Luxury by Previously
Collecting
Five pieces Alexander Calder hammered by hand for his mother, his sister and his niece — led by a circa-1940 silver necklace estimated at $100,000–$150,000 — headline Bonhams' November 19 sale in New York, a group the house values at nearly $300,000.
A different world
Luxury culture
MB&F's MusicMachine 3 puts two hand-built Swiss music boxes inside a TIE fighter. Ninety-nine were made, and every part of the spaceship shape is doing acoustic work.
Luxury culture
Marc Newson's Cabinet of Curiosities opens flat, hands you 19 leather cubes and more than 1,000 ways to arrange them. Forty were made, at $243,000 — and the real exhibit is whatever you own.
Luxury culture
Belmond's Britannic Explorer turns restored 1980s carriages into a travelling collection of British making — shell-work mirrors, hand-dyed textiles, a dining car run like a potting shed — and charges from £14,200 a cabin for three nights inside it.
Luxury culture
Rockstar and West Coast Customs have brought Vice City into a London department store with a £1 million asking price.
Luxury culture
Julien's opened bidding and published the full catalogs on November 9 for its December 7–9 auctions at Rosewood Abu Dhabi — Jackson's Motown 25 glove and the 'Thriller' jacket on one side, Diana's gowns and her landmine-walk loafers on the other.
Luxury culture
Abu Dhabi's restored 924 brings back the painted police markings of a royal escort car. Its next appointment is a Dubai festival, then a museum.
Luxury culture
A 5.6-metre, four-motor electric limousine from BYD's luxury brand, unveiled in Abu Dhabi: coach doors, umbrellas in the doors, jade in the vents, and a reported $310,000 pre-sale price.
Watches & craft
He sold it for $720,000. It sold again for $621,000. On Sunday it was on his wrist at Gillette Stadium — and nobody has explained how it got there.
Luxury culture
On November 18, Sotheby's sells the Blaquier-Arrieta collection — twelve paintings, half a century out of view, expected to reach $450 million together, led by a Van Gogh estimated at $180 million and a Cézanne at $120 million.
Luxury culture
The wine pairing is the thing being replaced. Handshake Speakeasy — No. 1 in the world in 2024 — builds the drinks at CUT for one night, Wednesday, November 18.
Watches & craft
CHF 92 million ($112.3 million) across one Geneva weekend. Every lot sold. 24 world records. And the top lot belonged to an independent maker.
Luxury culture
André 3000 is the new face of Moncler's Re/Icons campaign — and he scored the film himself, with fresh music that marks his first new offering in over a year.
Luxury culture
Hong Kong paid €100,000 for the final lot — an 850-gram twin white truffle travelling with large-format Barolo, Asti and Moscato and a 20-kilo panettone — at Grinzane Cavour Castle. The 27th Alba World Auction raised €545,800 for charity — its second-biggest total ever.
Watches & craft
Phillips catalogued F.P. Journe's diamond-set Vagabondage III at CHF 350,000 to 700,000. On Saturday in Geneva the room paid CHF 5,057,000 for it — and a steel Patek from 1945 tore up the sale's biggest estimate right behind it.
Watches & craft
Geneva's jury handed the Aiguille d'Or — the top prize at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie, watchmaking's Oscars — to an independent maker who builds about 50 watches a year, for a flyback chronograph he developed entirely in-house.
Luxury culture
Twenty-eight months in Tennessee whiskey barrels, a blend with the house's extra añejo, and a white-and-gold gift box at $149.99 — the limited bottle from Jordan's tequila house had to clear the founders' own tasting first.
Luxury culture
The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2026 list put exactly one United States restaurant in the top 50: New York's Atomix at No. 11 — and its chef, Junghyun 'JP' Park, also took the Chefs' Choice Award. Spain's Asador Etxebarri is the new No. 1.
Watches & craft
The only shiny pink gold Régence dial ever made just sold in Geneva for CHF 8,680,500 — after opening at five million.
Luxury culture
The first abalone shell marquetry in Rolls-Royce history, built as one man's tribute to his wife — 53 pieces of shell in a single bird.
Luxury culture
Gordon Pointe, the Donahue family's peninsula estate at the end of Gordon Drive in Port Royal, is back on the market at $195 million: 5.39 acres, 722 feet of private Gulf beach, a 231-foot yacht basin on Naples Bay, and the most irreplaceable address in Naples, Florida.
Luxury culture
Tyler Perry's Puerto Rico deed tells the real story: $25 million recorded for a Dorado Beach Estates house that sold for $40 million in 2022 — while his Beverly Hills chateau asks $57 million and his Wyoming lodge just dropped to $36 million.
Luxury culture
Petrossian's Special Reserve Kaluga Huso Hybrid is the Paris house's rarest grade of the Beluga stand-in America can actually buy — $565 for a 30-gram tin, climbing to $17,952 by the kilo, served cold with a mother-of-pearl spoon and nothing metal anywhere near it.
Luxury culture
MBL’s 101 X-Treme MKIII is a $444,900-a-pair omnidirectional loudspeaker system from Berlin — four towers, 2,170 pounds, bass to 17 Hz — and The Absolute Sound named its Vienna debut the Best Soundstage of the show.
The collection
The craft, the engineering and the ideas in our coverage — all in one place. Find your way in.
