Next to Heaven by James Frey
A raunchy, hilarious, and absurd-yet-not satire about the one percent of the one percent living in a fictional Connecticut town, the latest novel from literary bad boy James Frey, Next to Heaven (Authors Equity), makes for a pulpy page-turner and a most excellent summer read, preferably poolside. Centered around a swingers party and a murder, this novel—yes, to all the James Frey haters, it’s not a “memoir”; it’s autofiction—captures that sense that, as Frey himself puts it on our Season 11 finale episode, out next Wed., June 25, “We have witnessed, over the past ten years, the greatest accumulation of wealth by the smallest number of people in the history of civilization.” Also: “There is humanity beneath the veneer of beauty and wealth and perfection. There is love and hate and secrets and violence and rage and terror and revenge.” While the haters are gonna hate (The New Yorker, for one, calls the book “unintelligible”), this skewer-the-rich saga is enormously entertaining, much in the same way that HBO’s The White Lotus and AppleTV+’s Your Friends & Neighbors are. Twenty years ago, Frey became one of the earliest examples in our cancel-culture era, shamed on live TV by Oprah, but no matter. He’s still swinging. Refreshingly, on next week’s Time Sensitive episode, he refers to Next to Heaven as “a giggle.”

Airstream Frank Lloyd Wright Travel Trailer
Developed with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West studio in Scottsdale, Arizona, the Airstream Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian Limited Edition Travel Trailer—a collaboration between Airstream and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation—has been unveiled as a tribute to this totemic figure of 20th-century architecture and design. The 28-foot trailer distills Wright’s ideals down into an organically shaped vessel tailor-made for movement. Wright’s Usonian home-design principles—which incorporate, among other tenets, efficiency, fluidity, and simplicity—shape the interior, where every space bends toward function without losing form. Twin beds convert into a king at the press of a button. A desk folds flush into the wall. Generous, circular windows—a hallmark of Wright’s design language—dissolve the boundary between lounge space and landscape. There are archival echoes to Wright’s earlier works, too, including a mobile kitchen he designed in 1939, but was never realized, as well as a desert-inspired palette lifted from his 1955 collaboration with the Martin Senour paint company. Although there’s a Frank Lloyd Wright Suite at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, this travel-trailer extension opens the doors to a whole new way of experiencing Wright: on the road.

SO–IL’s “Necto” at the Venice Architecture Biennale
As part of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the New York–based architecture studio SO–IL, the architect Mariana Popescu, and the Berlin- and New York–based design studio The Green Eyl are presenting “Necto,” a sculptural knitted installation that hovers somewhere between architecture, art, and performance. “Nectograph,” a series of live performances by the dance artist and educator Riley Watts, accompanies the 3-D structure. Suspended between the columns of the Arsenale’s Corderie production center and on view through November 23, “Necto” casts rationality into doubt by featuring strips of biodegradable natural fibers hanging in the air. One is never quite able to orient oneself as to where the geometric installation begins or ends. Florian Idenburg, a founding partner of SO–IL, tells us in an interview that the pieces used for the installation are entirely portable and—in an attempt to save on shipping costs and limit the use of heavy equipment, but also to reduce the exhibition’s footprint—arrived at the exhibition via carry-on luggage. At any construction site, Idenburg says, almost nobody knows where all the pieces, materials, and parts come from—not so with “Necto.” Embedded within its fibers are microscopic DNA decoders so that when the exhibition ends, “Necto” will leave no trace, only the digital details required for its reassembly.

An archaeological, architectural, and agricultural wonder, São Lourenço do Barrocal sits on land that traces its rich history back an astounding 7,000 years. Today in the same family for more than two centuries, this 1,927-acre estate at the foot of the medieval village of Monsaraz in Portugal’s rural Alentejo region is currently overseen by the eighth generation, including José Anónio Uva, who, working with the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, transformed it with great care and consideration into a 40-key hotel, farm, and vineyard in 2016. 

