Clarksville, a historic district of Austin, Texas, has lately emerged as a stylish dining and shopping enclave. Among the area’s most compelling new businesses is La Embajada, a design shop housed in a 1923 Craftsman bungalow. Combining the hospitality and interiors expertise of its founder, Raul Cabra — who has designed tableware for some of Mexico City’s most celebrated restaurants, including Rosetta and Pujol — La Embajada presents a refined, regionally diverse selection of Mexico’s artisanal offerings. A series of small rooms display vintage and contemporary furniture, from stately midcentury armchairs and 1970s glass sconces to a minimalist agave fiber rug by the Oaxaca-based textile artist Trine Ellitsgaard. The house is also an actual residence. Cabra often stays in the bedroom up the creaky stairs, and he’s recently made it available for short-term stays (bookings include a daily basket of baked goods from Austin’s Swedish Hill). Guests can purchase the room’s handmade décor, such as a pair of sleek bedside lamps in milky white onyx, a 1960s La Malinche dresser and a bedspread from a Michoacan manufacturer that once supplied Herman Miller. Downstairs, glassware, candles and gifts fill a section modeled after a typical general store in a small Mexican town. But La Embajada’s heart is its inviting kitchen, where visiting chefs cook elaborate meals and staff prepare ice cream and coffee. In another twist, every bespoke detail — including a hammered copper sink, caramel-colored tiles and waxed pine cabinets — can be custom-ordered for one’s own home. From $295 a night; email queonda@laembajada.shop to inquire about a stay.
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Court-Ready Clothes and Tennis-Themed Art
Tennis, everyone? The starchy sport, long the province of country clubs and corporate sponsors, has inspired a whole new creative class. Palmes, an online magazine that sells a streetwear version of the sport’s classic togs, is also a burgeoning community that aims “to break down the barriers to tennis,” says founder Nikolaj Hansson, with outreach such as free hitting sessions and lessons around the world. Tennis Club Milano Alberto Bonacossa in Italy’s design capital — featured in a new art book-travelogue “The Tennis Court, A Journey to Discover the World’s Greatest Tennis Courts,” by Nick Pachelli — dates back to the late 19th century but now doubles as a venue for opera, gallery openings and book signings. The Courts, a funky little public oasis in the California desert, also functions as a design studio. Fashion labels MCM and J. Lindeberg have incorporated the sport into their collections in the form of logoed racket bags and Borgian headbands. And the first New York solo show of the 75-year-old Scottish tapestry weaver Elizabeth Radcliffe will debut during this year’s US Open, at the Margot Samel gallery in TriBeCa (Sept. 6 through Oct. 12). Picking up from her waxed motorcycle jacket series from the 1970s, Radcliffe has been inspired by iconic and vintage tennis gear, as in “Philly in Lacoste,” a 17.7 inch by 11.4 inch tapestry depicting a polo shirt that took about 200 hours to weave.
The New York-based artist Laura Chautin grew up in London and has fond memories of childhood trips to the English countryside. The heaths and ponds of the country’s rural areas often show up in her delicate landscape paintings, while blossoms and vines adorn the plates, vases and other tabletop staples she’s sold in limited runs since 2019. Now she’s expanding her offerings with a new venture, Goods by Laura Chautin, which she says will eventually include all the elements to set “the perfect table,” including linens, tablecloths and seat cushions. The initial Goods collection consists of new ceramic pieces handmade by artisans in Porto de Mós, a town in central Portugal, and painted with Chautin’s beloved English flora and fauna. A candlestick holder is accented by rings of foliage and sky, while a pair of egg cups come with pink or blue accents. A dinner plate features a flowery marsh; a dessert plate, a pair of swans. The collection is available online at Moda Operandi, and at a late September New York pop-up at Vacancy Project, a hair salon in the East Village owned by Chautin’s partner, Masami Hosono. From $50, modaoperandi.com.
Drink Here
In Silver Lake, Los Angeles, a Wine Bar and Cafe That Showcases Local Design Talent
When the restaurateur Jos Gozain moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 2016, he dreamed about creating a place “where you want to stay all day, with Mexico’s style of hospitality.” Last week, in partnership with the creative director Olivia Lopez, he opened Barr Seco, a cafe and wine bar in Silver Lake that blends their respective cultures — Lopez is Filipina American — in its food, design and atmosphere. The menu features dishes like hamachi crudo, yuzu ponzu with brown butter and an Ibérico pork adobado tostada, while the bar’s design spotlights artists who live or work in the neighborhood. Ananas Ananas Studio designed the stainless steel bread plates, the furniture designer Michael Felix created the space’s cherry wood and Formica cafe tables and the florist Adam Gallagher contributes rotating arrangements that Lopez describes as “abstract and unruly”: a recent array included panicled hydrangea, amaranth and asparagus fern. barrseco.com.
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An Artist’s Contemplation of the Familial and Spiritual, on View in TriBeCa
Though the artist Amy Bravo grew up in what she calls “a really Italian part of the world” — Bergen County, N.J. — to an Italian American mother and Cuban American father, her practice is largely uninterested in the Catholic imagery such an upbringing might conjure. Still, the Brooklyn-based 27-year-old finds a connection to the religion’s death rites and a parallel mysticism in her upcoming TriBeCa exhibition, “Transmogrification NOW!” In a temporary space hosted by Swivel Gallery, which represents Bravo and will soon move into a new permanent location nearby, a mix of paintings and sculptural works will be installed within a large-scale recreation of Bravo’s paternal grandparents’ house. The works, she says, are her way of imagining faraway relatives she’s never met and reckoning with who they might have actually been, or representing traits in the family members she does know. A found cabinet in her “Automaton” series, for example, symbolizes her father’s temper through a mounted bull’s head and boxing gloves which, she says, “he’s 1724922992 hung up, so to speak.” The pieces are as strange and startling as any you’d find in a spell book, and indeed they serve as artistic incantations for Bravo, often using farm imagery from her Cuban family’s region. “Trojan Rooster (Day Stalker),” a 2024 mixed-media work on plywood, involves an avatar of the artist holding a sword inside a rooster; braids of her hair are connected to the animal’s glowing yellow eyes. “There’s a Hispanic male cockiness: you’re loud, you’re proud,” she explains. “For me, being a lesbian, those [qualities] mean something totally different, but I’m trying to live inside that [feeling] more.” “Transmogrification NOW!” is on view from Sept. 7 through Oct. 15, swivelgallery.com.
For years, the French illustrator Marin Montagut has made and sold what he calls “secret books” from his namesake home goods store in Paris’s Sixth Arrondissement. They look like normal books. (They have curved spines and illustrations on the covers.) The “secret” is the hidden compartment inside — perfect for love letters or spare euros. In the past year, Montagut realized they have other uses, too. The artist was recently approached by the Parisian patisserie Ladurée and asked to design a box of macarons. The result would fit in on just about any bookshelf. One box features a print of a chair from the Luxembourg Garden on the cover with enough room for 16 macarons inside. (Flavor options include black currant jam, orange blossom cream and candied pineapple.) A second box, designed to look like a set of watercolors, is filled with chocolate-covered shortbread. The collaboration will be available from Sept. 4 through Nov. 5, from $51; laduree.us.
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