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New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A House That Reimagines English Country Style
IN 2017, WHEN the British designer Faye Toogood, already the mother of one, learned that she was pregnant with twins, she found herself craving more space and privacy than life in central London allowed. And so, along with her husband, the broadcaster and writer Matt Gibberd, and their eldest daughter, Indigo, now 12, she moved to the small city of Winchester, in Hampshire, where she'd spent her teens. The family, which soon included the twins Etta and Wren, now 7, lived first in a rental cottage, then in a Victorian garden flat down the road from Toogood's parents. Finally, in 2020 they settled into a two-story Victorian outside of town, eight miles east of Winchester's Norman Gothic cathedral. A country manor whose stucco facade is interrupted by an elegant arched loggia, the house is a departure from the spare, conceptual spaces that the couple always inhabited in London. And, they insist, it was never their intention to live on such a grand scale: The six-bedroom house encompasses 6,500 square feet and sits on five and a half acres. But Toogood, 48 — who, since establishing her namesake studio in 2008, has become well known for her sculptural furniture, modern decorative objects, workwear-inspired clothing and minimalist residential interiors — often leans heavily on intuition as a designer and took a similar approach to house hunting. 'This is the house,' she says, 'that invited us in.' Built in the late 19th century, the slate-roofed mansion sits high above the main road, its crescent-shaped, south-facing lawn giving way to a patchwork of fields and grassland that slope down to the River Itchen on the horizon. It was the picturesque setting that drew Gibberd, 47 — who is the grandson of the English architect and town planner Frederick Gibberd — to the property. 'The view,' he points out, 'is the only thing you can't change.' In remaking the home to suit her family, Toogood also worked from the outside in, first repainting the pistachio exterior a light taupe and then adorning the frontage with pale pink climbing roses. Inside, the goal was to soften the space, which had been stripped of its original finishes by the previous owners and, says Toogood, 'lit up like a football stadium' with recessed fixtures, which they removed. After restoring the moldings and fireplaces — which had been covered up, layered in paint or fitted with modern wood burners — they installed traditional Victorian cast-iron radiators in many rooms, refurbished the sash windows and renovated the kitchen, adding internal glass windows and doors, an Aga stove, Plain English cabinetry and Derbyshire fossil stone countertops. WHEN FRIENDS FROM London visit for the first time, the couple say, they're often taken aback, having expected to find the pared-down interiors that Toogood is best known for designing and that Gibberd has championed with the Modern House, the London-based real estate agency-cum-digital magazine that he co-founded in 2011. Instead they're met with Pierre Frey floral curtains in the dining room, Jean Monro rose fabric on the primary bedroom headboard and botanical chintz armchairs in the sitting room. But Toogood points out that the décor is less a departure than a return: She and Gibberd first met working at The World of Interiors, where they developed an appreciation for print and pattern under the tutelage of the magazine's founding editor, Minn Hogg, an affirmed maximalist. One enters the home through a rectangular foyer, where the walls are papered with a woodland scene that Toogood designed with the Brooklyn-based manufacturer Calico. In the center of the room, a giant glazed 19th-century display cabinet, which once sat in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, holds a collection of antique French plaster mushrooms that Toogood purchased from a friend's father. A life-size Carrara marble sculpture of a coat from the clothing line that Toogood designs with her sister, Erica, stands against the far wall, casting a slightly eerie specter. To the right is the dining room, where the 19th-century French mahogany dining table is surrounded by a set of Gio Ponti Superleggera chairs. Devoid of electric lighting, the room is flooded with sun during the day from the large French doors that open onto the lawn. At night, the egg yolk-hued walls — painted in a custom Farrow & Ball color called Toogood Earth — glow with candlelight during frequent dinner parties with weekend guests. Though Toogood says that she wanted to avoid making the home feel like a showroom, its size made dipping into her archive a necessity. 'This house swallows up furniture,' she says. Near the end of renovations, she filled a truck with pieces, including a crystal version of her signature Roly-Poly chair and one of her hand-carved oak Plot I coffee tables — both of which are now in the sitting room, providing a contemporary counterpoint to the 1960s Holland & Sons sofa and canvas Marcel Breuer club chair, which once belonged to Gibberd's grandfather. In the kitchen, a large space at the back of the house that she lined in reclaimed Staffordshire blue tiles, she placed her Roly-Poly table, a 55-inch round fiberglass pedestal where family dinners — planned by Toogood and mostly cooked by Gibberd — are served. Adjacent to the table is what the family refers to as the Pot Room, a glassed-in area dedicated to the white hand-thrown ceramics that Toogood has amassed over the years, some of them everyday dishes, others prized rarities. It's one of several such collections on display: Brown slipware fills a shelved nook off of the mudroom and, in the Flower Room, which is papered in a Colefax and Fowler seaweed print and hung with 19th-century pressed blooms, there are dozens of white biscuit-fired vases designed by the early 20th-century florist Constance Spry for London's Fulham Pottery. 