In 1966, Slovenian architect Saša J. Mächtig designed the K67, a prefabricated, modular kiosk that garnered international acclaim. Designed for everyday use, it could serve as a newsstand, flower shop, or snack bar (or, as The Lot Radio demonstrated in Times Square decades later, a DJ booth).

The K67 was a product of Yugoslavia’s particular modernity during the Cold War: socialist, but independent of Moscow and increasingly open to Western cultural and economic influences. Its playful, futuristic design was as much a product of this environment as its practical ambitions.

It’s also the primary reference for EJE Belgrade, a listening bar designed by Supaform that brings together a wonderfully unlikely collection of influences. Alongside the K67 are Japanese jazz kissas and ramen bars, the patterned moquette originally designed for the London Underground’s District Line, and a Japanese Dulton Double Face clock reminiscent of those found in railway stations and waiting rooms.

Together, they form what Supaform calls “a contemporary embassy of aesthetic pleasures.”

We spent a long weekend in Montréal recently scouting spots for the LINEAR city guide, and on the advice of our friends at Atelier L’Abri, were particularly excited to join the cool kids for a morning at FOIL Gallery. Founded by artists Frédéric Duquette (FVCKRENDER) and Jo-Anie Charland (Baeige), the gallery and café occupies a former Canadian munitions factory, thoughtfully restored by Atelier L’Abri themselves.

Between the rotating exhibitions, good coffee, Parc des Gorilles next door, and Jean-Talon Market a short walk away, you could easily spend a whole morning in the neighborhood. We were lucky to catch Sean Brown’s Curves pop-up. Currently on view is 50 Years, 50 Posters, an exhibition of Canadian graphic design curated by Bryan-K. Lamonde of Montréal-based Principal Studio, running through November 11.

For a city with as much going for it as Rome, we’ve always found its hotel scene a little underwhelming. Not that there aren’t exceptions — Jean Nouvel’s Rhinoceros is a favorite — but so many of the city’s hotels seem content to trade on old-world grandeur. Experimental Roma, with interiors by Rodolphe Parente, feels like a welcome change of pace.

The hotel occupies a former bank at 46 Via Ludovisi, just off Via Veneto, which, in the 1950s and ’60s, was the center of Rome’s international café society — a meeting place for Hollywood actors, Italian filmmakers, aristocrats, journalists, and photographers. Parente draws on the likes of Carlo Scarpa, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, and Gio Ponti, the latter of whom was immortalized in a series of 1927 frescoes depicting Rome’s artistic and social circles at the Grand Hotel Palace, just around the corner.

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Despite decades of international success, Joan Miró was 63 before he finally got the dedicated studio he’d always imagined for himself. In 1956, he turned to his longtime friend Josep Lluís Sert to design a studio in Palma, Mallorca, now part of Fundació Miró Mallorca. Sert was living in exile in the United States following the Spanish Civil War, so the two designed the studio largely through letters. Today, it remains much as Miró left it, filled with shells, stones, postcards, and curious objects he’d collected over the years.

But as Mallorca’s tourism boom transformed the surrounding landscape, the Mediterranean views Miró had fallen in love with began to disappear. When Rafael Moneo was later commissioned to design a museum for the foundation, he responded by turning the building inward, shielding it from the surrounding development and introducing pools of water, including one on the roof, in an attempt to bring back something of the lost Mediterranean horizon.

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In this issue: Formant Studio’s Chicago-inspired tavern in Mexico City, Pieter Peulen’s house, a new bathhouse in Sydney, and a shelter in South Australia.

Formant Studio’s latest project is a Chicago-inspired tavern in Mexico City, which begs the question — what’s a Chicago-inspired tavern doing in Mexico City? It turns out, the founders are siblings Katherine and Diego Morales, who grew up in Chicago and wanted to bring something of their hometown to the city they’d fallen in love with. With Guatemalan family roots, an Italian-American menu, and a home in Mexico, it makes sense that “Nota” stands for “none of the above.”

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We first encountered Pieter Peulen on TikTok, where his Tadao Ando-inspired home and garden provide a quiet backdrop for his ever-changing collection of secondhand finds. Living in the Belgian countryside, he told Cosmos, gives him room to create his own environment and experiment within it.

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New in the bathhouse collection is Sense of Self’s Sydney outpost, designed by Ritz & Ghougassian. Their Collingwood location was one of the first projects we ever featured — this location in Surry Hills feels a bit more grown up, architecturally. The original windows, brickwork, and columns were retained from the former Sydney Antiques Centre, with more than 90,000 hand-laid bricks introduced around them. Our favorite part might be the main mineral pool, where columns rise out of the water and create this feeling that the building’s structure is part of the bathing experience.

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And in South Australia, Architects Ink’s Carrickalinga Shed wraps a family home in corrugated metal, with a central courtyard offering shelter from the elements. Inside, books and heirloom furniture sit against concrete and brick. For all its tough exterior, it feels like a home you could settle into.

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This week, we stumbled upon Mouthwash Studio’s office in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, designed by Noam Saragosti and Juhee Park of Aunt Studio. It feels surprisingly warm and domestic for a rehabilitated industrial building, helped along by handmade objects and furniture from friends of the studio, including a custom walnut phone booth designed with Waka Waka.

The approach references the London home of Sir John Soane, a 19th-century British architect who filled his house with art, architectural fragments, and objects he collected, in part to educate his students. The idea that the office becomes something of a portrait of the studio itself feels especially fitting for a creative practice, where the relationships behind the work can be just as important as the work itself.

The relationship between Mouthwash and Aunt Studio extends beyond the office too. Mouthwash previously designed the digital identity for Neutra VDL, which Aunt Studio co-founder Noam Saragosti helps direct, and the two studios also worked together on Café Tondo, a Mexico City-inspired café and bar in Chinatown (and latest addition to our Los Angeles Guide). We love a good duo.

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Santnerpass Hütte is closed for the season, but if you’re the hiking (or climbing) type, consider this your cue to start planning next summer’s trip.

Originally built as a mountain refuge in 1956, Santnerpass Hütte was reimagined by Senoner Tammerle Architects in 2023, perched 2,734 meters above sea level in the Italian Dolomites. There aren’t any roads leading up to Santnerpass, so construction materials had to be transported by helicopter, with just 0.3 cubic meters of concrete carried per flight. Getting there yourself isn’t much easier: you’ll either need proper climbing gear, or you can take a cable car to Ciampedie and hike for about three hours, climbing 880 meters along the way.

