Nomad is a fashion label based in Porto, Portugal and Stockholm, Sweden – an interesting combo that you can see in their clothes. a bit of a Mediterranean feeling, combined with that pared down Swedish design sensibility. the SS14 collection, Road to Dambulla, was inspired by a journey through Sri Lanka by bus: easy to wear pieces that you can just throw in a bag and go.
Designed and produced in Portugal with a strong handmade approach, Nomad fully embraces the experimental process behind every collection. All our knits are hand-loomed in our studio and the rest of the pieces are made in a very small, family-owned local factory. Rather than focusing on trends and mass-production, we at Nomad choose a more conscious approach and are committed to being as sustainable as possible, both by using materials that are local and eco-friendly (many of them are dead-stock coming from small, local warehouses), and by manufacturing our pieces in the most fair and sustainable way we can find.
city guides are one of my favourite things to discover online (i even created my own one for Cape Town, and also a guide of sorts to places i like in NYC). i bookmark them all the time, even though i probably have no intention to travel to some of the places – it’s always handy to have in your virtual back pocket. one of the places i always wished i had a great insider’s guide to was Paris, i have been there 4 times but i always feel like DAMN there must be some cool shit that i don’t know about!
fret no more, Cereal Magazine (who i mentioned before over here) has launched an awesome series of online travel guides called Guided that i have been fortunate enough to preview. their first installment covers ten cities, and they are always updated – so if something closes or something new opens, Guided will tell you.
The digital city guides feature bespoke content and photography exploring ten cities, with ten more to follow. Taking in a concise edit of recommended hotels, restaurants, cafes, museums and beautiful, outdoor spaces and landmarks that are all hand selected, by the GUIDED curators. Hosted online, the definitive guides are updated regularly and accessible from both smart phones and tablets with a downloadable version to view use when you are offline.
you can currently preview their guide to London, and if you are also interested in NYC, Paris, Hong Kong, LA, Bath, Bristol, Austin, Charleston & Vancouver then you can subscribe for an annual fee of £20, which gives you full access to all of the travel guides. looking through all the cities has me wanting to visit places i never considered even travelling to (Vancouver looks especially amazing!) here are some of the places i’d like to see some day. just realised that most of them are restaurants because… i like to eat. all images courtesy of Guided.
thought i’d share some photos of our current holiday at Kei, Anton’s family’s holiday home where we got engaged this time last year. Kei Mouth is a small town on the banks of the Kei River, which used to be the border of the old Transkei. this area of the Eastern Cape, known as the Wild Coast, is the traditional home of the Xhosa people. it is beautiful, rugged, wild and tropical. yesterday we took the ferry across the river, drove up the hills past herds of Nguni and 4×4′d our way to The Gates at the Qolora river. it reminded me, once again, how much there is to see on our own doorstep. i think a perfect new year’s / life resolution would be to explore more of South Africa.
all photos shot on iPhone, edited with VSCO / Afterlight. more on my Instagram.
i LOVE staying in hotels. i don’t travel often, so i don’t have that jaded traveller attitude to hotels and flying as if it’s all old hat. it’s always new hat to me. even the most boring, average hotel – i’m basically like, “wait, i get to sleep in this foreign place, i don’t have to make my bed, AND someone else is making me breakfast tomorrow? sign me up.” of course when a hotel is actually nice that feeling is multiplied by a thousand, which is what i imagine it would be like to stay at the Hotel San José in Austin, Texas. i have never had any inclination to visit Texas, but now i do.
Built in 1936 as an “ultramodern” motor court, the property has been transformed into a 40 room urban bungalow-style hotel tucked behind stucco walls and set amidst lush garden courtyards. More than just a unique place to sleep, the Hotel San Jose serves as a gathering place and occasional hub of community activity for locals and visitors alike. Dogs are always welcome.
since i have shared a bit about the wedding i thought it would be nice to show some pics from our honeymoon. whenever people asked where we were going post-wedding, and we replied NYC, they were either really excited for us or genuinely confused about our choice of destination. i guess people associate honeymoon with tropical beaches or romantic cities like Paris – but we have always, always wanted to visit NYC (ever since we first got together) and we are far more into new visiting places that allow us to explore, see museums, eat great food, shop and just experience something other than what we have at home. we have beaches at home… and fantastic ones at that.
our trip unfolded like something out of a storybook. everything we did was awesome. staying in Williamsburg and taking the subway into Manhattan every day like some kind of a real New Yorker (and being totally blasé about it – just gonna take the subway), doing a cheesy but required and ultimately enjoyable boat ride in Central Park, seeing the Book of Mormon on Broadway (highly recommended!), running into someone i know from the internet at a random subway station on our first day, experiencing Sleep No More (what a trip), eating more pizza than i could handle (i can handle more pizza than you might think), indulging in very expensive lobster rolls as a treat, seeing more art than my eyeballs could deal with, falling in love with the Natural History Museum, spotting some celebrities (ok don’t look now but Hilary Swank is eating a burger right behind you), going to the top of the Empire State building at night, eating a feast at Brooklyn Crab, spotting a Banksy, seeing ARCADE FIRE at a secret show in Brooklyn after discovering a cryptic poster in Red Hook – that actually happened! for reals! it was just absolutely unbelievable and amazing. by the end of it we were walking fit and our bank accounts were drained.