'I've always made sense of the world through collecting,' says Toogood. 'Living with Matt has refined these collections down, but the disease is still there.' For the girls, the most exciting aspect of their home is upstairs: At the far end of a landing, what appears to be a deep shelf set into the wall and stocked with seashells and pink British lusterware is actually a hidden 'Scooby Doo' door, as they call it, leading to the couple's shared dressing room. To enter, one must hop over an 11-inch-high, 15-inch-deep slab, which — they discovered during renovations — is essentially the structure's central lintel. Like much of the house, it's made from an early form of concrete known as no fines, mixed from fragments of flint and fish bones rather than sand. In the Victorian era, the material was extremely rare, considered the height of innovation. The family's new home, it turns out, was more on brand than they'd initially believed. 'It's irrefutably an English country house,' says Gibberd, 'but it has a real modernity to it.'
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn't Wealth. It Was Corruption.
Is the U.S. in a second Gilded Age? Many in the news media seem to think so: You'll find the claim in The New Yorker, NPR, Politico, and these pages. The White House, for its part, seems to think that would be a good thing: 'We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,' Donald Trump said days into his second presidential term, a period that covers—that's right—the Gilded Age. Although the claim was factually lacking, it was politically prophetic. Trump has governed like a late-19th-century president, with his penchant for tariffs, his unusual relationship with a major industrial titan, and his bald-faced corruption. It's widely understood that the late 19th century was an age of technological splendor and economic consolidation, and this is true enough. Thomas Scott and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould dominated the railroads. John D. Rockefeller dominated oil. Andrew Carnegie dominated steel. J. P. Morgan dominated finance. We can see echoes here in the titans of modern industry: Jeff Bezos and the Waltons in commerce; Tim Cook and smartphones; Mark Zuckerberg and our attention; Elon Musk in space. But some of the most interesting echoes of the Gilded Age involve the government's relationship to business. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family held talks to pardon a major crypto executive who had pleaded guilty to money laundering. In exchange, they would secure a stake in his company, Binance. Similarly, in the late 19th century, which was an era of unusual grift, a range of public servants—from White House Cabinet members to local deputy sheriffs—were unembarrassed about skimming fees and taking bribes. [Read: The specter of American oligarchy] To understand what made the late 19th century gilded, I spoke with Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, a mammoth history of America between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. This conversation, which originally appeared on the podcast Plain English, has been truncated and edited. Derek Thompson: The driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point in 1869 marked the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Gilded Age begins just after and extends into the early 1900s. How did the transcontinental rail system set the stage for the Gilded Age? Richard White: At the end of the Civil War, the United States was a country of vast ambitions and relatively little money. What it wanted to do was build an infrastructure to connect California to the rest of the United States. It didn't have the money to do that, so it resorted to a series of subsidies and cooperation with private capital. The railroads were the great corporations of the United States at the core of the American economy. But the railroads depended on a system of insider dealing, corruption, and stock manipulation, in which people who accrued great wealth accrued great influence over the course of the United States. This system went on to define the Gilded Age. Thompson: In the introduction of The Republic for Which It Stands, you write: 'The Gilded Age was corrupt and corruption in government and business mattered. Corruption suffused government and the economy.' How? White: People described each other as 'friends.' They weren't friendly in any colloquial sense that we understand. Friendship in the 19th-century sense was a relationship devoid of any affection in which people pursued common ends by scratching each other's back. The railroad businessmen were friends with politicians, friends with newspapermen, friends with bankers. It was an age of dishonest cooperation. Thompson: There are so many incredible characters from this period of American history: Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. P. Morgan. Who was John Rockefeller, and how did his style of cooperation typify this era of corrupt monopoly? White: Rockefeller created what became the model corporation: Standard Oil. What he wanted to do was to organize a system he saw as too competitive and wildly inefficient. Rockefeller realized that there was just too much oil. He realized that if you were going to