five-plus years.”

A few decades ago living above the shop was seen as a rather pedestrian existence; former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher used to cite the fact that she was born above her father’s grocery store in Grantham, Lincolnshire, eastern England, as a reminder of her humble roots. Now, however, residential and retail property are being blended together for the opposite reason. Developers are persuading homebuyers to see living above the shop as something to aspire to – especially when the establishment in question is operated by Gucci or Salvatore Ferragamo.

This phenomenon can be seen in new-build developments and regeneration projects around the world, especially in city centres. There are older neighbourhoods, such as Soho in Hong Kong and Le Marais in Paris, with apartments above trendy stores and restaurants, and modern malls with housing attached, such as Avenue K in Kuala Lumpur and Westfield in White City, London. Going forward, we can only expect more of the same. European developer Uplace, for example, wants to roll out its “experience destination” communities, where people can shop, work, play and live, to cities across the continent.

“The industrial age was marked by the construction of single-family homes [but] the hallmark of the new spatial fix will be denser use of land and increased compactness,” says Richard Florida, professor of business and creativity at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Canada, whose latest book, Who’s Your City?, focuses on the “where to live” question. “The demand for central locations is motivated by people’s desire to conserve time – by eliminating commuting, for instance.”

But, perhaps not surprisingly, it is in the consumerist US where the retail-residential concept is really taking off. Developers are bringing it not just to cities but to towns and suburbs, manufacturing entirely new, upmarket communities around pre-packaged, open-air malls. Call it instant yet sanitised urbanism – with a focus on shopping.

Santana Row, five miles from the nearest city, San José, is an ideal case in point. Designed to resemble a large urban block with a main street running through the centre, it has 70 retailers, 20 restaurants, nine spas and salons and more than 1,000 residents on its 42-acre footprint. Having opened in 2002, it has become the go-to spot for young professionals looking for upmarket shopping, a vibrant restaurant scene, a buzzy nightlife and, crucially, a convenient place to live.

The location of the development is significant. San José is California’s third largest city and, as the capital of Silicon Valley with its concentration of high-tech industries and wealth, its inhabitants rank among those with the highest median incomes in the country. But it has long drawn unfavourable comparisons with San Francisco, 50 miles north, for its lack of animation. And, if anything, the vibrancy of Santana Row has exacerbated the situation, luring not only shoppers but also homebuyers with its promise of a new kind of community.

“I’m addicted to the convenience. Everything is at your fingertips,” says Casey De Carlo, a software company sales executive and former suburbanite who now lives in The Heights, a Santana Row apartment building flanking an open courtyard with a swimming pool. “I made more friends here in six months than in six years in the suburbs and I could write a book about what goes on around the hot tub,” he adds wryly.

To walk the streets of Santana Row is to confront a melange of architectural styles and cultural references. Jan Sweetman, a vice-president at developer Federal Realty, says designers were sent to France and Europe to source ideas before blueprints were drawn up. Several architects were contracted to work on different buildings to avoid a “Disneyland-type product”. There are fountains imported from Barcelona, grassy plazas, fragments of ironwork and distressed stucco from Tunisia and Italy and Gaudi-esque pillars encrusted with broken tiles. The façade of a 17th-century French chapel is affixed to the front of a wine bar.

At the heart of the community people sit under mature oak trees; there’s a fire pit, chess tables and live music. A concierge is on hand to make restaurant reservations or secure transportation and residents can also take advantage of a regular onsite farmers market, “mommy and me” events and jazz evenings. Staff seem to appear from nowhere to sweep up the first hint of a discarded coffee cup or ice cream wrapper. And the streets are patrolled 24/7 by private security firms in addition to being overseen by the San José police department. As the San Francisco Chronicle put it when reviewing the development in 2006: “It’s as if San José, having surpassed San Francisco in population, decided one day to catch up on the urban lifestyle thing but without the gridlock, the grime or the poor people.”

Carlos Dunlap, a former resident of Los Angeles who moved to northern California five years ago intending to settle in San Francisco, is now on his second Santana Row home. He first bought an open-plan loft, then switched to a three-level town house with views of the nearby hills. His office is a 10-minute drive away and he says he loves the fact the Row is both “immaculate” and safe. “There’s something going on here all the time for everybody,” he says.

