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The Isamu Noguchi Sunken Garden in Lower Manhattan was designed by the American artist to evoke the Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto, Japan, which is home to the world’s most famous Zen rock garden. Designed to draw the eye downwards – the circular garden sits below ground in the shadow of the 60-storey Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed Chase Tower – it’s populated with seven basalt stones taken from the riverbed of Japan’s Uji River. One of his major works in the city, he designed it – like the rock garden of Ryoan-ji – to be viewed at a remove through its glass windows; a place of quiet contemplation amid the surrounding energy of New York’s Financial District.

For Tory Burch, who selected the space as the venue for her S/S 2027 show yesterday evening, the garden provided a counterpoint for a collection which she described as unapologetically ‘more is more’. Seemingly in no mood for quiet contemplation, she posited the vivacious spring collection as one which celebrated the ‘joy of dressing’ up through the kind of eclectic combinations of colour and texture that have defined this edition of New York Fashion Week so far (a similarly liberated approach was seen at Ralph Lauren, Diane von Furstenberg and Proenza Schouler).

‘I was thinking about how people want to feel joy and optimism right now, that you still need to dream,’ she said backstage after the show. ‘Everything feels quite dystopian, so I was thinking about how do you dream, and how do you escape? You can do that through self-expression.’

It led to pieces which captured what Burch called an ‘opulent femininity’, a mood of richness largely achieved through the collection’s fabrications, a focus of the designer since she stepped down as CEO of the eponymous label in 2019 to dedicate all of her time to the creative side of the role (the time since has been deemed as the ‘Torynaissance’ due to bolder creative decisions and a slew of viral accessories, particularly with Gen-Z). ‘Granny cardigans’ (Burch’s personal favourite garment from the collection) were richly embroidered; jacquards recalled lavish fabric wallpapers; while handpainted silk ‘feathers’ became boas and pom-poms. Accessories included pumps in woven leather which splayed open at their front, shark tooth earrings, embroidered handbags and high-shine chain-link belts.

Colour was similarly eclectic: for the palette, which recalled heady 1970s decor, Burch had tasked her team with finding unusual colours and combinations ‘which weren’t just easily available’. One green ‘was impossible to name… we still haven’t come up with a name for it as a team.’ ‘I started this collection with colours,’ she said. ‘I really want it to have depth.’ Lightness was also important: heavy knits were actually made from chenille, a fluffy yarn which is much lighter than wool. More utilitarian elements also featured, like a series of military-style overcoats, trenches and blazers, some featuring delicate beading or crafted from Burch’s take on classic menswear tailoring wools.

It was, she said, the way she envisaged women dressing today: a riposte to perfectly matching outfits and the conventionally tasteful. ‘I think we all have to manage through difficult times and look for bright spots,’ she said. ‘I think self-expression is one of the ways to do that.’

Stay tuned to wallpaper.com for more from New York Fashion Week S/S 2027.

London design agency Heirloom has given shape to the newest iteration of the Yoto audio player. We talked to Heirloom founder Jack Godfrey Wood, designer Yemima Lorberbaum, and Tom Ballhatchet, VP Innovation at Yoto, about the 4th generation Yoto Player and Yoto Mini, two devices aimed squarely at de-screenifying the childhood experience of the modern audio and media landscape.

Yoto was born via Kickstarter just over ten years ago, with the idea of building a friendly, child-focused audio player for telling stories, telling the time and providing access to curated daily content. It was a cult hit, and over three iterations the design language was honed and refined to make it more suitable for little hands without deviating from the strong values of the founders.

Ballhatchet (who designed and assembled those very first units) and the Yoto team turned to Heirloom to make the card-driven player more scalable, adding greater scope for accessing content without ever letting users fall down the rabbit hole of screen addiction. The utter simplicity of the original – two buttons, a low-resolution screen, card slot and inbuilt speaker – has been retained and refined, with the newest innovation being the addition of a navigation wheel, the ‘Green Button’, to aid discovery.

