Monocle

4 stories

MonocleGift guide: 22 books and magazines for cooks, design devotees and print lovers Looking for a present that will be read and treasured long after the wrapping paper is gone? Beautiful print always makes for one of the most thoughtful, tactile gifts under a tree.

11.02

MonocleAre we entering a new golden age of car design? For the better part of a decade, cookie-cutter, identikit design and Chinese copycats have made the automotive market particularly bland.

11.02

MonocleTo emerge from under an analogue rock, sometimes all it takes is tidying up your home screen If someone asked me to list the reasons that my relationship has endured several decades and all the twists and turns that we have encountered en route, I would say love, a shared sense of humour…

10.30

MonocleEight architecture and design books you need on your coffee table 1. ‘Magazine C’, South Korea From the team behind Magazine B – the South Korean brand-documentary publication – Magazine C is a quarterly publication for furniture obsessives.

10.29

A room is a decision about how you want to be tired at the end of the day.

I live in forty-eight square metres in Tokyo with one good chair and far too many bowls, so I have had to mean that. I trained as an architect and left to write, which my teachers took badly. Uchi (内) means inside, and it means home: the room you come back to. The palette comes after the tiredness. So does the name on the lamp.

This is where I keep what the world's rooms are doing. Around seventy sources, read in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, French and English: an apartment in Seoul, a house outside Taipei, a Copenhagen showroom seen from here rather than from Denmark. East first, because east is where I am sitting.

Each story is a headline, an excerpt of a few lines, one photograph and a link to whoever did the work. We never reprint the piece, and the photograph belongs to the person who took it. When a room was written up in Korean or Italian it stays in Korean or Italian here; the link takes you to the writer's own words.

I am not trying to be complete. I am trying to notice.

— Mio Tachibana, Tokyo