The ritual of it all
Give us this day our daily spaces
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This week’s edition: Local Rituals
Designed by KKAP — Melbourne, Australia
Palace Coffee turns a quick coffee into a community ritual with a design-forward, sculptural edge, grounded in Melbourne’s laneway culture.
Designed by Mesura — Barcelona, Spain
Built from salvaged Montjuïc stone, Aesop and Mesura design a modern ritual grounded in the city’s past that could only exist in Barcelona.
Designed by Neri&Hu — Tbilisi, Georgia
Against the monoculture of global luxury hotels, Telegraph turns to Tbilisi’s own rituals to breathe new life into an old post and telegram office: shared meals, courtyard gatherings, and community jazz nights, framed by Soviet-era grandeur.
Sixty Seconds With: Hunter Owens
This week, we’re sitting down with Hunter Owens, whose great taste and fanatical obsession with chasing exceptional design I’ve long admired. Hunter’s been supporting Linear from behind the scenes for a while now and I’m excited to officially welcome him to the Linear team (now at a mighty team of two). Here’s Hunter in his own words.
What does good design feel like to you?
To me, good design feels like the actualization of intention, conveyed through considered details, clear structure, and the calm it imparts.Where are you traveling to next?
As it cools down in Southern California, I’m sneaking away for a long weekend in Palm Springs. I love the abundance of midcentury architecture there, and there’s a kind of mental clarity you can only get from the raw desert landscape.What’s a space you can’t stop thinking about lately?
Lately, I’ve been captivated by LA’s cafe culture, the endless lines at Community Goods always catch my eye. But the space I can’t stop thinking about is across the pond at the PARIS 4 location of Café Nuances designed by Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios (featured in August). The crumpled paper cups cast in stainless steel form a striking, tactile statement. More than decoration, they embody routine, waste, craft, and the poetry of daily coffee.What’s a small detail you’ve noticed recently that made you think?
I’ve noticed how often the TV dominates the best room in a home. In spaces that are more design-forward, it’s treated as secondary or hidden. I love that approach to living where a room encourages presence and connection rather than screen time.Where’s somewhere in LA everyone should go?
The new Cha Cha Matcha in Beverly Hills. It’s light and airy, pairing humble plywood walls with emerald green marble tables. The contrast feels both grounded and refined, elevated further by soaring ceilings and a hanging planter. It epitomizes how good design can transform a simple beverage into a memorable moment.
Stay a while: Lost Lindenburg
We’ve been obsessed with this hotel for a minute now. Designed by MORQ, the retreat sits on Bali’s Wild West coast where the jungle meets the black-sand beach. Trading resort-sprawl for something more communal, it’s eight rooms stacked in timber towers, with just enough strangeness to make getting “lost” feel intentional.
Quick hits
How to spend your spare $43K: KITH is launching a new members-only club. It features Padel Courts designed by Wilson, a spa designed by Georgio Armani, and New York’s first Erewhon. It’ll cost you $7,000 per year, with a $36,000 initiation fee.
End of the Line: Saudi Arabia’s reconsidering the feasibility of The LINE, its 170-kilometre-long city that hoped to house 1.5M residents by 2030. I think I speak for everyone when I say we saw this coming.
Field trip, anyone?: Donald Judd's architecture office reopens in Marfa after a years-long restoration — the office, along with various other Judd buildings and exhibits, is open to the public. I still need to make a trip out there.
The design is mysterious and important: Severance won the Emmy for Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Contemporary Program. Dwell breaks down some of the hidden meanings of the set design.
On the market: David Lynch’s LA compound is listed for $15M — it’s a mix of Lynchian surrealism, midcentury modernism, and brutalism that culminates in something very, very weird.
RIP to a good one: Ford is demolishing their iconic Glass House headquarters built in 1956, designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill
After recently moving to a new apartment I've decided to forego the TV and instead make the focal point of the living space the window. Still working on ways to populate where a TV would go, but so far I've found it to be refreshing.