Staff picks
James velaise
‘Doing something’ is in the Velaise gene, and not always in a predictable manner. Famous for living life in « reverse mode » (see livingobit.com), James recently acquired the domain name james.paris without the faintest idea of what the product might be. Chances are, serendipity will provide the answer, as it infallibly has done until now.
The son of Scottish-American heiress Isobel Mitchell and infamous Swiss film producer-playboy Robert Velaise (né Weil) - James Velaise’s childhood was not destined to be a conventional one. READ MORE
JOHN HARDY
The ruler is the ugliest thing ever made. It makes people think in straight lines, and John Hardy hates straight lines. The right angle does not exist in nature, he says, while standing in a bamboo building, bent into curves and soft arches with a roof built to capture breezes that work as nature's air conditioner. That bamboo building is The Green School in Bali.
John Hardy is an evangelist for all things green. It may be his inner hippie, with ideas picked up in the late 60s fog of Toronto's Yorkville, a place filled with draft dodgers, coffee shops and Joni Mitchell singing about not paving parking lots. READ MORE
Paddy renouf
One night in early 2018 Paddy Renouf was having dinner at the Academy Club with his life-long friend Dr Mark Sopher, a cardiologist who practises on the English south coast. The following morning Sopher was flying to Kenya with friends for a kite-surfing trip.
Sopher wondered aloud why on earth Renouf wasn’t coming too. The doctor whipped out his phone and quickly established a seat was still available on his flight, and it was promptly booked. Thus it came about that Renouf, who never leaves home without his passport, joined the party to Heathrow a few hours later. READ MORE