To those who have stayed here, it will come as little surprise that, two years after its opening, Souto de Moura received a Venice Architecture Biennale Golden Lion—one of his profession’s highest honors—for his work recuperating and transforming the understated structures and surrounding landscape. Architectural sleights of hand, Souto de Moura’s light-touch interventions here are barely noticeable, and yet, when seen from above (the Venice presentation showed “before” and “after” aerial images), his design makes clear how integrated, intentional, and all-encompassing it truly is. The judges took particular note of how the project “reveals the essential relationship between architecture, time, and place.”

Time is an, if not the, essential element of São Lourenço do Barrocal. The research, renovation, rehabilitation, and restoration work, which began in 2002, took 14 years to complete—requiring the structural recovery of seven existing century-old buildings—and it shows in all of the hotel’s subtle, exquisite details and layering. Patina is the word that immediately comes to mind upon setting foot on the property. This finely aged limewashed retreat is an alchemical master class in “Slow Design.” There is indeed a time-honored feeling to it, at once ancient and modern. To visit São Lourenço do Barrocal is to engage in the site’s multifarious memories and histories, and to travel through time.

In its breadth and depth, São Lourenço do Barrocal astounds. The hotel itself comprises 22 rooms, two suites, and 16 cottages; two farm-to-table restaurants and a bar; a “farm shop” (the site’s former dovecote and chicken coop); a spa, run by the Austrian organic skincare brand Susanne Kaufmann, with four treatment rooms; and a gym—all with interiors designed by Filipa Almeida and Uva’s wife, Ana Anahory. Also at the heart of the property is a winery and an open-air tasting room. Beyond, the land extends out across 148 acres (60 hectares) of olive groves, home to 6,600 trees and 37 acres (15 hectares) of grapevines. It also includes a small Romanesque colosseum (the former apiary), stables (where eight horses and a donkey reside), two outdoor swimming pools, a vegetable garden, a fully equipped olive-oil mill, roughly 220 cows (fed by locally grown oats), and more than 15 beehives.

Central to the estate is its agriculture. Uva’s concept was to recuperate the farm and bring it fully back to its former life as a traditional, fully functioning “monte alentejano” landscape, a regional equivalent to a Spanish finca, or agricultural estate. Today, maintaining the pioneering spirit of Uva’s ancestors and the guidelines they put in place as far back as 1820, São Lourenço do Barrocal is an entirely organic-certified operation. The property’s wines—including its Vinho de Talha, made from hand-picked Menteúdo, Perrum, and Rabo de Ovelha grape varieties—serve as a fitting metaphor for all of the care that goes into this intricate hospitality operation. Producing around 30,000 to 40,000 bottles a year and largely following the same techniques as from centuries past, Barrocal has a rather intimate wine-making setup, with 14 concrete tanks that hold a capacity of 80,000 liters, as well as an adjacent room lined with French oak barrels and century-old amphorae (the latter previously lined with resin and beeswax, a technique from Roman times).

In a world quick to exalt the latest slick and streamlined spaces, São Lourenço do Barrocal takes a slower, handcrafted, and hyperlocal approach to hospitality, one with a free-flowing energy beautifully exhibited in the herd of wild horses that roam the estate. What I remember most from my visit is the calm and collected sense of being I felt there, spurred on by the hotel’s many intersecting temporal and sensory touchpoints. I’ll never forget one moment in particular: During a Barrocal Energizing Massage at the spa, facing downward toward the floor, I opened my eyes to find a locally made terra-cotta bowl half filled with water and a colorful, perfectly arranged medley of grown-on-site botanicals floating inside, their potpourri gently perfuming the room. It’s exactly this kind of subtle splendor that makes this Portuguese paradise so profoundly special, so rooted in the earth, so Alentejo.

This is a condensed and edited excerpt of a text by Spencer Bailey, published in the forthcoming book Culture: The Leading Hotels of the World (Monacelli), out June 25, with editorial direction by The Slowdown.