East Eats West

Mad Men optician in Zurich

Should you be a fan of the American TV hit show “Mad Man” you should make a trip to Felder Optik in Zurich. The newly relaunched shop was run by the Felder family for over 100 years. The previous shop owner recently decided to hand over his business to two dynamic young opticians. The two of them embarked on a challenging re-design project. They kept the old wooden furniture, removed all the smoke stains, laid a new carpet and added some tasteful ambient lighting. The result is a very pleasing combination of retro and new. The couple also updated the product range with many hand-made and exclusive glasses from Robert Marc from France, Entourage of 7 from Los Angeles and other hard to find brands like Dita and KBL Eyewear.

www.felderoptik.ch

 

If you don’t want IKEA in your children’s room

I have seen many children’s room, ranging from richly decorated to overstuffed, from cramped to such fitted with every imaginable contraption. However, most children rooms are more about the parents than the kids, especially when they are small (babies actually don’t care at all where they sleep so long as they get their sleep!). With cheap IKEA furniture and even cheaper plastic toys made in China, a children room can be easily and quickly converted into a pillage of last year’s hit movie toys and cheap electronic contraptions. With generous grandparents, relatives and friends meaning well any children room can become quickly cluttered. So what to do? Go to Zug (Switzerland) where a charming Irish woman, Caroline, maintains a wonderful interior and furniture shop catering to babies, children and teenagers by the name of Rooom 4 Kids. She has a wide range of solid Swiss, French and European furnitures, tasteful toys and hand-made art that would ‘grow’ with the kids. Certainly a place to go for children’s stuff especially if you are looking for a one off item/gifts for your children.

Website: http://www.rooom4kids.ch/

Hand-painted shoes in Paris

 

Ever since I met Mr. Hiroki, the shoe painter, in Japan I was intrigued about the idea of customized men’s shoes. Recently in Paris I happened on Mr. Di Mascio who does the exact same thing. He buys classic goodyear welted men’s shoes from Portugal and hand-paints them to the customer’s specification. He used to work with several Italian shoe makers, Kiton among them. Beautiful!

http://www.laurentdimascio.com/

Russian shoeshine in Dublin

 Owning hand-made good-year welted shoes comes with an obligation: cleaning. I wrote about shoeshine before (http://easteatswest.typepad.com/east_eats_west/2010/04/shoe-care-made-easy.html). It is every quality shoe owner’s duty and maybe joy to clean his or her shoes. However, sometimes a little help is highly appreciated. So whenever I travel and get the chance to get a shoeshine I go for it. Dublin airport nowadays offers shoeshine and I gave it a try. My shoeshiner’s name was Sascha and he hails from Leningrad (not St.Petersburg). By trade he was a carpenter but somehow ended up polishing shoes. The shoeshine cost €7 and he used by far too much shoe crème and definitely was on the lazy side when it came to polishing. So far, the best shoe shine I ever got was in New York for a mere $3 (http://easteatswest.typepad.com/east_eats_west/2011/07/shoe-shine-for-3.html).

Marvelous Chateau Chenonceau

The Loire Valley in France has many wonderful sights and castles. But for pure romance and poetic appeal Chenonceau clearly ranks at the top of my list. It sits on top of the peaceful Cher River and is clearly the most feminine of all Loire castles. In contrast to many other Loire castles it also sports fully furnished rooms and three charming kitchen. In contrast to the very symmetrical Chambord castle Chenonceau’s charm lies in its asymmetrical design and off-center gardens. Website: www.chenonceau.com  

Leather shoes made in France

Italy and England might be more famous for hand-crafted leather shoes, France however also has a few notable players. Heschung is one of them. Since 1934 they produce classic men and women’s shoes with a modern twist.

http://www.heschung.com/

Les Schlumpf, Switzerland and the largest car museum in the world

What a story and what a legacy. The Schlumpf brothers had Swiss parentage and struck it big in France before the war. One of the two brothers became, maybe unsurprisingly, a banker. The other became a textile baron. Together they became very wealthy. Most of their wealth went into an amazing car collection. They were particularly obsessed with Bugatti cars, back then the most prestigious car brand. As collectors they amassed an absolutely breathtaking collection of 400 cars, among them many unique Bugatti, Maserati, Maybach, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls Royce, Bentley and Ferrari. However, the war brought their empire down and today the Cité de l’Automobile in Mulhouse close to the Swiss border houses 400 vintage cars. It is therefore the biggest car collection in the world. A visit is a must for everyone with just a tiny little bit of petrol in his or her blood!

http://citedelautomobile.com/en/home  

A peaceful monastery in the forest

Sometimes a major destination can fade into the background and the side-road becomes the attraction. Sometimes, taking a small detour holds big rewards. On the way to Paris from Dijon by car I followed some local advice and took a detour to the L’Abbaye de Fontenay. The abbey sits tucked away in a beautiful forest in Burgundy and is a UNESCO world heritage site. It was founded in 1118 by the St. Bernard and was for the longest time a Cistercian monastery. The buildings are modest but well arranged. The gardens are simple and contemplative. And the abbey houses the oldest hydraulic metal forge in Europe. It is the perfect stop on a busy journey to Paris.

More information on: www.abbayedefontenay.com

 

Good old journalism

Do you remember the time before all the free commuter newspapers flooded trains and buses? The times when content mattered and thoughts where actually printed and not transmitted by LCDs? Do you remember the touch and smell of printed-paper? Do you think that the iPad should not be used for reading books or magazines? Look no longer, Reportagen, sponsored by the Freitag recycled bags, offers you just that: well-researched stories from around the globe, printed in beautiful fonts on sturdy paper. Nothing more, nothing less. Yes, the good old times! 