127 stories
The Standard
Five pieces Alexander Calder hammered by hand for his mother, his sister and his niece — led by a circa-1940 silver necklace estimated at $100,000–$150,000 — headline Bonhams' November 19 sale in New York, a group the house values at nearly $300,000.
Read the story: Calder Made These Jewels for His Own Family. They're for Sale for the First Time in Nearly 70 Years ↗The Standard
MB&F's MusicMachine 3 puts two hand-built Swiss music boxes inside a TIE fighter. Ninety-nine were made, and every part of the spaceship shape is doing acoustic work.
Read the story: The Starfighter That Plays Its Own Soundtrack ↗The Standard
Marc Newson's Cabinet of Curiosities opens flat, hands you 19 leather cubes and more than 1,000 ways to arrange them. Forty were made, at $243,000 — and the real exhibit is whatever you own.
Read the story: The Louis Vuitton Trunk That Becomes a Personal Museum ↗The Standard
Belmond's Britannic Explorer turns restored 1980s carriages into a travelling collection of British making — shell-work mirrors, hand-dyed textiles, a dining car run like a potting shed — and charges from £14,200 a cabin for three nights inside it.
Read the story: The Sleeper Train Built Around British Craft ↗The Standard
Rockstar and West Coast Customs have brought Vice City into a London department store with a £1 million asking price.
Read the story: The GTA VI Cheetah Is for Sale at Selfridges ↗The Standard
Julien's opened bidding and published the full catalogs on November 9 for its December 7–9 auctions at Rosewood Abu Dhabi — Jackson's Motown 25 glove and the 'Thriller' jacket on one side, Diana's gowns and her landmine-walk loafers on the other.
Read the story: Bidding Opens on Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' Jacket and Princess Diana's Gowns ↗The Standard
Abu Dhabi's restored 924 brings back the painted police markings of a royal escort car. Its next appointment is a Dubai festival, then a museum.
Read the story: The Porsche That Led a Queen's Motorcade ↗The Standard
A 5.6-metre, four-motor electric limousine from BYD's luxury brand, unveiled in Abu Dhabi: coach doors, umbrellas in the doors, jade in the vents, and a reported $310,000 pre-sale price.
Read the story: Yangwang's Altior Takes the Electric Limousine Fight to Rolls-Royce ↗The Craft
He sold it for $720,000. It sold again for $621,000. On Sunday it was on his wrist at Gillette Stadium — and nobody has explained how it got there.
Read the story: Tom Brady's $720,000 Roast Watch Is Back on His Wrist ↗The Standard
On November 18, Sotheby's sells the Blaquier-Arrieta collection — twelve paintings, half a century out of view, expected to reach $450 million together, led by a Van Gogh estimated at $180 million and a Cézanne at $120 million.
Read the story: Sotheby's Sells the $450 Million Blaquier-Arrieta Collection in New York ↗The Standard
The wine pairing is the thing being replaced. Handshake Speakeasy — No. 1 in the world in 2024 — builds the drinks at CUT for one night, Wednesday, November 18.
Read the story: CUT Las Vegas Hands Dinner to a World's 50 Best Bar for One Night Only ↗The Craft
CHF 92 million ($112.3 million) across one Geneva weekend. Every lot sold. 24 world records. And the top lot belonged to an independent maker.
Read the story: Phillips Just Ran the Richest Watch Auction in History ↗The Standard
André 3000 is the new face of Moncler's Re/Icons campaign — and he scored the film himself, with fresh music that marks his first new offering in over a year.
Read the story: André 3000 Hid His First New Music in Over a Year Inside a Moncler Campaign ↗The Standard
Hong Kong paid €100,000 for the final lot — an 850-gram twin white truffle travelling with large-format Barolo, Asti and Moscato and a 20-kilo panettone — at Grinzane Cavour Castle. The 27th Alba World Auction raised €545,800 for charity — its second-biggest total ever.
Read the story: A Fungus Priced Like a Diamond ↗The Craft
Phillips catalogued F.P. Journe's diamond-set Vagabondage III at CHF 350,000 to 700,000. On Saturday in Geneva the room paid CHF 5,057,000 for it — and a steel Patek from 1945 tore up the sale's biggest estimate right behind it.
Read the story: The Estimate Was Off by Seven Times ↗The Craft
Geneva's jury handed the Aiguille d'Or — the top prize at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie, watchmaking's Oscars — to an independent maker who builds about 50 watches a year, for a flyback chronograph he developed entirely in-house.
Read the story: Rexhep Rexhepi Beat Every Giant in Watchmaking Tonight ↗The Standard
Twenty-eight months in Tennessee whiskey barrels, a blend with the house's extra añejo, and a white-and-gold gift box at $149.99 — the limited bottle from Jordan's tequila house had to clear the founders' own tasting first.
Read the story: Michael Jordan's Cincoro Just Bottled a Limited Añejo Reserva — and He Tastes Every Batch Himself ↗The Standard
The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2026 list put exactly one United States restaurant in the top 50: New York's Atomix at No. 11 — and its chef, Junghyun 'JP' Park, also took the Chefs' Choice Award. Spain's Asador Etxebarri is the new No. 1.
