Weekendpaper* | Robert De Niro’s next resort | Frank Lloyd Wright’s accessible house | X-girl in 1994

In an airy wooden office in Barbuda – Antigua’s smaller, flatter and dramatically less developed sister in the Leeward Islands – open to one of the world’s most extraordinary beaches, pink and white sands against an azure Caribbean Sea, a barefoot Robert De Niro and fellow investor, hotelier Daniel Shamoon, are seeing the first interior designs for the 25 turnkey Nobu Beach Inn Residences. These are part of a larger development plan, which will include not only private homes, but a 17-key hotel, Nobu Beach Inn, that's scheduled to open next year. Already, a beachfront restaurant is open, Nobu Barbuda, serving an exclusive clientele who arrive by private jet, helicopter or yacht.

Writer Cathy Hawker is at the design team meeting to listen in for Wallpaper*. Luxury is a million miles from ‘chandeliers and endless marble’, says De Niro, a successful hotelier and restaurateur, the co-founder of Nobu Hospitality and co-owner of New York’s The Greenwich Hotel. As he considers limestone floor samples for their practicality, turns down metal room dividers as ‘too fussy’ and dicusses materials for kitchen cabinetry, Hawker finds him eager to refine and reduce rather than add and embellish. 

Though X-girl had officially arrived a year earlier, its 1994 fashion show – comprising just 20 looks and spilling over a Manhattan sidewalk, somewhere down the street from where Marc Jacobs was presenting his A/W 1994 collection – served as an announcement of sorts, underlining its intentions as a label that wasn’t about to take itself too seriously.

‘It wasn't something Grace Coddington was going to wear, it was something Kim Gordon and Sofia Coppola were going to wear,’ offers photographer and IDEA co-founder Angela Hill, who has authored a new book, X-girl Show, documenting the 1994 happening – having rediscovered a set of her forgotten negatives in her mother’s basement. Zoe Whitfield joins Hill for a look back.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist architecture – characterised by open floor plans, efficient use of space and emphasis on functionality – naturally lent itself to accessible design. Or so thought Kenneth Laurent, a Second World War veteran who became paraplegic due to a spinal injury. After his wife, Phyllis, read about Wright’s work, Kenneth wrote to the architect, stating: ‘I am paralysed from the waist down and by virtue of my condition, I am confined to a wheelchair. This explains my need for a home as practical and sensible as your style of architecture denotes.’

A surfboard that doesn’t need waves? Inspired by the lack of swell in the Stockholm archipelago, the Lind Canvas is a first-of-its-kind electric surfboard that aims to ‘insert the power of a wave into a board’, say its creators. Expect 27 horsepower and a typical speed of 20mph, controlled by a hand-held remote, plus a design based on a traditional shortboard. We took the plunge in Stockholm.