Property prices vary depending on size and location. A three-bedroom, two-and-a half bathroom, 2,161 sq ft town house across the street from The Valencia, the development’s boutique hotel, is listed at $1.8m while $3.3m will buy an extra 1,600 sq ft, cathedral ceilings and a balcony and terrace. Monthly rental rates for flats range from $2,700 to $4,000.

Federal Realty has built several other surburban retail-residential developments on the US east coast, including the Village at Shirlington and Pentagon Row, both in Virginia, and Bethesda Row in Maryland. And the formula is being mirrored all over California. Outside Los Angeles, in Glendale, there is the Americana at Brand, marrying high-end stores such as Tiffany & Co and Barneys, luxury condominiums and the amenities of a five-star resort, in a project that developer Rick Caruso says was inspired by Newbury Street in Boston. And west of San Francisco in Emeryville there is Bay Street, a development where more than 1,000 residents live above 60 retailers, 10 restaurants and a 16-screen cinema.

These new communities don’t appeal to everyone. Former suburbanities can be put off by the crowds, says Mike Pynn, residential manager at Santana Row. “Some of our first customers thought they wanted the urban experience but then complained about the noise and left,” he says. And, perversely for a place focused on walkability, most outsiders arrive by car, keeping valet parking attendants busy.

Those used to a traditional city will have the opposite problem. As John King, architecture critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, points out, Santana Row and its sisters are “artificial urbanity”. “For people who define the idea of a cosmopolitan urban scene as essentially a stage set to live the sort of life they want to live, it’s a terrific stage set,” he says. But “it’s not part of San José. It’s like suburbia with an urban jolt. If it was parachuted into lower Manhattan there would be a sense of ‘Why do we want it?’” Even residents of a small town might question where the post office, fire station and library are.

Richard Florida also thinks manufactured “urban villages” are better if they are linked to a historic neighbourhood, rather than “out in the middle of nowhere”. He points to SouthSide Works in Pittsburgh, which saw the addition of high-end housing units, retailers and restaurants to an old mill site, and the Distillery District in Toronto, a pedestrian-only village with Victorian architecture that dates back to 1832, as examples.

But it’s difficult to argue with Santana Row’s thriving retail trade and 98 per cent residential occupancy rate. And the development is expanding: construction began on a 95,000 sq ft glass-and-steel building for offices and more retail space this summer.

Whether growth can be maintained in the current economic downturn remains to be seen. But Pynn is optimistic. He says he still gives regular tours of the Row to goverment officials and developers from all over the US who say they are looking for inspiration on how to fashion the perfect community. “Everyone wants their MTV and everyone wants their Santana Row,” he says.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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FT: Men’s wear – big and small in Japan

Men’s wear – big and small in Japan

By Tyler Brûlé

Published: October 4 2008 01:18 | Last updated: October 4 2008 01:18

Here’s one for the boys. Is this the weekend that you finally give yourself a good two hours to go out and sort your wardrobe for autumn? Depending on where you happen to be today, this might be easier said than done. In fact, unless you’re reading this in Japan or Italy, finding a great independent men’s wear shop that’s not stuffed with predictable brands, displayed in predictable looking shops, is more than a challenge. The same might be said of women’s wear but I always get the sense that the female shopper is better served by buyers prepared to spend that extra day in Paris or Florence checking out a new knitwear label they hope they’ll be the first to stock.

There are many reasons why shopping for a well-designed, sharp yet sensible wardrobe is so challenging but two of the driving factors are that there’s a global shortage of competent men’s wear buyers and an absence of likeable sales people. I also have strong evidence that men are desperate for good garments because this column receives at least 10 letters a week from men and women eager to find a retail oasis that will solve all their sartorial needs.

This situation is so critical for some that there are even requests for the name of the label stitched into the blazer I’m wearing at the top of this page (for your reference, the jacket’s from Tomorrowland in Shibuya – more on it shortly). While I don’t spend that much time poking through hanging rails and shelves on my travels, I do find that the bulk of my purchases happen in a few select shops in Tokyo and a handful of stores in Italy.