Featuring softer corners and radii, the Yoto Player is still friendly and lightly anthropomorphic without dipping too much into a cartoon-like creature. ‘It’s a fine line,’ Ballhatchet admits, ‘we didn’t want to be a character, but we wanted to be characterful.’ ‘With a grown-up product, you’re often forced to be quite serious,’ admits Godfrey Wood. Yoto’s primary colours, chunky buttons and satisfying click mechanisms are anything but, although behind the simplicity of the interface is a sophisticated content creation operation.

Yoto was originally pitched at three- to five-year-olds, although the upper age range has crept up to eight and beyond as the device and audience have grown up. Yoto has found that children favour hanging onto to their players rather than age out of it, and its dual functionality as a straightforward Bluetooth speaker certainly helps.

So too does the impressive roster of content Yoto has built up over the years, from classic audiobooks to new releases, in-house commissions and Yoto Daily, a pint-sized podcast aimed squarely at the target audience with songs, facts of the day and a breezy disposition. Nearly 3,000 episodes have been made. It’s a little cultish, but in a good way, with many of the tech company’s family members having been willing guinea pigs for the devices from the outset, feeding back into what works and what doesn’t.

Most importantly, the Yoto Player is substantially more palatable than letting a young child loose on the platforms to find content themselves. With screen-driven parenting is becoming more and more socially unacceptable, Yoto wants to provide a true alternative.

The Player is a true 360-degree product in the way that it is shaped – no one way is up. A wedge shape on one side allows the player to be angled and flipping it turns on the nightlight. Ballhatchet admits that the Green Dial is a ‘big bet’ innovation, one that triggered fierce internal debate, along with back and forth with the team at Heirloom.

In short, the youngest users tend to access content via the smartcards, which don’t contain any media but act as a switch to listen to a story or audiobook. Player can store this media on the 64GB of internal memory, and whilst earlier iterations allowed this library to be explored via the two buttons, the new dial makes for more intuitive navigation.

As Godfrey Wood reiterates, ‘it’s a menu, not a screen’, and time was spent making sure the graphics, icons, and reactive animations weren’t too ‘sticky’. ‘Animation, etc., is counter to the goal [of the device],’ he clarifies. ‘We consciously didn’t want to make [something like] a fidget spinner,’ says Ballhatchet, ‘there’s a happy friction, but you can’t scroll infinitely…. Our original Kickstarter manifesto stated that we wouldn’t employ manipulative tricks.’

Avoiding the urge to weaponize distraction is definitely counter to the ambitions of most tech companies. ‘Our key metric is weekly active families,’ Ballhatchet says, explaining how family engagement is the goal, making the Yoto Player a part of a supervised routine rather than a digital babysitter. Parents control the set-up and content via a separate app and while the simple card system lays out the available content is easy-to-understand ways for smaller children, there’s also the ability to create personalised custom audio – reading a bedtime story, for example.

All this is supported by the newest addition to the Yoto family, the Yoto Mini, which gets the same Green Dial navigation system, alongside physical changes that enhance its tactile feel and the same playful aesthetic. Reference points included classic toys from the American giant Fisher-Price, while the timeless look and feel of the hardware cloaks all the heavy lifting done by the software and the back-end content team. Detail design extends all the way to the USB cables, with grips designed to be friendly to small fingers (as well as a little winking face Easter egg).

‘We definitely leave room for joy,’ Ballhatchet confirms. ‘The designs aren’t austere,’ Godfrey Wood acknowledges, ‘it’s one of the rare kids’ products that adults are happy to have in their home.’ According to Ballhatchet, ‘it was a conscious decision to create something that endures long after the kids have grown-up.’

‘What’s unique about working with Yoto on future products is that it becomes a big discussion about morals,’ says Lorberbaum, ‘often the designer is the one representing the human side, but here it is Yoto. It’s very rare that a start-up makes a decision to follow a simple strategy so early on.’

The more tech-savvy can eke out a little more from their Yoto devices. A burgeoning community and the occasional hacks have surfaced, allowing cards to carry routines like toothbrush timers or tap into plane identification software. You could even create a card that turns the speaker into a radio after the children have gone to bed.

Yoto Player and Yoto Mini excel at their primary purpose of opening up worlds of imagination. Yet like all the best technology design, the hardware has longevity baked in, helping ensure a long lifecycle and flexible future use.