On arrival though, you’ll be rewarded views across the Rosengarten and as far as the Brenta, Ortler, and Austrian and Swiss Alps. And for those inclined to stay for sunset, the refuge has 36 beds, with a four-course vegetarian dinner, local wines, and breakfast available to overnight guests.

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In Brooklyn, Million Goods tapped Gjergji Shkurti to design their new Fort Greene outpost in a landmarked townhouse, complete with a wine bar and hi-fi listening space downstairs, menswear upstairs, and a courtyard out back. And for the hi-fi enthusiasts among us, Bridge Street Sound even built a speaker directly into the stone bar, with the system tuned by Ojas collaborator Mo Yasin. We like the direction retail’s been heading lately. World building is in!

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And from Vipp, a guesthouse on Denmark’s North Sea coast, a stretch of shoreline nicknamed “Cold Hawaii” for its surprisingly good (and frigid) surf. For this project, Vipp tapped architects Hahn Lavsen to transform a 20th-century fisherman’s cottage into a contemporary retreat. Rather than reorienting the building to maximize ocean views, the architects preserved its original layout, designed to protect its occupants from the harsh western winds.

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We sent one of our readers to Casa TO for their trip to Puerto Escondido last weekend. It’s a Ludwig Godefroy-designed hotel conceived as a contemporary Oaxacan temple, with references ranging from the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul to Hornsey Wood Reservoir in London. It’s a wonderfully geometric, brutalist stay where you can never quite tell whether you’re inside or outside. (Hint: it’s both.)

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There’s something that feels quite ceremonial about moving through ruins — feeling more connected to both your body and the space around you, rather than disappearing into yourself.

For Alchemy Saunas, Rezen transformed the former stables and cellar at the base of the Royal George Hotel to channel the feeling of a Roman bathhouse, where bathing was as much a communal and architectural experience as a private one.

It’s part of a larger story around the long-disused heritage hotel, which is gradually being brought back into use as a third space for the community after years of redevelopment plans.

In Central Victoria, Pepper & Well renovated Lumeah (originally known as Harley House). It’s one of the more intact surviving works of Australian modernist architect Paul Couch, whose architecture was unusually rigorous in its treatment of structure and material.

Couch pushed Australian modernism toward an almost extreme material clarity, believing not only that buildings should respond to climate, landscape, material and construction, but that structure wasn’t something to conceal and decorate afterward — it should create the space, character and visual order of the building itself.

For the renovation, Pepper & Well preserved the house’s underlying logic, removed later interventions that obscured it, and introduced only what was necessary to make the house more accessible and functional for its owners as they age.

In Tokyo, Tatsuhiko Endo turned a forty-year-old sewing-machine shop into a gallery for collected objects, where handmade Japanese ceramics sit alongside industrial modernist furniture, contemporary lighting, plants and hi-fi equipment.

That commingling is part of Rurbanism’s broader philosophy: rural meets urban, old meets new, and the handmade meets the machined. Exploring one object alongside another, each with different histories and origins, Endo thinks, reveals things about both that might otherwise go unnoticed.

And for Gaoxingli Insun Cinema in Haikou, One Plus Partnership looked to Hainan’s relationship with the South China Sea and the shoreline that shapes the city’s coastal identity. The bricks were made from sand from nearby beaches, then stacked under the concept Footprints Fade, Waves Embrace. Even movement through the space feels fluid, guided by smaller waves that run along the floor and are traced by concealed lighting. You almost forget you’re swimming through stone.

Last week, we invited a small group of LINEAR friends across architecture, design, hospitality, and creative industries for an intimate lunch with the team from Neko to celebrate the opening of their first U.S. clinic in SoHo.

Earlier this year, Neko flew us out to London to experience their spaces in person. We’ve seen plenty of beautiful wellness spaces (and had our fair share of poor encounters at the four-letter dentist who shall not be named — no, your beautiful marble-green sinks and Instagram aesthetic will not get me to buy Invisalign!), but it felt especially rare to experience a wellness space that doesn’t just use beautiful design as a veneer on an otherwise traditional healthcare experience.

It’d be a mistake to assume, based on photos alone, that Neko is after some luxury wellness experience — or that luxury wellness should be synonymous with exclusivity or high-cost concierge medicine. In London, we spoke with Neko’s VP of Creative, Rémi Perengaux, who emphasized that luxury at Neko means consideration: the thousands of tiny details and decisions that add up to create a remarkably calm and consistent visit for members, even as each space responds a little differently to its local context. For too long, he says, we’ve accepted the idea that medical spaces don’t deserve the same level of attention we give to hospitality.

The waiting room, changing room, scan room, and debrief spaces all play a vital role in how you move through the visit, what you encounter, and more importantly, what you don’t. Your shoes somehow end up waiting for you where you need them. Blood samples disappear into the wall and shoot off to the back-of-house lab. You rarely cross paths with a member of staff (or other patients) you don’t need to see. The feeling is somewhere between a private clinic and a well-designed members’ club — except it’s been designed from the beginning as a system that can be repeated at scale.

Mike Waldo, lead architect for the New York location, told us his favorite details in the SoHo space were the exit signs and badge readers. We admitted we hadn’t noticed them. “Perfect.”

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We stopped by Marcel for brunch the other weekend, part of a pilgrimage up the Upper East Side’s museum row. It occupies the lower level of the Breuer building — home, over the years, to the Whitney, the Met, and the Frick — before Sotheby’s took over the building and tapped Roman and Williams to design the restaurant.

This is Sotheby’s, after all, so almost everything around you can be bought. The art on the walls is for sale. So is the tableware. As are the martini glasses.

The food’s drawn mixed reviews, depending on who you ask — we did enjoy our brunch — but our favorite part is what Roman and Williams managed to do with the building itself: carve something light, warm, and almost airy out of one of Madison Avenue’s great concrete monoliths.

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Ricardo Bofill may be best known for La Fábrica, his home and studio carved from a former cement factory outside Barcelona. A lesser-seen recent work from his firm, now led by his sons, is the Centre de Congrès at UM6P’s Rabat campus. Between the contemporary, almost sci-fi interior and the more classical monumental forms on the exterior the firm is known for, it feels like a kind of ancient futurism we’re very much here for.

Conner + Perry Architects have developed something of a specialty in stewarding Lautner houses, from Sheats-Goldstein to the Schwimmer Residence, completed in 1982. Lautner himself called the latter a “horizontal castle,” wrapped around a Beverly Hills hillside.

Most of the original house was restored, but the more interesting interventions happened outside, where leftover and overlooked spaces around the property became new places to inhabit, most notably the “Castle Cavern,” a firepit deck tucked beneath the cantilevered swimming pool.