Read the story: Atomix Is America's Only Seat at the World's Top Table ↗The Craft
The only shiny pink gold Régence dial ever made just sold in Geneva for CHF 8,680,500 — after opening at five million.
Read the story: The Pink Dial Nobody Could Outbid ↗The Standard
The first abalone shell marquetry in Rolls-Royce history, built as one man's tribute to his wife — 53 pieces of shell in a single bird.
Read the story: Nine Months for a Hummingbird ↗The Standard
Gordon Pointe, the Donahue family's peninsula estate at the end of Gordon Drive in Port Royal, is back on the market at $195 million: 5.39 acres, 722 feet of private Gulf beach, a 231-foot yacht basin on Naples Bay, and the most irreplaceable address in Naples, Florida.
Read the story: The $195 Million Peninsula ↗The Standard
Tyler Perry's Puerto Rico deed tells the real story: $25 million recorded for a Dorado Beach Estates house that sold for $40 million in 2022 — while his Beverly Hills chateau asks $57 million and his Wyoming lodge just dropped to $36 million.
Read the story: Tyler Perry Is Selling $93 Million in Mansions and Moving to Puerto Rico ↗The Standard
Petrossian's Special Reserve Kaluga Huso Hybrid is the Paris house's rarest grade of the Beluga stand-in America can actually buy — $565 for a 30-gram tin, climbing to $17,952 by the kilo, served cold with a mother-of-pearl spoon and nothing metal anywhere near it.
Read the story: The $565 Tin ↗The Standard
MBL’s 101 X-Treme MKIII is a $444,900-a-pair omnidirectional loudspeaker system from Berlin — four towers, 2,170 pounds, bass to 17 Hz — and The Absolute Sound named its Vienna debut the Best Soundstage of the show.
Read the story: The $444,900 Loudspeaker That Plays in Every Direction ↗
The Standard
Box seats with a buffet start at €792.75, the best table in the house is a 10th-floor sushi bar, and the famous Sky Bar is open for the NFL without its kitchen.
Read the story: Dinner at the Bernabéu: What NFL Sunday Really Costs ↗
The Standard
On Wynn Resorts' Q3 earnings call, CEO Craig Billings said the company has 'started to doodle' on the 38 acres it owns across Las Vegas Boulevard from Wynn and Encore — land it bought in 2017 for $336 million and has left empty ever since. No project, no design, no timeline. Just the first public thinking about it.
Read the story: Wynn Is Doodling on the Strip's Most Valuable Empty Lot ↗
The Standard
Seventeen years after it opened, XS at Encore went dark for three months and came back rebuilt: 1,200 moving light pendants, gold-mirrored screens, and a four-night reopening run that ends Sunday. The best seat in the house costs more than a car.
Read the story: XS Is Back — and the New Room Is the Headliner ↗
The Standard
In late July 2026 NetJets curtailed new 25-hour card and lease sales and steered new money toward shared ownership. The $215,000 Card275 is still the published price of entry — it just isn't a price a new buyer can pay. Inside: the three doors, the calendar money actually buys, and the arithmetic that closed the easy one.
Read the story: NetJets Closed the Easy Door ↗
The Standard
The red 1991 Honda NSX that Honda kept for Ayrton Senna in Portugal sold at RM Sotheby's London for £871,250, a world auction record for the model.
Read the story: Senna's Hosepipe NSX Sets a World Record ↗
The Standard
A private 40–50 metre yacht costs roughly 12–15% of its purchase price every year to run — crew first, then maintenance, insurance, fuel and a Monaco berth priced like a landlord who is also the judge. The purchase is the down payment.
Read the story: Buy the Yacht. Then Pay for It Every Year. ↗
The Standard
Farfetch, Matches, SSENSE and Net-a-Porter were supposed to own the door to luxury online. The brands took the door back.
Read the story: The Luxury Middlemen Broke ↗
The Standard
Jane Birkin's own prototype made $10.1 million. Underneath it, the ordinary Birkin has quietly lost its markup — and the most standard Birkin of all now resells for exactly what Hermès charges.
Read the story: The Birkin Premium Is Breaking ↗
The Standard
Andrew Crowley brought Sotheby's three stone figures and a paper trail dated 1976. The paper was the problem — its typeface would not exist for another 25 years.
Read the story: The Invoices Were From the Wrong Century ↗
The Craft
Rolex keeps no queue and publishes no wait times. Your name lives in one store's book, the dealer decides who gets each steel Daytona, and the grey market charges you for the years that saves.
Read the story: There Is No Rolex Waiting List ↗
The Craft
A man tried on a ¥46 million Audemars Piguet Royal Oak at Kamekichi in Tokyo's Nakano Broadway and ran out with it on his wrist. Days later the watch came back in a cardboard box — serial number matching, with a handwritten note that said sorry.
Read the story: The ¥46 Million Royal Oak Came Back in the Mail ↗
The Craft
The man who runs Bugatti left the keys in his personal Chiron, the way he always does. A job-seeker drove it off the campus near Zagreb — so Rimac tracked the car's own telemetry in a Porsche 911, fed police its location across Slovenia, and watched Austrian officers arrest the driver at a gas station. Police value the car at about €3 million.
