Tailored touch
Pedder Arcade, Martha's Vineyard properties, Faena NY, Les Sources de Vougeot, top Paris restaurants open in August, MORE
Did you catch last week’s debut of The FOUND 45, our definitive list of favorite restaurants in all six FOUND cities? Paid subscribers can access the full set:
GETAWAYS • Hong Kong
Arcade game
The most convincing piece of urban placemaking I’ve seen in Hong Kong isn’t on the street. It’s on the fifth floor of a 1924 building on Pedder Street, reached by the sort of elevator you’d expect to find in an office block. In the churn of Central, it’s easy to miss — undoubtedly, part of the charm.
Pedder Arcade is the work of Mark Cho, co-founder of best-in-class menswear store The Armoury, which began in Hong Kong before expanding to New York. Cho grew up in London with a fascination for its storied arcades: Burlington, Princes, and the characterful runs of small shops gathered under those gilded roofs, tucked into genuinely iconic alleys.
The space is a long-term vision finally brought to life with a remarkably coherent selection of tenants, as if assembled with a retailer’s eye for curation (rather than a landlord’s need to fill space). To help fund this dream, Cho sold around 60 watches from his own collection in a highly publicized auction, which tells you something about the level of conviction involved.
In partnership with Katherine Wong Design, Cho pulled off a small trick of the eye that turned out to be a large idea. They took a gutted upper floor, and somehow, made it read as a ground-level street. There are arched windows, café-style curved glass, door lamps, lit signage, and even post boxes. The lighting is perfect. You step out of the elevator and your brain quietly reclassifies the experience.
The shops are meticulous. The Armoury anchors the arcade, with an edit of tailored clothing from Italy to England to Japan. Phillips Perpetual sells rare collectors’ watches, and Kaneko handles Japanese eyewear with elevated precision. The Whisky Library carries thousands of bottles, and treats curious amateurs as warmly as serious collectors. Lok Man deals in rare books, and it’s hard to set foot inside without walking away with a lighter wallet and, possibly, a first edition of Casino Royale or Lawrence of Arabia. Tucked into the run is The Study, a cigar shop and lounge with comfortable couches, excellent art, and a Concorde sculpture to gaze at.
What works isn’t only the strength of the shopping destinations, but the magnetic pull of places to linger. There’s the espresso bar and the full bar at JK on the 5th, which sits in the middle of the floor like a town square. It’s perfect for a midday catch-up with a friend, or for a drink later in the day. The space easily moves from morning to night: you can have a coffee with someone, wander past the watches, end up trying on a navy hopsack jacket or some loafers you didn’t initially come for, and leave having spent a wonderful hour. People cross paths, linger, and return. Cho calls the place a secret neighborhood, and the perfect mix of experiences is what makes it so.
There’s an instructive lesson here for anyone building anything in a city, and it’s not about budget. The arcade works because someone with a point of view chose every tenant, then gave them a place to gather. Curation plus conviviality is the formula — and tucked away up an otherwise inconspicuous Hong Kong elevator, it works world-class wonders. –Colin Nagy
→ Pedder Arcade (Central, Hong Kong) • 12 Pedder St • Mon-Sat 11a-730p, Sun 12-6p.
REAL ESTATE • Martha’s Vineyard, MA
Three for-sale properties that came to market in the last 10 days.
→ 205 Meetinghouse Way (Katama, Edgartown) • 3BR/3BA, 2844 SF house • Ask: $2.7M • brick patio w/ fireplace, mature gardens • Annual taxes: $5045 • Days on market: 8 • Agent: Thayer Whipple, Sandpiper Realty.
→ 43 Sengekontacket Rd (Oak Bluffs) • 3BR/3BA, 2234 SF house • Ask: $5.995M • at tip of prominent peninsula on Sengekontacket Pond’s western shoreline • Annual taxes: $19,744 • Days on market: 7 • Agent: Peyton Wallace, Studio Realty.
→ 10 & 12 Boldwater Rd (South Shore, Edgartown, above) • 11BR/11.2BA, 9500 SF estate • Ask: $14.5M • multiple structures on 22 acres, including Robert A.M. Stern-designed main residence • Annual taxes: NA • Days on market: 5 • Agent: Patrick McCarthy, Grace Hagerty Real Estate.
GETAWAYS • New York
Argentine vision
Approaching Faena New York, I spotted Alan Faena, seated at a table by the big picture windows at La Boca on 10th Avenue in West Chelsea. The visionary Argentine hotelier insists on dressing exclusively in white, often with a fedora, making him easy to spot in a crowd. But at lunchtime that afternoon, he was among the only figures in the window of the hotel’s ground-floor restaurant, helmed by legendary chef (and frequent collaborator) Francis Mallmann (intel).
When Faena opened on Miami Beach in 2015, it made a big splash as luxury hotels were just beginning to develop the previously underutilized stretch known as Mid Beach, between 24th Street and the Fontainebleau. In New York — with all its density and action — it’s harder to make a ripple. And the days of West Chelsea feeling like a new frontier are long behind it, as the High Line and its canyon of starchitect luxury condos have largely cemented over the frisky nightclubs of 20 years ago.