You’d be forgiven for not wanting to leave your room at SOIL Nihonbashi. It’s the kind of room you might hope to find yourself in during a Perfect Days-like fantasy, bathed in warm, filtered light, surrounded by brick tiles borrowed from the architectural language of Ningyocho, a vintage cassette player and a library of tapes, some passed along by neighbors of the hotel, and sounds from occasional passing cars and neighborhood greetings.

The balconies at SOIL spill with plants, a nod to the surrounding neighborhood, where greenery is strewn across alleyways, balconies, and windows. But there’s an even more local story to them: many were donated by neighbors themselves, extending the area’s culture of rojiura engei — informal alleyway gardening — into the architecture of the hotel.

The greenery, brick, and rust-colored metal echo the improvised palette of the surrounding streets, where pots, plants, masonry, and additions have accumulated over time. And despite being nine stories tall, the Kiyoaki Takeda-designed hotel sits comfortably in Nihonbashi’s streetscape, turning the neighborhood’s informal gardening into a kind of vertical facade. Downstairs, a small reception area and Pizza Tane meet the street. No grand lobby or rooftop DJs here — and that’s how Yuta Oka wants it.

DOUBLE SHOT OF ESPRESSO AT PARKLET……………………………………………………………………….¥520 (~$3.30)

NIHONBASHI PALE ALE…………………………………………………………………………………………………¥750 (~$4.30)

TAIYAKI AT YANIGIYA……………………………………………………………………………………………………¥200 (~$1.80)

Oka is the founder of Staple, the firm behind SOIL’s properties, and neighboring hotel, K5. For centuries, Ningyocho, or eastern Nihonbashi, was animated by merchants, wholesalers, and everyday commerce, and as the commercial systems that sustained those streets changed, the neighborhood’s community intensity faded. Oka saw an opportunity to build a hotel as a kind of strong point, a place to attract outsiders to first, then strong enough to gradually build relationships and activity around it.

The original idea was to do this in regional Japan, where the need for new reasons to visit (and new ways to strengthen local economies) was easier to see. Central Tokyo, Oka thought, was too dense, too established, too anonymous for the same model to matter. Then he built K5, just a seven-minute walk from where SOIL now stands: a lush, magnetic destination inside a former bank building, designed to draw people into a financial district that had gone quieter outside office hours. But working in Nihonbashi changed his mind. On the other side of Showa-dori, the broad north–south avenue that marks the shift between Nihonbashi’s western and eastern areas, he began to see a different opportunity: density, he realized, doesn’t automatically create connection.

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Oka thinks at the scale of a roughly 20-minute walk — the distance within which repeated encounters and local relationships can form. At SOIL, though, much of Staple’s own network is tighter still: a set of places spread within roughly 300 meters around Horidome Children’s Park. There’s Pizza Tane adjoining the small reception downstairs. A couple of minutes away is PARKLET, a bakery conceived as an extension of Horidome Children’s Park. Nearby are Soil work, timsum for wine and dim sum, Overview Coffee, and other small neighborhood spaces, functioning less like hotel amenities than pieces of a wider local ecosystem.

The relationships between those places are intentionally literal as well as conceptual: Pizza Tane’s sourdough starter came from PARKLET, just as plants and cassette tapes have been passed into the hotel from the surrounding community. Even the flow of capital at Staple is designed to be symbiotic — Oka talks about using the profits generated by a successful hotel to support the surrounding area, while GOOD SOIL, the investment company he launched with Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, is designed around recovering capital from one round of development and reinvesting it into the next.

It’d be a mistake to think of SOIL as another lifestyle-hotel concept, in the mold of Ace or Hoxton, which, to their credit, have played a vital role in designing community spaces. SOIL instead seems to pose a slightly different question around activation: what if the community doesn’t need to be created at all? What if it’s already there?

It’s the beautiful part about SOIL, and what makes it feel particularly LINEAR. The more time you spend outside of it, the more complete the hotel begins to feel. Its “amenities” aren’t just Pizza Tane, the cassette player, or the donated plants. They’re the neighborhood spaces around it, including plenty of places Staple doesn’t own at all.

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Among the installations is Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Forest, a layer of artificially generated mist that constantly shifts with the weather and wind, but whose moisture will eventually change the forest too, fostering new plants and flowers. Nearby, Louise Bourgeois’s Maman — one of the monumental spiders more often found in urban plazas — suddenly feels almost natural among the tall trees and new growth. Pansera says that here, it “seems to shrink back into what it truly is — a small insect in the wild.”

Our favorite, though, is K-BAR, a remarkably metropolitan six-seat cocktail bar that almost anywhere else might disappear among a hundred other dimly lit rooms. Here, it stands entirely on its own: a roughly 500-square-foot box of glass, steel, leather, and backlit bottles hidden in the forest.

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The artist duo behind it, Elmgreen & Dragset, is the same one behind Prada Marfa, which bears a remarkable resemblance: a permanently closed luxury storefront in the middle of the West Texas desert, and a favorite stop for the road-tripping influencer class.

And, as much as we love a good desert backdrop, what makes K-BAR more interesting to us than Prada Marfa is the relationship it has with the land, despite seeming so obviously out of place.

Displacement and denial have long been central to Elmgreen & Dragset’s work: take something familiar, put it somewhere it doesn’t belong, then withhold the thing it appears to promise. It heightens your awareness of both the object and the landscape around it.

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And at Khao Yai, where you start by wondering whether the cocktail bar is even real, you end up noticing the forest too. How much of it was here before the cassava farms? Which parts are new? How much of what looks natural has actually been planted, restored, or even watered by the fog?

K-BAR is real, though. Once a month it opens, and if you’re lucky enough to snag one of the six seats, you get to go inside.

We spent our weekend going down a rabbit hole prompted by an observation that Arcane Estate Coffee in the West Village bears a suspiciously remarkable resemblance to Anaïs Nin’s house in Silver Lake. Something about the dark wood paneling, the violet upholstery, the same insistent purple.

Arcane began in 2015 as a record label founded by Edgar Rojas-Masferrer, imagined as something that could encompass music, art, prints, clothing and collectible objects in a darker, grittier world. In an interview with Vice, he cited Taxi Driver, Weegee and Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law among its references. Real noir type stuff.

But there was always some contradiction. Vice described the “laidback lightness” of LA producer Jamma Dee, whose records Arcane was releasing, against the “back-alley shadows” of the label’s visual identity.