Read the story: Mate Rimac Chased His Own Stolen Chiron Into Austria ↗
The Standard
A gorilla covered in crystals is holding court inside the Wynn — built one silicone dot at a time by Eddy Maniez, a forester from Grasse who turned a trick for protecting fragile cargo on boats into an entire zoo. The crocodile costs €47,000. The gorilla's price? You have to ask.
Read the story: The Gorilla at the Wynn Is Covered in Crystals. So Is the Alligator. ↗
The Standard
A handmade Miami Cuban starts as arithmetic, loses half its gold to a hand file, and takes longer to make than most watches. Inside the bench work behind hip-hop's defining object.
Read the story: The Chain Is a Craft Object ↗
The Standard
Mood boards, fly-in fittings, a $41,000 bag and a resale channel: the NBA tunnel walk runs on stylists, tailoring and logistics. This is the operation behind the fits.
Read the story: The Tunnel Is a Runway With a Supply Chain ↗
The Standard
A PSA 6 just sold for $12,932,000 and a $1,000 card became $12.6 million. At the top of the card market, the cardboard is not the product — the documented chain of hands is.
Read the story: The Jordan–Bryant Card That Sold for $12.9 Million ↗
The Standard
From a $50 single-day ticket to a $31,774 chef's garage that already sold out — the Las Vegas Grand Prix's hospitality ladder, priced from the race's own listings.
Read the story: The Price of Access: A Las Vegas Grand Prix Weekend, Top to Bottom ↗
First Generation
A pressure hull is supposed to be a sphere or a tube — shapes water pressure understands. Triton stretched the sphere sideways into an ellipse, seated nine people inside the acrylic, and got the result certified to 200 metres. The window is the hull.
Read the story: Triton 660/9 AVA: Building a Window the Size of a Room ↗
Handed Down
Only 600 bottles of Romanée-Conti were made in 1945, from vines pulled up straight after the harvest. In October 2018, two of them, from Robert Drouhin's cellar, sold at Sotheby's New York for $558,000 and $496,000 — and the story has moved on since.
Read the story: Romanée-Conti 1945: The Last Vintage From the Old Vines ↗
Handed Down
In Konjic, Bosnia, one family has carved furniture by hand for four generations — through empire, socialism and war. The technique is on UNESCO's heritage list. The furniture, designed with some of Europe's best-known names, is thoroughly contemporary.
Read the story: Zanat: A Bosnian Carving Language Finds a New Generation ↗
Handed Down
Dave Wilson spent five years on a loudspeaker whose drivers sit in separate modules on an aluminium gantry — each adjustable in steps of five microseconds, so every driver's sound reaches your ear at the same instant.
Read the story: Wilson WAMM Master Chronosonic: Timing You Can See ↗
The Path
In Queen Maud Land, where the nearest neighbour is a research station and the season lasts about ten weeks, White Desert set down six composite-fibreglass pods — heated, window-walled, and built to be taken away without leaving a mark.
Read the story: White Desert Echo: Heated Pods at the End of the World ↗
Handed Down
Jean Schlumberger put a diamond bird on an oversized gemstone in 1965 and Tiffany never put it down. Today's workshop assembles each bird from seven hand-made parts — and once a year, builds one that outruns them all.
Read the story: Tiffany Bird on a Rock: The Same Bird, a Different Generation ↗
First Generation
An heirloom usually arrives by inheritance. Thebe Magugu's Heirloom shirt is commissioned instead: send the house a photograph of someone who made you, and it comes back printed into the fabric — living or transitioned, blood or chosen.
Read the story: Thebe Magugu: An Heirloom for the Family You Choose ↗
Handed Down
She has been catching the same silver fish since 1773. The hard part was never the performance — it is 250 years of decisions about what to clean, what to replace, and what to leave exactly as her makers left it.
Read the story: The Silver Swan: Keeping an 18th-Century Machine Alive ↗
The Path
In November 2017 a small walnut panel became the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. The price is a documented fact. Almost everything else about the painting is an argument — and this piece keeps the two apart.
Read the story: Salvator Mundi: What an Auction Result Can Actually Prove ↗
The Path
George Daniels looked at Roger Smith's first pocket watch and sent him away: it looked handmade, and it should have looked created. Smith's answer took five and a half years — and he remade it four times before he dared go back.
Read the story: Roger W. Smith Pocket Watch No. 2: The Audition Remade Four Times ↗
The Path
The Battista is the most powerful car Italy has ever produced, and it is built the slow way — ten people, fourteen work zones and more than a thousand hours of handwork per car, in a converted workshop in Cambiano.
Read the story: Pininfarina Battista: The Atelier Behind an Electric Hyper GT ↗
Handed Down
Baltic's 117-foot custom sloop wears the straight stem, bowsprit and counter stern of a nineteenth-century pilot cutter. Under the teak she is advanced composite, lithium-ion and hydrogeneration — and the judges made her Sailing Yacht of the Year.
Read the story: Perseverance: A Pilot Cutter With a Battery Bank ↗
Handed Down
Joanne Woodward gave her husband a Rolex Daytona with three words engraved on the back. Fifteen years later he handed it to a young man who didn't own a watch — and that unbroken chain of giving is what the world paid for.
Read the story: Paul Newman's Daytona: An Inscription and a Documented Gift ↗
The Path
Pagani asked its best clients what they still wanted, and the answer was less — less weight, less automation, less screen. Answering it took more than four thousand drawings, eight complete prototypes and over six years.
