Travel L’Apogee Courchevel Hotel - French Alps

Pristine snow-covered scenery of Courchevel in Les Trois Vallées area of the French Alps, one of the world’s oldest and largest ski areas with all the amenities and options imaginable. Not a bad set-up to build an exclusive luxury ski resort.

L’Apogée Courchevel (the summit, zenith, pinnacle of Courchevel) is a new resort located on the same peak where the former Olympic ski jump was located.

It was designed by one of our favorite architect-designers, Paris-based India Mahdavi, with interiors by Joseph Dirand.

With slabs of stone, peaked rooflines and massive timbers, the hotel exterior speaks the tried-and-true language of resort that reminds us of many ski resorts around the world but also of the National Parks “Parkitecture” in North America. Nothing strikingly different here.

Inside, timbers, fur, leather, suede, wool fabrics with plaid patterns and velvet in rich textures, all confirm that we are, indeed, in an opulent, Tyrolean ski resort.

But the hotel’s 55 rooms and suites involve real modern luxury with customized furniture, bathrooms of Fior di Bosco marble and designer showers and deep soaking tubs. Underfloor heating throughout – including on the balconies. And the scenery from each suite is breathtaking.

If that is not enough, you can stay at the penthouse suite. It has four bedrooms, and a rooftop terrace with a hot tub that is literally a large wooden tub.


And for those with even deeper pockets, there is the private, five-bedroom chalet. The resort’s own spa, restaurant and other amenities may also mean that you never get to the slopes.

The hotel’s owner is French technology entrepreneur Xavier Niel who owns the Internet service provider, Free. L’Apogée Courchevel is managed by Oetker Collection www.oetkercollection.com that manages resort properties around the world. -

TreeLife

innovative and creative sustainable architecture, and illustrate that green can co-exist with urban city life.

The world's first major public exhibition of 'green design' treehouses, TreeLife will bring the biggest names in international architecture, design and art into the one public place for the first time,  showcasing cutting edge green and sustainable design.   

Life in the trees
Treehouses have become creative eco-statements in the design world. They allow people to literally be "in" nature and peace above the stressful street level of life. The Cool Hunter will invite top local and international architects, artists and designers to design for the event a modern treehouse, created from sustainable and recycled materials

Global program of events:
To celebrate the incredible temporary environment created by TreeLife, the exhibition will host a program of events that will vary from city to city.
Art-life: Green-themed, organic art installations placed around treehouses including topiary.


Silent Cinema: Public, open-air "silent" movie screenings using wireless, sound-proof headphones.

Free bikes at each satellite venue for people to move from site to site in an eco-friendly manner

Hi-Tea: Refresh in the TreeLife High Tea Room

The Green Room: An off-site sister hospitality venue

Sleep overnight in a treehouse: The ultimate tree house experience.

Illuminating TreeLife at night: LED installations and nightly LIGHT SHOW

Rollerdisco:  A 70s "rollerskate" rink.

Eco-stage: Artists will perform amongst the installations on the green-powered Eco-Stage

The Ecotarium: A showcase of green technology.

Graphic Art exhibition: 100 TreeLife posters designed by 100 of the world's top graphic illustrators

El Mirador House - Valle de Bravo, Mexico

For someone born in 1977, Mexico-born and educated architect Manuel Cervantes Céspedes has scooped up his fair share of accolades. With his team at CC Arquitectos, he has completed both residential and commercial project that deserve attention.

One residential project in particular, El Mirador, located in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, and completed in 2013, has remained in our minds as an impeccable example of how to create elegant balance.

In this mountaintop residence, the architect and interior designers – as well as the owners – have resisted bravely the temptation to add just that annoying bit of attention-demanding “interest” - a contrasting dash of colour or a contemporary piece of furniture or art in a completely unrelated genre.

We admit that when we first saw the images way back then, we fell in love with the free-ranging horses. Then we admired the use of reclaimed railway ties as logs for the walls and then we were intrigued by the mirror-like pond at the entrance that also functions as a drinking fountain for the horses.

In the end, all of these features are essential parts of the balanced whole: A natural theme that is not disrupted.

There isn’t a single material or colour, inside or out, that breaks the theme, yet the house does not look or feel over-themed or over-designed.

The structure is a combination of steel and wood, and local stone is used extensively throughout.
The residence itself is a one-bedroom plan and takes up only about 550 square meters (5,920 sq.ft) and includes a kitchen and a large family room that connects to the outside terrace.