Arcane Estate feels like that world made physical. It’s dark and cinematic, but also warm, plush and slightly fantastical. It feels less like a recreation of rain-soaked, Venetian-blinds detective noir, and more like Arcane’s own dream of it.

That slightly unreal version of noir is what made us think of Nin’s house.

Designed by Eric Lloyd Wright in 1962 as what he later called a “nest,” the Silver Lake home is an unusual counterpoint to the white planes and glass walls of California modernism. Something about the purple-tinged plywood and the color wash in the rooms has always given us a weird, bad-trip energy.

The house, though, feels completely at home in the less-sunny Los Angeles Nin inhabited, where she moved through an avant-garde of experimental filmmakers, artists, mystics and outsiders preoccupied with dreams, sexuality and altered states. Decades later, an exhibition surveying Los Angeles art beginning in 1960 would call this contradiction Sunshine & Noir: Los Angeles as both Pacific paradise and the darker metropolis of film noir.

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It seems unlikely that Nin’s house was a direct reference for Arcane (the resemblance is more interesting if it wasn’t), but we can’t help but notice that both spaces seem to invite their guests to escape the brightness outside for something darker, more enclosed, and more theatrical.

Nin’s house feels like midcentury California in a dream state. At Arcane, noir becomes warmer, stranger and more inhabitable.

Bohemian Noir, maybe.

Menorca, in the 1960s, hadn’t yet found the success of its neighbors to the north. And when it finally did in the 1970s, its hotels leaned more functional, relying on white stucco, metal-railed balconies, and plastic pool toys to support the second wave of mass-market sun-seekers. Some 50 years later, Hotel Riviera occupies the former Hotel Madrid (1973), this time bathed in Aperol hues — the island’s answer to Capri, decades late and imagined into being. Menorca has a history of inventing its past, after all: the island’s iconic “fishing village,” Binibeca Vell, was itself built for tourists.

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Starck is no stranger to narrative or world building. We wrote about his Maison Heler in France, a surrealist project that asks the visitor to imagine the story of an eccentric inventor who comes home to find his mansion raised 16 stories in the air. For Brach Madrid, he looks to the 1920s and ‘30s, when the city’s grand interiors became stages for the newly modern social life of real figures like Dalí, Buñuel, and Lorca. Starck doesn’t reconstruct that world so much as invent a life inside it: a man mourning a lost lover, whose home is filled with the traces of their life together — photographs, boxing gloves, musical instruments, travel souvenirs, even a green ceramic mirror he made for her himself.

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In San Sebastián, we go to Mendi Argia, designed by Openhouse Studio alongside From a Clear Height, a fictional story by Inma Buendía imagining the life that might eventually unfold inside the early 20th-century villa. Its protagonist spends the day wandering San Sebastián — visiting an exhibition at Tabakalera, stopping at San Telmo, eating pintxos in the old town — before climbing back up Mount Ulia to Mendi Argia. There, she lingers in a bathtub at the foot of the bed as sunset washes the room orange, pink, and blue, before stepping onto the balcony in a silk robe to watch the last light reflect off the Kursaal below.

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Curious about what makes its architecture feel so singular, we called David Noble, an architect based in Puerto Escondido whose work extends across Oaxaca and beyond.

We spoke about designing buildings that slow people down, opening them to the landscape without making them feel exposed, and what Oaxaca taught him about building elsewhere. Plus, a shortlist of places David would send us in Puerto Escondido.

LINEAR MAGAZINE: You started your career in Mexico City before eventually moving to Oaxaca. What brought you out there?

DAVID NOBLE: I was working in this office in Mexico City. They sent me to overlook a project on the coast. And in those days there was one day which was from morning to evening, full-on work, and then the next day, before taking the plane back to the city, I had a couple of hours to go to the beach and just enjoy the whole scenery. And I just fell in love with it. I felt such a profound sense of peace within myself, that I value a lot in my life, and I told myself: this is the way I want to live. So I basically quit my job in the city. I didn’t have any actual opportunity on the coast, but I had a couple of contacts. So I just came with a leap of faith — this is how I want to live my life — and so I did it.

LM: That search for peace and slow living seems to be a big part of the projects you’ve built there. Where does that come from?

DN: For me personally, I find that I want to convey something in the things that I design. I had a very profound experience with a couple of buildings in my life. And what I felt, it was like that silence, that peacefulness — and that is something that is not like a showy building, nothing like shapes and materials. It’s something more profound, more within yourself, but the atmosphere can trigger those things. And in my practice, it’s always kind of like this flirting of ideas, to try to achieve those for the people that live in these houses — or hotels — slowing them down, making them realize where they’re living, in the moment, just feel that.

LM: What were those buildings that gave you that profound experience?

DN: First of all, Casa Luis Barragán. It’s a classic, but it was the very first experience for me, personally, of a shocking architecture that really turned my world around. Barragán has other projects, like the Capilla de las Capuchinas, and other religious projects, that are the same way — they guide you through these environments and lead you to that sense within yourself. Carlo Scarpa has this tomb in Italy — it’s a classic. And there’s another architect who writes about walking and pausing, and a couple of his projects, it’s all about how you walk and then you stop yourself and realize there’s something beautiful around you. It can be a garden, it can be anything. Álvaro Siza in Portugal also moved me a lot.

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LM: I love his Leça swimming pools in Porto. You look at the photos and it’s a cool scene, to swim next to the rocks, but it’s that arrival sequence that takes your breath away. There’s something so much more important about being in the space that allows you to fully experience it.

DN: And it’s so hard to picture. It’s so hard to take a photograph of that, because on a photo, being in that hallway, it’s just a hallway. It’s so pale, so hard to just take a picture and convey the feeling. So this architecture is what actually moves you deeper, on a learning level.

LM: Was there anything you had to unlearn about architecture or design once you started building in Oaxaca?

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THE TBILISI FIELD GUIDE

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When I came to Tbilisi for a long weekend in June, I don’t think I expected to still be here in August. This is the third and last piece I’ll write for LINEAR about this city, and it’s the practical one that I’m struggling with the most — it’s easy to write a piece about the mythological hospitality culture or the post-Soviet development boom. Writing a list of places I’d recommend to someone visiting is hard because it’s making me reflect on all the things that I didn’t do as well as everything that I have come to love doing so much it’s become routine.

I want this list to be short– here’s why:

I finally took the cable car up to Mtatsminda Park a while back, having avoided it because I have a real thing about dangling from heights. Sharing the gondola were Sashka and Tekla, twenty, high school sweethearts who I started conversation with when I blurted out halfway up that I was scared of heights. By the time we got to the top they’d told me I had to try ponchiki at a restaurant up there, so as we were getting off the gondola I asked if they wanted to join me.

