Town & Country April 2025

MUSTIQUE It is no surprise that in carrying out his mission to capture “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places,” Slim Aarons ended up on Mustique, on assignment for T&C, photographing the inhabitants of the most glamorously eccentric island in the Caribbean. It holds that title to this day—just look at this issue’s cover, featuring the island’s grande dame Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian, and the accompanying story on page 66, in which Mike Albo writes, “Mustique is, still, a rare refuge where the rich, the royal, and the rock star roam.” Mick Jagger, who was part of Aarons’s portfolio in T&C’s December 1989 issue, remains a fixture, as do members of the British royal family; the Prince and Princess of Wales were there recently with their children. But it was…

This issue began with questions about time. Deadlines? Yes, always, but also bigger ones: What is worth our time, and what stands the test of it? It began over breakfast with contributing editor William Li and designer Markham Roberts, as we looked at images of a London project that took Roberts years to finish. Was it worth it? We certainly think so (see page 82). Then David Netto showed us a Los Angeles home he had decorated for one generation, only to redo it years later when the children decided to move in. What changed? What didn’t? He tells all (page 100). We made a return trip to Mustique to check in on Princess Margaret and Mick Jagger’s fantasy island. What did we find 36 years after our first Slim…

WHERE ARE WE GOING? His name destined him for a career in jewelry (at which he excelled), but Louis Comfort Tiffany first blazed his own creative legacy in stained glass. With his trademark Favrile method and a cadre of artisans, he made windows, pottery, and, of course, lamps. Today the largest collection of them is at the Queens Museum in New York, which is fitting: His original workshop was in the neighborhood. WHAT ARE WE WEARING? The Wisteria remains highly prized among Tiffany lamps; one from the Getty collection sold at Christie’s for nearly a million in 2023. The lamp inspired this limited edition watch, which features an intricate technique that lets enamel mimic the opalescent mosaic of the glasswork. And lest we forget the maison’s other specialty, each hour…

In early January, the author Susan Orlean was trying to get into her home in Studio City so she could evacuate, when she discovered that the front door was stuck. Wildfires were consuming Los Angeles, and her neighborhood was at risk. She and her husband forced their way into the house, a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument built in 1946 that was designed by Rudolph Schindler and that they had restored over four years, grabbed their dogs and pictures, and fled. “I didn’t know if we would see the house again, and I had to make peace with that,” Orlean tells me. A former New Yorker, she understood the looming presence of fire in the local imagination. In The Library Book, about the 1986 Los Angeles Library fire, she wrote about…

“I Paley?’” Pask is a Tony-winning scenic just got a text message,” Scott Pask says, “asking, ‘What have you picked for designer. Paley, of course, is William S. Paley, the late CBS honcho who is a pivotal character in Good Night & Good Luck, the new Broadway play co-written by and starring George Clooney as Edward R. Murrow for which Pask is designing the sets. The question is about Paley’s offce furniture, and to prepare for the play, which is directed by David Cromer and is adapted from the 2005 film of the same name, Pask had similar decisions to make for any number of spaces. (The show opens April 3 at the Winter Garden Theatre.) His design includes Murrow’s soundstage as well as a recording studio, a staff lounge,…

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s 1845 portrait of Louise de Broglie, Comtesse d’Haussonville, has always been a crowd favorite at the Frick Collection in New York City, but now, after the museum’s four-year renovation, it will hang in the gloriously restored (and newly opened to the public) second-floor galleries. The painting has had an unusual journey, acquired eight years after Henry Clay Frick, the robber baron/art collector who lived here, died in 1919. Here’s how it ended up in what was once his bedroom. 1840: The Comtesse d’Haussonville (née Louise, Princesse de Broglie) asks Ingres, already an indemand artist, to paint her portrait. The commission, which he begins in 1842, takes him three years but is an immediate sensation. The comtesse keeps the painting at her estate in Switzerland and bequeaths…