In the morning I tend to wash my face before I get in the shower. I usually use the Dr. Barbara Sturm Enzyme Cleanser; it’s lightweight so is great for travel and comes in a powder form you mix with water. I’m a longtime user of Biologique Recherche and swear by Lotion P50. On my eyes I use the Tata Harper Elixir Vitae Eye Serum, which is firming and lifting. My moisturizer depends on the season: When it’s cold I’ll use Augustinus Bader the Cream. If it’s humid I’ll use the Light Cream. About a year ago, I discovered this desert island product, which is Natura Bissé Diamond Cocoon Sheer Eye cream — it’s a tinted eye cream that makes you look rested. After the shower, I use the Augustinus Bader Body Lotion. When I need it, I’ll use either Biologique Recherche Masque Vernix, which is a bit rich, or Auteur’s retinol serum. For flights, I always take the Omorovicza Queen of Hungary Evening Mist with me — the flight attendants will usually ask for a spray. Sisley has this Black Rose Cream Mask that’s always in my travel bag, too.
For makeup, I love Hourglass Veil Hydrating Skin Tint or Macrene Actives Tinted Moisturizer. If it’s humid, I use the Westman Atelier Vital Pressed Skincare setting powder. It leaves no chalky finish whatsoever. I’m an eye person — I love the Hourglass Voyeur Waterproof Liquid Liner for the top lid and, on the bottom, I’ll use Sisley Phyto-Kohl Perfect pencils. For mascara I use Tom Ford Extreme Mascara. NARS Laguna Bronzing Powder, to me, is just perfect. Sisley also has two products that I’m obsessed with, one is the Nutritive Lip Balm and the other is their Phyto-Lip Twist in nude. At night, I’ll go more pronounced on the eyeliner and apply much more mascara. I might use a Charlotte Tilbury Lip Cheat pencil.
Hair-wise, I use Olaplex No. 4P Blonde Enhancer Toning Shampoo. If you have dark hair with highlights, it’s the one thing that counters warmth supersuccessfully. For conditioner, I’ll either use Oribe Intense Conditioner for Moisture & Control or Davines Love Smoothing Conditioner, which is a brand I adore. I use a GHD dryer and a Mason Pearson hairbrush. I also have a Dyson Airwrap that I use just to make sure that I don’t have so much heat on my hair. Oribe has this great product called Imperial Blowout, and I use K18 to repair damage. My style tends to be very pared back, but I absolutely love Jennifer Behr hair accessories — I have her bows in a whole bunch of colors, and I’ll wear one in a low ponytail or a little tortoiseshell clip.
I’ve been a Diptyque customer for a long time. The one that I came upon a few years ago and haven’t left is Eucalyptus. You don’t smell it everywhere, and I adore it. I have a really strong sense of smell. My dad worked in the fragrance business and I remember reading about Carnal Flower from Frédéric Malle when it launched, and they described it as this tuberose with a hint of eucalyptus. I bought it without smelling it and I’ve worn it ever since.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Stay Here
A Guesthouse in Bali With a Seven-Course Tasting Menu
The pastry chef Will Goldfarb studied with Ferran Adrià, the chef of El Bulli in Spain, before opening his own restaurant, Room4Dessert, in New York’s NoLIta in the mid-aughts. It was well- known for its eight-course dessert menus (the New Yorker writer Bill Buford described it as “dessert as performance art”). But two years into the project, Goldfarb closed his pioneering restaurant and eventually relocated to the island of Bali. In 2014, he reopened Room4Dessert just outside of Ubud. Its dining experience has always been immersive — during a meal, guests move between the property’s orchard, medicinal herb gardens and a multiroom restaurant with a terrace — but as of this month, visitors can spend the night at Goldfarb’s new eight-room guesthouse, Shelter Island, which he and his wife, Maria, transformed from an abandoned Balinese homestay, upcycling as many materials as they could. Rooms are decorated with locally made paintings, and an umbrella-lined pool is bordered by gardens with fragrant frangipani trees and a traditional shrine. The restaurant, which is next to the guesthouse, serves a seven-course meal preceded by seven snacks — which might include a creamy ricotta-stuffed squash blossom drizzled with a black shallot sauce — and followed by seven petits fours. Once you’ve had your fill of food, there are trails to follow through the nearby rice fields, and cooking, permaculture and ceramics workshops at Goldfarb’s academy. Rooms from $75 a night (including breakfast); room4dessert.com.
