A Designer of Everything

When the SAS Royal Hotel in the Danish capital was finished in 1960, it was a marvel. It was Copenhagen’s first skyscraper and it is considered to be Arne Jacobsen’s principal work of architecture. The building was designed with two separate sections with different functions. The 22 story tower contains 275 hotel rooms and the lower horizontal building held the hotel foyer, a restaurant and a conservatory. Regardless of the fact that the building was situated in the center of Copenhagen, 14 kilometers from the airport, it was also an airport terminal. Here SAS passengers could check in their luggage and wait in the stylishly furnished lounge for the SAS airport shuttle to whisk them away to their flights. 

In the end, the most remarkable result of the project wasn’t the building itself but rather the furniture that Arne Jacobsen designed for the hotel. Not only did he create the Egg, he also designed the Swan chair and the Drop chair as well as a wide range of other custom furniture, glass wear, textiles, cutlery and more, specifically for the hotel. Just like Gio Ponti in Italy, Arne Jacobsen preferred to design all aspects of a project himself. From the structure to the furniture and down to details like door handles. 

In keeping with the design trends of the day, Arne Jacobsen was inspired by organic shapes the same way Eero Saarinen and Charles & Ray Eames were. Using the latest in materials and production technology he was able to create the remarkably organic shape of his sculptural Egg, intending to lend the visitors a calm space where the chair was placed in the bustling hotel lobby. In fact, he actually made the initial model just as you would a classic sculpture by adding and filing of material from the plaster model. 

The Boxer and the Green Book

This younger cousin of the Manhattan was created a few years before the American prohibition. First published in Hugo R. Ensslin’s Recipes for Mixed Drinks in 1917 it is also, according to Cointreau, probably the first ever American cocktail that calls specifically for the French orange liqueur.

As opposed to the Manhattan the Deshler is also specific when it comes to another ingredient. Instead of using a sweet vermouth the Deshler is made with Dubonnet, the French fortified wine created in 1846 to help the French colonists in Northern Africa cope with malaria.

The name of the cocktail is taken from the Deshler Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, one of three hotels owned by two brothers called Wallick. Hugo R. Ensslin worked at all three but he worked longest at their Wallick Hotel on Times Square, New York, and this is supposedly where he created the Deshler.

Interestingly, the Deshler Hotel in Columbus was listed in the African American postal worker Victor Hugo Green’s The Motorist Green Book. This was a guide book where African Americans could find hospitable lodgings during the time of the Jim Crow laws of racial segregation in the southern states of the US.

A more far fetched background story to the cocktail is that it was named after a lightweight boxer called Dave Deshler. After a pretty good career he finished his last ever boxing match after a technical knockout in January of 1917, the same year Hugo R. Ensslin published his book. So maybe this 5 ft. 3 in. boxer was worth a cocktail in his honor.

The glass is called Buster and was designed by Willy Johansson in 1961.

When Snail Mail Got Faster

Sending messages by air started a very, very long time ago. It was the Egyptians that figured out how to use pigeons for the job around 3,000 B.C. It took almost 5,000 years until a the son of Benjamin Franklin, William Franklin, in 1784 used the, at the time, ultra modern hot air balloon to send a letter to his son William Temple Franklin on the other side of the English Channel. Using balloons never did catch on though, since they aren’t very reliable, so as far as airmail went, pigeon post was the best option. That is until the first airplanes came along. 

The first recorded use of mail by airplane was three letters sent from Petaluna to Santa Rosa in California on February 17, 1911. But since the postmaster wasn’t involved the first official use of airmail was the very day after when Sir Walter Windham in India convinced the Indian postmaster general to let him operate an airmail service.

Cuba started their own airmail service in 1930 and this is where we get to the Airmail cocktail. Shortly thereafter the Bacardi Rum Company issued a pamphlet, Bacardi and Its Many Uses, promoting a cocktail called the Airmail, possibly to celebrate this event. The original drink was elegantly garnished with a real postage stamp. 

During the 1940’s the Airmail started appearing more commonly in bartender guides like in W.C. Whitfield’s 1941 book, Here’s How, where he described the drink as “It ought to make you fly high”. The Airmail also appeared in David Embury’s 1948 The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks and in Esquire’s 1949 Handbook for Hosts. 

The glass was fittingly designed for Scandinavian Airlines in 1998 by the Swedish designer Gunnar Cyrén. 