Read the story: Pagani Utopia: Six Years to Make a Simpler Car ↗
Handed Down
A Nakashima commission does not start with a catalogue or a drawing. It starts with a conversation, a room the piece will live in, and a short stack of actual boards — because at the New Hope studio the wood helps decide what it becomes.
Read the story: Nakashima: Choose the Board Before the Table ↗
Handed Down
Namiki's 2025 Emperor carries eleven flowers from Japan's four seasons on a single pen — plum and cherry, hydrangea, peony, chrysanthemum — each built up in lacquer, gold powder, shell and eggshell by one artisan, then polished back until the surface forgets the work. Ninety-nine pieces. One signature.
Read the story: Blooming Flowers in Profusion: A Garden Built One Layer at a Time ↗
First Generation
Maximilian Büsser asked Eric Coudray to build the craziest three-axis tourbillon ever, then handed the result to Kari Voutilainen to finish. The Legacy Machine Thunderdome is what happens when spectacle and restraint share one watch — and sign it together.
Read the story: MB&F Thunderdome: Two Watchmakers, One Storm ↗
Handed Down
From the water, Mariette is all sail and varnish. Her 2017–18 refit at Pendennis tells the real story: an entire deck and sub-deck lifted off a 1915 steel hull, the beams underneath re-faired, and a century-old schooner rebuilt to keep sailing.
Read the story: Mariette of 1915: The Hidden Work Beneath the Teak ↗
First Generation
A television is furniture you point chairs at. LG's residential MAGNIT is a wall of self-lit modules with its own controller — and at this scale, the room gets designed around the display, not the other way round.
Read the story: LG MAGNIT Residential: Building the Room Around a Micro LED Wall ↗
Handed Down
Most archives keep what a house has finished. Lesage keeps what it might do next — 75,000 embroidery samples, filed by designer and decade, waiting for the next couturier to walk in with an idea and leave with a technique.
Read the story: Lesage: A Couture Archive Made of Possibilities ↗
The Standard
The Saxonia Thin is the simplest watch A. Lange & Söhne makes — two hands, nothing else. Turn it over and the back tells a different story: 167 parts finished by hand, and one small engraved component that identifies the person who cut it the way a signature identifies a letter.
Read the story: Saxonia Thin: A Signature Smaller Than a Fingernail ↗
The Craft
Rolls-Royce's first Droptail commission wraps its two occupants in an abstract fall of rose petals — every petal a hand-cut triangle of Black Sycamore, placed by one craftsperson, working in silence, an hour at a time.
Read the story: La Rose Noire Droptail: 1,603 Pieces of Wood Inside a Car ↗
The Standard
Most yachts are designed around their saloons. The 77-metre SeaXplorer La Datcha was designed around its hangar, its submersible and forty days away from the nearest port — the interior came after the engineering.
Read the story: La Datcha: Fitting Two Helicopters and a Submersible Into an Expedition Platform ↗
The Path
L-Acoustics built its name filling arenas. Island wraps that concert engineering around a lounge for two and sells the result as furniture — a personal auditorium you sit inside, shown as a concept in 2018 and formalised as Island Prestige at ISE 2020.
Read the story: L-Acoustics Island: The Auditorium Is the Furniture ↗
The Craft
In a studio on his family's farm at Fartha in County Cork, Joseph Walsh strips wood into thin layers and rebuilds it into furniture that behaves like nothing solid should — tables and chairs that loop, drape and climb.
Read the story: Joseph Walsh: How Thin Wood Becomes Sculptural Furniture ↗
Handed Down
At 9 St James's Street, the first thing John Lobb makes for a new customer is not a shoe. It is a carved wooden copy of the customer's foot — and the firm keeps it, among thousands of others, for every pair that follows.
Read the story: John Lobb: The Wooden Last That Remembers a Customer ↗
Handed Down
The most valuable handbag ever sold at auction is not pristine. It is scuffed, sticker-marked, and worn soft by nine years of use — because the bag Sotheby's Paris sold for €8.6 million in July 2025 is the prototype Hermès made for Jane Birkin, and her life in it is what the money bought.
Read the story: Jane Birkin's Original Birkin: Wear Is the Provenance ↗
Handed Down
Feadship's rebuild of the 1954 Istros kept the original steel hull and threw away nearly everything that sat on it or inside it — a corroded superstructure, 38 tonnes of engines — then had to solve the stability puzzle those removals created.
Read the story: Istros: Keeping the Hull, Replacing Almost Everything Above It ↗
The Craft
A Huntsman suit does not start with cloth. It starts with how you stand — up to twenty-eight measurements and a cutter's read of your posture, drafted by hand into a paper pattern that exists for one person only.
Read the story: Huntsman: Posture Becomes a Paper Pattern ↗
First Generation
He won the 2000 Kentucky Derby and earned just under $2 million doing everything a racehorse is supposed to do. Then his breeding rights sold in a deal reported at $70 million — never officially confirmed, and still the biggest figure ever attached to a horse.
Read the story: Fusaichi Pegasus: The Reported $70 Million Horse ↗
The Craft
Tree, seat, flaps, girths — a Hermès saddle is tuned as one system of balance, built start to finish by a single master saddler above the Faubourg flagship, and measured for the horse first and the rider second.
