A Design Landmark Reimagined as a Retreat (2024)

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The Berkshires’ Tourists Hotel Opens Rental Houses

The back windows of Tourists, a renovated 46-room motor lodge that opened in North Adams, Mass., in 2018, overlook 80 acres of Berkshires forest land. Now, a foot trail winds through those woods, connecting the hotel to two neighboring houses in the town’s Blackinton Historic District, a former mill community. Both accommodations — one sleeps up to 11, the other six — were restored for Tourists Homes, a new offshoot that allows larger groups to book individual houses. “As a joke we call them the mullet houses — business in the front, party in the back — because [we preserved the] 1860s fronts but we gave the backs all the benefits of contemporary design,” says Tourists co-founder Ben Svenson. Similar to the company’s original property, both houses embody a retro, chalet-inspired aesthetic (each has a wood-burning stove) and are furnished with bespoke pieces made by local carpenters (the larger house has an oversize round Douglas fir table for family-style dining) and vintage gems curated by the interior designer Julie Pearson (the smaller house comes with an original Rhodes Mark 1 piano). The back decks of both homes offer scenic views of Mount Williams and Mount Prospect. All houseguests get access to the hotel’s pool and community events, including a free concert series featuring visiting musicians who play in exchange for room nights. The two Tourists homes are available to book now (there’s a three-night minimum for the small house, a four-night minimum for the larger), along with a third house, a former five-room B&B, which the Tourists team plans to renovate in the winter. From $895 a night, touristswelcome.com.

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A Line of New Bags From LeSportsac and the Philadelphia-Based Brand Yowie

Before Shannon Maldonado founded Yowie, her Philadelphia-based design shop and boutique hotel, she was a student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in the early aughts collecting colorful, functional LeSportsac nylon totes and handbags, drawn to their “sporty but chic quality.” Now Maldonado has collaborated with LeSportsac on a collection of nine new bags. The first three — a cherry red oversize hobo, an acid yellow cross-body tote and a spherical black bucket bag — are available today. The bags represent new shapes for the 50-year-old brand, all made with its signature ripstop fabric. A trained apparel designer, Maldonado drew inspiration from other sources that influenced her decades ago — Marc by Marc Jacobs accessories, ’80s- and ’90s-era photos of off-duty models, and vintage Prada and Miu Miu editorials — for a line that captures both a sense of nostalgia and a decidedly modern energy. From $95, lesportsac.com.

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Louise Bourgeois Sculptures on Display in Rome’s Galleria Borghese

In November 2020, Francesca Cappelletti started her new role as director of the Galleria Borghese, the Rome museum that houses a collection of Renaissance-era Berninis and Caravaggios assembled by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, secretary to the Pope, in the early 1600s. With the museum closed to the public during the pandemic, Cappelletti had plenty of time to explore the less-famous works in the institution’s storage, unearthing pieces like a 1613 canvas depicting Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, by Lavinia Fontana, the Italian Mannerist painter from Bologna who was trained by her father, Prospero Fontana. Cappelletti says the discovery inspired her not just to bring painters like Fontana out of storage but to highlight modern-day women artists in the context of the palazzo’s historic collection and its extensive English-style gardens. Last week the museum inaugurated an annual series that will showcase work by contemporary female masters. “Louise Bourgeois: Unconscious Memories” features 20 pieces from the French American artist, including her early marble sculptures of carved body parts and “Spider” (1996), one of her monumental bronze works, which has been installed in the Giardino della Meridiana, a part of the museum’s garden that’s rarely open to the public. “Louise Bourgeois: Unconscious Memories” is on view at the Galleria Borghese, Rome, through Sept. 15; galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it.