Airmail

2 oz Gold Rum
1 oz Lime juice
1 oz Honey syrup
3 oz Champagne
1 Lime twist

Shake rum, lime juice and honey syrup until well chilled. Strain into chilled glass, top with champagne and garnish with a lime twist and/or a postage stamp.

Taking Prints to the Next Level

You might not have either space nor the economy to buy an Italian design classic like Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s Arco floor lamp. You might not necessarily have any wall space to get a print from the Italy at Random collection either. But you probably have a sofa, a bed or a favorite chair. What makes that relaxing space even better, well, a double sided throw pillow of course.

You can now get the Random Things collection as a beautiful pillow to light up any space in your home or office, or vacation spot for that matter.

Happy Midsummer From Martinique

When most Swedes celebrate Midsummer by drinking schnapps and eating herring let’s talk about a cocktail being almost as strong as a schnapps, the very potent French Caribbean, Ti’ Punch.

Wherever you find liquor and lime you will find them combined in a drink. The Daiquiri in Cuba, the Caipirinha in Brazil, the Pisco Sour in Peru and Chile and the Ti’ Punch in the French Caribbean. In this particular drink Rhum Agricole is the main ingredient, a rum distilled from freshly pressed sugarcane juice rather than leftover molasses from sugar refining, normally used in rum production. This makes for a grassier, some say rougher, rum with a very distinct character and this particular rum distillation is unique to the French West Indies. Another difference that makes Rhum Agricole stand out is that it is generally 100 proof. This fact combined with the small amount of lime juice in the Ti’ Punch compared other rum sours, the use of cane sugar syrup and the lack of dilution from ice makes for drink quite different from the smooth Daiquiri. 

The history of the Ti’ Punch dates back to  when French colonists started sugar cane plantations in Martinique and Guadeloupe during the 17th and 18th century. The drink was probably created by the sugarcane fieldworkers to raise their spirits during a hard days work. The Ti’ Punch is so connected to the islands, especially to Martinique, that they made it their national cocktail. Ti’ is Creole for petite so the Ti’ Punch quite literally means small punch. Since there obviously were no ice in the sugarcane fields a purist would still never dilute the drink with ice. 

When traveling to Martinique or Guadeloupe you will find the Ti’ Punch everywhere, often presented for you to prepare yourself to. There is even a saying in Martinique “Chacun prépare sa propre mort” or “Everyone prepares their own death”. 

The Bamboo Grove glass was designed by Anna Perugini in 2020. 

Have a fantastic French Caribbean Midsummer!

This Cocktail is the Cat's Pajamas

As with many cocktails from the early 1900s there is not one, but several different origin stories. The Bee’s Knees is no different. In fact, even the origin of the name is up for debate. Either it’s just a nonsense expression like “the cat’s pajamas”. Or it derives from the word business. In the 1920s saying that something was “the bee’s knees” was short for exclaiming that it was “the business”, that is to say, something outstanding.

Possibly the cocktail was created by the Austrian Frank Meier, during the 1920s when he was the first head bartender at Cafe Parisian at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. During WWII and the German occupation of Paris Mr Meier kept the bar open but being half Jewish he started working with the French resistance and handed information about the Germans staying at the Ritz to British intelligence. He also helped Jewish hotel guests escape the Vichy government’s concentration camp roundups by providing them with fake documents.

The first time the cocktail was mentioned however was in a news article from 1929 where it was attributed to the American socialite Margaret Brown. The article was about women-only bars in Paris and Margaret Brown, being a wealthy widow shared her time between Denver and Paris where she was a frequent guest in said bars. On a side note Margaret Brown also went by her nickname “the Unsinkable Molly Brown” after being one of the 712 people surviving the Titanic in 1912.

Yet another background story is that the honey used in the Bee’s Knees was added since it is a great way to hide the harsh taste of cheap bathtub gin. Putting it all together Margaret Brown might have had the cocktail in an American speakeasy and brought the recipe to Paris where Frank Meier made it his own making all three origin stories true. But that, of course, is just mere speculation.

The glass was is designed by Astrid Luglio in 2023 and is called Travasi.

Roy's Roundup

The classic mocktail Shirley Temple is said to have been created for the child actor when she was enviously eying her parents old-fashioneds and wanted her own drink. A resourceful bartender mixed lemon-lime soda and ginger ale, added some grenadine and garnished the creation with a maraschino cherry. 