Read the story: Hermès: The Saddle Is a System of Balance ↗
Handed Down
Oceanco took a 95-metre yacht launched in 2000, kept most of her hull, and handed her back 10 metres longer — new superstructure, new engines, new interior, new name. The classification society treats H3 as a new build. After a rebuild like this, so does everyone else.
Read the story: H3: Rebuilt, Not Refitted ↗
The Standard
Almost every luxury watch is hand-finished. The Hand Made 1 asks a harder question: what if it was hand-made — balance spring included — on tools a person turns by hand?
Read the story: Greubel Forsey Hand Made 1: What Happens When You Refuse to Scale ↗
The Craft
A BBJ 787 cabin is not fitted out; it is manufactured — every monument designed, engineered, built and certified once, for one aeroplane. Greenpoint Technologies just delivered another one, a VVIP 787-9 out of Moses Lake, Washington.
Read the story: Greenpoint's BBJ 787: Building One-Off Furniture at Widebody Scale ↗
Handed Down
Frederick the Great kept Prussia's finest green stones for himself and built them into a palace at Potsdam. Two and a half centuries later, Graf von Faber-Castell's Pen of the Year 2015 set the same stones into a fountain pen, cut by hand.
Read the story: Graf von Faber-Castell "Sanssouci": A Palace Translated Into a Pen ↗
Handed Down
The world reads a Goyard trunk by its chevrons. The house reads it by a mark almost nobody sees: every trunk is numbered, and it carries the initials of the one person who built the whole thing by hand.
Read the story: Goyard: The Maker's Initials Inside the Trunk ↗
The Standard
Every photograph of the Gordon Murray T.50 ends up at the same place: the back of the car, where a 400 mm fan sits in the middle of the tail like a jet intake.
Read the story: Gordon Murray T.50: What the Rear Fan Actually Does ↗
The Path
The grand sonnerie is the most fragile complication in watchmaking — one wrong move can wreck it. François-Paul Journe wrote a different first line in his specification book: make it safe for a child to use. Six years and ten patents later, this is what that sentence cost.
Read the story: F.P.Journe Sonnerie Souveraine: Built Safe for an Eight-Year-Old ↗
The Path
An Airbus A321neoLR normally carries 220 people. Four Seasons kept the airframe, threw out the arithmetic, and rebuilt the cabin around 48 lie-flat beds, a social lounge and a crew that outnumbers most hotel departments.
Read the story: Four Seasons' A321neo: An Airliner Rebuilt Around 48 Beds ↗
The Craft
Alma Theresia Pihl watched her mother-in-law embroidering by the fire and saw the pattern catch the light. Her design for the Tsar's 1914 Easter egg rebuilds that needlework in platinum and calibrated stones — and the egg still holds its surprise.
Read the story: Fabergé's Mosaic Egg: Embroidery, Translated Into Gemstones ↗
The Path
Before New York saw Andile Dyalvane's iThongo, the whole collection travelled to his family's kraal in Ngobozana — because the people the work honours were meant to sit with it first.
Read the story: Dyalvane: The Collection That Went Home First ↗
The Craft
Dilbar is 156 metres long and, at 15,917 gross tonnes, the largest motor yacht in the world by volume. Lürssen's construction film shows how a yacht that size gets built: in multideck blocks, wired and plumbed before they ever meet.
Read the story: Dilbar: Built in Blocks ↗
The Craft
Printed wallpaper repeats. A de Gournay room cannot, because it is painted for one set of walls — the design drawn up elevation by elevation, worked around the windows, doors and fireplace, then painted by hand across panels that only make sense in that order, in that room.
Read the story: de Gournay: Painting a Room to Fit ↗
The Craft
A digital file either arrives intact or it doesn't — so why does playing one back take five machined aluminium boxes? dCS filmed its own answer: the fascias being sculpted, the boards being populated, and the people in Cambridgeshire who build and test every unit by hand.
Read the story: dCS Varèse: How a Digital Music System Gets Built ↗
Handed Down
In AlUla's Old Town, thirty centuries-old mudbrick houses were not demolished to make room for a luxury hotel. They were repaired — with bricks moulded on site, by local artisans, using the town's own methods — and the houses became the hotel.
Read the story: Dar Tantora: Mudbrick Becomes a Hotel ↗
Handed Down
The most famous Tutti Frutti necklace ever made began as jewellery Daisy Fellowes already owned. Cartier took her old stones apart in 1936 and built the Collier Hindou — then rebuilt it again, for her daughter, in 1963.
Read the story: Daisy Fellowes' Cartier Necklace: Old Stones, Another Life ↗
The Craft
Bottega Veneta has no logo worth mentioning. It has a weave instead — intrecciato, fifty years old this year — and at the Montebello atelier the house still measures a bag the way its own film puts it: in days, not hours.
Read the story: Bottega Veneta: Time Woven Into Leather ↗
The Craft
A wide Cogolin rug does not come off a wide loom. It is woven in narrow strips on 19th-century Jacquard handlooms near Saint-Tropez, then sewn together by hand — the seams are the signature, not a compromise.
Read the story: Cogolin: A Rug Made Seventy Centimetres at a Time ↗
The Craft
The 342-carat Queen of Kalahari could have been cut for one trophy jewel. Chopard cut it into 23 diamonds instead — and built six pieces whose biggest stones unclip from the necklace and go travelling.