They agreed and we ate ponchiki together: hot custard-filled doughnuts, totally ruinous, and I’d send anybody up there for them. Besides the doughnuts, picture Mtatsminda as a year-round Soviet state fair type vibe complete with rides and games and stuff at the top of a mountain. From the ferris wheel, you can see for miles.

None of this came off a list, though. I ended up staying more than 10 minutes at the top of the mountain and going back down because I swallowed my fear of cable cars and talked to strangers in a gondola.

That’s the whole thing, here or anywhere. Everything good I’ve found traveling came to me that way. You can’t put it all in a guide. So I’ve kept this deliberately short. Use it for your first couple of days — get your bearings, eat well, don’t waste a meal. Then put it away and go talk to people. If you follow this or any list of must-see spots too closely you’ll never have the trip only you could have: the one off your own beaten path.

Everything that follows is somewhere I’ve been, often more than once, with one glaring exception that I had to throw in towards the bottom.

Here’s the FIELD GUIDE.

If you’re planning a trip to Tbilisi, or anywhere else, LINEAR can help you plan it.

Members get access to preferred rates and VIP perks at our curated collection of design-forward hotels, including room upgrades, late check-out, property credits, and more.

Every booking also includes complimentary access to a LINEAR city guide. And if we haven’t made one yet, we’ll reach out to friends of LINEAR — architects, designers, artists, hoteliers, and restaurateurs who know the place — to help you build an incredible trip.

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For our Irish readers, the group is hardly new. Its founders, Paddy McKillen Jr. and Matt Ryan, have spent the past two decades building restaurants, bars, cinemas, clubs, and hotels around the shared idea that hospitality should bring the life of a city inside, which is a philosophy we find easy to get excited about.

Historically, though, that ambition has taken the familiar form of the 2010s cheeky-neon-sign-on-the-destination-rooftop. The Dean translated that formula particularly well for an Irish audience, but from the outside, it didn’t always feel especially novel.

The group now has new capital behind it, along with plans to expand well beyond Ireland. And while money doesn’t necessarily buy vision, Berlin and Munich feel like the first signs that The Dean may finally have the room to pursue its original one with a little more depth.

We’ve long been interested in the global sameness emerging across hospitality and design. Even the supposedly design-forward hotel groups aren’t immune. If you build a strong enough aesthetic and repeat it often enough, distinctiveness becomes its own kind of uniform.

The Dean’s answer, at least so far, has been to hand each hotel to a different designer and let the city do more of the work. We don’t think a hotel needs to summarize an entire place, but we do think it should reveal something about where you are, and ideally, something you might not have noticed otherwise.

BOOK A STAY AT THE DEAN MUNICH WITH LINEAR CONCIERGE AND GET A COMPLIMENTARY ROOM UPGRADE, LATE CHECKOUT, DAILY BREAKFAST, PREFERRED MEMBER RATE, AND A WELCOME GIFT IN YOUR ROOM. PLAN YOUR TRIP →

In Berlin, Rachael Gowdridge draws on both the refined residential character of Charlottenburg and the city’s more subversive creative traditions, preserving the imperfections of a late-19th-century building while introducing saturated color, vintage furniture, contemporary art, and sculptural lighting.

Munich receives an entirely different treatment from Tatjana von Stein. Her interiors bring together the city’s Jugendstil heritage and its less-remembered role in the music culture of the 1980s, moving from calm, tactile bedrooms into increasingly theatrical public rooms.

Two hotels aren’t enough to call it a playbook just yet, but consider us curious about where The Dean goes next. Miami is due later this year.

THIS ISN’T A SPONSORED POST, BUT IF YOU BOOK A STAY THROUGH LINEAR CONCIERGE WE’LL EARN A COMMISSION. AS ALWAYS, WE ONLY FEATURE SPACES AND PLACES WE’D WRITE ABOUT ANYWAY.

INTERESTED IN PARTNERING WITH LINEAR? SEND US A NOTE AT PARTNERS@LINEAR-MAGAZINE.COM.

For your listening pleasure

EVERYTHING HERE USED TO BE SOMETHING ELSE

Tbilisi’s buildings are reconstructing themselves out of their own wreckage. So are the people. So where is everybody?

Words by

I sneak onto roofs. I’m a habitual roof sneaker — I have been since high school. This is my one real vice as a traveler, and after two years of living out of a bag I’ve gotten good enough at it that I no longer think of it as sneaking so much as checking. Service stairwell, propped door, a confident walk past a housekeeping cart. Nobody stops a man who looks like he left something up there, or like he has somewhere to be. Yellow reflective vests work a charm for this stuff.

The roof of The Telegraph in Tbilisi is worth the trespass for one reason besides the views: from up there, you smell all four restaurants at once. Grilled meat from one vent, khachapuri baking from another, coffee and pastries from the café, and... Pad Thai? from another? I lingered up there for a look around on my first weekend in Georgia, peering down at a city that I did not yet understand at all.

Let’s explore the buildings that make the city what it is, and the people behind them.

EXISTING CONDITIONS

Georgia sits in the middle of the world’s most complicated neighborhood. Russia sprawls over the north, Turkey in the southwest, and Armenia and Azerbaijan below. Roughly a fifth of Georgia’s territory is currently occupied by Russian forces. You can drive from downtown Tbilisi to an occupation line about the same time as it takes to get from lower Manhattan to JFK.

Now come up on the roof with me, because the view does the explaining.

Look down: we’re standing on the 1964 Post and Telegraph building designed by Lado Alexi-Meskhishvili and Teimuraz Mikashavidze, faced in all its original Bolnisi tuff — that’s the pale volcanic stone this entire city is quarried out of. For thirty-odd years, before the wall came down, this was where you came to talk to anyone outside Georgia — the physical building you walked into in order to reach the rest of the world. Symbolic and a little bit auspicious for what would become a five star boutique hotel half a century later. After the Soviet Union collapsed, it sat empty for decades. Its now 239 rooms, a (crappy, if not weirdly high production value) jazz club in the basement, the four restaurants I can smell from here, all redone by Shanghai based Neri&Hu.

Towering over to our left: the Radisson Blu. Built in 1967, twenty-two floors, designed to be the finest hotel — the pinnacle of Soviet Georgian hospitality. Then war broke out in Abkhazia in the early nineties and roughly a thousand refugees moved into the hotel and lived there for a decade. Laundry strung across the balconies of a modernist tower — the tallest building in the city at the time. It became the most photographed building in the city for the worst reason a building can be photographed. In 2004 the families were paid to leave — somewhere around seven thousand dollars a room — and it reopened as a Radisson of all things in 2009.