From first glance it’s easy to see why you can readily part with money in Japan: when the whole shopping experience is so evolved – the stores are exquisitely designed, there are platoons of well groomed and attentive staff, and the variety of shops is endless.

For in Japan, there seems to be a men’s shop pitched at each and every stage of life.

On the side streets of Harajuku and on the lower floors of Isetan’s men’s store in Shinjuku (perhaps one of the best one-stop shopping experiences in the world), you can be a woodsy looking preppy boy who might have just strolled off the campus at Dartmouth except every garment will be so precisely researched and sourced that there’s not a chance in hell that anyone attending an Ivy League school would ever have access to such clothes because Japan’s most powerful retailers have bought up all the best pieces and bundled them in a container for shipment back home.

In a Ginza department store, you might see a whole floor specifically targeting a 52-year-old male, BMW-estate-driving golfer who likes to collect wine and take his family on holiday to Italy every other summer and is a sucker for sorbet-coloured cashmere zip necks and high-waist chinos with a woven belt.

However, the key drawback to shopping in Japan for men’s wear is sizes, unless, of course, you’re Japanese or slight of frame. You either have to have no bum, thighs or shoulders or an extremely evolved sense of humour to enjoy a day looking for shirts, jackets and trousers. The biggest frustration, aside from bursting out of garments and being told that you’ve just wriggled out of the largest size they stock in the whole country, is the fact that there’s so much wonderful stuff to buy.

But none of this helps your search for that perfect blazer or the three pairs of jeans you feel you need to make your autumn wardrobe complete, so where are you going to go to refine your look for the season? Having just completed the exercise over the past three weeks, here’s a sampling of the best shops that are hopefully within easy striking distance.

If you’re in New York, it’s hard to beat the keen eye of the buyers from Odin who’ve colonised a pocket of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and do a brisk trade in brands such as Engineered Garments (best jackets of the season) and Common Projects (best sneakers). It’s also worth checking out J Crew chief executive Mickey Drexler’s new retail experiment, Liquor Store, down in Tribeca. It mixes the best elements of J Crew with vintage pieces and lesser known brands selected for their timeless made-in-the-USA credentials. In Toronto, Nomad also does a brisk trade in clothes by Engineered Garments, Rag & Bone, APC and Canadian label Wings & Horns.

Across the Atlantic, A Gi Emme in Como continues to be the Fast Lane favourite for one-stop wardrobe surgery, but you can also do well on a Saturday afternoon at Storm in Copenhagen and both Albam and Oliver Spencer in London.

And, finally, to show that persistence really does pay, after three years pestering the nice people at Tomorrowland in Shibuya, I finally managed to persuade them to do a set of bespoke blazers for me every season. I can’t promise they’ll do the same for you on your first visit but a few polite inquiries might set you on course for a rather handsome addiction.

Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine
tyler.brule@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/brule

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Man who put a shine on Sin City

That the company was prepared to back him speaks volumes about the culture of entrepreneurship in the US, he says.

"This is a country where people are prepared to take a risk on you because of your character, rather than reputation. They liked what they saw and said: 'Go ahead and try.'"

==

Man who put a shine on Sin City

By Matthew Garrahan in Los Angeles

Published: July 23 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 23 2008 03:00

Andrew Sasson is talking about how to serve ice in a drink. "If it's frozen properly, then it takes longer to melt," explains the Las Vegas bar and restaurant magnate. "So in a restaurant you have to use cubed ice. But in a bar, we would serve flat ice to keep the drink at the right temperature."

The ice in their drinks may be an afterthought to most bar and restaurant patrons. But to the fastidious Mr Sasson the shape of ice is one of many small but important ingredients that go into running a successful nightspot.

The 38-year-old founder and partner in the Light Group has 16 properties in Las Vegas that he runs through a partnership with MGM Mirage, the world's largest gaming group. From Fix, an upmarket restaurant at the Bellagio casino, to Jet, a 2,000-person nightclub at the Mirage, he has built a small but fast-growing empire that has played a role in changing the city's image and reputation.