Still, that doesn’t mean Faena, which opened last fall, can’t find a foothold in the city. Occupying the first 10 floors within a pair of Bjarke Ingels-designed towers — which also house luxury condo units — the 120-room hotel was sold out during my visit.
On approach, compared to Faena Miami Beach — which masterfully restored an Art Deco-era hotel, preserving its historic bones to create a maximalist colossus, decked out with commissioned and blue-chip art, and a palette of red, gold, and leopard print, all while managing to strike a note of elegance, not garishness — the shiny new-build digs can feel a bit sterile at first.
But give it time, and Faena’s maximalist sensibility begins to take hold in New York with a Gatsby-esque flourish. Especially in the second-floor Living Room — a plush, gold-bedecked lounge, where a chanteuse and DJ kept things lively late night during my visit, in a manner worthy of its Miami Beach forebearer. –Shayne Benowitz
GETAWAYS • France
Burgundian escape
Hoteliers Jerome and Alice Tourbier pioneered a new style of wine country hospitality when they opened Les Sources de Caudalie in 1999. Their formula? Find a prestigious wine-country location for a hotel — in this case, on the edge of the Château Smith Haut Lafitte Grand Cru Classé wine estate owned by Alice’s parents Daniel and Florence Cathiard — build or renovate a property with décor that reflects the region’s viniferous and local history, and complete the offer with a spa and wellness program and a gastronomic restaurant and a bistro.
The latest Les Sources property, Les Sources de Vougeot, has just debuted in the charming village of Gilly-les-Citeaux in the Côte d’Or. This hotel was created by renovating the 14th-century Château de Gilly, the former 6th-century residence of the Abbots of Citeaux. This complex of handsome stone buildings with steep roofs tomettes (traditional flat Burgundian terra-cotta tiles) is surrounded by an ancient moat and beautiful gardens.
Though history and heritage are at the core of Les Sources de Vougeot’s identity, A.S.I. architects gave the hotel interiors a well-measured dose of contemporary minimalism, which works brilliantly with the historical buildings’ austere Cistercian architecture. Rooms here — each with their own respective, unique décor — are large and cosseting, with lovely views over the surrounding park and vineyards, or the interior courtyard where porters greet you with wicker luggage wagons. The striking spa, with an indoor pool, sauna, and hammam, is located in the stone-pillared medieval cellar where monks once stored kegs of wine. There’s also a large outdoor swimming pool and tennis court.
Ultimately, Les Sources de Vougeot is one of those hotels where you just want to stay put for a week, because — aside from its warm hospitality, delicious food, and plush comfort — it’s supremely Burgundian. –Alec Lobrano
AROUND FOUND • Bonus Intel & Recs
→ NY: Echo Lake isn’t exactly a tiki bar. But with half a dozen daiquiris to choose from, numerous other tropical drinks on offer, and serious tiki bar pedigree, it more than captures the spirit of tiki in a handsome new way. The new bar is indeed the product of cocktail (and specifically, tiki) royalty: Paul McGee ran the renowned tiki bar Lost Lake in Chicago, and his partner (in life and business) Chloe Frechette is a veteran of the drinks website Punch, and author of the book Easy Tiki. When I dropped in on a weeknight last month, McGee was near the bar, not bartending, but chatting up everyone in the vicinity, obviously excited about his new spot.
→ UPSTATE NY: In a getaway town like Windham, NY, it’s rare to find a place where locals and weekenders alike want to hang out, but Dandies (above) threads the needle. On a recent weekend stay at Eastwind, the Catskills retreat where Dandies recently opened, I found that I didn’t want to go exploring for food because Dandies was right there… and so good.
→ SF: At the recently opened Bar Orso in SoMA, the cocktail menu reads a bit like the elaborately themed dinner menus at Merchant Roots (intel), with cocktails like the Clear Burrata, featuring pisco, ginjo genshu sake, basil, salt, olive oil, and Petaluma buffalo mozzarella milk. There truly isn’t another cocktail experience like Bar Orso in San Francisco, bringing with it the same unapologetically complicated, joyfully effortful dedication to finding new tastes that delight people, just like Merchant Roots provides.
GOODS & SERVICES • Big Ticket
Notable responses to the FOUND Routine query, “What’s a recent big-ticket purchase you love?”
→ ALEXANDRA ZATARAIN, co-founder & VP of Brand and Marketing, Eight Sleep (NY): A Pilates reformer for my home. I travel more than 200 days in some years, and I finally realized that making exercise dependent on a class schedule was an unnecessary source of friction. Pilates is one of the few things I have done consistently for years, so having a reformer at home means I can fit in 30 or 40 minutes even on a day full of calls. It was expensive and takes up an absurd amount of space, but I use it constantly.
→ ELISABETTA TUNDO, co-owner & chef, Altamura Trattoria (Miami): Our Italian dome pizza oven! We named it Luigi; he’s the best, and really handsome!
RESTAURANTS • The Nines
Paris restaurants, open in August
The Nines are FOUND’s distilled lists of the best.
Grand Véfour (1st arr), ancient Palais Royal restaurant and recent reboot by Paris Society make this a hot table to try, share catch of the day fish w/ beurre blanc and tipple from impressive cellar