Displaying items by tag: Luxury

Once home to kings and now one of France's most visited sites, the Chateau de Versailles is planning a new venture with a luxury hotel to prop up its finances, local media said on Sunday.

The palace's management has called for a tender to create a hotel in three 1680s buildings situated just outside the Versailles park's gates, with views of some of its most famous buildings, the Journal du Dimanche said.

An enameled glass exhibit at the Flint Institute of Arts takes visitors back in time to the post-World War I art scene of Europe.

The exhibit, "Style Moderne: French Art Deco Enameled Glass from the Ed & Karen Ogul Collection," will continue through Sept. 13.

The Art Deco style embraces modernity in Europe, incorporating elements of luxury and combining bold colors and floral patterns, according to the FIA's description of the exhibit.

What is luxury? A watch, a couture dress, a crown? Or is it having control over space, time, privacy? Is the notion of luxury changing over time?

A new exhibition, organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London together with the Crafts Council, asks these very questions. (In fact, it’s called What Is Luxury?) The works showcased help illuminate the way we use and perceive luxury today, and how that might change in the future.

“We realized when we started researching the project that on the one hand, everyone has a relationship to luxury and its own definition of it,” says Leanne Wierzba, V&A/Winchester School of Art research fellow and co-curator of the show.

Veins bulge from a wasp-waisted candle holder, while sinuous flow-lines run down the side of a teacup, splitting to merge seamlessly with the faceted saucer beneath. It looks like a colony of mutant lifeforms has scuttled into Harrods’ interiors department, which can only mean one thing: Zaha Hadid has taken on homewares.

At the age of 63, the Iraqi-born architect has won every prize going, graced international power lists and erected buildings across the globe – and now she’s making a bid for your dining table.

Christie’s Geneva held a three-session auction of important watches on November 10^th and 11^th that realized an unprecedented combined total of $43,985,467 million – the highest result for a series of watch sales ever held. Rolex Daytona “Lesson One,” a unique single-themed auction featuring 50 exceptional luxury wristwatches garnered $13,248,167 million and the various-owner Important Watches sale totaled $30,737,300 million. The top lot of the week was a 1957 Patek Philippe ref. 2499-second series in pink gold, which sold for $2,160,474.

Aurel Bacs, International Head of Christie’s Watch Department, said, “On November 10 and 11, Christie’s dispersed over 370 fine watches in an historical ten-hour auction marathon, which set a new record total for any series of watch sales. We exhibited highlights in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, New York, Paris, Dubai and in all locations we noticed an ever-growing appetite for high quality collector’s watches. This trend was demonstrated by a fiercer-than-ever competition generated by both experienced and new international bidders, in the room, on the telephone and online.”

The sale set 50 world records for 50 watches as well as a record price for any Rolex Daytona ever sold at auction.

The complex and nuanced lifestyle of the elite in Paris during the fifty-year reign of King Louis XV (reigned 1723-1774) is re-imagined through art and material culture in Paris: Life & Luxury, organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Paintings, sculpture, applied arts, drawings, metalwork, furniture, architectural fittings, lighting and hearth fixtures, scientific and musical instruments, clocks and watches, textiles and dress, books, and maps embody the visual aesthetics of the era while also revealing the social values of the enormously influential sector of society responsible for making Paris the fashion and cultural epicenter of Europe.

A group of allegorical paintings, The Four Times of Day, by Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743), lays out the organizing principle of the exhibition, in which objects are grouped together according to a sequence of daily activities. The subjects of Lancret's scenes are rising and dressing in Morning (Fig. 1), setting pocket watches in Midday, playing a game of trictrac in Afternoon, and bathing in Evening. The images provide a plethora of details about the everyday elite life in mid-eighteenth-century France, a lifestyle now difficult to grasp because the extant objects are dispersed physically, across museum collections, and intellectually, across academic disciplines.