In the 1950s and 1960s organised crime maintained a tight grip on Las Vegas casinos. The city attracted gamblers and their spouses, who were so focused on the gaming tables that they put up with sub-standard buffet food and entertainment from past-their-prime lounge singers.

But in recent years, as quoted companies have taken over the city, Las Vegas has become a culinary and nightlife hotspot, attracting hordes of young, affluent people eager to eat, drink and party. Gambling remains popular but to many younger Sin City visitors it is now a secondary pursuit, overtaken in revenue terms by food, beverage and entertainment sales.

Luring the new generation of Hollywood screen stars and tourists to Las Vegas are the properties operated by Mr Sasson. Thanks to the agreement with MGM Mirage he operates venues in several casinos, running them in line with a precise set of measurements and principles. Seats must be 18 inches from each table. Coffee tables have to be 21 inches in height, while there must be eight feet of clearance space around the bar.

To keep his managers on their toes he sometimes sticks chewing gum under the tables before his venues open. If the managers fail to spot the gum at opening time, they can expect an ear-bashing from the boss.

A Briton who hails from Walton-on-Thames, Mr Sasson has lived in the US for more than 20 years and speaks with a mid-Atlantic accent. His relationship with MGM Mirage and the presence of Light Group venues across Las Vegas give him unique influence that is set to increase next year, when his company opens its first hotel - The Harmon - as part of the new $8bn City Center development.

City Center, which is being financed by MGM Mirage, will also include a Mandarin Oriental hotel, a casino and a shopping mall. It is the highest-profile project to hit Las Vegas in years - which means Mr Sasson, who has never operated a hotel before, will face a new level of scrutiny.

He says he is up to the challenge, adding that The Harmon will blend high-quality service with the design standards that are sought after by younger, style-conscious travellers. "Customers don't expect to have to wait 40 minutes for their room service to arrive, or to have to stand in line when they want to check in. Yet that's what happens everywhere else. I want a guy opening the door saying 'good morning', 'good afternoon' and 'good evening'. The customer experience has to be compelling from A to Z."

Mr Sasson started his career as a bar entrepreneur in Miami after what he admits was a misspent youth in England. He moved to Miami in 1991 and first worked as a doorman, but with the city's party scene exploding he picked up plenty of knowledge. After moving to New York and borrowing money from his father, he opened his first venue, Jet Lounge.

When it took off he visited Las Vegas and realised the city was "there for the taking . . . there wasn't anything to do after 10pm apart from gambling or going to a strip club".

He found a partner in MGM Mirage, which was willing to take a chance on the brash, bigdreaming Brit and agreed to let him open Light, the first club at the Bellagio.

That the company was prepared to back him speaks volumes about the culture of entrepreneurship in the US, he says.

"This is a country where people are prepared to take a risk on you because of your character, rather than reputation. They liked what they saw and said: 'Go ahead and try.'"

To the relationship with MGM Mirage, he says, he brought know-ledge and insight about what younger people were looking for in a nightspot, while MGM Mirage taught him about customer service. "Before I came to Las Vegas I thought I knew about service, but I was very naive."

His move into hotel operation comes at a tricky time. Las Vegas is entering an economic slump: airlines are cutting flights to the city, room occupancy rates are in steep decline and gaming revenues at casinos on the city's famous Strip were down 19 per cent in May. But Mr Sasson is bullish and says his venues have yet to feel the pinch. The 160-seat Fix will exceed $14m in sales this year while Bank, a 6,000-sq-ft club at the Bellagio, will generate $25m.

The success of his properties has not gone unnoticed internationally. In February this year he sold 50 per cent of Light Group to Zabeel Investments, a Dubai-based property and private equity investor.

Mohammed Ali Al Hashimi, Zabeel's 35-year-old chairman, tells the Financial Times he plans to take the Light brand into international markets and is already working on a hotel project in Dubai: "I want to do things that target our generation," he says. "I can't think of any hotel that does that. Hotels are either trendy, with horrible service, or they are the complete opposite."

For Mr Sasson, the opening of The Harmon is the next logical step in what he says is the younger generation exerting its influence over an industry that has traditionally been controlled by babyboomers.

