Books

Wallpaper City Guides

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category: Travel

Wallpaper Magazine — the bible of all that is cutting edge in international design/fashion/travel/interiors — is celebrating its 10th birthday.

And how better to show off its grown-up status — at ten, a magazine is old enough to drink and smoke and Lord knows what else — than by rolling out a slew of travel guides that are exactly as hip as the magazine?

These make no effort to be complete. They’re 100+ pages. Paperback. Smallish: 6” by 4”. With photos that sometimes fill two pages.

In other words, these are not travel guides for first-time travelers. (You want a primer — start with a guide like Fodor’s.) These books are a whole other game. Indeed, they’re so of the moment that they probably need to be junked and massively revised every year or two — the cutting edge has a way of cutting the throats of hip restaurants and shops. And the thing about architecture is that there’s always more of it, and the new stuff is (or so the media would have it) just a bit more exciting than last year’s.

To judge these guides, I selected a city I know well (Paris) and the city that’s been home for most of my life (New York). Talk about surprising! No, make that mind-blowing.

Wallpaper’s Paris Guide doesn’t fall for the lie that the city never changes. It sees “constant, if sometimes, gentle, upheaval.” Yes — if you are 25 years old and have spent quantity time haunting the chic arrondissements. If, like me, you have a family and plunk yourself down in the 6th or 7th, this guide is a revelation.

I loved the cheek of this praise of the Marais: “These streets…are as near as Paris gets to signs of life on a Sunday.” I was happily surprised to learn that Sacre-Coeur was “built as a monument to failure” (in the Franco-Prussian War). But after that…everything was new. I was especially agog at the hotels — the photos are so exquisite they’re hotel-porn. Who could afford these rooms? Why did I know so few of them?

For that matter, I’d heard of half the restaurants, none of the clubs, few of the buildings. Shopping? Spas? Getaways? Zip. Zip. Zip. It got so that I frowned when I came across a recommendation for a known entity — like Joel Robuchon’s Atelier. Clearly, Joel’s super-expensive, no-reservations eatery must be on the way out.

Wallpaper’s New York Guide was equally full of surprises. I live uptown — clearly, everything worth seeing or doing is way downtown. (Though it was bracing to see the Paris Theatre, at 5th Avenue and 58th Street, listed as the city’s best art-movie cinema.) I’ve never heard of the beautiful Matsuri Restaurant (in the Maritime Hotel), or Thor, or Public, or Odea, or En, or Morimoto. And that’s just the tip of my iceberg of ignorance.

But here’s the thing: Nowhere in these guides do I get the feeling that the writer is sneering at me. Or, that if I go to these places, the proprietors will look at my preppy blazer and graying hair and frantically look for a velvet rope to bar me. The exclusionary factor here is money — bargains are not a Wallpaper priority.

But, hey, you’re on a vacation. A little splurge won’t kill you. And if you cherry-pick the suggestions in these guides, you’re sure to have an adventure you can share with the folks back home. But you’ll have to excuse me now — I’m off to visit New York.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Paris from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to New York from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to London from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Los Angeles from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Amsterdam from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Barcelona from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Madrid from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Milan from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Rome from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Istanbul from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Bangkok from Amazon.com, click here.

To buy Wallpaper’s Guide to Tokyo from Amazon.com, click here.