Designing an innovative house is a rite of passage 
for many young architects. But building in a city doesn’t always make experimentation easy; after all, neighbors have their own ideas about how a block is supposed to look.

When Ho Ping Kong and Tan found their site 
back in 2001, it held a building you could literally back a truck into: a contractor’s warehouse with 
a storage yard. Yet the two-story concrete-block structure seemed like the perfect place to begin. “Here, you don’t have to conform with the facades of the street,” Ho Ping Kong says. And the building itself “was so elemental—a block and an empty space,” Tan says. “It was perfect. We weren’t paying for things we didn’t want to use and we could experiment with all our crazy ideas.”

Just a few months ago, Fasano Hotels opened a sprawling property in Sao Paolo, Brazil, that highlights the natural beauty of the area. It’s so easily accessible from the city that guests are shocked at how quickly they are transported into what seems like a different world—a world surrounded by lakes, preserved forestry, and stunning gardens that flow seamlessly into the Fasano Boa Vista. The man behind the hotel’s strong structure and bold design is one of Brazil’s most renowned architects, Isay Weinfeld. With this project, his goal was to create a hotel that looked and felt as wondrous and peaceful as the nature that envelops it.

True to the spirit of sunny Southern California, where surf and stars blend in casual harmony, Planet Blue has emerged as an authentic alternative to the fast-paced retail world of mass malls and faceless crowds. Planet Blue has served to inspire the fashionista in each of us- along the way it has cultivated a strong and loyal following from in-the-know locals, swank, well-traveled tourists, and high profile celebrity shoppers, alike.

photography//zoey grossman, model//rina@photogenics, makeup//stacey tan……………………………

Any traveler, who ever been  to Iceland, know that is one of the country full of creative people and interesting places to explore. Last May thanks to Kex Hostel, a new hostel concept that was an instant hit with locals and tourists alike. There are 16 bunk-bedded dorm rooms—and if you aren’t a 20-something backpacker anymore you can stay in one of sixteen private rooms, two of which have a private bath. 

Kex is the Icelandic word for biscuit, and the 132-guest hostel was built in an old biscuit factory on the Reykjavik shore overlooking Mt. Esja in the distance. It’s located near the main shopping street, close to many restaurants and bars—nothing in tiny Reykjavik is really very far away, but you could easily never leave the hostel and have a great in-house experience.

While staying at the hostel, you won’t be bored, even for a week. You will find there a variety of dorms and rooms for up to 138 guests along with a café and bar, lounge area, heated outdoor patio, tourist information desk, laundry room, old school gym, guest kitchens, meeting room, free Wi-Fi, and more. KEX is also just steps away from an interesting array of cafés, museums, shops, bars, music venues and various attractions.

KEX Hostel offers a full range of accommodation options. Shared accommodation is available in dorm rooms for 4, 6, 10, or 16 persons. Private accommodation (with shared WC) is offered in family-style quad rooms as well as double and single rooms, and there are also two hotel-quality double rooms that include private WC.

The biggest surprise is in how quickly the restaurant and living areas became a destination for both locals and tourists to hang out. But by far, the most was seeing local Reykjavik residents, teenagers as well as people in their 70s and 80s, coming in for dinner.

If you go to Vienna, probably you will spot a dazzling penthouse by Delugan Meissl has boldly inserted itself between traditional rooftops of the city’s Wieden district like a recently landed alien intruder.

The penthouse is really wierd. It was designed by Elke Meissl and her partner/ husband, Roman Delugan, as a penthouse addition for their family, but it feels more like a prosthetic device that has attached itself temporarily and will move to a new destination as soon as it gets what it wants.

his Alien sense of glomming is particularly evident in a cantilevered section that sticks out the back of the penthouse and looms above the building’s courtyard. It connects to the home’s main stairwell and contains the entry foyer. From there the apartment unfolds not in a conventional hierarchy of rooms but rather in a sequence of vectors that rush in and out toward the surrounding roofscapes of Vienna’s Wieden district, combining a sense of perpetual motion and vertigo.

Converging lines of sheer glass, sloping floors, and ceiling planes create the impression of multiple perspectives and vanishing points. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls enhance the illusion of total transparency. There are no interior walls except for those around the bedrooms. Most of the furniture is built-in and plays its part in the spatial continuum. Ramps lead up to the living zone, while the kitchen sits on a central plateau, which the architects refer to as their “culinary cockpit.”

A long white bar stretches down the center of the apartment and serves as both kitchen counter and visual continuity for the exterior. In the “relaxation zone,” a broad, pillow-laden platform—a kind of updated conversation pit—appears to be suspended between planes of glass.