See This
A Show of Portraits by the Chelsea Hotel’s Resident Photographer
When the photographer Tony Notarberardino was handed the keys to his room at New York’s Chelsea Hotel in 1994, he expected to stay for one night. He went on to live there for the next three decades, becoming the unofficial documentarian for a bohemian refuge that attracted artists, misfits and vagabonds from around the world. Originally conceived as an experiment in communal living, it soon evolved into the center of the city’s counterculture. With his large format black-and-white film camera, Notarberardino photographed the cast of characters who passed through the hotel’s historic doors, taking over 1,500 portraits of subjects ranging from famous drag queens and nightlife legends to artists, activists and filmmakers. “I fell in love with the place for its people. Photographing them was how I met everyone and became a part of the hotel,” recalls Notarberardino, who lives there to this day. “I used to call it ‘going fishing’: When I had nothing to do at night, I’d go sit in the lobby until two or three in the morning and wait for someone amazing to walk through the door, whether that was Grace Jones or Sam the garbage man.” Photographs of his subjects, including the singer Debbie Harry and the model Shalom Harlow, will be displayed at Manhattan’s ACA Galleries for the first time as part of his series “Chelsea Hotel Portraits,” providing an intimate glimpse at an era of creativity that would inspire generations of artists to come. “Chelsea Hotel Portraits” will be on view at New York’s ACA Galleries from March 9 through April 13, acagalleries.com.
Kate Driver, the founder of the Los Angeles design studio West Haddon Hall, has long created custom pieces to fit within her eclectic European meets laid-back California interiors. But in 2020, while quarantining in Palm Springs, she began sketching prototypes for her own furniture line. Today, West Haddon Hall debuts its first 14-piece capsule collection, featuring arsenic green cast-resin cocktail tables, white oak credenzas resting on crescent-shaped enamel feet, Parisienne mohair daybeds and barrel-backed chairs upholstered in pecan leather. Driver took cues from the Swedish designer Axel Einar Hjorth, whose sculptural woodwork became emblematic of the Sportstugemöbler (“weekend house furniture”) movement in the 1930s, and the Parisian Art Deco architecture of Paul Dupre-Lafon, among others. Each piece is named after a street that’s familiar to Driver, from Habersham Road in her hometown, Atlanta, to Rosemont Avenue, where she once lived in Nashville. That sense of place recurs throughout the collection, which is embellished with patinas and patterns (and is entirely handmade by local artisans in Los Angeles). The mappa burl veneer of her Cloister Cabinet, a reference to an antique highboy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, nods to Driver’s years spent studying at the Parsons School of Design. From $1,050 for an ottoman, westhaddonhall.com.
Visit This
Three Artists Contemplate Coming-of-Age in a Harlem Exhibition
Girlhood can be a prickly thing. The artists featured in “Teetering on the Brink: Femininity, Inheritance and Disaster,” a new exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem, explore the friction that occurs when childhood innocence meets gendered expectations. “Many people come to my work and are tantalized by its saccharine and overtly feminine qualities,” says Ebony Russell, an Australian artist whose intricate porcelain pieces are inspired by her favorite childhood ceramic figurines and call to mind a cake with icing applied to the point of near collapse. “But the more you look at it, the more you see the menacing underlying subversion.” Suyao Tian, a Chinese artist based in Minnesota, draws on the gulf between her childhood love of nature and the rigidity of her upbringing in China to produce watercolors that channel botanical illustrations and the unexpected beauty of bacteria cultures. Rounding out the group show is Sami Tsang, an artist with roots in both Toronto and Hong Kong, who approaches her practice as “a personal diary of my past and future,” she says. Her sculptures occupy a liminal space between the whimsical and the grotesque, like “Take a Good Look at Yourself” (2020), a plump, pastel visage that reveals more than one pair of menacing eyes within it. “Growing up in a traditional Chinese household, my opinion didn’t matter, because I’m the youngest and the girl in the family,” Tsang says of her drive to express her inner world. “It’s been a very slow journey of being brave and adding [that] to my work.” “Teetering on the Brink: Femininity, Inheritance and Disaster” will be on view at Claire Oliver Gallery from March 15 through May 11, claireoliver.com.
Go Here
A New Hotel in a Turreted Villa on the French Riviera
Château de Théoule, a 44-room hotel that opens this week, solves some of the biggest drawbacks of the French Riviera. Overlooking the Mediterranean in the quiet village of Théoule-sur-Mer, it skirts the crowds and traffic that often come with the popular holiday destination. And instead of the Riviera’s mostly pebbled beaches, Château de Théoule sits above a strand of white sand facing the Bay of Cannes’s turquoise waters. (Well-spaced sun loungers and waiter service from the hotel’s La Plage Blanche beach restaurant make it an ideal place to spend a lazy day.) Originally a soap factory built in 1630, the hotel’s main building was remodeled by successive owners, one of the last being Lord M. Harry Crowford, a Scot who transformed it into a fancifully turreted villa inspired by Tudor architecture. The chateau contains 20 rooms, while three others are in a fisherman’s house just above Théoule harbor, and the rest in a more modern Art Deco structure. Marie-Christine Mecoen, a former antiques dealer who’s now the interior designer for Millésime Collection hotels — the small French chain of restored historical properties of which the Château de Théoule is a part — sourced a variety of vintage pieces for the property and commissioned custom-made linen curtains from the French brand Maison de Vacances. Weather permitting, the hotel’s restaurant Mareluna serves dinner on a sea-view terrace. The menu might include squid ink tagliatelle with avocado and smoked herring eggs, and an apricot dessert with a chestnut honey mousse. At the spa, you can get a signature hot seashell massage, which is done with polished tiger clam shells that diffuse calcium ions when heated. Rooms from about $390 a night (breakfast included), chateau-de-theoule.com.
