EDITOR’S LETTER
We’re living through troubled times and it would be naive to consider the world our playground as once we could. Current events and recent history have rendered so many places off-limits or at best ill-advised for travellers. Yet I still believe in the transformative power of travel. The cities and countries, landscapes and cultures I’ve had the good fortune to experience feel like the backdrop to my life. More than 30 years on, I can precisely recall the smell of diesel and wood smoke as our truck rattled through the Burmese night; taste the vanilla in my first butter-yellow New York corn muffin; hear the shrill ululations of a wedding celebration in a Cairo bazaar. The instinct to enrich and enlarge our lives through travel runs deep and I hope it’s impossible to extinguish. This issue of Vogue Living turns up the dial on travel. From Kelly Hoppen’s London (page 146) to Pieter Ary Bakker’s Amsterdam (page 162), our homes reveal the local address book secrets of their owners and designers. And, exclusive to VL, British-born Skye McAlpine shares her personal Venice (page 173), a city that became her home serendipitously. Our London correspondent, Fiona McCarthy, was granted a rare interview with restaurateur-turned-hotelier Jeremy King (page 185), whose establishments (with business partner Chris Corbin) have dominated London’s dining scene for decades. As a Corbin & King disciple who precociously propped up the bar at Le Caprice in the ’80s before gravitating to The Ivy in the ’90s, I was excited to experience The Beaumont, an Art Deco hotel the pair have opened within cooee of Selfridges. It didn’t disappoint. I hadn’t met Melbourne architect Matthew Bird when I read Annemarie Kiely’s appraisal of his Toorak apartment (page 154), but I have now. When I learned that Bird’s inspiration was a vision of Diana Ross on the legendary Studio 54 dancefloor, a meeting was imperative. There are few subjects where I can hold my own better than ’70s disco. While I concede the Mission Brown velvet is pure Motown, it was a stretch to conjure Ms Ross against the wallaby-fur bedhead. Or maybe not.
NEALE WHITAKER