The penthouse was always intended as a daring move, one calculated to challenge the existing codes and counteract Vienna’s museumlike character. Within the city’s arcane building code, there are provisions for rooftop/attic expansions, but they are exacting: a mansard-style silhouette with a 45-degree slope.

The building faces Platz am Mittersteig, a small triangular plaza created by the odd intersection of several streets. The architects’ own office is located above the plaza directly across from their penthouse. Along this street elevation, House Ray 1 presents a dizzying array of extruded and folded lateral barriers, with metallic surfaces that appear to be scooping air and light for internal consumption. One is reminded of air-intake systems and jetways. (It’s no coincidence that while working out the intricate interfaces of their own penthouse, the architects were designing an extension to the Vienna International Airport and a proposal for the Italian Space Agency.)

The outer skin of the roof is made from Alucobond, a thin manufactured panel of coated aluminum. From inside the home, these panels act as blinders, allowing a degree of privacy within the all-glass apartment, while at the same time blocking or directing attention toward the enviable panoramic views. You can stand in the middle of the penthouse and see all the way to the snow-capped mountains, St. Stephen’s Cathedral at the heart of the old city, and even the brash new high-rises of Donau City.

WILDFOX COUTURE is one of my favourite trend in the whole world, because of the wonderful soft fabrics and the unique design of the items…Musician Jimmy Sommers and co-designers Kimberley Gordon and Emily Faulstich established Wildfox Couture in Los Angeles in 2007. The line has progressed into a full knit range of tops, bottoms, dresses, scarves, socks, and denim. A Limited Edition Daydream T collection featuring the designers’ personal photos, paintings, favorite animals and inspirations, a jewelry range, and also a shoe collaboration with designer Jeffrey Campbell are all launching debut collections for Spring 2012. With continued growth and success of the Women’s line, a kids division called Wildfox Kids hit stores in Fall 2009.

Couture is distributed in over 30 countries worldwide including the U.K., Germany, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Russia and Taiwan, and can be found in such stores as Harvey Nichol’s, Selfridges and Queen for a Day.

I have always been a fan of a group shot in any type of photo so this WILDFOX ’even cowgirls get the blues’ collection is my fav campaign!! Makes me want to drive to a desert and have an impromptuphotoshoot with my gals!!

These days, women are all obsesed with fashion. This could be good if it is connected to creativity and it is not related to a bunch of suitcases full of money. Jungle Fever is a new spin on accessorizing…. It’s already the second decade of the new century, and we are dealing with style questions, ethical and otherwise, that would have bedeviled our chic ancestors. We may pay lip service to sustainability and strive for a toddler-size carbon footprint, but who among us is considering the environment when our cupboards are stuffed with nonbiodegradable synthetic Marc Jacobs fetish frocks, shiny plastic Balenciaga houndstooth-check spring coats and truckloads of industrial-strength Spanx made of who knows what mysterious chemical compound? Not to mention the sheer quantities of merchandise that languish in our armoires, living as we do in a time when 30 pairs of shoes don’t raise an eyebrow, instead of the measly two (or maybe three or four, if they were really prosperous) that our forebears made do with.

Flirt in a Skirt Grown-up looks that don’t take themselves too seriously.

Last night the photographer Arthur Elgort opened his SoHo studio to friends and admirers looking to land last-minute gifts, like a photograph by the famous lensman of Kate Moss. Or how about a portrait of Mick Jagger? There was plenty of Elgort’s oeuvreto choose from (and all at discounted prices). On site the hairstylist Christiaan Houtenbos, the Pace Gallery director Nicola Vassell and the television personality China Chow all shopped and swapped stories about their own Elgorts. “I’m getting my father photos that Arthur took of my mother,” said Chow, dressed in a fur Giambattista Valli top. “They were taken for Vogue; she wasn’t wearing any makeup.” With all the gift-buying going on, T went ahead and asked guests what they were treating themselves to for the holidays:

Cabo Polonio, a remote beach village in southeastern Uruguay, sits on a green peninsula between the Atlantic and a desert landscape of shifting sand dunes. Strewn across the grassy promontory are a single lighthouse and a few hundred whimsical dwellings.

Rasta-colored flags serve as wind vanes, tinted glass bottles are embedded in walls, and exteriors are painted with pictures of suns, cow spots, rainbows and a Klimt-like rendering of a woman. One stands out as particularly fanciful.