In El Mirador, Manuel Cervantes Céspedes’s team included José Luis Heredia Alvarez, Rafael Rivera Sanchiz and Javier Claverie. - Tuija Seipell.

Nozomi Sushi Bar - Valencia, Spain

Last fall, José Miguel Herrera and Nuria Morell closed their popular SushiHome restaurant in Valencia, Spain. Fans and patrons were surprised, but they did not have to wait long for the answer.

In December, the couple opened Nozomi Sushi Bar in the funky Ruzafa neighbourhood of the city.

For interior design and branding of their new venture, they employed Valencia-based creative consultancy Masquespacio established in 2010 by Ana Milena Hernández Palacios and Christophe Penasse.

The founders selected the name Nozomi, popular for restaurants and businesses, including the Japanese bullet train. It is a lovely word with dual connotations. The word itself means wish or hope in Japanese and with the bullet-train implications, it also signifies efficiency and modern lifestyle. The whole project was then envisioned around two concepts, ‘emotional classic’ and ‘rational contemporary.’

In the 233 square-metre (2508 sq.ft) space, Hernández Palacios, creative director for this project, managed to evoke the feel of a Japanese street. “We have been studying photography from the most authentic Japanese streets with the aim to create a reinterpretation on a metaphoric way of those streets,” she says. Nozomi Sushi reminds many people of a typical street in Kyoto where traditional Japanese houses are well preserved.

The best feature of the restaurant is the overall quiet balance. It does not appear to be trying too hard like so many concepts today. Instead, it feels natural and coherent with its light-weight wood slats, shelves and partitions contrasted with the strong and solid concrete features.

We love the entrance where the slanted-roof overhang creates a nice play with scale. The otherwise quite basic doorway now appears both inviting and intriguing.

Inside, the chefs ply the ancient trade of sushi – the original fast food – behind a neutral bar with a fantastic origami-inspired cherry-tree-blossom ceiling above them. - Tuija Seipell.

Ileana Makri Store - Athens, Greece

Just before the Holiday shopping season last year, Greek Jewelry designer Ileana Makri opened an intriguing retail store on Patriarhou Ioakim Street in Athens’s posh fashion district of Kolonaki.

She hired Greek architect Stelios Kois to envision an environment for not just her own jewelry but also for fashionable creations of other designers. The Makri is not new to retail, as her first entry, Mageia, also in Athens, opened in 1987. Mageia was also the setting for the launch of her precious jewelry line in 1996. Steeped in symbols, nature, mystique and multicultural lore, her pieces featured snakes, evil eyes, insects and other nature-inspired themes created in gold, diamonds, rubies, sapphires and other precious materials. Barneys New York noticed, and from there on, Makri has been part of the jewelry scene, and not just in the up-market fine jewelry segment but also in costume jewelry .

Celebrities and stars, from Jennifer Lopez and Faith Hill to Uma Thurman, Heidi Klum and Rita Wilson, have walked the red carpets of the world wearing Makri’s pieces.
As one would expect, Kois and project manager Antriana Voutsina with team members Nikos Patsiaouras, Marielina Stavrou, Konstantinos Karanasos and Alexandros Economou, used Makri’s work and philosophy as inspiration for the new Athens store.

The quality of light, geometric patterns, exquisite workmanship and intricate detailing are all essential in Ileana Makri’s work in which she transforms “memories to jewelry”, as Kois expressed it in a brief.

In the “peculiar forest” that Kois’s team created, our eyes are drawn to the strong, angular lines of the glass-and-metal trees on which jewelry and other items are displayed. The trees allow 360-degree viewing of the items inside the branch-boxes. We like the scarcity and strength of materials: metal, glass, wood and stone that gives the items on display a minimalist backdrop.

However, our favourite aspect of the store is the exterior. The window opening that appears like a big picture frame, was divided into three segments: Two windows framed with black stone protrude from the façade and, in between them, a narrow door made of black-stained oak leads into the store.

DR. MARTENS TEAMS UP WITH ADVENTURE TIME

Brace yourself, Adventure Time fans! Cartoon Network collaborate equally famous British brand shoes, Dr. Martens, for making a special collection of Dr. Martens X Adventure Time are certainly cute and gemesin really. The main character like Jack the dog and Finn the human going to appear in Dr. Martens' 8-eyelet boots, with various materials like canvas and leather. Imagine not you think, funny like what? Senengnya again, made a limited edition collection is not only available for the size of a small child wrote, but also adult size.
  Yeay!

 
3 designs of shoes from the collection of Dr. Martens X Adventure Time is going to be released and each design only 1,460 pairs contrived wrote that will be deployed in Dr. Martens' stores worldwide and online starting March 3, 2015.