Read the story: Chopard's Garden of Kalahari: One Stone, a Whole Wardrobe ↗
First Generation
Breakthrough's owners asked Feadship a question: what green technology can you include? Five years later the answer was a 118.8-metre yacht carrying liquid hydrogen at −253°C — the first hydrogen fuel-cell superyacht, and the largest motor yacht ever launched in the Netherlands.
Read the story: Breakthrough: Hydrogen Below Deck ↗
The Standard
Every projector can go dark. Christie's Eclipse G3 is built around the harder trick — a single bright pixel sitting in true black, with nothing glowing around it — and the third generation finally folds the lasers into the machine itself.
Read the story: Christie Eclipse G3: Black, Actually Black ↗
The Standard
Barco builds the projectors commercial cinemas run on. The Nerthus is what happens when that same machine — DCI compliance, cinema media processor and all — is specified for a private house instead.
Read the story: Barco Nerthus: When a Home Theater Adopts Cinema Infrastructure ↗
The Standard
From across a room, Bulgari's Serpenti Misteriosi is a jewelled snake coiled twice around the wrist — no dial, no crown, no clue. Press the serpent's tongue, the head opens, and the watch is there.
Read the story: Bulgari Serpenti Misteriosi: The Watch Disappears Into the Jewel ↗
The Standard
Every W16 Mistral was hand-built in Molsheim — and then, before its owner ever saw it, driven a minimum of 400 kilometres by one of the only three people on Earth qualified to judge it, over cobblestones, mountain passes and a closed airfield at 300 km/h.
Read the story: Bugatti W16 Mistral: The Inspection After the Hand Build ↗
First Generation
The company began with yarn handed over on trust — enough ecru cashmere for about sixty sweaters, to be paid for when the money came in. What Brunello Cucinelli built with it was a fashion house, and then, stone by stone, the village it lives in.
Read the story: Brunello Cucinelli: Sixty Sweaters, Then Solomeo ↗
The Standard
A Gregorian perpetual calendar is a solved problem: its years march in a tidy loop. The Chinese calendar does not — and three Vacheron Constantin watchmakers spent eleven years teaching gears to follow it anyway, through the year 2200.
Read the story: The Berkley Grand Complication: Programming a Calendar That Refuses to Repeat ↗
The Standard
A helicopter cabin is the hardest room in private aviation to make beautiful — every gram is argued over, and the windows, doors and seats all answer to the machine first. The ACH160 Exclusive is Airbus's answer: bespoke craftsmanship, fitted inside those limits.
Read the story: ACH160 Exclusive: A Hand-Finished Cabin on a Rotorcraft's Terms ↗
Handed Down
The 1930 motorsailer arrived in the Netherlands expecting repairs and interior work. She left nearly three years later with 40 percent of her hull, deck and frames replaced — and her original Gardner diesels still at her heart.
Read the story: Atlantide: Rebuilt Around Her Own Engines ↗
The Path
The Valkyrie's spec sheet reads like a Formula One car that wandered onto the road. The production story is more interesting: a dedicated team at Gaydon, more than 2,000 hours of hand-building per car, and an engine brief handed to Cosworth by the man who designed the aerodynamics.
Read the story: Aston Martin Valkyrie: The Team Behind a Road-Going V12 ↗
The Craft
Eighteen coupes, every one spoken for before the covers came off. The Batur is Mulliner building a farewell to the W12 engine out of titanium, flax fibre and — if the customer asks — solid gold printed a layer at a time.
Read the story: Bentley Batur: 3D-Printed Gold Meets a Hand-Assembled W12 ↗
Handed Down
Bang & Olufsen tracked down 200 of its 1990s six-CD players, shipped them home to the Danish factory that made them, and rebuilt each one on the same workstations from its first production run — then paired it with modern speakers and a $55,000 price.
Read the story: Beosystem 9000c: Rebuilt in Struer ↗
The Path
Most support yachts serve a bigger yacht. Bad Company Support 175 serves a fleet of fishing boats — a 53-metre Damen built to carry the game boats, the helicopter, the gear and the people, then stay on station across three oceans.
Read the story: Bad Company Support 175: The Mothership Is the Boat ↗
The Standard
The three horns on Avantgarde's flagship are not styling. Each one is sized by the wavelength it has to launch — and once you understand that, the whole strange silhouette reads as arithmetic.
Read the story: Avantgarde TRIO G3: Why the Horns Are So Large ↗
The Craft
Azzam is 180.65 metres long and still the longest private yacht in the world — but length was never the hard part. The hard part was making something that size travel at over 30 knots in warm, shallow water, and Lürssen delivered her in 2013 after under three years of building.
Read the story: Azzam: The Engineering of Scale and Speed ↗
Handed Down
A nineteen-year-old duke ordered it from Florence's grand-ducal workshops in 1726. It has been breaking its own auction record ever since — most recently at £19,045,250 in 2004.
Read the story: The Badminton Cabinet: A Family Commission in Hardstone ↗
First Generation
Airbus took its A220-100 airliner, stripped the hundred-plus seats down to room for eighteen, and handed the cabin to Comlux in Indianapolis. The TwoTwenty is what happens when a completion workshop gets an airliner's worth of floor to work with.