I only know this because The Telegraph doesn’t have a pool, and guests are afforded use of the Radisson’s for that reason. We’re all refugees here in one way or another.

Straight ahead, a few hundred meters down Rustaveli Avenue: the literal Parliament, where Georgians have protested more or less continuously since November 2024, when the government suspended the country’s EU accession talks after a disputed election.

Soviet luxury. Refugee camp. Five-star. Riot line. Sound novel? Let’s keep walking down Rustaveli. This story plays out in Tbilisi over and over again, pretty much everywhere that is new and trendy and cool you can look.

CHANGE OF USE

I learned how to look at buildings like this in Istanbul, standing inside the Hagia Sophia and feeling like something was subtly wrong with the room.

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We tend to be drawn to projects in Spain that reinterpret history for contemporary living, while the Argentina collection leans more landscape forward. Across both, though, there’s a shared appreciation for local materials, climate, and the kinds of spaces that emerge from patios, porches, galleries, and courtyards rather than being prescribed a form from the outset.

BY THE WAY: We’re looking for contributors to write GUIDES to Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Mallorca. If you’re an architect, designer, chef, hotelier, or just a great writer with great taste, we’d love to hear your pitch.

AND: If you’re planning a trip to Spain or Argentina (or anywhere else), reply to this email, or send us a note at CONCIERGE@LINEAR-MAGAZINE.COM, and we’ll put together a curated list of recs tailored to your trip.

THE STARTING LINEUP

1. CASA TER, by MESURA. Baix Empordà, Spain.

If you were to build a farmhouse in Baix Empordà today, it’d probably look something like Casa Ter. It feels unmistakably Mediterranean, built with local river stone and Catalan ceramics. MESURA is one of our favorite practices working today—we especially loved what they did with Aesop Diagonal in Barcelona.

2. FEN House, by VDV ARQ. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

We’ll spare you the “intermediary of the landscape” chat and let the green roof do the talking.

3. House 1736, by Harquitectes. Barcelona, Spain.

Harquitectes transformed a historic Barcelona house by carving an airy atrium through its center. It’s surprisingly light for something that feels so monumental.

4. Atelier Workshop, by Agustin Berzero. Rafaela, Argentina.

We have an unreasonable appreciation for beautifully designed outbuildings. If you’re going to build a workshop in your backyard, you might as well make it this good.

5. House in Port de la Selva, by Marià Castelló Martínez + José Antonio Molina. Port de la Selva, Spain.

Concrete feels especially at home on the rocky Costa Brava coastline. More than anything, this house feels shaped by its site, equal parts shelter from the wind and frame for the view.

Next week, we’re returning with PART II of the GEORGIA EDITION. ICYMI, catch up on PART I, THE GUEST IS FROM GOD.

Only once you understand the people, the architecture, the traditions, and the daily rituals do the hotels, cafés, galleries, and neighborhoods begin to make sense.

It would’ve been easy — predictable, even — to begin with Paris, London, Melbourne, or New York. We admire them enormously, as some of the world’s great design capitals. But for our first EDITION, we found ourselves drawn somewhere that felt a little more LINEAR.

We wanted to begin with a place still in the process of defining itself, where architecture reflects not just changing tastes but changing circumstances, where creativity feels less like an aesthetic pursuit than a way of reclaiming the nation’s story.

So for our first EDITION, we’re sending to Tbilisi.

More than three decades after independence, Georgia remains a nation actively negotiating its identity — a negotiation made literal by the roughly 20% of its internationally recognized territory still under Russian occupation. You can feel it in projects like Fabrika and The Telegraph Hotel, which reimagine Soviet relics into spaces for community and creativity. You can feel it in a generation of designers, architects, restaurateurs, and hoteliers building something distinctly their own.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll share his dispatches, along with locally curated guides, interviews, and collections.

This is the GEORGIA EDITION.

THE GUEST IS FROM GOD

Words by

My airport routine is precious to me after two years of full-time traveling and living, as I like to say, in the world. Check bag, hit security, saunter through duty free, spritz of the perfume I secretly love and refuse to ever actually buy. I dig waiting in line. I like looking for the windsock when the plane taxis. I like watching the little wing flaps come up when we touch down. At thirty years of age, I still text my parents before every flight I board, usually after security, because ever since I started living this way — on the road, on the move, in time zones that keep stretching farther from Central Standard — it has gotten harder and harder to be in the same place at the same time as the people who made me.

The day before I flew to Georgia for the first time, my dad texted me a story. He’d been chatting with a waitress in a Jersey diner who turned out to be from Tbilisi. She had shown him pictures of khinkali — the twisty soup dumplings that I’d soon be eating not for every meal... but for many meals — and khachapuri, the baked bread boat full of molten cheese. She told him that, “If he needs anything let me know, I will call my cousins in the police.” It was the first real instance of Georgian hospitality I received, even indirectly, before I’d ever set foot in the country. I landed with my phone already full of tips, warnings, and enthusiastic instructions from people who had been there before me. “It’s a hospitality culture,” everyone kept saying. I wanted to know what that meant.

Fortunately, I was being shipped off to Tbilisi with LINEAR Magazine, whose concierge has the uncanny and seemingly miraculous ability to secure anyone royalty-level treatment at the nicest hotels in the world. A few days in, I think I understand it better, but I’m still learning what it means to live in a hospitality culture. One thing I’m sure of: my dad’s diner waitress was deadass serious.

Aside from the petitioning my travel here, the paying for my hotel, and my financial compensation for this article, LINEAR has not instructed me to include any mention of their concierge service in my writing. I just feel so moved to shout it out because my experience traveling with them under my wings has been refreshingly delightful.

A cultural focus on hospitality, however you want to define it, crops up more and more the further east you move from the States. Before I left for Tangier last April, I made a solemn oath to myself that I would never refuse tea from a stranger if ever offered. As such I’ve had sweet glasses packed with mint on the floors of shops in souks and paper dixie cups of wood-fired Bedouin red tea with lemongrass and sage on the dunes of the Sahara. Most of the map, really, from the Atlas Mountains, over the Sahara, up through and across the mighty Bosphorus, these are all hospitality cultures. My hunch has always been that this has religious undertones — and specifically Islamic ones. I lean in when I hear about hospitality culture. It means the people are warm, food portions are large and keep coming, and there’s often an archetypal or actual grandmother involved. Tbilisi’s deep orthodox culture plays nicely into my expansion of this theory. They swear that they were the first people in the world to accept and adopt Christianity — but I’m not sure how true that is.