Order it here: www.reportagen.com

Fantastic Chateau Chambord

The Loire valley, southwest of Paris, is a UNESCO heritage region famous for its many magnificent castles. Clearly a must-see destination is the fantastic Chambord castle. Originally a hunting castle it had many illustrious occupants, Louis XIV one among them. It is also rumored that Leonardo da Vinci, who lived and died nearby in Amboise, had a hand in its strictly geometrical design. The most spectacular side of Chambord are its many chimneys and little turrets, lending the castle a fairy-tale, almost fata-morgana-like, appearance. It is set in a wonderful forest and well worth a visit. Website: www.chambord.org

 

At the market in Paris

Yes, it is possible to have a bad dinner in France, it happened to me. However, one of the easiest ways of tasting the fabled French food is paying a visit to the local market. I did exactly that in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe. Not only were the bread, cheese and Foie Gras (goose liver) bigger than anywhere else, the tasting portions were also generous. A very enthusiastic market vendor chopped off a generous chunk of cheese and goat liver for me to try. Just amazing! He then moved on to sausages and small, round goat cheese (crotins). I ended up trying not only cheese but also bread and many fruits. Amazing!   

Rapid bike lane in Paris

I recently made a trip to Paris by car. While having breakfast in Dijon, halfway to Paris, a German couple said that I do not have to worry about other cars in Paris but instead should worry about the bikes. They were spot on. Between the very left and second left lane there is an unofficial bike lane. The ‘lane’ or rather the space in between these slowly moving or standing cars is used by bikers. And the bikes can be anything from a three-wheeler scooter up to a full-sized Harley-Davidson. Every Parisian knows to be extra careful when crossing this lane as bikes approach at break-neck speed. And should you switch lanes not fast enough, you can be sure that impatient bike-riders would disapprove by honking and gesturing very explicitly!

How studying Buddhism for 25 years in Tibet made someone wealthy

Buddha might be an unlikely management guru. However, Geshe Michael Roach of the “The Diamond Cutter” book fame exactly thinks that. Geshe Michael is an American who studied Buddhism in Tibet and eventually became a “Geshe”, a Tibetan Buddhist academic degree for monks. After studying for 25 years he had to proof his understanding of the ancient Buddhist principles by working in a business. He did so very successfully and wrote a book about it (The Diamond Cutter). Nowadays he travels the world and teaches “karmic management” to people from Moscow to Zurich. I attended one of his first lectures in Zurich and was impressed by his simple explanation of the Buddhist idea of karma and how it can be applied in business and life in general. 

Geshe Michael’s story was simple. Life is about planting seeds, again and again. Those seeds will grow into a tree and die again. Therefore one has to continuously plant seeds. Seeds are thoughts and actions. He told us the story of an architect of Chinese origin who wanted to find a life partner. She wanted to know from Geshe Michael if she would find her husband in a club or on the internet. After contemplating for a while he told her that she would find her future husband in the elderly home. That startled the woman as she was in her mid thirties. Geshe Michael explained to her, that in order to find companionship she had to be a good companion to someone who is lonely. So she went to the elderly home every other week until one day, in a yoga class, she bumped into her future husband. It was love at first sight. Six months later Geshe Michael married them. After the marriage he asked them how the woman from the elderly home was doing and she told him, that she was too busy with her wedding plans to visit her again. Geshe Michael told her, that she continuously has to plant seeds of companionship, otherwise her marriage will not last.

Geshe Michael also explained, how the same Karmic principle can be used for a successful business. At the end the recipe is as simple as foreign to us: give others what you want and you will be given in return. Or isn’t it that unfamiliar?

Learn more about his teachings here: http://www.diamondcutterinstitute.com  

Box-houses everywhere in Switzerland

I sometimes share an office with architects who make virtual rendering of architectural projects mostly in Switzerland. Whenever I pass their desks I see the same type of homes again and again: boxes with big windows. Everyone who builds houses nowadays seems to go for box-shaped houses with floor-to-ceiling windows. It is deemed to be the most efficient house structure as it maximizes space and presumably light. However, whenever I pass such boxes I see curtains drawn and shades shuts. Isn’t that surprising? Why would you want big windows if you block the view?

My theory is that people buy into the idea of maximizing space and light. And architects like designing such simple structure. The problem is that those boxes are designed from the outside, not with the view of someone living on the inside. With increasing density of urban space this obviously leads to conflicts of privacy versus light.

A current exhibition titled “Learning from Tokyo” tackles this conundrum. It shows clever, ingenious and homely examples of houses in the super-dense Tokyo area. And how architects cleverly make use of space, public areas and privacy. It is all about interesting angles and views, but planned from inside out; boxes are made by architects but people have to live in it. Anyone considering building a house should visit the exhibition!

Learn more here: http://www.learningfromtokyo.ch/

Pharmaceutical lighting

Sometimes you happen on something that feels very familiar, very soothing, like it has been around for a very long time. I had exactly this feeling when I first saw the limited edition Apotheca lamps by the Zurich based interior designers Mia Kepenek and Nicholas Frei. They salvaged sixty antique brown pharmaceutical glass containers from a pharmacy renovation and transformed the thick brown glass bottles into an amazing ambient light, only adding a carbon filament light bulb that is custom-made in Switzerland. Each light is therefore absolutely unique and radiates a very soothing warm orange light. Should you be interested in purchasing one, better hurry up, as the Italian furniture giant Poliform bought almost all the remaining lamps, using them at their Milano furniture fair!

Hurry up and contact Mai Kepenek at mia@kreismitte.ch