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HEADLINES
This week, at a glance.
Soho House goes country club
F1 layover, anyone?
Where to drink a martini in Paris
George Lucas’s billion-dollar museum
The Porsche 911 you can only buy in the Alps
The new A. Lange & Söhne Triple Split
Aluminium luggage and the art of the dent
No 1 Savile Row is back in business
Emirates brings privacy to premium economy
Aman is coming to Seoul
Why St Kitts wants your fingerprints
What we know about Pharrell’s Paris hotel
Is your Oura actually doing anything?
Finally, a proper sauna hat
Atlas: a fitness tracker for the brain
David Protein and the $2.25 billion protein bet
TIME
What to do: culture, events, and experiences worth your time.
Soho House goes country club
Soho House has announced Soho River House, a country club along the Thames in Windsor, set to open next year. Anyone who has already spent a summer weekend at the River House pop-up at Oakley Court will recognise the idea – this is, after all, the permanent version of it. The centrepiece is a first for the group: a Racquet & Rowing Club, with tennis, padel and pickleball courts, boat storage and a launching ramp straight onto the water. Around it sit bedrooms, several restaurants and bars, a Soho Health Club, an outdoor onsen garden with cold plunge, and a 25-metre pool.
Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire showed the company a decade ago that members would drive out of London for a House with things to do, and it has leaned further into experiences ever since. River House takes that logic to its conclusion, built around the courts and the river with the bar in support, which is more or less where members’ clubs generally are heading. You can register your interest now at sohohouse.com.
F1 layover, anyone?
Qatar Airways has folded a Grand Prix into its stopover programme, so for the first time a three-day grandstand ticket comes bundled with the flights and the hotel for anyone passing through Doha on race weekend. Search dates between 27 and 29 November on Qatar Airways Holidays, pick from four hotel tiers, and a T16 Grandstand seat at Lusail is added to the booking – with a view of the final sector. Lusail is a night race under floodlights and the penultimate round of the season, and for anyone flying between Europe and Asia or Australia that week, a connection can now become a race weekend with very little extra effort. For pricing, head to Qatar Airways’ site and enter your itinerary.
Where to drink a martini in Paris
Colin Field has been named the world’s best bartender by both Forbes and Travel + Leisure, and for close to three decades he ran one of the most famous hotel bars in Paris. These days, he runs the lobby bar at Maison Proust – the 23-suite, thoroughly theatrical Jacques Garcia hotel in the upper Marais – and this week he unveiled his new menu. It's a martini list at heart. The first page is Field's own recipe, sketched out in his handwriting: gin infused with Sorrento lemons, two vermouths, a single frozen cube of honey water, stirred over ice. From there, the menu moves through his Clean Dirty Martini, made with a distilled olive from Avignon, and a vodka martini sharpened with ginger essence. At the top of the list sits the Folie de Proust, a glass of 1922 Château de Laubade Armagnac, the year Proust died, served with a bottle of Barons de Rothschild champagne. How good.
The bar itself, with its velvet banquettes, hidden library, and monumental fireplace, is a pleasure to sit in at any hour, and Friday – when Field is running the show from 5 o’clock – is really the night to go.
George Lucas’s billion-dollar museum
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles on 22 September, nine years after George Lucas and Mellody Hobson picked Exposition Park for it and five years after it was first supposed to open. Ma Yansong of MAD has produced a 300,000-square-foot building that looks like a spaceship come to rest, lifted off the ground on arched steel so the park flows underneath, with a further 11 acres of gardens around it. Inside are 35 galleries named for the experiences the pictures describe: love, family, work, play, adventure.
The museum argues that illustration is art, and it makes its case with range. Norman Rockwell hangs alongside Frida Kahlo, Artemisia Gentileschi alongside Robert Crumb, with Jack Kirby’s comic panels, Dorothea Lange’s photographs and Diego Rivera in between, more than 1,200 works from a collection of 40,000. Then comes the complete Lucasfilm archive, including Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder, in a show called Star Wars in Motion.
“This is a museum of the people’s art,” said Hobson, and the pricing agrees with her – $25 for adults, free for anyone 17 and under – with timed tickets on sale now through February 2027. Opening night on 19 September is co-chaired by Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Greta Gerwig, Guillermo del Toro, Jensen Huang and Pharrell.
FINANCIAL
What to buy: product launches and material obsessions.
The Porsche 911 you can only buy in the Alps
Porsche has built a 911 for the Alps – one that can only be bought there. The GT3 Bergsport is a collaboration between Porsche’s four Alpine subsidiaries: Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, with 100 cars in total and sales restricted to customers in those four countries. It made its debut on Thursday at the Arosa ClassicCar hill climb, on the 7.3km Swiss course where Porsche’s Bergspyders raced in the 1960s.
