Author: My World of Interiors
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The Life of Somebody Else
Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the Ethical Problem of Autofiction Rachel Cusk’s Life of M has produced one of the strangest literary controversies of the year. Its famous actress is fictional, yet recognisably assembled from details belonging to Natalie Portman. The resulting argument is larger than celebrity gossip: it asks who owns a life, what…
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The Human Condition According to Henry James
By Bergotte Henry James believed that consciousness was the most important thing in the world. Not action, not achievement, not the accumulation of experience in the traveller’s sense — the places visited, the people met, the events survived — but the quality of attention brought to experience, the precision and depth with which a mind…
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Villa Nava by Francesco Castiglioni
Francesco Castiglioni made that declaration. The house he designed in the early 1970s on Via Ippocastani — known as Villa Nava, a building that has been featured in the international architectural and design press with the consistency that attaches to buildings of genuine formal intelligence — is not a house that apologises for what it…
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John Galliano: The Theatre And The Ruin
The cancelled Metropolitan Museum retrospective has reopened one of fashion’s most difficult questions: what should history do with an artist whose creative achievement is inseparable from an act of profound disgrace? By Bergotte The Metropolitan Museum of Art did not merely cancel an exhibition when it abandoned John Galliano: Horizons, the major retrospective that had…
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Peter Pennoyer
Makers & Rooms — Essay V The Classical Present Peter Pennoyer builds in the tradition of McKim, Mead and White and sees nothing remotely conservative about it. In an architectural culture that treats ornament as embarrassment and history as weakness, he has spent thirty years making the case that the classical orders are not a…
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What’s So Special About Mulatu Astatke
By Bergotte Mulatu Astatke went to music school in London, studied jazz in Boston, played vibraphone in New York, and then went home to Ethiopia and made something that had never existed before. He took the pentatonic scales and ancient modal structures of Ethiopian music — a tradition reaching back centuries, untouched by the Western…
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The Cult of More
I think about this a lot…by Bergotte Greed, Consumption and the Failure of Enough Late capitalism has produced one of the strangest societies in history: we have more of almost everything and yet live inside a permanent rhetoric of lack. We have too many clothes, too much furniture, too much technology, too much food, too…
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Thrown Into the Open: Who We Are According to Martin Heidegger
He asked the most fundamental question in the history of philosophy — what does it mean to be? — with a depth and a rigour that nobody before him had quite managed. He was also a member of the Nazi party who never adequately recanted. Both of these things are true, and the essay that…
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Nan Goldin
Encounters · No. 5 The Ballad Nan Goldin spent decades photographing the people she loved — in bed, in bars, in hospital, in death. Then she turned the same unflinching attention on the family that had helped kill them. By Bergotte There is a photograph taken in 1984 that Nan Goldin has described as the…
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Copenhagen Now – September 2026
Music, Design, Fashion, Literature, Film, Hotels, Food, Art & the City The City Between Summer and Seriousness There is a particular moment in Copenhagen when summer has not quite disappeared, but the cultural year has unmistakably begun. The evenings can still be spent outside, Tivoli is still illuminated, bicycles continue to crowd the bridges and…