Welcome to SubTropolis: The Massive Business Complex Buried Under Kansas City

More than 1,000 people spend their workdays in SubTropolis, an industrial park housed in an excavated mine the size of 140 football fields

About 10 percent of Kansas City's commercial real estate is underground, says Ora Reynolds, president of SubTropolis landlord Hunt Midwest. Landlords have made a cottage industry out of underground industrial space, thanks to rock formations near the Missouri River that allow trucks to drive into the old mines instead of tenants needing to use elevators to get things in and out.

The underground industrial park known as SubTroplis opened for business in 1964 in an excavated mine below Kansas City, Mo., attracting tenants with the lure of lower energy costs and cheap rents. The walls, carved out of 270-million-year-old limestone deposits, help keep humidity low and temperatures at a constant 68 degrees, eliminating the need for air conditioning or heating. Tenants have reported saving as much as 70 percent on their energy bills, says Ora Reynolds, president of SubTropolis landlord Hunt Midwest. Rents run about $2.25 per square foot, about half the going rate on the surface. "It's also a question of sustainability," says Joe Paris, vice president at Paris Brothers, a specialty foods packager that employs about 200 workers underground. In addition to Paris Brothers, 51 tenants have rented nearly 6 million square feet of space. Others include LightEdge Solutions, a cloud computing company that uses the mild climate to help cool servers, and an underground archive that contains the original film reels to Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz.
The U.S. Postal Service keeps hundreds of millions of postage stamps in an underground distribution hub at SubTropolis. There's still plenty of space here, with about 8 million square feet of land to develop—almost 10 times the floor area of Kansas City's tallest building. To reach capacity, Hunt Midwest may have to consider additional uses. Underground real estate has been used to grow mushrooms in Pennsylvania and vegetables in London. "We've talked about that," says Reynolds. "We've talked about fish, too. For now, we're trying to stick to what we're good at."Journey to the center of the earth—or at least, to EarthWorks, an educational program that schools students on the Midwest's natural habitats in a 32,000 square-foot space in SubTropolis. Road runners have been competing in 5-kilometer and 10k races inside SubTropolis's seven miles of roadways for 33 years.

Here Is the Mathematical Formula for Finding True Love

Three personality traits that = passion, apparently.

 

Hannah Fry, a math professor at University College London who wrote the book The Mathematics of Love, has identified the three Ps you need to succeed for the magic formula.
If you're PROUD + PROACTIVE + PROVOKABLE, then you could fall in LOVE.
Here's what that means.

Proud

Be proud of yourself and "play up to whatever it is that makes you different," Fry advises. And she's not just making this stuff up. It's backed up by research carried out by OkCupid dating site founder and mathematician, Christian Rudder.
On the site, participants rate one another in terms of how attractive they are, on a scale of one to 10. Rudder took a random sample selection of 5,000 women from the site, and measured their average "attractiveness" rating with how many messages they were sent per month.

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He found that the women who received a wide range of ratings did significantly better than the women who were, by everyone's agreement, very stereotypically beautiful and got a lot of high ratings.
So don't judge yourself so harshly against others, remain proud of what makes you unique, and use this as a "selling feature" for yourself. Do all that and you've got the first step in the formula sorted out.

Proactive

Basically, decide what you want and then go get it. 
Fry asks us to consider the traditional "boy hits on girl" scenario in the context of a party. If a boy starts chatting up a girl and gets rejected, it's likely that he will move on to the next girl until he finds someone to "partner up" with. Following this algorithm, everyone will end up with a partner eventually.
But if you think about it, those who are proactive in doing the asking are much more likely to end up with a better partner than those who sit back and wait to be approached. 
By coming out of your comfort zone, you could be opening up opportunities to meet all sorts of people, rather than just waiting for one to have the courage to approach you. 

Provokable

Although this doesn't sound like an attractive trait, Fry disagrees and suggests speaking up when something is bothering you. Apparently, mathematicians are able to determine the chances of your relationship being a success, based on the way you argue.
An experiment by psychologist John Gottman recorded hundreds of conversations had by married couples, and came up with a way to assess what happened as they played out. Researchers recorded the couples' blood pressure, skin conductivity, and heart rates, and measured it alongside the content of the conversations. 
They were then able to predict whether or not a couple was likely to get divorced with great certainty. The couples who were evidently open and honest in their emotions with each other had a greater chance of survival than those who kept quiet.
So there you go, the love equation that (apparently) works. And you didn't even need a calculator!