Georgians believe in a universal demonstration of this idea that a guest is not someone to be transacted upon. Take notes, America! A guest, be that in your restaurant, antique booth, or home, is a person whose arrival should indeed change the vibe of the room. It goes both ways. To be a guest in someone’s home means you never come empty-handed. In America, hospitality is usually a marketing catchall that translates synonymously to “service”. It’s something polished, priced, rated, and tipped 20% on. Or are we doing 25 now? Around Georgia’s mountain-valed capital of Tbilisi, what I kept encountering felt even older and more mythologically rooted than that. It felt like people actually gave a shit here.

What I’ve found in Tbilisi in a few short days is clear indication that there’s a broader kind of reverence for other people — for The Guest — that is plainly evident all around when you look outside of the individualistic bubble that we’ve built for ourselves in the west. That’s something we could all do to experience firsthand.

ARRIVALS

I stayed at The Telegraph, a former Soviet post office turned boutique hotel. At first brush, it’s straight out of the Ian Schrager hospitality-and-design playbook. That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how you want to look at it. The Taschen books on the shelf. The pumping of a specific santal through the air ducts. The brass/wood/marble punch and fluted glass detail work. At first brush it’s a well designed hotel as any, but what stuck out to me was the people moving through it. No amount of design attention and detail work can outdo what is made so plainly evident by just hiring really good people.

I met a bellboy named Georgi on his first day at work — he was awkwardly trying to hold this absurdly oversized green velvet jacket together by clasping his hands behind his back so the jacket wouldn’t hang caddywhompus. When I joked that oversized blazers were in, he laughed and let his shoulders drop. Poor guy had buttons on that thing that looked like poker chips from the casino next door.

All the employees at The Telegraph are made to wear distinct and hilarious uniforms depending on what area of the hotel they work in, all of which look like something the costume department dug up from a Wes Anderson set. The maids are all older women with curled hair and they all wear the same black dresses with these ridiculous white ruffled collars. Once, I went into the lobby men’s room and there were five of them all cleaning the sink at once. I think they just hide in there to hang out. The hotel is, plainly, overstaffed. To me, the guest, this is undoubtedly a very good thing – it means I can have lobiani and cheesecake delivered to my room at two in the morning and it only takes ten minutes to get there.

When I needed a tailor to mend a hole in my pants, the concierge immediately arranged for them to be fixed while I was working out, so that when I got back to the changing room from the gym, my newly repaired trousers were freshly pressed and laid out on the bench for me. Stellar.

That’s it. That’s the difference between being nice and actually paying attention. That same concierge who, having had recommended me a specific dish at the hotel’s Grand Café restaurant the night before, tracked me down the following morning to — earnestly — ask how I liked it.

At breakfast, at dinner, in shops, in bars, in passing conversations, there’s an earnestness to the way people check in on you. At Honoré, a waiter set down my pan fried chicken livers in plump (sic) sauce, leaned in, and winked: “These chicken livers, it’s my childhood!” It was funny, and it summed up his whole philosophy. Food here means something to people. They’re excited to share their memories. Food is their inheritance and their pride. He continued on: “in Europe it’s like people order one dish and say, this is my dish, but in Georgia we never do this — we order three or four and share!”

Eating alone here is almost unheard of. For a solo traveler, that’s an excuse to make conversation with strangers – but it has also gotten me some odd glances from hosts and fellow diners. Two-tops in many restaurants are few and far between. The most authentic Georgian restaurants have these grand dining rooms with a few long banquet tables – of which one or two are always open. You never know when a guest is going to arrive.

The measure of a meal here is not the stack of plates in front of you; it’s the whole damn table. And boy, the tables keep growing.

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This week’s study is a collection of recent projects we’ve added to the ARCHIVE. Among them are an apartment renovation in Madrid that feels like a very LINEAR version of granny core, a house upstate perched on Ice Age-era plinths, and a newish wine bar in the Lower East Side inside a former dumpling factory that has us thinking about the relationship between retail and third places. Walk with us.

Jesús de Valle, by Archive for Space

We got an early look at a new project from Archive for Space that brings a kind of “punk romance” to a 20th-century apartment in Madrid’s Malasaña neighborhood.

Our familiarity with the neighborhood is admittedly limited, but everything we read about Malasaña — graffiti-covered streets, independent record shops, young Madrileños hanging out in public plazas — made the apartment make a little more sense. Archive for Space describes the space as something for a “grandmother with leather pants.” If we had to describe our version of granny chic, we’d probably point here.

The Findling, by Of Possible

We go back and forth between wanting our houses to feel like placed objects, light on the land, or monumental, weighty structures that seem intent on standing the test of time. Findling manages to be both.

Half the house rests on a New England stone wall built between 1770 and 1830, a remnant of the region’s agricultural past. The other half sits on Ice Age-era stone plinths. The house itself is built almost entirely from locally sourced larch, which will almost certainly lose the battle of time against the stones, but there’s something about a house that lets the landscape tell part of its story.

NOT A HOTEL Setouchi

Designed by BIG, NOT A HOTEL Setouchi works its way through the dramatic topography of the Seto Inland Sea, framing the landscape through a series of 180°, 270°, and 360° views inspired by local building traditions.

What makes it especially LINEAR, is the way the project encourages guests to explore rather than prescribing a single route through the property. We’d recommend watching Bjarke’s walkthrough if you have a few minutes.

One detail to keep an eye out for: the courtyard ventilation grilles spell the name of each villa in Morse code. A small detail we’d never notice ourselves, but are very glad someone thought to do.

Colbo Next Door, by Of Enso

Colbo has made waves among the Buck Mason-type crowd for their natural blends, but it’s their first non-retail space that caught our attention.

We caught up with Of Enso, who transformed a former Lower East Side dumpling factory into a wine bar for the brand, and asked how they approached designing a space that was able to find the balance between retail and third place.

Of Enso told us, “We didn’t want it to feel like things are for sale in the space. The moment something is for sale, the room changes. People read it differently.”

The original stainless steel walls remain from the dumpling factory, while Enso’s handmade pendants and sconces are wrapped in Colbo deadstock fabric (which was a standout object for us — we’d very much like one for our home).

Swing by if you’re around, and let them know LINEAR sent you.

Car Part Time, by Office of Tangible Space

East Williamsburg keeps finding new uses for old industrial buildings. Refuge opened last year inside a 19th-century industrial complex. Now Car Part Time has transformed a former hangar into a café, record shop (curated by Freakout Spot, one of our favorite record stores in the Hudson Valley), registered collector car dealership, and event space.