get profit, you had to eliminate the number of refineries. So Rockefeller went to the railroads and said, 'I will give you all of my oil, but you have to kick back money to me—and don't do it for my competitors.' Competitors soon found they couldn't compete with Rockefeller, and so he came in and bought them out. By the 1890s, he was saying, 'This is a new age, an age of cooperation.' And what he called cooperation, his opponents called monopoly. Thompson: The U.S. government protected the monopolies in several ways. Steel tariffs helped Andrew Carnegie build his business, and in exchange Carnegie fed information to politicians. The government also quashed labor when it threatened big businesses in the late 19th century. Why does the state side with the monopolies again and again in this period? White: Very often, the people in office were corrupt. The big industrialists would tell congressmen and senators: 'When this is done, you're going to serve a term or two, then come to work for us.' Or: 'I'll loan you a few thousand dollars to invest it in this.' Or: 'I got a land grant from you, and in return, I'll use part of the land grant to kick back to you under a fake trustee.' I mean, the industrialist Cosby Huntington wrote a letter to his associates that said: 'I just bought 1,000 wheels from Senator Barnum from Connecticut, because he does pretty much what I want.' Thompson: What was it about the character of government or the rules and customs of the time that you think made the late 19th century so corrupt as far as government goes? White: The United States was becoming a major industrial country and a continent-spanning country. At the same time, it was incredibly averse to taxes and would not fund its necessary infrastructure and services. So it came to what scholars have called 'fee-based governance.' In the 19th century, to get something done, you'd subsidize a corporation to do it, and that's one source of corruption. The other thing is you take things like collecting the tariffs: Somebody has got to collect it, and that's why the customs house becomes one of the plum appointments you can get. The head of the customs house in New York City makes more than the president of the United States because he gets to keep a certain amount of the customs he collects. You make sheriffs and deputy marshals tax collectors, and they keep a certain proportion of the taxes. That means that there's going to be corruption from the post office all the way up to the sheriffs, to the customs houses, to people who are appointed offices. Everywhere in this system is going to get a fee, a bounty, and opportunity, which allows private profit to perform a public service. The result is corruption that is rampant throughout the whole system. Thompson: One paradox of this era is that it was an astonishing time for material progress and also a decrepit time for human welfare. You write that men and women in this era suffered 'the decline of virtually every measure of physical well-being.' White: By 1880, in the middle of the Gilded Age, if you lived to be 10 years old, you would die at 48, if you're an American white male, and you would be 5 feet 5 inches tall. You would lead a briefer life and be shorter than your Revolutionary ancestor. And you were one of the lucky ones, because on average, 20 percent of infants would die before age 5. You're living in an environment where, as America urbanizes, there's no reliable sewage system. There's no pure water. There's no public health. Thompson: What did the Gilded Age build that's most worth remembering? White: It began to build public infrastructure—which allowed Americans to live better and to be in better health—and transportation infrastructure. The United States, unlike Europe, is this single country without tariff barriers between states, which can use the resources of the entire country. Did we do it efficiently? No. But we did it. And in the end, it became the basic source for much of the growth that followed. [Read: The other fear of the founders] The other thing we started to do, at Edison's lab and at the Gilded Age universities, is build a way to create useful knowledge. We'd always been a nation of tinkerers and inventors, but then we began to systematize it for the public good. The final thing, and it's not so popular anymore, is we begin to create a set of experts and expert organizations, which begin to take that kind of knowledge and to put it to public use. Thompson: How did the excesses of the Gilded Age set the stage for the next era of American history and government, which was the Progressive era? White: I think that the best way to understand the Progressive era is that the Progressives saw society as a machine. You don't let a machine evolve. You design a machine. When a machine breaks down, you repair the machine. When you can get a better machine, you build a better machine. So Progressives begin to think civil society is something which is going to have to be managed all the time. The great advantage of Progressivism is what it did in terms of distribution and equity. But the major drawback of Progressivism, which we struggle with still today, is that in essence, it becomes undemocratic. There's tension in a democracy between rule of experts and having a country which ostensibly is under the control of people through their votes and setting the goals. That tension appears in the Progressive era, and it has never, ever gone away. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
03-04-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
The Story of the Gilded Age Wasn't Wealth. It Was Corruption.