Available to order now from UK.YotoPlay.com, @YotoPlay

Heirloom.co, @h_e_i_r_l_o_o_m

For an artist most associated with her renderings of the natural world – flowers, landscapes and bones – it is perhaps nonintuitive to consider architecture as a constant in Georgia O’Keeffe’s career.

Indeed, ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture,’ which opens today at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is the first exhibition concerned exclusively with the artist’s relationship to the built environment. As the show ably demonstrates through an assembly of 36 paintings spanning almost 40 years of O’Keeffe’s career, architecture was a fundamental and perennial fascination for this painter-of-flowers.

The show was passionately cultivated by curator Benjamin W. Colman, who developed the concept from the sole O’Keeffe painting in the DIA’s permanent collection: Stables (1932). The work appears in the Barns section of the exhibition, which collects paintings developed mostly in relationship to upstate New York, particularly Lake George, to which O’Keeffe frequently sojourned from the city.

One of the earlier pieces in this section, My Shanty, Lake George (1922), provided an important talking point for O’Keeffe. Her exploration of colour, form and architecture in this painting was, among other things, a response to the sexism and pigeonholing that would attend her long and singular career in an extremely male-dominated profession.

‘I can paint one of those dismal-coloured paintings like the men [e.g. Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and Paul Strand],’ O’Keeffe said, in a recollection captured by the Phillips Collection, regarding Shanty. ‘I think just for fun I will try – all low-toned and dreary with the tree beside the door.’

‘Dreary’ seems a harsh characterisation for any of the pieces in the show, which continue over two more sections, focused on the architecture of New York and New Mexico, respectively. The works are united in their formality, and perhaps more strictly figurative than some of O’Keeffe’s trademark subjects – as if turning up the volume on the 'objectivity’ aspect of the dialectic she famously outlined between objectivity and abstraction. Nonetheless, even in her imagery of a city undergoing an industrial revolution and hyper-phallic building boom, there is undeniable emotionality and sly yonic detail in paintings like New York Street with Moon (1925) and Abstraction (1926).

The exhibition comes home, appropriately, to the Southwest, where O’Keeffe settled into her New Mexico environs. This includes her Ghost Ranch homestead, whose patio door was a famous point of obsession in her later works. Here, the curators have provided some charming immersive elements, including a 360-degree video panorama of her Ghost Ranch courtyard, and a hands-on drawing area featuring 3D-printed models and midcentury modern furnishings that were hallmarks of O’Keeffe’s eclectic New Mexico living spaces.

This section offers the viewer much opportunity to meditate on O’Keeffe’s sense of place, from The House I Live In (1937), to the tender, bodily details of her various Ranchos Church renderings, to her patio door. ‘That door was what I bought the house for,’ O’Keeffe says in a video at the entrance of the exhibition.

In a final nod to its lingering importance, the exhibition closes out with a black-painted corridor, a gesture to the portal that held such lingering fascination, with a final work Ladder to the Moon (1958) hanging wistfully in the dark, seemingly pointing the way toward the infinite.

‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture’ is on view from 11 September 11, 2026 – 3 January, 2027 at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

There’s an elusive sweet spot in the midst good design, admirable function and inoffensive pricing, and the Romanian car brand Dacia wants to be right in the heart of it. Over the past two decades, with close collaboration from Renault, Dacia has built itself a rock-solid reputation as a no-nonsense bargain brand.

Models like the ultra-compact Spring city car, no-frills Sandero, seven-seater Jogger, and the perennial favourite Duster crossover have all brought a robust and spirited functionalism to the market. Upcoming models include the more premium mid-size Striker, while last year’s self-consciously cute Hipster Concept showed there’s also scope for the brand to downscale further.

Announced in 2024, the Dacia Bigster is the company’s first push into the ‘proper; SUV market. Available in two flavours of hybrid, the Bigster is one of the most literal car names you’ll find. Measuring 4.57m long, 1.81m wide and 1.71m high, the Bigster is a strict five-seater (Dacia’s seven-seat option remains the Jogger) with chunky, almost Tonka-toy like styling.