We’re fans of spaces that refuse to be just one thing. Their audience is described as “car curious,” which we can’t help but feel like we inspired. We’re talking ourselves into hosting a party here. Should we? Hit our line.

Let us know what you think in the comments, or start a thread in our chat. Next week, we’re sharing a few of our favorite new stays that opened this year. And for our paid members, the LINEAR Field Guide to Porto. Stay curious.

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We’re standing in the living room of the Glass House, which isn’t so much a room as much as it is an area inside a 1,815 square-foot glass rectangle. We’re sitting on stools (not original to the house), so as not to disturb the Mies-designed furniture (some of it original, some of it might as well be, as production prototypes). We’re not allowed to touch anything. It all feels very perfect. And yet, for a single-room building with four glass walls, oddly human.

TO GO BEYOND THE (LACK OF) WALLS

We were somewhat embarrassed to find out, as architecturally curious as we consider ourselves to be, that the Glass House does not stand alone. Standing opposite the Glass House is the Brick House, which looks a little bit like you’d imagine a utility building at a public middle school.

The front door, said Johnson, started at the end of the driveway. The sound of steps making their way across the gravel was its doorbell. The manicured grass stretching between the Glass House and the Brick House — the only mowed part of the 49 acres he built on — was its carpet. He envisioned the property as a sort of nesting doll — the dining table being at the center, enveloped by the Glass House, then the lawn (and the Brick House along with it), then the greater property.

As Johnson and, and his partner, David Whitney’s lifestyle evolved, so too did the property. An 18th-century farmhouse became the sitting room to watch TV. A subterranean art gallery and Aegean-inspired sculpture gallery provided a temporary home for their growing art collection as pieces made their way to MoMA.

A BUILDING SHOULD NEVER BE FOLfDED

There are fourteen structures on the property, including the Glass House. Johnson spent most of his time in five of them, designed over more than thirty years.

The Glass House, completed in 1949, is the one everyone knows, in its signature, International Style. Very Miesian. (Too Miesian, Mies might say.)

The Brick House, completed the same year, sits opposite as its foil.

Then come the later buildings: the Painting Gallery, completed in 1965; the Sculpture Gallery, completed in 1970; and the Library, completed in 1980, a “recombination of geometric forms,” with Gehry furniture and Venturi/Scott Brown carpet.

We found it somewhat surprising to see such a varied style across his works. Unlike his peers in the International Style community, like his friend Mies van der Rohe, Johnson didn’t seem particularly interested in sticking to a style, or even a belief system.

Johnson was a curator first, and walking the property gives you the sense that his projects were less about finding the ideal way to live, and more about whatever interested him at the time. It feels rare to get to spend time in a place that has so many different eras of an artist — you might really only be able to do this with music.

(The twisted forms of Da Monsta, for what it’s worth, were literally nausea inducing.)

THE HOUSE IS FULL OF SMOKE

For such a prolific architect, the Glass House and its neighboring structures came with a surprising number of design problems. The chimney, built into the bathroom column, was too shallow, and sending smoke and soot onto the ceiling. Johnson covered the bathroom walls in leather tiles, a very beautiful and very bad idea for a room with a shower. The wall tiles didn’t last. The ones on the ceiling, improbably, did — helped by the fact that Johnson and Whitney often showered across the lawn in the Brick House.

Then there was the glass itself. The first time Johnson turned on the lights at night, he found himself staring back at his own reflection rather than the landscape outside. The house he’d built to dissolve the boundary between inside and out had been reduced, by a light switch, to a mirror. Richard Kelly later fixed the problem by lighting the exterior of the house and surrounding trees, making the windows pass-through again.

The subterranean art gallery had its own issue: moisture. A lot of it. The solution was not especially glamorous, but it worked: a drainage ditch, spanned by a small bridge.

At the base of the driveway sits a sculpture by Donald Judd which, during the concrete curing process, ended up scarred by mismatched pours. Judd insisted he fix it. Johnson wouldn’t allow it. We’re paraphrasing:

“The project was mismanaged. It’s going to stay.”

PLAN YOUR VISIT

And while we do admire some of those ambitions, we’ve been increasingly drawn to projects that make the water feel like part of the city. Real projects that real people can live in, swim from, have a beer on, and enjoy.

MAST makes the case that we can be a lot simpler (but no less considered) in our ambitions for life on the water, with projects like Bedding 1 and Sauna KKF that feel more like extensions of cities than speculative visions for the future.

We found ourselves sat next to the founder of Plus Pool not too long ago and asked her about the motivation behind building a pool in the East River, expecting a lofty statement about the environment, climate resilience, or some grand vision for the future.

“People just want to swim.”

Delightful. MAST seems to agree.

For Sauna KKF, MAST worked with the city of Copenhagen to design a place on the water that would feel as normal as spending time beside it.

KBHØ1 is the first in a planned archipelago of floating islands, it creates new places to swim, kayak, fish, and gather throughout Copenhagen’s harbor. Who said public parks had to be on land?

For all the talk of floating cities, Slusen is interested in something much simpler. Built within a former shipyard, the floating neighborhood brings together homes, workshops, gardens, and shared spaces on the water.

Moored alongside Paper Island, Bedding 1 is a floating guesthouse and community space by Arcgency and MAST. It’s the first piece of a larger vision for the harbor, where the water becomes a place to meet friends, spend the night, or hang around for a while.

Consider us part of the MAST fan club.

I first visited Copenhagen three years ago during a long layover on the way to a wedding in Lithuania. Like any good planner, I arrived with a list of restaurants, museums, and buildings I wanted to see. When I asked my bartender how he’d spend 72 hours in the city, he told me to “just wander.”

It was somewhat frustrating advice at the time. Three days never feels like enough, and I’ve always had a tendency to treat travel like an optimization problem. But I took his advice anyway, and I think he was right.

There are some cities that do need a checklist. Copenhagen certainly has those too, and you should absolutely make time for the Louisiana Museum and take a boat around the canals. But I found the city was at its best in the spaces between destinations.

Use this guide to pick a few anchors, leave room to wander, and don’t worry too much about checking every box. If you’re headed that way and want to know where we’d start, here’s the FIELD GUIDE.

FIELD GUIDES are available to paid subscribers. Each one includes a saved Google Map with every recommendation linked in one place, plus updates as we find new places worth sharing. Planning a trip to Copenhagen (or anywhere)? CONCIERGE@LINEAR-MAGAZINE.COM.

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