Being considered a girly drink, solely because of its name, boys wanted a drink they could relate better to (mind you, this was some 80 years ago) so during the 1940s someone came up with the Roy Rogers. Nothing was more popular amongst boys during the 40s and 50s than cowboys and actor/singer Roy Rogers was one of the most popular. Also Mr Rogers himself didn’t drink alcohol. 

Roy Rogers, also known as The Singing Cowboy or The King of the Cowboys was born Leonard Franklin Slye in 1911 and early took up singing and playing the guitar. During the Great Depression he actually worked as a cowhand in New Mexico making him a real cowboy. He began his long career in 1935 in the country singing group Sons of the Pioneers. A few years later he became star in his own movies, often with his wife to be, Dale Evans, and his horse Trigger, who got almost as famous as Rogers himself. He ended up making some 90 movies from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s and over 100 episodes of a weekly tv-show, The Roy Rogers Show from 1951–1957. Always portraying the good guy he was the cowboy who shot the guns from the villains hands rather than trying to kill them.

Interestingly, but not officially, if you watch the Disney/Pixar Toy Story 2 from 1999, the character Woody learns that he is actually the main character from a 1950s TV show called Woody’s Roundup. In the show within the movie he has a horse named Bullseye and a girlfriend called Jessie. It’s hard not to see the similarities with The Roy Rogers Show with Woody as Roy, Jessie as Dale and Bullseye as Trigger. 

The glass for the Roy Rogers is called Birds was designed by Tomoko Mizu in 2022.

The Roy Rogers

1/2 part Grenadine
6 parts Cola
1 Lemon wedge
1 Maraschino cherry

Pour the grenadine over ice into the glass. Fill upp with cola and garnish with a lemon wedge and a maraschino cherry.

A Cocktail With A Crust

Joseph Santini was a pioneer in mixology. He was born in 1804 in Corsica but moved to New Orleans in the 1830s. He started his bartending career at the then famous City Exchange where he soon showed his skills and innovations behind the bar.

Mr Santini’s is most well known creation was made during the 1850s. He called it the Brandy Crusta. This classic cocktail was either created at the City Exchange or at another bar called Jewel of the South, a bar he started in 1852. It first appeared in print in Jerry Thomas’ Bartender’s Guide from 1862. The cocktail was a departure from the much simpler cocktails of the day and so it was very well received.

A Crusta isn’t actually just one cocktail, it is a type of cocktails. Crustas always contains a spirit, lemon juice and sugar, sometimes in the form of a liqueur. In fact the name Crusta comes from the sugar rim that is supposed to be applied hours in advance to make it into a dry crust. Apart from that they are always supposed to be served in stemmed glasses with a long lemon zest spiraling around the inside of the glass.

Despite being one of the many classic cocktails created in New Orleans the Brandy Crusta was as good as forgotten until David Wondrich published the recipe in his 2007 book Imbibe! Finally the Brandy Crusta and Joseph Santini made a comeback and today the drink is almost as easy to come by as the Ramos Fizz and the Sazerac. At least in New Orleans.

Brandy Crusta

2 parts Brandy
1/4 part Orange Curaçao
1/4 part Maraschino
1/2 part Lemon juice
1/2 part Sugar syrup
1 Dash Angustura bitters
1 Lemon spiral

Wet the glass with lemon juice. Rim it with sugar and set aside. Shake the ingredients until well chilled. Place the lemon spiral inside the glas. Strain the cocktail into the prepared glass.

The Last Heir To The Hawaiian Throne

Princess Ka’iulani was born in 1875 to Hawaiian Princess Miriam Likelike and Scottish-born businessman Arthur Cleghorn, during the reign of her uncle King Kalakaua.

At birth she was given an estate in Waikiki where she grew up next door to Robert Louis Stevenson. When Princess Ka’iulani was 11 she lost her mother and a couple of years after that she was sent to England to get a British education. While there, in 1891, King Kalakaua passed away and the new monarch, the king’s sister Princess Lili’oukalani made Ka’iulani the heir apparent.

She wanted to return to home but was told to stay in England during a tumultuous time in Hawaii. When she finally came back in 1897 Queen Liliuokalani had been forced to abdicate. Princess Ka’iulani identified strongly with her homeland and became a fierce advocate for Hawaii. She spoke out against the pending annexation of Hawaii by the United States and fought to keep the Hawaiian Kingdom independent.