It’s big, but not vast (certainly not in the realm of American XXXL SUVs) and therefore avoids all the pitfalls of navigating such a car betwixt town and country – you won’t be hated in the former and narrow country lanes aren’t too much of a trial.

We spent a week with the Bigster, during which time Dacia’s attention to detail really stood out, as did the car’s abilities and interior features. Not all Bigster’s have four-wheel-drive, but the high ride height and dedicated terrain modes make these variants pretty handy off the beaten track. This is always nice to have and in the Bigster’s case, it’s functionality that follows form, emphasising that the black plastic clad wheel arches and business-like bumpers aren’t just for show.

In fact, inside and out there is a pretty heavy concentration of black plastic. Dacia is one of the few car companies who commit to the bit and make a virtue of the cheap and durable material, refused to dress it up with soft touch surfaces or unnecessary trim. What you see is what you get, a rare honesty that really shines through.

The interior layout is also impressive. Yes, there’s a central touch screen display but it doesn’t dominate the dashboard and it’s accompanied by physical buttons for the heating controls. There’s also a built-in smartphone dock, made slightly redundant by the inclusion of Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. The digital dash is clear with consistent graphics, backed up by physical buttons – not haptic switches – on the steering wheel.

So far, so good. You also get regular air vents that can be moved by hand, not given over to servo motors buried deep in the dash and accessible only via the screen. It’s all very much on brand for a company that makes a virtue of building ‘cars for real life’.

Usually, real life means getting from A to B without fussing too much over things like dynamic abilities and other performance metrics. It's absolutely not a criticism of the Bigster to say that it's a fairly forgettable thing to drive, with great ride and economy on the positive side. It simply works.

Inevitably, the innate value of such simplicity has become a form of signifier just like any other brand. Dacia is the Uniqlo of carmakers, starting off as a welcome distraction from excessive label-consciousness but eventually circling round into an identifiable brand all of its own.

It should be pointed out that this pathway only works when the product truly does its job. Just as the Duster has become shorthand for canny, tasteful, inconspicuous consumption, the Bigster looks set to follow suit.

The interior volume is flexible and generous, while another brand differentiator – practical thinking – is in evidence throughout, from clips and storage compartments to modular roof bars, and quirky features like a second room armrest that transforms into a backpack.

Dacia is also on trend with its optional Sleep Pack system, which gives the Bigster a leg-up in the burgeoning world of car camping. Accessories include a rear bed system for the load deck and an awning. All this and more makes the Bigster one of the friendlier, more accessible and acceptable iterations of modern SUV culture. Look after it well, and it’s the kind of car that only gets better with age, as time and experience add a little patina to the palette while the basic functionality remains undimmed.

Dacia Bigster, from £25,215, Dacia.co.uk, @Dacia_UK

If you want to admire one of the landmark architectural collaborations on show in Paris this week, you’ll have to look down. Opting for a more experimental ‘passion project’ to launch in conjunction with this season’s Maison & Objet, local practice RDAI, led by Denis Montel and Julia Capp, teamed with Canadian rug manufacturer Creative Matters on a product of an altogether different nature.

Frequent partners on RDAI’s commercial contracts, both sides have harnessed their artistic sensibilities to create Zoometry, a collection of six fine rugs, now on display at Galerie Mouvements Modernes, in a classical arcade building overlooking Palais-Royal.

The (seemingly) abstract compositions represent a first for both sides. In his work at RDAI, interior architect Johan Thuillot had been exploring ways to mimic the structure of living creatures. When the opportunity presented itself, he says, ‘The idea was not to design a carpet with a bird on it.’ Instead he zoomed in. Using the cutting-edge (and appropriately named) parametric 3D modelling software Grasshopper, he replicated the microscopic workings of Earth’s tiniest creatures, flattening their biology in a pattern that could be rendered in Tibetan wool and Chinese silk.

He shared his layouts with Anna Panosyan and Clémence Hardelay, textile artists from Creative Matters, who suggested corresponding colours, gently graduated to suggest movement, depth and the way pigments intensify to attract prey. The partners edited back and forth for nearly two years, giving new credence to the word ‘micromanagement’.