No roads lead to Cabo Polonio. To get there, most visitors cross the sand dunes to the west by jeep, horse or on foot. Save for a handful of businesses with generators or wind power and houses with solar panels, the structures in town have no electricity or running water. The only power lines in sight illuminate the lighthouse.

Cows graze on earth banks where the beach begins. Long blades of grass swirl in the wind, tracing their own form of hieroglyphics in the sand. Vendors pass from shack to shack, selling mussels, cakes and hot water to refill thermoses of yerba maté. A small pickup truck from a neighboring town distributes bags of ice once a day.

Besides being a nature preserve, Cabo Polonio is also something of a cultural preserve, a place to find a bohemian ethos that is disappearing from the Uruguayan coast, where, 50 miles to the south, around José Ignacio, construction of high-end hotels is booming.

Polonio’s spectrum of regulars spans artesanos who sleep on the beach and sell their wares in town — jewelry, wind chimes, miniature lighthouses made of seashells — to doctors, lawyers and the occasional celebrity. The French-Spanish pop star Manu Chao and the Academy Award-winning Uruguayan composer Jorge Drexler have been known to go occasionally, while the Argentine writer Alan Pauls, the songwriter Diego Frenkel and the actress Inés Estévez have been spending summers here for years.

Though there is cellphone service now — seven years ago, you could find it only on the top of the lighthouse or the peak of a nearby sand dune — Polonio remains largely unplugged. The only place to recharge your cellphone battery is in the main grocery store, Lujambio’s, and only when its generator is running. Dim in the daytime, Lujambio’s flares up at night, becoming a beacon for people fumbling through the dark in search of food, water, batteries, candles and beer. Last year, Lujambio’s started Polonio’s first “Internet cafe,” consisting of one laptop and a stool.

Not everyone wants to preserve the bare-bones lifestyle. Some people who live here year-round say that keeping things primitive is unnecessarily costly and complicated. A restaurant owner named Diego Grignola told me that when his truck broke down on the way to buy gas for his generator, he was in a jam. “Without gas, we have almost no battery left,” he explained. “Soon we’ll have no music, no blender for smoothies.” He pointed to a small windmill on the roof of his restaurant. “Everything depends on the wind.”

“Electricity is the most incendiary topic of all,” said Laura Cánepa, who owns Posada de los Corvinos, a hostel-cum-library where, to borrow a book, you must leave something that holds value where you live but not in Polonio, like your driver’s license or fingernail polish. “The fishermen and business owners want electricity, since it would be much cheaper to keep things cold. Others of us are strongly opposed.”

At night, life is lived by candlelight. If you venture outside, your chances of making it to your destination depend on the cycle of the moon and the power of your flashlight. When the moon is new and your flashlight dies, you must wait for the lighthouse to swing landward. With no televisions or radios, apart from a handful in the village center, and no cars to speak of, the loudest sounds are those of waves breaking on the sand or horses shuddering in the distance.

Today the Berlin-based Design Hotels group is staking the first big claim to the trend on the beach in Tulum, Mexico. The company’s founder, Claus Sendlinger, who moved with his family to Tulum last year, is spearheading the opening of Papaya Playa, a spiffed-up campus of cabanas once belonging to three now-shuttered resorts on about a half mile of beachfront land.

He brought in his creative team from Berlin to make simple stylish improvements to the 99 structures — “make it a bit more comfortable but keep the rawness,” he says — leaving about half of them with shared bathrooms, including a clutch of jungle huts with communal bunk beds that rent for $25 a night to the many backpackers, yogis and spiritual nomads who regularly drift through town.

But Occupy Tulum this isn’t. There are 40 ocean-facing cabanas with private decks and hammocks, a spa, a boutique, raw food to go from 42°Raw, and a restaurant run by the folks behind Bar 25 andKaterHolzig in Berlin. An international network of D.J.’s and artists will provide weekly entertainment and contribute to monthly full-moon events dreamed up by the Berlin creative agency Mamapapcola. “The fun part is that we brought our friends,” says Sendlinger, who adds that no one’s arm had to be twisted; most of them were already fans of Tulum.

Sendlinger himself is a longtime blow-in to the area, and he’d had his eye on this piece of land for six years before finally making a deal with its owner. Five years ago, he says, such an arrangement wouldn’t have been possible, but the financial crisis has created more opportunities in the hotel business for those who are “good at moving into a temporary space and creating something. I see this happening more and more.” And if it works this winter, it may become permanent — with some further construction and the help of solar and wind power. What won’t happen is a 500-room tower or luxury condos. “That would kill Tulum,” he says. “We want our kids to have as much as possible the same Tulum as we have.”