Is the U.S. in a second Gilded Age? Many in the news media seem to think so: You'll find the claim in The New Yorker, NPR, Politico, and these pages. The White House, for its part, seems to think that would be a good thing: 'We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,' Donald Trump said days into his second presidential term, a period that covers—that's right—the Gilded Age. Although the claim was factually lacking, it was politically prophetic. Trump has governed like a late-19th-century president, with his penchant for tariffs, his unusual relationship with a major industrial titan, and his bald-faced corruption. It's widely understood that the late 19th century was an age of technological splendor and economic consolidation, and this is true enough. Thomas Scott and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould dominated the railroads. John D. Rockefeller dominated oil. Andrew Carnegie dominated steel. J. P. Morgan dominated finance. We can see echoes here in the titans of modern industry: Jeff Bezos and the Waltons in commerce; Tim Cook and smartphones; Mark Zuckerberg and our attention; Elon Musk in space. But some of the most interesting echoes of the Gilded Age involve the government's relationship to business. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family held talks to pardon a major crypto executive who had pleaded guilty to money laundering. In exchange, they would secure a stake in his company, Binance. Similarly, in the late 19th century, which was an era of unusual grift, a range of public servants—from White House Cabinet members to local deputy sheriffs—were unembarrassed about skimming fees and taking bribes. To understand what made the late 19th century gilded, I spoke with Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, a mammoth history of America between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. This conversation, which originally appeared on the podcast Plain English, has been truncated and edited. Derek Thompson: The driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point in 1869 marked the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Gilded Age begins just after and extends into the early 1900s. How did the transcontinental rail system set the stage for the Gilded Age? Richard White: At the end of the Civil War, the United States was a country of vast ambitions and relatively little money. What it wanted to do was build an infrastructure to connect California to the rest of the United States. It didn't have the money to do that, so it resorted to a series of subsidies and cooperation with private capital. The railroads were the great corporations of the United States at the core of the American economy. But the railroads depended on a system of insider dealing, corruption, and stock manipulation, in which people who accrued great wealth accrued great influence over the course of the United States. This system went on to define the Gilded Age. Thompson: In the introduction of The Republic for Which It Stands, you write: 'The Gilded Age was corrupt and corruption in government and business mattered. Corruption suffused government and the economy.' How? White: People described each other as 'friends.' They weren't friendly in any colloquial sense that we understand. Friendship in the 19th-century sense was a relationship devoid of any affection in which people pursued common ends by scratching each other's back. The railroad businessmen were friends with politicians, friends with newspapermen, friends with bankers. It was an age of dishonest cooperation. Thompson: There are so many incredible characters from this period of American history: Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. P. Morgan. Who was John Rockefeller, and how did his style of cooperation typify this era of corrupt monopoly? White: Rockefeller created what became the model corporation: Standard Oil. What he wanted to do was to organize a system he saw as too competitive and wildly inefficient. Rockefeller realized that there was just too much oil. He realized that if you were going to get profit, you had to eliminate the number of refineries. So Rockefeller went to the railroads and said, 'I will give you all of my oil, but you have to kick back money to me—and don't do it for my competitors.' Competitors soon found they couldn't compete with Rockefeller, and so he came in and bought them out. By the 1890s, he was saying, 'This is a new age, an age of cooperation.' And what he called cooperation, his opponents called monopoly. Thompson: The U.S. government protected the monopolies in several ways. Steel tariffs helped Andrew Carnegie build his business, and in exchange Carnegie fed information to politicians. The government also