Panosyan refers to the final creations as ‘couture’. She points out the masterful colour gradation in the Coral rug, and the moire effect created by the contour lines in Butterfly 03, drawn to mimic the curvature of a wing poised for flight. ‘We concentrated on just a few elements but pushed them to the max,’ she says. Set out on tables at the gallery, laser-engraved glass blocks demystify the process: the delicate structure of butterfly wings and spiderwebs twist and flow in 3D when viewed from the side, while the bird’s-eye view encapsulates the 2D facsimile. The show’s centrepiece is the Butterfly 02, laid out on a long plinth, its hundreds of rectangular cells reminiscent of the creatures’ trademark ocelli, or ‘eyespots’.

‘These pieces are for life,’ says Panosyan. ‘People can keep them for their children and grandchildren.’ At 35kg, they are deceptively heavy, yet they couldn’t withstand the foot traffic of a hotel or retail space. Creative Matters had to search beyond their usual mill in Nepal to recruit artisans versed in a specific Tibetan knot. They worked three or four astride on a single 3x2 metre rug, completing no more than 7cm, or 400 knots, each day. Each rug’s total density is 1.8 million knots. ‘It’s not what we usually do with our more durable hand-tufting,’ says Panosyan. An artist by trade, she says she felt an enormous sense of creative freedom on Zoometry. ‘You can sense some imperfections from the hand, which adds dimension to the product,’ she says. ‘You can feel this is handmade.’

Zoometry is on view at Mouvements Modernes until 23 September 2026.

Jardins du Palais Royal, 11 bis rue de Beaujolais, 75001 Paris

This new residential project from Dallas-based Smitharc architecture + interiors continues the studio’s run of elegant contemporary houses in the area – see this house in Greenway Parks, the St Andrews Residence and Griggs Residence for earlier examples.

The Northaven Residence follows an established template of a flexible pavilion that combines a strong sense of transparency with careful planning to ensure privacy for the occupants – from outside and from each other – as well as a baked-in longevity that’ll allow for evolution and growth over the years.

The client is a professional mother with three young sons, and the tailored brief not only gives the family space to grow over the decades to come but also provides the children with their own ‘zone’. This takes the form of a dedicated upper-floor wing containing three identical en-suite bedrooms and a separate sitting area, raised up and away from the living room (and the mother’s room).

These rooms are reached by a striking sculptural oak and steel staircase, with a satin brass railing. At the top of the stairs, a circular rooflight, or oculi, illuminates the curved and polished plaster walls. From the outside, a corner window reveals the form of the stair, treating like a vignette in a case.

Everything else takes place on the L-shaped ground floor, with architectural elements that spread into the generous one-acre lot. A large, covered terrace adjoins the outdoor pool, which overlooks the sloping, wooded garden. There’s plenty of space for everything from cookouts to soccer parties, with lawns scattered with mature oak trees.

Directly beneath the boys’ rooms you’ll find the triple garage, utility area, gymnasium and a second snug, while the entrance foyer with the grand stair serves as the dividing space between utility, sleeping and the living spaces.

These are collected together in one long linear double-height space, a Great Room with banks of windows to the north – the public-facing façade - and south across over the pool. A separate formal dining room adjoins the kitchen and pantry, with a kitchen table and island unit adjoining the main living space.

Tall custom-built metal screens provide separation in the space. The covered terrace is set beneath a spectacular raised roof which oversails the living room and creating views through the entire structure.

The principal bedroom suite is housed in another wing, accessed through a discrete opening in the monumental limestone clad walls. This is treated like private sanctuary, with a generous walk-in closet and a large private bathroom with a view into its own walled-off area of the garden.

In total, the living spaces run to a generous 4,500 square feet. In addition to the extensive use of Texas limestone, the materials palette includes plaster, white oak and cypress. Despite the open expanses of space and the large windows, the house still offers plenty of places to retreat into.

Although there is a clear mid-century modern influence running throughout, the Northaven Residence is no retro throwback. Instead, it offers a luxurious expression of a well-defined brief with a consistent aesthetic approach.

Smitharc.com, @Smitharcarchitects