Her efforts were ultimately unsuccessful and Hawaii was annexed by the US in 1898. Having struggled with poor health during the 1890s the devastated Ka’iulani sadly died in 1899, only 23 years old.

Twenty eight years later, in 1927, a new hotel opened in Honolulu, a grand pink palace named the first resort hotel built in the US. Sometime during the 1920s they created a signature drink, a cocktail called Princess Ka’iulani as a tribute to the influential princess. The cocktail changed name in the 1950s and is since then sharing its name with the Royal Hawaiian Hotel but the legacy of Princess Ka’iulani lives on as a symbol of strength, grace, and the rich cultural heritage of Hawaii.

The glass is fittingly called Princess and was designed by Bent Severin in 1957.

Italy at Random

In a world of Italian design mobilità studio has illustrated a series of products all being part of making Italy into the world leader in design that it is. All products are genuine design icons form the gondola bow iron first mentioned in the 11th century to Cini Boeri’s Ghost Chair made from a single sheet of glass in 1987.

On Friday April 28 you are more than welcome to join me at the Sempre Coffee Bar on Jakobsbergsgatan 7 in Stockholm when the new exhibition Italy at Random opens at 5 pm.

If you have any other designs or random products from Italy (or other parts of the world) that you think should be part of the collection please tell me and they just might find their way onto your wall, a pretty great place to enjoy world class design.

The Little Fridge Car

During the first decade after WWII, war torn Europe was slowly trying to rebuild its economies. Engineer and businessman Renzo Rivolta, the owner of Isothermos, a company that before the war manufactured refrigerators and electric heaters, saw the rising demand for a micro-car. Rivolta was also the owner of ISO Autoveicoli, at the time Italy’s third largest producer of two-wheeled vehicles. Together with two aeronautical engineers, Ermengildo Preti and Pierluigi Raggi he created the first Isetta prototype in 1952. Isetta being the diminutive form of Iso. Legend has it that they actually used a repurposed fridge door for the prototype.

As for the performance, the Isetta, equipped with a motorcycle motor, took 30 seconds to reach 50 kph. This was, however made up by the fact that it fit two adults and was perfect for use in the narrow streets of Italian cities.

To be able to fund other project, like his sports car ISO Grifo, Mr Rivolta decided to sell the license for the Isetta to other manufacturers. BMW was at the time on the verge of bankruptcy and quickly saw the potential of the micro-car. They upgraded the Isetta with a new motor, better suspension and added a sunroof making the car reach a whopping 85 kph. BMW ended up making 10,000 cars during the first 8 months making it more popular than it ever was in Italy.

Apart from Italy and Germany the Isetta was also manufactured in France, the UK, Argentina and Brazil and has had such an influence on the automobile industry that it inspired the creation of the Smart Car in 1998.

More Than A Philly Cheese Steak

If you are pondering what to drink with your perfectly cooked Philly Cheese Steak we have got the answer. As with pairing a wine with your meal, a Pinot Noir from Burgundy with your Boeuf Bourguignon or a Chianti with your Spaghetti Bolognese it just seems natural to pair your Philly Cheese Steak with a Clover Club cocktail.

The Clover Club was a pre-prohibition gentlemen’s club that held their meetings once a month at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia from the 1882 to the 1920s. The cocktail by the same name was probably first shaken up at the turn of the last century and was published in New York Press in 1901. It went from being a favorite among the club’s members to making it big in New York when the hotelier at the Bellevue-Stratford, George Boldt, was recruited as proprietor for the Waldorf Astoria on Manhattan.

After having had a good run the Clover Club fell out of favor. In 1939 it was even listed in Esquire Magazine as of the ten worst drinks of the decade and in the 1950s it started being viewed as a ladies drink. Maybe due to the pink color of the cocktail.

Interestingly pink was originally considered a masculine power color and as thus fitting perfectly at the gentlemen’s club. In The Great Gatsby from 1925, Gatsby himself naturally sported a pink suit. Little girls were dressed in light blue and little boys in pink, a color that was said to be “a more decided and stronger color”. This changed in the 1940s and suddenly macho cocktails like the Clover Club and the Pink Lady were giving way to Manhattans and Martinis. 