"The people in my company are part of the developing market - they're young, they go out - whereas most of the people that operate hotels in Las Vegas are older," he says. MGM Mirage recognised that it could connect with younger consumers if it brought him on board, he adds.

But most other operators continue to be run by "50 and 60-year-olds, who are making decisions for 30 and 40-year-olds . . . and they really don't know what our needs are".

Hotel partners make light work of new markets

Mohammed Ali Al Hashimi and Andrew Sasson have only been in business together for a few months but say they are already learning from each other as they prepare to take the Light brand into new markets.

"[Mr Sasson] grabbed my attention," says Mr Hashimi, whose Dubai-based Zabeel Investments acquired 50 per cent of Mr Sasson's Light Group in February.

"Every trip that I come out to see him in Las Vegas, I pick up something from him.

"He was choosing the towels that will be in the rooms of The Harmon two years before the hotel opened. I'm opening a hotel in Dubai in six months and we hadn't even started looking at that yet."

Zabeel's capital will help fund the expansion of the Light Group. But Mr Sasson says the Dubai-based company and Mr Hashimi, a former Barclays banker, have more to offer than just money. "It's capital and it's education as well . . . they bring a hell of a lot to the table," he says.

"They're not just a financial partner. I don't have a lot of experience of big deals but they do and they have a deep understanding of capital markets."

The two men plan to use this combined knowledge as they expand.

They are working together on the Dubai property and have plans for hotels in Abu Dhabi, New York, Los Angeles and Miami.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: Out of the box

Out of the box

By Hettie Judah

Published: July 12 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 12 2008 03:00

For such a simple term, "prefab" brings with it a burdensome mess of political and ideological associations. Plainly put, prefabrication is the practice of readying the components of a building project off site before they are assembled on site. The term can be applied to works ranging from dinky ski huts transportable by helicopter to any building that incorporates pre-cut panels.

In Britain it still carries with it the taint of unlovely post-second world war housing but during the past decade the concept has been picked up and brushed off: for some buyers it has become the route to affordable modern housing; for others, it is simply a less stressful way to build.

Prefabrication's current fashionable image is thanks in part to Dwell, a San Francisco-based magazine with a heavy online presence. "In America there is definitely a stigma against 'factory-built homes'," says Sam Grawe, Dwell's editor-in-chief. "They are the things you see being hauled down the interstate with a yellow flag reading: 'caution oversized load'." But Grawe and his colleagues aren't the kind of radical types who go against the grain of public opinion because they think it might be cute to live in trailers and shipping crates. What first drew them to prefab was its employment in modernist architecture.

The early and mid-century works that are traditionally thought of as prefabs were victims of a classic paradox. Created by designers and architects who had developed an inventive and utilitarian approach to form and fabrication as a result of experience with wartime engineering, they were put on to a market full of traumatised buyers for whom the stark aesthetics of mechanical efficiency held slim appeal.

R Buckminster Fuller's Wichita House was commissioned by the Beech Aircraft Company at the end of the second world war and was intended to be produced at a rate of 60,000 a year, reaching the market for only $6,500 and in a state that could be erected by one person. But many postwar buyers were looking for the comforting grooves and filigree of the previous century; the Wichita House looked like a galvanised semi-permanent tent and only prototypes were ever made.

Jean Prouvé's Maison Tropicale, one of the few examples of which was recently on show outside Tate Modern in London, suffered a similar history.

"Prouvé was commissioned to look at houses that could be flown in to landlocked French colonies by plane," explains Gemma Curtin, curator of the London Design Museum's recent Prouvé exhibition. "It is extremely beautifully finished but in the expat colonial market he was trying to get into the British were building mock-Tudor and chalet-type architecture. Today these buildings have a lot of glamour and status but then they were quite brutal and metal, and perhaps that didn't appeal to expat French colonialists."

For architecture-literate consumers such as Grawe and his readers, the idea of living in the kind of forward-looking designs proffered over half a century ago by Fuller, Prouvé and their contemporaries seems pretty dreamy, as did the ethos of controllable factory-produced housing components.

