FOUNDATIONS: April
Spring; Full Throttle
March said shut up and sit down, which I took extremely seriously, quietmaxxing as it were. Acai bowls and yoga, and for a meauxment, I was a person who had their life together. I looked great in the morning, de-puffed and de-frosted.
April tried to do that, but with Terazzo and Bleach.
I went to Milan, went back blonde, played a brand new room at The Cause, got a new tattoo, and did a fab photo shoot. At some point in the eye of the storm of it all, I started asking myself whether I was actually enjoying any of this or just doing it very quickly. The answer, for the record, was yes, but lord am I recovering from the whiplash.
Welcome to Foundations. Each month I gather the cultural footings beneath my life: the films, music, architecture, books and odd discoveries that quietly shape the structure of the month.
LIFE LATELY
Milan Design Week happened, big time. You can read the full debrief here. The short version: I love design, and I love my job; I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.
I went back blonde again. Last year, I made a sincere and sustained attempt at brunette, which was fine, genuinely fine, alas, some things are structurally important, and I have decided my hair colour is one of them.
Stunning Photo shoot this month, details to follow. I am deliberately being aloof, how Aquarian of me, I think it suits me. Nonchalance, in this economy?
I DJed at The Cause for the second time, this time in their new room. New as in genuinely new, freshly built, a gorgeous terrazzo DJ booth (my favourite material), untouched. I was the first person to play it. Which is way more fab than saying I played the warm-up set.
APRIL MEDIA
A chaotic month on a surprisingly coherent media diet. Everything I consumed this April was somehow about people who are in over their heads. I did not plan this, believe it or not, I think it must have been planned for me.
FILM & TV
URCHIN
Often, London on screen is either in the past or part of some far-off fantasy. Another period drama, Mr Darcy, maybe a shot of a red bus. Urchin, however, is set in the actual texture of contemporary London, the parts that aren’t quite mood board fodder. I found that quite startling. You recognise it immediately, not as backdrop but as atmosphere. The cinematography is extraordinary: melancholy without being miserabilist, beautiful in a way that makes the bleakness land harder. I thought about it for days, I’ll leave it at though as you should go in knowing as little as possible.
GIRLS
I am watching Girls for the first time, and it is nostalgic in the same way a VK is. I hate (to love, or love to hate, I’m not so sure yet). Frankly, I would not go back to being 23 for love nor money. I barely made it out the first time. Something about the specific texture of that chaos, the confident wrongness of it, is now allowing me to break away.
BOOK
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
I did briefly consider doing another Isherwood, two in two months, but I thought perhaps I had posted enough about pre-Nazi Germany for one quarter. Time to let civilisation collapse on a slightly larger scale.
Foundation was my first Asimov and I loved it completely. Incomprehensible scale, entirely familiar politics. A universe a million times the size of ours, current events dressed up in robes. I found that both impressive and a little bit grim. The line that has not left me: violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Written in 1951. I will leave it there. (it's also not lost on me that the book is this column’s (column?) Name sake)
ALBUM
Symbol, Susumu Yokota
Randomly, it’s a sample album built almost entirely from classical music. Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saens, Debussy, John Cage, Meredith Monk, Frankensein-ed into something that has scratched a brain itch I’ve never been able to reach before. Slightly baroque in the sense that it has too much ornament, too much drama, beauty that accumulates past the point of elegance into something overwhelming and strange, but god, it is beautiful.
If Moon Safari last month was your life softly lit, a Sainsbury’s back over the big light at 7 am, Symbol is your life turned into a meadow of wildflowers of impossible colours. (yeah I know)
ARCHITECTURE
Banco de Londres y América del Sud, Buenos Aires - SEPRA Architects, 1966
Look at that facade. The structural fins splay outward like load-bearing limbs, bracing for impact. The structure isn’t hidden behind the skin, it IS the skin. You can read exactly how the building works just by looking at it. The most honest thing a building can do, or the most theatrical. In this case, emphatically both.
My love of this vocabulary probably comes from Star Wars if I’m being honest. AT-AT walkers, Star Destroyers, the Millennium Falcon: monolithic, slightly threatening, couldn’t care less if you think they’re pretty. I wanted to live inside all of it at age seven and architecturally speaking I have never recovered. Here’s the thing though: the Banco de Londres was completed in 1966. Star Wars came out in 1977. I absorbed it as a child through science fiction, completely unaware of the source material. The Banco de Londres is the source material.
George Lucas made an entire generation fall in love with monolithic concrete and they didn’t even clock it. Truly incredible work.
ARTWORK
The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Salvador Dalí, 1937
Yes, I am picking a painting about staring at your own reflection in the month I went back to my original hair colour and did a photo shoot. We all know exactly what I am doing.
What I love about the Metamorphosis is that it doesn’t read Narcissus as simply vain. Dalí paints the moment where self-absorption tips into something else: the figure dissolving into its reflection, a hand rising from the water holding an egg, a flower growing from it. Transformation rather than just vanity. The real question is where the line is between knowing yourself well and becoming a surface.
The whole month was like that, actually, lots of surface and a lot of noise, but something underneath it was quietly becoming.
April was loud. Milan, the dancefloor, the hair, all of it very visible, all of it pulling outward. There were moments where I had to remind myself what I actually thought, as opposed to what the room seemed to need from me. Mostly fine. But worth noting.
The flower grows. Something comes of it. I am choosing to find that comforting.
April was a lot, the good kind, the kind that feels earned once it’s behind you.
Onwards to May, longer evenings, bare arms, and the annual delusion that this will be the summer I actually use the park intentionally rather than just walking through it on the way to somewhere else. My word of 2026 is still SLOW. I need to remember that.
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My real goal is to have a weekly newsletter, two more lifestyle and two more architecture-leaning. If this is something you would read, or at least look at the pictures of, let me know, because my poor little brain only deals in absolutes.