THIS 200 YEAR-OLD STONE HOUSE IS NOT WHAT YOU'D IMAGINE INSIDE

This 200-year-old stone house in Linescio, Switzerland looks like ruin outside, yes? It IS, more or less until you go inside where a spacious modern interior has been “inserted”. The Swiss firm of Buchner Bründler Architekten renovated the centuries-old building into a summer home that boasts a clean and minimalist light-filled interior. Since it will only be used in the summer a heating system or additional insulation wasn’t necessary but a minimalist fireplace was added on the ground floor. The house features high, folding shutters that open up to maximize its natural cooling. A small wooden extension that features concrete elements was built on too. Reclaimed spaces are my favorites and this one looks like it just might last 500 more years.

(via Inhabitat)

HAPPY ONCE-IN-A-CENTURY PI DAY! (SO, PIZZA HUT OR IHOP?)

Pi Day was dreamed up 27 years ago to celebrate 3.14 on 3/14, but this year the geek dial got turnt up! Until 2115, this will be an only exact match for pi’s first 10 digits. 3.141592653. Twice at 9:26:53, here are there are two –no, three!– opportunities to celebrate… physicist Larry Shaw organized the earliest known Pi Day celebration in 1988 and they’re going old school and celebrating 1:59 PM. What do most nerds do? Duh. Eat pie. (How about fruit in the AM, pizza in the PM?) What is it about pi that makes geeks freak? The number is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. And as an added bonus— because it’s Albert Einstein‘s birthday– 2015 marks the 100th anniversary of his theory of relativity! It has been calculated out to more than 13 trillion digits with no end in sight, but here’s a site that has one million digits of pi. And here’s a nice chunk of pi, disappearing off into infinity… 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609

(via NBC News)

SO, TAKING A QUOKKA SELFIE IS A "THING" NOW IN AUSTRALIA...

A Quokka is a small Australian macropod that no matter what, always looks like it’s smiling. Apparently, taking selfies with these cute little creatures is a “thing” in Australia right now. Who knew? Well, after looking at these pics, who wouldn’t…?

HEY, WHAT SMELLS?: 7 NEW CELEBRITY FRAGRANCES FOR 2015

I can't take any credit for these, but if you're in the market for a new signature fragrance that captures the moment we are living through, Bill Maher's marketing team is trying out a few new ads. Honestly, some look like they might stink –or at the very least get you kicked out of an awards banquet. I have to say, I am a little partial to "Inevitable" –but to the GOP it must smell like napalm in the morning.

19 AMAZING STREET PHOTOS OF NEW YORK CITY IN THE 70S

I was a teenager in Texas during all of it, so I missed out on the New York City of the 1970s. It was a very different place than where I live today. The Bowery, now lined with million dollar apartments, lived up to it’s infamous name by hosting much of the city’s illicit activities. Dealers and hookers worked pretty openly in the now-santitized Times Square. Mid-decade the city went through a HUGE final crisis, much like Detroit has been experiencing lately. In ’77, a city-wide blackout plunged Gotham into chaos after the power went out for a full 24 hours. By the end of the decade, the city saw 1,814 homicides, three times what it is today — while the population declined to just over 7 million, down a million from the previous decade. Today, on the face of it, people would LONG to return to a time when the city was cheaper, but these grim stats are a grim reminder that is was a tough town. Granted, there were exciting things happening too: Andy Warhol’s Factory, Saturday Night Live in their heyday, Studio 54 and CBGB‘s thrived in a climate of sexual freedom and wild creativity. But in these pictures, none of that good, or bad, is apparent. Just street life –like the great 70s anthem says:

Street life / You can run away from time / Street life / For a nickel, for a dime Street life / But you better not get old / Street life / Or you’re gonna feel the cold

Facing Southwest to Fourteenth Street from Third Avenue. Photo by Bill Ricco

42nd Street at Seventh Avenue, facing Northwest, 1970

14th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues, facing East, 1976. Photo by Eugene Gannon

Mulberry Street at Hester, facing North, 1975. Photo by Nick DeWolf

Eighth Avenue at 41st Street, facing Northeast, 1978. Photo by Tony Smull

Madison Avenue at 64th Street, facing South, 1979. Photo by Alan Benjamin

West End Avenue at 79th Street, facing North, 1979

Northeast corner of Delancey and Bowery, c.1978. Photo by Manel Armengol

68th and Broadway, facing Northeast, 1980

Lafayette Street at Bleecker, facing North, 1976. Screen grab from the film “Marathon Man”