It wasn’t until the early 2000s when craft cocktails came back in a big way that the Clover Club started reappearing. As a tribute, American mixologist Julie Reiner, opened the Clover Club in Brooklyn in 2008, complete with wooden paneling, leather couches, velvet curtains and a tin ceiling. 

The motto of the original Clover Club went “Who enters here leaves care behind, leaves sorrow behind, leaves petty envies and jealousies behind.”

The glass called Fylgia was designed by Gerda Strömberg in 1930. 

The Clover Club

2 parts Gin
1/2 part Lemon juice
1/2 part Raspberry syrup
1/2 Egg white
3 Raspberries

Shake gin, lemon juice, raspberry syrup and egg white without ice (dry shake). Add ice and shake until well chilled. Strain into chilled cocktail glass and garnish with 3 raspberries.

Enjoy with your Philly Cheese Steak.

Picking Italian Mushrooms

Massimo Vignelli was born in Milan in 1931. At the age of 14 he decided he wanted to be an architect and at 16 he started working as an architectural draftsman before attending Università di Architettura in Venice. Here he met his future wife and business partner Lella Vignelli, herself coming from a family of architects.

In 1956 Massimo Vignelli was commissioned by the already famous glass maker Venini to design a series of lamps. The company had already worked with Italian designers like Carlo Scarpa and Giò Ponti. This project was initially called 4040 Zaffiro a name that was later changed to Fungo thanks to the lamps mushroom shape. The collaboration with Venini lasted for a couple of years and the result was an incredible number of lamps in a vast array of colors.

In 1965 Massimo and Lella co-founded Unimark International with five other partners including Bob Noorda, famous for his Pirelli-posters. Two years later they started a branch in New York. Unimark soon rose to fame through their corporate identities for, amongst others, American Airlines, Ford, Gillette and Knoll and it quickly became one of the biggest design firms in the world. Being on top didn’t last for that long though. In 1970 the Vignelli’s left the company to start their own business, Vignelli Associate.

The Vignelli’s eventually changed focus to product and furniture design and in 1978 they founded a new company, Vignelli Designs.

During their entire career the Massimo and Lella complemented each other with Massimo mainly focusing on 2D projects like the New York subway map and corporate identities for American Airlines while Lella worked more with their 3D projects.

They both lived by the motto “If you can design one thing, you can design everything” and in the case of Massimo and Lella Vignelli they really could.

A True Design Victim

As much as it is a piece of innovative design the Up chair was also a political statement. The design was inspired by an ancient fertility goddess and the ball and chain symbolizes women being prisoners, not a victim of design. “Women suffer because of the prejudice of men. The chair was supposed to talk about this problem.”

Born in La Spezia in 1939 Gaetano Pesce went to study in Venice at the School of Architecture and then the Institute of Industrial Design. After graduating he worked with collective of young architects in Padua before focusing on design from 1962.

Endlessly researching and experimenting with new materials he started working with the trendiest material of the day, polyurethane. Standing in the shower in his Paris apartment in 1968 Gaetano Pesce got the idea to try and make a chair behave like a sponge. In his workshop he realized that polyurethane was a perfect material not only for comfort but he could actually vacuum pack his new design. Opening the four-inch-thick package his new chair would almost magically expand into its proper shape rendering its name Up. This extraordinary and irreversible performance was made possible thanks to the freon gas present in the polyurethane blend.

This easily packaged and shipped future of furniture design unfortunately didn’t last long. In 1973, after only four years of international success with the Up Chair turning up in everything from the James Bond movie “Diamonds are Forever” to photo shoots with Salvador Dalì, the producer B&B Italia removed it from its catalog. This was due to a recent ban on freon gas making the production as it was impossible.

It took until the year 2000 for the Up chair to to make its comeback. This time being made in cold shaped polyurethane foam and no longer inflating.

Another One From the Boroughs

When the Brooklyn cocktail was created, two out of five boroughs in New York already had their own cocktails, the Manhattan and the Bronx. The head bartender at Baracca’s Restaurant on Wall Street, Jacob “Jack” Grohusko, took on the task to make one for Brooklyn and in 1908 he published his recipe in Jack’s Manual. Mr Grohusko himself lived in Hoboken and his connection to Brooklyn came from the restaurant’s owner who was a Brooklynite.