Underneath the pretty package, it’s a GT3 with the Touring Package and a six-speed manual, and on top comes a specification designed for its mountain-going pedigree. There’s a front-axle lift for steep ramps, a 90-litre tank for long days on the passes, a roof-transport system with HEAD skis, and a new colour called Valleygreenmetallic, a deep green with gold particles in it – offset by orange calipers meant to recall alpenglow. The badge on the rear, by the photographer Stefan Bogner, carries four snow-white peaks, one per country. Though the internet’s geographers noted right away that the Alps pass through eight countries, and that Germany, Porsche’s own, sits among the excluded. A fair point Porsche will have to live with. Deliveries begin in winter 2027/2028, with pricing on application through Porsche Centres in the four markets.
The new A. Lange & Söhne Triple Split
Of all the things a mechanical watch can do, timing two events at once for 12 hours is among the hardest. The updated Triple Split from A. Lange & Söhne is, by the Glashütte manufacture’s account, the only split-seconds chronograph in the world that manages it. A standard split-seconds watch lets two hands sweep together, stops one for an intermediate time, then catches it up again, doing so just for a single minute. Lange extends the trick to the minute and hour counters as well, so two marathon runners, two laps of a hill climb or two flights can be timed against each other all afternoon. It takes a rather complex work of 567 parts to do it.
It was this week at the Concours of Elegance at Hampton Court Palace that Lange showed the new piece, and it’s the third version since the watch first appeared in 2018 – after the white gold original and a pink gold edition in 2021. The new one is a 100-piece edition in platinum, with a rhodium-coloured silver dial, darker grey subdials and blued split hands. It’s the coolest and heaviest of the three by some distance. The case remains 43.2mm across and 15.6mm tall, space the movement understandably requires, on a dark brown alligator strap with a platinum folding clasp. Long the watchmaker’s watchmaker, Lange is in fine form at the moment, and really the name collectors reach for when explaining that the very best of the trade isn’t all Swiss.
Aluminium luggage and the art of the dent
Aluminium luggage occupies a strange place in the world of things, as one of the few goods that seemingly improves in its owner’s eyes by being damaged. Rimowa started it in 1937 with a case built from aircraft alloy, added the grooves in 1950 in homage to a Junkers fuselage, and over the following decades the ribbed silver box became the most recognisable object on any baggage carousel, worth €640 million ($750 million) to LVMH for an 80% stake in 2016. The appeal is partly practical, sure. Aluminium can take a beating. But it’s mostly cultural if we’re being honest. A dented case says its owner goes places; the stickers and tags become a travel diary, and the whole thing acquires a patina that plastic is built to avoid.
Carl Friedrik has been the luggage brand of choice around here for a while, on the strength of Italian leather-trimmed polycarbonate cases and silent Japanese Hinomoto wheels, so when its aluminium carry-on arrived in March, the obvious question was when the big one would follow. This week those wishes were laid to rest. The new Aluminium Check-in is 76 litres and 6.4kg, with steel-reinforced corners, dual TSA combination locks, and the same interior layout, in black, chocolate, or cognac leather, at $1,095. It’s on pre-order now, and ships from 17 September, and the brochure describes future dents as “an evolving record of your travels”, which is exactly the right attitude.
No 1 Savile Row is back in business
Gieves & Hawkes reopened No 1 Savile Row on Tuesday after a summer behind hoardings, and the result is a refurbishment in the truest sense of the word. Plaster cornices have been redecorated, panelling refreshed and timber floors refinished across the 7,000-square-foot, Grade II-listed building, with a new Portland stone entrance laid in a keystone pattern. All of the joinery, furniture and display cabinets were made in Britain, and carry subtle rope motifs from the house’s naval past. Made-to-measure has grown into a larger space, and upstairs, the Robert Gieves Room now holds an installation of archive pieces put together with Adam Ellis Studio.
Few addresses on the Row carry as much history. Built in the mid-18th century as a home for the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, No 1 later housed the Royal Geographical Society, whose explorers were often dressed by the tailor, and has been a tailoring house since 1912. Gieves & Hawkes moved in during 1975, after the IRA bombed its Old Bond Street store, and the two have been more or less interchangeable in people’s minds ever since. Now owned by Frasers Group, the 255-year-old house, a Royal Warrant holder since 1789, has bespoke, made-to-measure, ready-to-wear and the military department all back under one roof, with bespoke by appointment.
LOCATION
Where to go: travel and mobility for the globally curious.