Ninth Avenue at 56th Street, facing South, 1979

Sixth Avenue at 27th Street, 1978. Photo by Manel Armengol

Hell’s Kitchen, 1973. Photo by Paul Mones

Sixth Avenue facing South from 59th Street

Southwest corner of 74th and Broadway, the storefront was located inside the Ansonia. Early 1970s

July 4th, 1976 – Bicentennial celebration in New York Harbor. Photo by Steven Lindner

Northeast Corner of 14th Street at 7th Avenue, 1972. Photo by Lionel Martinez

Times Square night in 1970. Photo by James Wolcott

(via Vintage Everyday)

REAL ESTATE PORN: BLACK DESERT HOUSE

The desert is always a stark setting for any modern architecture to stand out but Black Desert House was conceived to disappear as a mere shadow cast across the boulders. Situated in Yucca Valley, it offers the ultimate desert experience –immersion into the timelessness of the California desert panorama. From the looks of these pictures here, it’s in one of those architectural settings that make it impossible to take a bad picture. By day, it shelters like a cave with all of the modern conveniences and at by night it seems to disappear into darkness. The simple geometry of the design minimizes any distractions, while floor-to-ceilings walls eliminate indoor-outdoor distinctions. The sheltered entry courtyard opens to broad view terraces, at an elevation of over 4000 feet. On 2.5 acres, the gated residence has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, and a pool and it’s on the market now, for what seems like a bargain price of $975,000.

AUTHOR KEVIN SESSUMS' LONG, STRANGE TRIP FROM THE VALLEY TO "THE MOUNTAIN"

My old friend, Kevin Sessums could be my older brother. We’ve had similar lives, both being gay, from the south and moving to the big (New York) City at a young age. But he’s honestly had a FAR more glamorous life than I (I’m not being falsely modest) and he’s had to be MUCH braver than I could ever be…

On his 53rd birthday he woke up in the hotel room he kept at the Chateau Marmont in LA, wondering how he would get through his interview with Hugh Jackman. For years he had interviewed everyone from Madonna to Courtney Love and everyone in between, but that hardly matter a blip as he knew his life was starting to unravel. We know this because he’s laid it all out in his new memoir, I Left It on the Mountain. I’ve honestly not read enough of it to give you a good review, but the Daily Mailwas doing their dishes in it last week. Here’s what they wrote:

Sessums was one of a few celebrity interviewers who was treated like an insider by stars while writing for Andy Warhol’s Interview, Vanity Fair in the 1990s, as well as later interviews for the Daily Beast, Allure and Parade.

Michael J. Fox discovered the magnitude of Sessums’ sexual obsessions after discovering a piece of paper the author accidentally left behind during an interview with every written word being sexual: ‘P****. D***. C***. F***’.

At an Oscar after-party in 1995, Tony Curtis was checking out Sessums and confessed that he once had a crush on Yul Brynner.

‘I think that’s why you’re making me feel so odd. You kinda look like him. I haven’t slept with a man in decades, but the night is young’, Curtis told him.

Daniel Radcliffe, who became a star through the Harry Potter films, revealed how ‘more collegial and camp and…well, let’s face it: gay’ – working in the theatre was versus making the Harry Potter films.

He said: ‘For a lot of straight guys and I know I’m guilty of it sometimes. When you know a gay guy has a crush on you it is the most flattering thing.

‘Yeah, I’m a fag hag, to use your term.

‘I know I definitely caught it. Absolutely. My mom was a casting director and my dad was a literary agent and I was surrounded by gay men from a very young age. And I was the only boy in my class at school who had that kind of relationship with gay men.

‘That’s one thing Harry Potter has done if nothing else. It has restored the reputation of the English boarding school. It has made it something other than a hotbed of sexuality.’