The original recipe calls for Italian (sweet) vermouth but it soon became common practice to use French (dry) vermouth instead. This new version is how the Brooklyn Cocktail was presented by Jacques Straub in 1914, by Harry Cradock in his Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930 and in Patrick Gavin Duffy in his Official Mixer’s Manual from 1933. The cocktail historian David Wondrich did not agree and in his Updated and Revised Imbibe from 2015 he stated that the version with Italian vermouth is far superior to the more common dry Brooklyn. Thus giving Mr Grohusko right a little more than a hundred years after the cocktail was first stirred up on Wall Street.

The Brooklyn never did become as famous as its neighboring Manhattan and Bronx. Possibly due to the fact that it contains Amer Picon, a French aperitif that has been very hard to come by in the US.

The glass called Manhattan was designed in 1937 by Norman Bel Geddes.

Benvenuti a Venezia

Full of hidden meanings the Gondola Bow Iron is the things that make the gondola into a gondola. Every part of the decorative bow iron is there for a purpose. But let’s start with the gondola itself.

The origin of the gondola is lost to history but already during the 11th venture the distinctively narrow boat filled the canals of Venice. It was mentioned for the first time in 1089 and during the 1500s some 10,000 gondolas were used for transportation of people and goods.

The gondoliers were soon rumored to be a rough crowd that were gambling and extorting the people of Venice. This led to the upper classes buying their own gondolas and as the status symbols they were they started competing with color, ornaments and expensive fabrics. The gaudy luxury gondolas became too much for the authorities and in 1562 they made a decree that all but ceremonial gondolas had to be black.

The gondolas developed over the centuries but all of them are built in the special gondola boatyards called a Squero. The gondolas, being adapted to fit perfectly in narrow and shallow canals have no straight lines and one boat takes close to 500 hours. Many of those 500 hours was spent on the finishing touches like the many layers of water proofing varnish made from very secret family recipes. An important part of the gondola is the oar made by a Fórcola, an oar lock. Over the years they created the very intricate fork that you can see today. The fork is the holder for the oar that makes the gondolier able to move the oar in any number of ways. The gondola itself were continously modified and by the late 1800s the gondola makers started to make the left side of the gondola wider as a counterbalance to the gondolier. Today there are only around 400 gondolas left in Venice, compared to the 10,000 traveling the waterways 500 years ago.

The final touch on the gondola must be considered to be the beautiful bow iron or Fero da próva in Venetian. It is certainly there for decoration but every part of it has a meaning. The upper part symbolizes the hat of the Doge, the almost half circle under the hat is the Rialto Bridge and the open space under the bridge is the. The six rectangular shapes pointing forward are the districts of Venice. From the top, San Marco, San Polo, Santa Croce, Castello, Dorsoduro and Canaregio. The rectangle pointing backwards is Giudecca. The intricate shapes between the districts are the islands of Murano, Burano and Torcello and finally the whole shape from top to bottom is the Canal Grande.

Santa's Favorite Drink

This festive cocktail is a riff on the pre-prohibition cocktail Stinger and it’s a perfect yuletide drink to enjoy in front of the fireplace when the gifts are wrapped and the Holiday calm sets in. Or by all means while sitting in the shade of a palm tree watching the ocean in the tropics.

The original first appeared in print in the 1914 book ”Drinks” by Jacques Straub. According to David Wondrich’s cocktail book ”Imbibe” an Ohio newspaper credited Reginald Vanderbilt with the cocktail in 1923 writing that he had served his guests Stingers since the beginning of the 1900s. It is said that Vanderbilt spent three hours a day mixing them for his guests during cocktail hour at his Fifth Avenue mansion. The cocktail has since the days of the Vanderbilts been associated with the upper class and was featured in many movies like ”High Society” from 1956 with Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Cary Grant orders one in the 1957 ”Kiss Them for Me” and James Bond drinks a Stinger in the 1956 ”Diamonds Are Forever”.

The glass called “Sukat Makkaralla”, Finnish for “Socks rolled down” was designed in 2010 for Marimekko by the Finnish designer Anu Penttinen.

The Cuddle Bowl

The Brazilian-Italian architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi was born in Rome in December of 1914 as Achillina Bo. Early in her life she decided to study architecture during a time when architecture schools accepting women were few and far between. She ended up studying at the Rome College of Architecture where she graduated in 1939. After school in 1942 she opened her own office in with a school friend but with the onset of WWII there weren’t many openings for architects and she had to take on jobs as a writer and illustrator for the Italian architecture magazine Domus.