"The reality of the situation is that for decades architects and even some builders have been aware of the inefficiencies of site-built, stick-built homes," says Grawe. "The common analogy is whether you would feel comfortable hiring a random contractor to come and build your car in your driveway, leaving it exposed to the elements every night after he goes home and ordering every part piece by piece."

In 2003 Dwell ran a competition for an innovative prefab home design. Such was the public response that the magazine ended up co-producing its own range of houses with the manufacturer Empyrean. This was a shrewd manoeuvre, since one of the key problems in budgeting a prefab building intended for mass production is that you have to make sure that there is a market for it. In Japan and Sweden, where prefab already has a significant market share, companies such as Ikea and Toyota offer affordable homes with the reassurance of a brand name. Like the enamel-sided Lustron houses produced in the US in the 1950s - marketed with the image of someone elegantly hosing down their dwelling while they sipped a martini - they symbolise a conceptual shift towards the idea of a house as a consumer product, little more complex than purchasing a car or a bookshelf.

In Britain there has also been a recent revision in attitudes thanks in part to the enthusiasm of Kevin McCloud, presenter of the Channel 4 television programme Grand Designs . Through the programme, contemporary domestic prefabrication has become almost synonymous with the German company Huf Haus, which first set up shop in Britain 10 years ago.

"The UK is responsible for about 50 per cent of our turnover now. It's an amazing market" says Astrid Bindewald of Huf. The family-run company has been building since 1921 and still produces all its distinctive-looking homes from the same factory in Germany.

"The houses are bespoke," explains Bindewald. "It's a modular system; architects will design the building to suit the plot, the clients' needs and circumstances." The company limits its production to 200 houses a year - and, certainly in the UK, it is targeting the top end of the market. On the ground, that 50 per cent of turnover comes from fewer than 50 houses a year.

For high-end clientele the key advantage of prefabrication is its speed. In 2001 the California-based architect Michelle Kaufman ran two parallel construction projects for Glidehouse, her eco-friendly design for a family home. The total project time for her own property, built entirely on site, was 21 months; the version constructed partly off-site had a total project time of 10 months and cost $50 less per sq foot.

The Glidehouse became the foundation of Kaufman's prefab-orientated practice and has been successful enough for the company to purchase its own factory outside Seattle in 2006, allowing it to control the quality of both design and production.

Creating a controlled process for house construction has allowed Kaufman and her company to focus on their eco-credentials; they have gone to great pains in researching the green construction principles that have now become the company's selling point.

To Professor Barry Bergdoll, senior curator in architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the prefab renaissance appears to split quite neatly into two camps: one pushed by consumers, fans of modernism who are drawn to prefab as a kind of lifestyle choice; the other springing from architects interested in the problem-solving potential of a range of new fabrication techniques.

From next week five different houses will be on show on MoMA's site as part of

Home Delivery : Fabricating the Modern Dwelling , an exhibition dedicated to modern construction methods. "It seems to me that there is a big gap between the two big movements," says Bergdoll. "I wondered what might happen if those two were forced to juxtapose and put into conversation in the galleries." Architects Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier have recorded the preparation of their Burst 008 house on MoMA's website.

"Contemporary prefabrication means that the building is constructed literally by using the architect's model," explains Edmiston. "This technology is very intensive in the design and engineering process but when it gets to the site we do not need highly skilled labour. It means that we can make the complex geometrical form without constantly measuring, adjusting and cutting. The process gives us confidence that all the pieces fit together and once they are together the form will fit and become complete."

In selecting it for the show, Bergdoll was impressed by Burst 008's use of a computer program that "nested" its 1,100 non-identical pieces so closely into standard wooden sheets that the waste from the house was barely enough to create a decent bonfire.

"I think it's quite possible to romanticise what goes on at a building site," says Bergdoll, pointing out that digitally guided manufacturing is really simply a question of changing where and by whom the architects' plans are interpreted. "We're just talking about machines that can do things in faster and more accurate ways."

However, speed and efficiency might also have their drawbacks: at the smart dinner parties of the well-to-do guests will no longer be able to fall back on a conversational mainstay; complaining about their building projects.

'Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling', July 20-October 20, Museum of Modern Art, New York, tel: +1 212-708 9400: info@moma.org

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

(stackable, stackables)