Pretty juicy, huh? Granted, they picked out the bits a Daily Mail audience is after, but the book isn’t all celeb gossip, Kevin also talks openly openly about LOTS of anonymous sex, his HIV Positive diagnosis and his descent into addiction. And finally his spiritual redemption that he found while climbing to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. It’s been a rough few years and it would be a tough story to tell, even to a close friend but he’s told the world now, which after asking celebs to do their dirty laundry in public for years, is kind of fair play.

Kevin and I first met X thousand years ago while both working at Vanity Fair, but most recently when he first got into town about ten days ago, we had breakfast at SoHo House to catch up. He lives in San Francisco now, the editor of the glossy quarterly, FourTwoNinemagazine. His latest is the “Conceptual Issue” and he was here to promote it. He asked me to do something for it a few months back, but after the artist Joseph Kosuth turned in 10 pages instead of 6, I got bumped at the last minute. No hard feelings – we are working on something for his next issue. When you’ve worked in magazines for years, as I once did, you know how it goes, and there’s ALWAYS another issue –well, until there’s not, which has been increasingly the case of late. Kevin was in a whirlwind of activity while in New York giving talks, doing interviews promoting the book (he was on Watch What Happens Live as the bartender last week and Jane Lynch asked for an autograph copy, btw) Believe it or not, he was also finalizing the magazine we held last night at the party to celebrate the James Franco issue (the straight James interviews the gay Franco… I know. THAT one everyone will be reading and talking about…) Anyway, I was lucky enough to have Kevin take me through the mag from cover to cover. He, the proud, and exhausted, editor throwing out asides as he flipped: 

“…here’s a Charles Busch original playlet…” “Amy Fine Collins and her daughter, Flora. LOVE them…” “this fashion story that made no sense, so I wrote the head and deck to make it sexy. He’s cruising now…” 

It was a fun flip through… and it’s a really good issue, although, I think it might have been made 15% better had that page-hog Joseph Kosuth just stuck to the assignment.

You can get FourTwoNine here and I Left It On The Mountain, here.

With Mr. Sessums in NYC: We dropped into Vitra to get a pic taken after breakfasting at SoHo House where no pictures are allowed.

STEEL MASTERS JOHN CHAMBERLAIN & JEAN PROUVÉ AT GAGOSIAN

Gagosian New York, along with with Galerie Patrick Seguin in Paris, just opened a dual show worthy of a museum with works by American artist John Chamberlain and French architect and designer Jean Prouvé. These two twentieth century innovators have used metal to a new potential in their respective fields –art and design. Large- and small-scale sculptures by Chamberlain are juxtaposed with two prefabricated houses and key architectural models by Prouvé.

“Every time I turn around I see more openings for the material to do something else.” –John Chamberlain

Chamberlain began to create his “crushed” metal sculptures from industrial detritus during the late 1950s. Again and again he returned to metal car components such as bumpers and hoods, which he dubbed “art supplies” fusing them into multi-colored compositions.

“It seemed to me that sheet steel offered unlimited possibilities: cut up, then bent, rolled, and welded, it let you create all the profiles you needed for specific purposes, from straight lines to angles to curves.” –Jean Prouvé

Prouvé is widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s most influential industrial designers creating furniture for the home, office, and classroom —as well as prefab houses, building components and façades—for more than six decades. He applied industrial principles used in the making of furniture to his architecture of the postwar reconstruction and vice versa.

This dazzlingly installed show pairs these two giants of the 20th century in obvious and unexpected ways within Gagosian‘s huge West 24th Street space. The exhibit runs through April 4. See it if you can.

13 AMAZING DESIGNS FOR A NEW LONDON BRIDGE

London Bridge is being built, not falling down. Well, not THAT London Bridge but a new one from Nine Elms to Pimlico. Hundreds of submissions from around the world poured in for this bridge competition in London and of 74 imaginative, striking, and offbeat designs were selected to advance to the next round of eliminations. I’ve culled those down to a baker’s dozen. The pedestrian bridge will connect two growing neighborhoods on opposite sides of the Thames. The designs will be judged by the people who know the area best —a panel of residents. Submissions from up to four teams will be shortlisted for the next round of competition, where they will further detail their concepts. The council plans to announce the panel’s decision—and the chosen contestants—later this month. I vote for the waterfall bridge, which must use the river water in circulation. To see the rest of of the designs, go here. 

TARGET SHOPPING EDITION: WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO MAKE SENSE?

(via Imgur)