quashed labor when it threatened big businesses in the late 19th century. Why does the state side with the monopolies again and again in this period? White: Very often, the people in office were corrupt. The big industrialists would tell congressmen and senators: 'When this is done, you're going to serve a term or two, then come to work for us.' Or: 'I'll loan you a few thousand dollars to invest it in this.' Or: 'I got a land grant from you, and in return, I'll use part of the land grant to kick back to you under a fake trustee.' I mean, the industrialist Cosby Huntington wrote a letter to his associates that said: 'I just bought 1,000 wheels from Senator Barnum from Connecticut, because he does pretty much what I want.' Thompson: What was it about the character of government or the rules and customs of the time that you think made the late 19th century so corrupt as far as government goes? White: The United States was becoming a major industrial country and a continent-spanning country. At the same time, it was incredibly averse to taxes and would not fund its necessary infrastructure and services. So it came to what scholars have called 'fee-based governance.' In the 19th century, to get something done, you'd subsidize a corporation to do it, and that's one source of corruption. The other thing is you take things like collecting the tariffs: Somebody has got to collect it, and that's why the customs house becomes one of the plum appointments you can get. The head of the customs house in New York City makes more than the president of the United States because he gets to keep a certain amount of the customs he collects. You make sheriffs and deputy marshals tax collectors, and they keep a certain proportion of the taxes. That means that there's going to be corruption from the post office all the way up to the sheriffs, to the customs houses, to people who are appointed offices. Everywhere in this system is going to get a fee, a bounty, and opportunity, which allows private profit to perform a public service. The result is corruption that is rampant throughout the whole system. Thompson: One paradox of this era is that it was an astonishing time for material progress and also a decrepit time for human welfare. You write that men and women in this era suffered 'the decline of virtually every measure of physical well-being.' White: By 1880, in the middle of the Gilded Age, if you lived to be 10 years old, you would die at 48, if you're an American white male, and you would be 5 feet 5 inches tall. You would lead a briefer life and be shorter than your Revolutionary ancestor. And you were one of the lucky ones, because on average, 20 percent of infants would die before age 5. You're living in an environment where, as America urbanizes, there's no reliable sewage system. There's no pure water. There's no public health. Thompson: What did the Gilded Age build that's most worth remembering? White: It began to build public infrastructure—which allowed Americans to live better and to be in better health—and transportation infrastructure. The United States, unlike Europe, is this single country without tariff barriers between states, which can use the resources of the entire country. Did we do it efficiently? No. But we did it. And in the end, it became the basic source for much of the growth that followed. The other thing we started to do, at Edison's lab and at the Gilded Age universities, is build a way to create useful knowledge. We'd always been a nation of tinkerers and inventors, but then we began to systematize it for the public good. The final thing, and it's not so popular anymore, is we begin to create a set of experts and expert organizations, which begin to take that kind of knowledge and to put it to public use. Thompson: How did the excesses of the Gilded Age set the stage for the next era of American history and government, which was the Progressive era? White: I think that the best way to understand the Progressive era is that the Progressives saw society as a machine. You don't let a machine evolve. You design a machine. When a machine breaks down, you repair the machine. When you can get a better machine, you build a better machine. So Progressives begin to think civil society is something which is going to have to be managed all the time. The great advantage of Progressivism is what it did in terms of distribution and equity. But the major drawback of Progressivism, which we struggle with still today, is that in essence, it becomes undemocratic. There's tension in a democracy between rule of experts and having a country which ostensibly is under the control of people through their votes and setting the goals. That tension appears in the Progressive era, and it has never, ever gone away.