Emirates brings privacy to premium economy
Emirates unveiled a new premium economy seat on Thursday, and with it a full-height divider between every pair of seats, which rises and lowers electrically and locks wherever it’s set – a first for the cabin class, Emirates says. The seat is fully electric for the first time too, with preset lounge and meal positions. It reclines into a cradle without tipping into the row behind, while a redesigned leather headrest, wireless charging and a tray table with a built-in phone holder round out a list typically reserved for business class. Arriving in a 28-seat cabin on the new A350s Emirates is currently taking delivery of, the seat is 20 inches wide and up to 39 inches of pitch – and while the airline hasn’t yet said which route will see it first, its A350s tend to fly the medium-haul routes into Europe and Asia.
Aman is coming to Seoul
Aman announced its first property in South Korea on Wednesday, in Cheongdam – the most expensive stretch of Gangnam – on a site overlooking the Han River, and its shape says a good deal about how the brand now builds in cities. Aman Seoul will stack a hotel, 49 branded residences and a members-only Aman Club into a 38-storey tower with eight floors below ground. It’ll be roughly 70,000 square metres in all, with a multi-floor wellness offering, Aman’s own restaurants, a club pool, gym and lounges, and a separate entrance for each element. The interiors draw on Korean spatial traditions and materials, developed with local craftspeople.
The developer is Shinsegae Property, the real estate arm of the Korean retail group, and the project is the first result of a joint venture signed in July between Shinsegae and OKO Group, the developer owned by Aman’s chairman Vlad Doronin. It’s a bet on Seoul as a luxury destination in its own right, a city whose influence in fashion, beauty, food and design has outpaced its supply of top-tier hotels. Zoom out, and it’s the latest in an urban run for Aman that began with Tokyo in 2014 and continued through New York and Bangkok, with Beverly Hills, Miami Beach, Dubai and Singapore still to come. No opening date has been given, though Korean press are writing 2029, so we can treat that as directional.
Why St Kitts wants your fingerprints
St Kitts and Nevis began issuing biometric passports on Tuesday, and for anyone who holds one of its citizenships by investment, the change comes with a deadline. Every citizen who came through the programme, dependants included, must complete biometric enrolment in person – fingerprints and facial capture at an approved centre – by 31 July 2027, after which the old passports stop being valid for travel. Enrolment has been open since April, and advisers report that appointment slots at newer centres such as Istanbul are limited, so the sensible plan is to allow a month or two between enrolment and the new passport arriving.
The reason is fairly simple: Europe. The European Commission has been watching the five Caribbean investor-citizenship programmes closely, and it’s strengthened the mechanism that lets it suspend visa-free access to the Schengen area – which is, of course, the reason people get these passports. Dating to 1984, the St Kitts programme is the oldest of its kind, with a minimum contribution of $250,000 these days, and it's now the first to make the process deliberately less convenient. An in-person appointment and a set of fingerprints make the passport harder to obtain and harder to abuse – the price of keeping Europe's visa-free door open. Historically, where St Kitts goes, the rest of the Caribbean follows. The advisory trade expects biometrics, and possibly residency requirements, to spread across the region over the next few years.
What we know about Pharrell’s Paris hotel
The former Hôtel Saint-James & Albany sits at 202 rue de Rivoli, directly opposite the Tuileries and a short walk from the Louvre, Place Vendôme and the shops of Saint-Honoré. In other words, a rather prime Parisian address. Since October 2024, it has belonged to a joint venture of Mohari Hospitality, Omnam Investment Group and Pharrell Williams – his first hotel co-investment – and planning documents that surfaced this summer have put shape to the project: 14,000 square metres in total, 106 rooms and suites, four private apartments, restaurants, several bars, a pool, a spa and a fitness floor. The Paris firm Valode & Pistre – which handled the Bulgari Hotel Paris – is leading the architecture.
Pharrell has been here before, in a sense, having opened the Goodtime Hotel in Miami Beach with David Grutman in 2021, and his partners are serious operators, with Mohari holding stakes in the Four Seasons Madrid and Tao Group, and Omnam carrying a record of reviving historic European buildings. The name, the operator, the opening date, and the rates are all still to come, as is any confirmation of how hands-on Pharrell’s creative role will be. For now, then, there’s an address and a floor plan, and both are promising.
HEALTH
How to live: wellness, performance, and the pursuit of longevity.
Is your Oura actually doing anything?
A proposed class action filed in California last month argues that the Oura ring cannot measure sleep stages at all, and that its marketing – “79% agreement” with clinical sleep labs, and more recently “95% Sleep Staging Accuracy” – amounts to false advertising. Sleep stages, the complaint says, are defined by brain activity, eye movement and muscle tone, measured in a lab with electrodes on the scalp, and a ring on the finger records none of those things. Oura instead infers them from heart rate, temperature and movement. The lawsuit cites a 2025 peer-reviewed study that put the ring’s four-stage accuracy at 53%, which the filing characterises as ‘a coin flip’.