During her time at Domus she was sent to Rome to interview an art historian called Pietro Maria Bardi. Despite her being part of the resistance and Pietro Maria Bardi being an ardent supporter of Mussolini they fell in love. After the war they had no other option but to flee the country for São Paulo, Brazil where Pietro had been commissioned to head an art museum.

Coming to Brazil the couple immediately immersed themselves in the Brazilian cultural scene and Bo Bardi was enthralled by the country’s modernist architects like Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa.

In 1951 she designed and built one of her most celebrated works, Casa de Vidro (the Glass House) in the outskirts of São Paulo for her and her husband. Here she stayed until her passing in 1992.

That same year, 1951, she designed the Bowl Chair. With her own design vision calling for “a process of humanization of art” she made the chair “in relation with the proportions of the human body”. The semi-spherical seat can be moved independent of the steel frame making it recline to whatever position the sitter prefers. In 1953 it was featured in the US magazine Interiors where it was described as a “cuddle bowl”.

Snowball Fight

The Snowball is a British creation from the 1940s made with the Dutch egg and brandy liqueur Advocaat, lime, brandy and lemonade. It is as Christmassy as the Egg nog but much lighter. The drink didn’t really catch a big audience until the 1970s when it started being served without the finesse achieved by the lime and brandy, ingredients needed to cut through the otherwise incredibly sweet Advocaat.

The earliest mention of the predecessor of Advocaat is found in Dutch texts from the 17th century describing a yellow-colored alcoholic drink made from avocados. Most likely Dutch sailors were introduced to a drink called Abacate during their travels to South America and the West Indies. Abacate is a yellow-colored alcoholic drink made from avocados that was popular in the area that is now Brazil. The Dutch took a liking to it and started to produce their own in the Dutch Antilles.

Back in the harsher climate of the Netherlands, where there were no avocados to be found, they tried to recreate the texture and look of the drink using egg yolk instead. The name Abacate simply turned into Advocaat in Dutch and the Advocaat of today was born.

Another explanation for the name, which is Dutch for lawyer, is explained in the 1881 edition of a Dictionary of the Dutch Language where it says that “Advocaat is a good lubricant for the throat and thus considered especially useful for a lawyer, who must speak in public.”

The glass was designed by Italian designer Federico de Majo in 2015 and is called Bilia.

Snowball

2 parts Advocaat
1/2 part Lime juice
1/2 part Brandy
3 parts Lemon soda

Shake all ingredients except lemon soda with ice. Strain into chilled glass and add lemon soda. Garnish with a Maraschino cherry and enjoy.

Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet

Dubonnet came into being in 1846 after a competition was held by the Frenchgovernment with a prize for anyone who could make a palatable quinine-rich drink. The French colonists in North Africa were suffering greatly from malaria and the only known cure was the incredibly bitter bark from the South American cinchona tree. The goal was to create a drink with enough of the quinine to help the French combat malaria but still be enjoyable enough to be used voluntarily.

Joseph Dubonnet created his Dubonnet by mixing Roussillon wines from five different grapes, blending them with herbs and spices like cocoa beans, colombo (a mild type of curry powder), orange peel, Colombian green coffee, cinnamon, camomille and elderflower. He then left it to mature in oak vats for three to four years.

One part of the success of Dubonnet is most certainly their marketing. In 1932 they hired the great designer and illustrator A. M. Cassandre who created the Dubonnet Man with a Bowler hat/Derby hat and a text reading Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet.

The Dubonnet Cocktail first appeared in print around 1914 in a book simply called Drinks by Jacques Straub but no one knows who first created it.

In Harry Craddock’s The Savoy Cocktail Book from 1930 the same cocktail appears under a different name, the Zaza Cocktail. The name Zaza was taken from a popular French play written by playwrights Pierre Berton and Charles Simon, and first staged at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in Paris in 1889. The play about a married man having an affair with an actress was translated into English and went on to become a huge success on Broadway and lent its name to a cocktail.

To complicate matters even further you can also find the same cocktail by the name The Queen’s Cocktail owing to the fact that it was the late Queen Elizabeth’s favorite cocktail. She is said to have had one every day before lunch, albeit made with two parts Dubonnetto one part gin instead of the original equal parts.

The silver beaker was designed in 1938 by the Swedish Prince Sigvard Bernadotte and is called Beaker 819B.