i want to thank everyone who commented on this post (and emailed) with recommendations of places to visit in NYC. we tried to do everything on the list but it was just impossible, even with 2 weeks there. if anyone is planning a visit soon be sure to check those out. you can also visit my pinterest board for more.
i took all of these photos on my iPhone. had the best intentions to take actual nice photos with my camera, but after taking perhaps 5 shots i decided i didn’t want to view our holiday through a lens. and, because i know it will be asked, they were edited with either VSCO or Afterlight, depending on whether i was on my phone or iPad – VSCO doesn’t work so great on my iPhone anymore after the iOS7 update (of course!) so i often just used Afterlight, which is simpler but also great.
if you want to know where any of these were taken, just ask in the comments!
i first noticed Megan & Mike Gilger of The Fresh Exchange when they tagged me in an Instagram photo of their travels in Cape Town – they had been making use of my Cape Town City Guide to discover some cool places to see. i always get the warm and fuzzies when people tell me that the guide helped them in some way, and when anyone visits my city for that matter, so I clicked over to their site and what a nice discovery.
Megan is a talented designer and together she and Mike have a design studio called Wild Measure. on their trip to Cape Town they collaborated with Over to create an app in 24 hours (!!) that with allow people to celebrate their love for Cape Town, featuring Megan’s beautiful hand-lettering, appropriately called Cape Town Love.
The app was inspired by the city we have been working in for the past 6 days, and we wanted to develop something that did not just offer another pack of graphics, but meant far more. We wanted to find a way to celebrate the Mother City, and to help encourage people to discover the beauty that we have found in this place.
read about how they created the app in 24 hours here and watch a short video by Megan and Over designer Aaron Marshall. the app itself is great to look at and a dream to use. i think it’s pretty damn awesome that a handful of talented Americans created such a lovely app that’s so appreciate of our city. download it here.
we are going on our honeymoon to NYC in October, and i am beyond excited to travel again! i haven’t been overseas since 2010, which felt like an absolute lifetime ago (but honestly i am very lucky to be able to travel every few years). even started collecting a bunch of stuff that we need to see while we’re there – 99% food related – so i tend to be a a bit of an obsessive researcher in that way. actually i’m pretty sure that i’m quite irritating to travel with, always consulting a map and making sure that we hit all the museums and get to our trains on time (my poor husband-to-be). well, i will try to relax a bit this time round, especially since we will be on h-o-n-e-y-m-o-o-n.
Paris based Pauline Chardin makes travelling look so easy, she just launched a blog called The Voyageur where she shares her beautiful travel photography, as well as insights into the places she and her husband visit. i always love seeing what people photograph on their travels, what one person notices that another does not. Pauline has visited some interesting places, i did not even know about the archaeological museum in Istanbul, but that is now top of my list if we ever go there. her photography is also absolutely exquisite, particularly the vegetation of Sri Lanka and this mouth-watering shot of quintessentially Italian figs and parmesan… mmm.
My day job is being a fashion designer, but I have been traveling and taking pictures for some time and it seemed only fair to share a little bit of it. The Voyageur is a place to make you discover or rediscover small corners of the world that feel unique, inspirational and surprising. All pictures are shot by me, unless, well, I am actually ON the picture, in that case I have my husband to thank for it. I currently shoot with a Sigma DP2M even if some of pictures here were taken with my former Sigma DP1. My husband’s pictures are shot with a Ricoh GR1V, a Leica MP or a Ricoh GXRm.
it’s cooooooooooooold in Cape Town today. i even wore my winter jacket that i bought (and last wore) 5 years ago when i was in wintery London. so when i got an email introducing Tiny Atlas Quarterly, an online magazine founded by photographer Emily Nathan and art director Liz Mullally, and i clicked through to this wonderful photo essay about Santorini i was temporarily transported to a warmer clime.
So often art directors, designers, photographers, stylists, digital techs and photo assistants become great friends on set, intermittently cracking up and stressing out during the long sunrise to sunset hours we keep. As friends we work for clients and as friends we dine and travel the world together. It is rare that we come together professionally for projects of our own devising. Instead of keeping all of our location production information and call sheets to ourselves though, we want to share it. With Tiny Atlas we are creating these stories for ourselves and for you. And while our clients may want the ever-sunny day, we also relish a moody storm sweeping across a mountain range. With Tiny Atlas Quarterly we want to show you the places we love to travel ourselves, both high and lowbrow. We also want to show you how we see our own backyards.
you should check out the rest of their Summer issue, which includes a story about demystifying abalone (which used to be a summer staple when i was a kid, before they became endangered in south africa due to illegal poaching), tips for traveling through the south, and awesome summer potraits. seriously, have a long look at Tiny Atlas Quarterly.
