Monocle

8 stories

MonocleThe second edition of our ‘Design Directory’ is a reminder that there is more to the sector than meets the eye The latest edition of our annual Design Directory is packed with smart reportage and fresh takes. Executive editor Nic Monisse introduces an issue about how design shapes communities and cultures.

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MonocleOur ‘Design Directory’ 2026: The architects, studios and designers to know around the world Stuck on a design problem or looking for the perfect creative partner? Discover top-tier studios and welcoming communities, from Copenhagen and Cairo to Tokyo and São Paulo, complete with contact…

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MonocleInside six spaces around the world where good design means more than aesthetic charm From an Hermès factory with 260 AI-proof jobs to a Wiltshire hotel that preserves tradition through a modern lens, here are interiors that show how design choices shape where we live, eat and work.

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MonocleThe best new homewares, books and accessories for design lovers From Alessi’s screw-inspired moka pot to Fiio’s Moma-approved cassette player, these are the objects and publications bringing style back into homes.

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MonocleIn Red Hook, New York’s creative fringe is building a design district by the water The ‘grungy’ seaside neighbourhood in Brooklyn is enjoying a creative boom, drawing furniture-makers, gallerists and designers to its waterfront warehouses.

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MonocleAmid pilgrimages to the now-complete Sagrada Família, ‘God’s architect’ Antoni Gaudí’s path to sainthood feels set A century after his death, Gaudí was declared ‘venerable’ by the Pope, putting him on the track toward canonisation.

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Monocle‘German industry is not agile enough.’ Designer Konstantin Grcic on the Deutsch design crisis The Berlin-based industrial designer talks us through his archive of abandoned prototypes, the Italian manufacturers who shaped him and what is going wrong in German industry.

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MonocleHow Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius built modernist Baghdad – and what remains today In the mid-20th century, the Iraqi capital set out to become the Middle East’s modernist hub, drawing major names in architecture. What has become of their legacy today?

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発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo