Calder Gardens
Although it’s situated on Philadelphia’s Museum Mile, directly across from the Rodin Museum, Calder Gardens—a new space dedicated to the art and legacy of Alexander Calder—could be considered more of a sanctuary than a museum. Opened to the public earlier this week, the 1.8-acre site is replete with gardens and meadows featuring native and perennial flora, brought to life by renowned Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf (who was recently profiled by Spencer in Elle Decor). Rising up from this landscape is a gently curved structure, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, featuring, to the north, a reflective metallic façade and, to the south, an understated wood exterior that recalls Calder’s own bohemian home in Roxbury, Connecticut. Both inside and outside the building, visitors will find a range of the sculptor’s works, some of them on public view for the very first time. Forgoing traditional labels that provide titles, dates, and didactic texts explaining how best to interpret the works, Calder Gardens allows the artist’s mobiles, stabiles, paintings, and drawings to speak for themselves and encourages visitors to pause, ponder, and react to the art in a more wholly emotional, instinctual way.

Chanel’s la Galerie du 19M Tokyo
Founded by Chanel in Paris in 2021, the le19M initiative assembles 11 Maisons d’art and nearly 700 artisans and experts in fashion and decoration. It also houses la Galerie du 19M, an open space that showcases these craftspeople’s work. Next week, la Galerie du 19M will travel east to take up residence on the 52nd floor of the Mori Tower in the heart of Tokyo. On view from Sept. 30 to Oct. 20, the space will unfold to visitors in three distinct chapters: “Le Festival,” “Beyond Our Horizons,” and “Lesage.” Designed by Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects, led by architect Tsuyoshi Tane, the installation “Le Festival” will introduce the savoir-faire of le19M’s Maisons d’art, exposing visitors to raw materials, tools, and samples of nearly finished works. “Beyond Our Horizons,” meanwhile, draws together the creations of almost 30 Japanese and French artists, artisans, and ateliers, including textile artist Akiko Ishigaki and the lantern-maker family Kojima Shoten. Finally, the retrospective “Lesage: 100 Years of Fashion and Decoration” marks the centennial of the embroidery and weaving house of the same name, a close partner of Chanel. Beyond paying tribute to Japanese and French artistry, la Galerie du 19M Tokyo serves as a testament to both cultures’ shared reverence for craftsmanship and beauty.

“Martin Puryear: Nexus” at MFA Boston
Opening today at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Martin Puryear: Nexus” (on view through Feb. 8, 2026) assembles some 50 works from across the lauded sculptor’s career, offering the most comprehensive survey of his work in nearly two decades. Co-organized by the MFA and the Cleveland Museum of Art, the exhibition centers on Puryear’s use of a diverse array of materials and media—from sculptures composed of wood, leather, glass, marble, and metal to rarely displayed drawings and prints. Beginning with works on paper from the early 1960s, the exhibition follows his lifetime of exploration and innovation in form, material, and process. Rooted in new scholarship, the show illuminates the ways in which Puryear’s singular practice has been shaped by his enduring interests in global traditions of material culture, African American history, and the natural world. The wall-mounted “Hibernian Testosterone,” for example, reproduces in full scale the 12-foot antlers of the Irish elk, an extinct species of deer common during the Ice Age, while the bronze sculpture “Aso Oke” borrows its form from the fila gobi, a ceremonial cap worn by the Yoruba people of Nigeria. Traversing time, cultures, and geographies, this retrospective evokes not only the artist’s physical migrations throughout a lifetime of travel, research, and study, but also the wanderings and wonderings of his endlessly curious mind.

What do Isabella Rossellini, basil, and fine dining have in common? The answer: Flynn McGarry. If you’ve heard of the chef, chances are you know that the 26-year-old prodigy started cooking when he was just 10 years old, and has since accrued a slew of projects to his name. First was Gem, the now-closed experimental tasting menu restaurant on the Lower East Side; followed by the more casual Gem Wine, a wine bar with small plates; and most recently, Gem Home, in Nolita, a casual, all-day café, bakery, grocery, and homewares store. Now he’s gearing up for his pièce de résistance: Cove, a larger-scale, 90-seat restaurant that will serve both à la carte and chef’s choice set menus, opening in Manhattan’s Hudson Square next month. Having signed a 15-year lease, McGarry envisions this as a grounding, long-term space—one he can grow into as his next decade in the fine-dining world unfolds. In preparation, he’s been hosting dinners all summer on actor and conservationist Isabella Rossellini’s Mama Farm on Long Island, where he’s been testing out menu concepts, growing his own fruits and vegetables, and getting to know the ins and outs of East Coast produce.

Here, we catch up with the chef to hear more about how ’90s California-style cuisine inspired Cove, the pleasure of drawing from Rossellini’s farm for his table, and his hope to build a restaurant that feels like home.

Can you tell us about how the idea for Cove came about?
It’s been almost three years in the works. Post-Covid, when we opened Gem Wine, it really felt like this was where we needed to focus our energy. As I found the space and then started to ideate about it, though, I felt that it needed to be something else. In a lot of ways, it’s a continuation of what we did at Gem, but it’s also the antithesis of what we did at Gem. We came from a restaurant with twenty seats on the Lower East Side, barely a kitchen, and sort of rough around the edges. Now we have a four-thousand-square-foot space.

In what other ways does Cove differ from your other restaurants?
Our references are different. I didn’t want to muddy the waters and confuse everyone with another thing called Gem. I really wanted it to exist on its own.

When you walk in, there’s a forty-seat à-la-carte room. In a way, we took Gem Wine, Gem, and the private event space of Gem Home and combined them under one roof. You can go in on a Tuesday night to have a few things to eat and go home. It can be something a little bit simpler; it doesn’t have to be a full tasting menu. Looking at New York City dining trends, what everyone wants nowadays is choice and option. We want to give people the concept of choice, and we want a place that people can come if they’re scared of a tasting menu.

Essentially, there are two ways you can eat here: In the à-la-carte room, you can order dishes to share, but you can also easily do a five-dish, family-style menu. We want to get people to understand that choice is great, but also that we know how to give you a better experience if we can be in the driving seat a little bit. Even in the à-la-carte room, we want this element that feels a little bit more like a tasting menu.

The set menu room is tucked behind the kitchen. It’s between eight and ten dishes every night, really whatever we want to cook that day. It’s a longer experience. The other thing that’s very luxurious about that room is that there’s a four-hour turn time on the tables. We’re trying to show that the concept of luxury in New York is time. If you’re thirty minutes late because you got stuck in traffic, that doesn’t really affect your experience—this is your table for the night. If you want a friend to join later and have a drink with you, or if you want to eat really quickly and leave, that’s up to you.

How did your upbringing influence your sensibility when it comes to cooking and what you want to serve at your restaurant?
I grew up in Malibu, and our neighbor would randomly catch a yellowfin tuna, then drop it off on everyone’s doorstep. This [farm-to-table experience] also exists on the East Coast. There are such amazing ingredients—they’re just a little bit harder to find.

Gem Home is what I felt was missing from New York. Cove is that same question, but on a much higher level—look at [Alice Waters’s] Chez Panisse and [Thomas Keller’s] The French Laundry. I just went out to California to all these restaurants, and it solidified my thought process that was like, they’re doing something that feels different than all of the fine dining that exists in New York, the nineties idea of fine dining.

Where did you draw inspiration from when conceptualizing Cove?
When you start looking back to nineties restaurants and dining, it was when all of these incredibly influential restaurants came about. They were all sort of facing a very similar thing: How do you recontextualize luxury and fine dining and ingredients? All these places I look at are still around and are still drivers of culture.

I’m trying to build a restaurant focused on what these places have done that have been around for thirty years. What are these elements? How do we build this as a restaurant that lasts versus a project? How do I employ people for a long time, and how do I allow us to grow steadily and pay for all of our bills and give myself a life that I want? It’s such a different thought process than I had when I was 19.

Can you talk about your friendship with Isabella Rossellini, and how you’re integrating the produce from your garden and the vegetable patch on her farm into Cove?
I met her five years ago during Covid. We wanted somewhere to do events, and we couldn’t be inside. Eventually, she was like, “Would you be interested in taking a little plot of land here and growing your own stuff?” To me, it’s such a special place, because it’s an hour and a half away from the restaurant. There are very few farms where we could, at 10 a.m., harvest our basil and bring it straight to the restaurant. The idea is we’re growing things that we want to have someone pick on Tuesday morning, and people are eating it that evening.

I think it’s so important for the restaurant to have that connection to nature in a very Japanese-inspired way. I love to surround the dish underneath with some oat leaves, give you that picture of what it looks like out of the city.

The farm is a really big element of the restaurant, even just inspiration-wise. I think we’re proving that by the amount of people who are like, “Oh, wow, I’ve never tasted an herb that tastes like that.” Now, the challenge will be: How do we bring that to the city?

What are your hopes for Cove’s future?
I really want to build a restaurant that feels like a forever home—we have a fifteen-year lease; hopefully everything works out—and it’s where I go to work every day for the next fifteen years. I finally feel comfortable enough to go, “This is actually how I can sustainably do this for a long time,” having seen, “Oh, these are the things that I actually tried and kind of burnt me out a little bit, and these are the things that were really difficult.” But then, the second that I’m actually in the restaurant, cooking, I’m like, “Oh, this is all so easy. This is what I should be doing.”

This interview was conducted by Dalya Benor. It has been condensed and edited.