Read the story: ACJ TwoTwenty: The Airliner That Learned to Be a Private Jet ↗
The Standard
A Berluti shoe does not arrive finished. Its colour is built by hand on uncoated Venezia leather, worn in, and then built again — because at this house, patina is not a shade you pick once. It is a service you keep coming back for.
Read the story: Berluti: Colour Is Something You Maintain ↗
The Craft
The famous names on modern Italian design — Ponti, Aulenti, Sottsass, Castiglioni — drew the objects. For over a century, one Brianza workshop has been the hands that made those drawings hold together: Bottega Ghianda, cabinetmakers whose signature is a joint you are not supposed to notice.
Read the story: Bottega Ghianda: The Joinery Behind the Designer's Name ↗
The Craft
Most luxury hotels announce themselves. Amangiri, at Canyon Point in southern Utah, was designed to do the opposite — 34 suites of dense, sand-toned concrete laid so flat against the rock that the building nearly disappears, and the desert does the decorating.
Read the story: Amangiri: Concrete That Recedes Into the Desert ↗
The Standard
There are no corridors at the Royal Mansour in Marrakech and almost no visible staff — because the staff travel underneath it. Behind the stillness sits a daily routine of hand-pleated curtains, underground tunnels and an army of Moroccan craft that never stops being maintained.
Read the story: Royal Mansour: The Hidden Work of Keeping a Medina Immaculate ↗
The Standard
Walk past the nose. Walk past the airstair door where the passengers climb in, all polish and ceremony, and keep going until you are standing under the tail.
Read the story: Pilatus PC-24: the business jet with a 1.25-metre cargo door ↗
First Generation
Three rotating carbon masts and energy recovery under sail give the 2018 yacht an engineering identity beyond its silhouette.
Read the story: Oceanco Black Pearl: the sailing rig that turns the mast ↗
The Standard
Nine ratios and seven clutches support a control that lets the driver choose a gear—or ask the car to choose for acceleration.
Read the story: Koenigsegg Jesko Attack: the two-stage shift that can skip gears ↗
Handed Down
A dated factory sequence makes the distinction between a body frame and a chassis visible.
Read the story: Morgan’s ash frame: the wooden structure beneath aluminium bodywork ↗
The Standard
A late eighteenth-century cabinet makes fine marquetry, concealed mechanisms and courtly power part of the same performance.
Read the story: Roentgen’s Berlin Secretary: royal authority at the touch of a button ↗
The Standard
The hotel’s 2019 restoration repaired weathered fabric while changing how an inherited building could operate.
Read the story: Raffles Singapore: the modern systems behind a familiar façade ↗
Handed Down
Project Gold makes authenticity more interesting by separating a genuine shell, newly assembled machinery and permission to use the finished car.
Read the story: Porsche Project Gold: a new 2018 car with an original 993 shell ↗
Handed Down
The work beneath the gold leaf explains how a palace keeps its age without surrendering to it.
Read the story: Versailles: the work beneath the gold leaf ↗
The Standard
A red-and-white koi from a Hiroshima fish farm sold at auction in October 2018 for ¥203 million — about $1.8 million, three times the previous record for a fish, and the most expensive koi ever sold.
Read the story: S Legend: The $1.8 Million Fish ↗
First Generation
Rimac’s 2022 production milestone separates the visible assembly line from the systems and testing that make an electric hypercar possible.
Read the story: Rimac Nevera: five weeks of assembly after five years of development ↗
The Craft
Gulfstream’s manufacturing account gives the aircraft’s domestic comforts an industrial frame: an airframe, a production team and an operating specification.
Read the story: Gulfstream G700: the work before five living areas ↗
The Craft
CHF 31 million — about $31 million — for one watch. The Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime Ref. 6300A-010 is the only one made in steel, the dial says so, and at Only Watch 2019 it became the most expensive wristwatch ever sold at auction.
Read the story: $31 Million on One Wrist: The Only One — Patek Philippe's Steel Grandmaster Chime ↗
The Craft
On May 5, 2022, inside its museum in Stuttgart, Mercedes-Benz sold the 1955 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé — a car it had kept for 67 years and said was not for sale. It went for €135 million, about $143 million. The record still stands.
Read the story: The $143 Million Mercedes: The Car the Factory Swore It Would Never Sell ↗
The Craft
Ordered in 1783 with a blank check, Breguet's No. 160 packed every complication known into gold and rock crystal — and took 44 years. The queen died 34 years before it was done. A master thief later stole it for 24 years. Today it hangs in Jerusalem, valued at $30 million.
Read the story: The Queen Never Saw Her $30 Million Watch ↗
The Standard
The second-priciest fossil ever auctioned, five times its estimate — and science spent decades arguing about what it even is.
Read the story: $47.3 Million for a Dinosaur That Isn't a T. Rex ↗
The Craft
The Concours returns to the Wynn Golf Club fairways Thursday through Sunday — hundreds of the world's rarest cars in a judged competition older than the automobile, world debuts from Pagani and Aston Martin, and a Ferrari Enzo crossing the auction block. Every ticket is sold out. Sunday morning, the winners parade down the Strip for free.
Read the story: The Billion-Dollar Car Show Is Back at the Wynn ↗No stories match. Try another search or reset the filters.