Oura disputes the allegations and says it stands behind its science, pointing out that every consumer sleep wearable estimates stages from the same signals, and that peer-reviewed research supports the link between those signals and sleep stages. The ring, worn by 5.5 million people at last count, is a very good tracker of when someone fell asleep, how long they slept and how consistent their nights are – none of which the lawsuit contests – and a rougher guide to how many minutes of deep or REM sleep they got. The latter, unfortunately, seems to be the number people tend to obsess over. The case remains pending in California, and the court has yet to certify a class or rule on any of the claims.
Finally, a proper sauna hat
Anyone who has spent time in a Finnish sauna or a Russian banya will have noticed the felt hats. The logic is simple enough: the head overheats before the body does, a layer of wool keeps it cooler, and the session lasts longer and feels better for it, with the added benefit that the hair is spared repeated blasts of dry heat. The problem has always been the hats themselves. Most are Amazon-grade felt of uncertain origin, with the occasional novelty Viking helmet thrown in – a strange state of affairs, given how expensive sauna culture has become. Bjorli, which launched this week, is really the first attempt to make one properly, constructed from undyed baby alpaca from a single farm in the Peruvian Andes.
At $200, it’s not exactly priced for Amazon, drawing instead on the luxurification of sauna culture and the Loro Piana playbook of fine fibres sourced from far-flung corners of the globe. The brand’s public face is Aris Yeager, the 26-year-old Greek creator you’ll know better as The European Kid, his three-million-follower parody of a bratty French trust-fund heir. Behind him, a small team in Scandinavia designs the brand, which launches in limited drops with little paid marketing.
The proven health benefits of a sauna hat are thin as far as the science is yet concerned, though the anecdotal case is convincing and the hair protection is as close to fact as these things get. There’s something ritualistic about it too, and if the regulars in Helsinki wear one, anyone already spending hundreds a month on sessions has probably earned the right. They’re tastefully made, the founder story is a good one, and it’s a safe bet these will be turning up in the better bathhouses before long. Available now at bjorli.co.
Atlas: a fitness tracker for the brain
Wearables have measured the heart for 15 years, and this week a San Francisco startup called Atlas opened pre-orders for the first one that claims to measure the brain in daily life, all day. The Atlas 1.0 is an adhesive patch worn on the hairless skin behind the ear. It combines EEG electrodes with motion, skin-conductance and voice-vibration sensors – the last of which detects that its wearer is talking without recording the words – and feeds all of that into three live scores in an app: Presence, Stress and Energy Burn. The company’s claim to novelty is that it records usable brain activity while a person is moving, walking, talking or exercising, which conventional EEG cannot. Its algorithms, it says, are built on more than 500,000 real-life brain recordings.
The Pioneer Edition is $499, including three months of membership. After that, the subscription is $29.99 a month and covers the app, the analysis and fresh sensors, each of which lasts around two weeks. Shipping is estimated for the first quarter of 2027. Backed by $24 million from investors including Acrew Capital and HOF Capital, and picked for the NBA’s Launchpad programme, Atlas is careful to describe the device as a wellness product with no medical claims attached. A daily number for how present someone is could be the next frontier of self-knowledge, or a very expensive way to be told to put the phone down, and the first units arriving next spring will start to settle the question.
David Protein and the $2.25 billion protein bet
Medici Brands, the company behind the David protein bar, raised $250 million on Wednesday at a valuation of $2.25 billion, triple what it was worth a year ago, in a round co-led by Greenoaks and Valor Equity Partners with ICONIQ and Imaginary Ventures alongside. The speed is remarkable. David launched in September 2024 as a direct-to-consumer brand with a single product: a bar with 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, and zero sugar. Two years later, it’s in more than 35,000 stores, including Walmart, Target, and Costco. Frozen desserts and ready-to-drink shakes have followed, and revenue is heading past $300 million a year.
You might be familiar with the founder, Peter Rahal – he co-founded RXBAR and sold it to Kellogg for $600 million in 2017. This, his second act, is built on an ingredient as much as a brand. Medici owns Epogee, maker of a plant-based fat substitute called EPG that delivers the texture of fat with a fraction of the calories, and it’s using it to rebuild the snack aisle. HallPass, a low-sugar candy line Rahal calls “the Coke Zero of candy”, launched at Walmart in August, and a third brand, Rowdy, follows later this year. “We are not interested in telling people to stop eating the foods they love,” Rahal said this week. Eating something that resembles them, it seems, will do.
America’s protein obsession has done some good, since most people were eating too little of it, and David deserves credit for proving that a bar can taste decent at 150 calories. The harder question is whether the answer to junk food is more heavily engineered junk food, built on lab-engineered ingredients and a stack of sweeteners, and on that, the jury is still very much out. What the valuation can at least confirm is the size of the demand, and that anyone selling protein in a convenient wrapper right now is selling into a very hungry market. For now, the bars are a US-only proposition, sold direct and through the major American chains.