Weekendpaper* | Cruise collections to go

Multimedia artist, filmmaker, designer, and Los Angeles native Alex Israel once put a head-shaped hole in a limited-edition cover of Wallpaper* (our February 2020 issue). Now, in collaboration with Pace Prints in New York, and with LA as his muse, he invites you inside his head with a new suite of ten archival pigment prints – ‘Where is My Mind?’ – that emphasises introspection. Within outlines of the artist’s head, closer inspection reveals a glimpse of the Hollywood Bowl stage, sprawling LA seen from an aeroplane window, and the ocean at sunset.

‘My creative brain turns on when I’m in motion. For most of my life, that meant driving. Then, during the pandemic, I started taking long walks – two, sometimes three hours long – and something shifted. The same flow of ideas started happening there too,’ Israel tells Hannah Silver. ‘And this flow became tied to a new way of seeing Los Angeles – on foot, slower, more attentive. Over time, as the images in this series accumulated, it became clear that what I was building was both a landscape of a city I know intimately and a map of my own mind.’

Getting to Shakti Prana requires commitment. From Delhi, the journey to the hotel begins with a short domestic flight to Pantnagar, followed by nearly six hours of winding mountain roads climbing steadily through the foothills of Uttarakhand, the first of several drives across a five- to seven-night programme that takes in traditional village stays on either side of Shakit Prana itself.

Founded two decades ago, hospitality group Shakti Himalaya pioneered a form of luxury travel in the Indian Himalayas that was intimate and community-rooted, built around private walking journeys between restored traditional village houses in three distinct regions: Ladakh, Sikkim and Kumaon. Its most celebrated property, Shakti 360 Leti, helped define what mountain hospitality could look like when it opened 16 years ago, before it was dismantled stone by stone in March 2024. Those same stones, carried by mule train 2,700 ft up a steep goat path, now form Shakti Prana, the brand's newest and most ambitious lodge, and one of the most remarkable properties to open in the Himalayas in years. Lauren Ho took her hiking boots.

‘The way that we work is pure experimentation,’ says Edward Barber, referring to Barber Osgerby, the award-winning British design practice he co-founded with Jay Osgerby three decades ago, and which the duo announced would close this week, as they part ways to pursue independent projects. In the beginning, he continues, ‘we weren't even thinking about a potential market for [our] pieces. We were just making stuff, folding plywood to create structures. When we design now, we are obviously imagining how [a piece] is going to be used and what price it is going to come out at, and if it is a viable product; but with the early stuff, we had no idea and honestly didn't care either. We were just having fun.’

In an exclusive interview with Rosa Bertoli, the designers reflect on their partnership, from day one at the Royal College of Art to a fortuitous early-Wallpaper* moment (they designed Wallpaper’s 100% Design stand in 1997, featuring their ‘Loop’ table for Isokon, and got scouted by Giulio Cappellini), designing the 2012 Olympic torch, their current retrospective at Triennale Milano, and forever taking the ‘unpredictable’ path.

This sleeping Mother Nature, carved from a fallen redwood, sums up the evocative sanctuary that scooped best in show at Chelsea Flower Show. Designed by Sarah Eberle for the Campaign to Protect Rural England, the garden highlights the importance and vulnerability of countryside on the fringes of urban areas. See more of our Chelsea highlights.