Axios
26-03-2025
- Politics
- Axios
Local Limelight with 'Abundance' author and journalist Derek Thompson
In writer Derek Thompson's view, a world full of clean energy, plentiful housing, vertical farming and fast and convenient transit is nearly in our grasps — if only we could just build it. The problem, though, is we no longer as a country know how to take on ambitious public works or we create too many rules and procedures that make projects too expensive and time consuming to take on. Driving the news: In " Abundance," a book the Chapel Hill-based journalist co-authored with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, Thompson examines what keeps the U.S. from taking on big public projects — from the clean energy infrastructure needed to avert climate disaster to high-speed public transit — or even simply to build enough housing to meet the demand for it. These are issues that even the Triangle has struggled with, especially in the realm of public transit projects, like light rail and bus rapid transit, said Thompson, who writes for The Atlantic and hosts the " Plain English" podcast. What they're saying: "One theme of the book is that many cities and states struggle with something we call state capacity: the ability of the state, the government, to accomplish its goals," he told Axios. "A theme of recent efforts to build light rail in the Triangle is that it just takes so damn long, and costs so much damn money, to get projects off the ground." "Delay is death for complex construction projects: New objections always emerge, motivations flag, costs spiral," he added. "This is not a North Carolina problem. It's a truly national problem. The U.S. used to be able to start and complete transit projects in a matter of years. These days it can take decades just to arrive at the conclusion that nothing can be built." We talked with Thompson for our latest Local Limelight conversation. The Q&A has been edited for Smart Brevity. Next month, Thompson will be part of a panel discussion in Durham to discuss "Abundance" with Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams and Raleigh Mayor Janet Cowell. More info can be found here. ✍️ What's your writing routine like? There's this famous idea in productivity called Parkinson's Law, which says that work expands to fill the time available to do it. I try to take advantage of the opposite of Parkinson's Law: If I rigorously limit the amount of time I work, I can get more done. I typically take my daughter to day care in the morning and try to go to the gym around 4pm. That leaves roughly 10am to 4pm to write and podcast and talk to people and do whatever else I have to do. Weirdly, I've found that prioritizing things outside of work — like family and exercise — makes me more productive, because it increases the urgency during the work hours. There are very few days where I wake up and think, "Wow, so much time and so little to do." 🍛 What do you think the Triangle is missing? More high-quality southern Asian and Latin American cuisine. 📱 What's your first read in the morning? The Atlantic and The New York Times. 🎧 Do you have a go-to podcast? Some days I listen to Bill Simmons' voice more than any other except my wife's. 🍷 Favorite place to go for a long weekend? Sonoma.
Boston Globe
12-03-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Spotify signs Bill Simmons to a new deal
'I've been in enough work situations at this point that you just kinda know when you're in the right spot,' Simmons said in the statement. 'I think all of us are motivated to do something pretty special in the talk and video space.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Simmons joined Spotify in 2020 when the streaming service purchased his company, the Ringer, for about $250 million. Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek was expanding Spotify from music into new kinds of audio and spent more than $1 billion acquiring podcasting companies and the exclusive rights to hit shows like The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy. Advertisement The investment attracted tens of millions of listeners and turned Spotify into one of the most powerful audio platforms in podcasting. Spotify also spent a lot of money on shows that didn't deliver a large audience and has since scaled back its investment. The founders of many of the companies Spotify acquired have since left, including Parcast's Max Cutler, Gimlet Media's Matt Lieber and Alex Blumberg and Anchor's Michael Mignano. The Ringer stands out as one of Spotify's more successful acquisitions. The company makes several popular sports and pop-culture shows that cost very little to produce and have large audiences, including The Bill Simmons Podcast and The Rewatchables. The Ringer continues to add new programs that broaden its portfolio, including Derek Thompson's current affairs show Plain English and a forthcoming podcast from actress Amy Poehler. The Ringer is now rolling out video versions of many shows, including Simmons' podcast. Spotify hopes adding video will bring in more advertising dollars and increase the amount of time users spend in the app. It faces competition from YouTube. Advertisement Spotify was among the top-performing media stocks last year, rising 138%. The shares have continued higher this year, fueled by better-than-expected subscriber growth and the company's first-ever annual profit.
