How to spend it in August (2024)

EAT

A Sri Lankan supper club in London’s Borough Market

British-Sri Lankan chef and food writer Cynthia Shanmugalingam opened her first restaurant, Rambutan, in Borough Market to much acclaim last year. This summer sees Shanmugalingam launch a supper club series at the restaurant. She is inviting some of her favourite cooks to explore the Rambutan larder and create their own Sri Lankan-accented menus. On 11 August, Will Gleave, co-founder of famed north London spots Bright, Peg and P Franco, will be cooking. His menu includes pollock in prawn-head curry, barbequed black tamworth pork with tamarind and coconut and toasted fig-leaf ice cream. Baya Simons

SEE

Abstract art by black artists in Beverly Hills

The writer Antwaun Sargent has curated an exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills that brings together several Black artists making abstract work. Some explore the meanings behind particular materials, such as Kevin Beasley’s chromatic paintings using raw Virginia cotton, or Lauren Halsey’s wall relief made with cascading synthetic hair. Others explore the significance of colour, such as Cy Gavin’s expansive celestial scenes, which show starlight glowing out of deep black skies. Come autumn, a second iteration will open at Gagosian in Hong Kong. Inès Cross

shop

St John’s latest clothing collaboration with Drake’s

London institution St John is bringing back its sell-out collaboration with another very British establishment, the haberdasher and soft-tailoring brand Drake’s. Where the first collection imagined a wardrobe for sitting around a lunch table, part two is a look at what St John co-founders Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver might wear while doing a wine tasting on a vineyard or visiting farms. The collection features a green chore jacket, a Breton jersey and sweatshirts with “Nose II Tail” emblazoned on the back. Jessica Beresford

SEE

Guy Bourdin on the Sardinian coast

The town of Porto Cervo on Sardinia’s smart Costa Smeralda is perhaps best known for its yachting culture, but if you go beyond the shorefront you’ll find that it boasts a micro art scene, too. This summer, Louise Alexander Gallery, the first contemporary gallery to open in the town, is showing an exhibition of subtly surreal work by emerging and established artists. The curation of work by Guy Bourdin, Charlie Engman, Amy Bessone and others “seeks to reveal beauty in the unconventional – the grotesque, the decayed, and the repurposed”, as co-curator and co-founder Ayse Arnal says. Baya Simons

shop

The Marbella Club smells like Loewe

Famed Andalusian hotel the Marbella Club turns 70 this year. To celebrate, they have welcomed Loewe onto their grounds to run a pop-up perfumery. Guests can shop the brand’s Botanical Rainbow fragrance line, spotlighting notes from green apple to guava, and twelve-strong collection of signature home scents inside a Victorian greenhouse. Tablescaping workshops are also running, using fruit and vegetables from the on-site gardens, including the tomato patch, home to more than 100 ancestral varieties. Inès Cross

SEE

Sir John Soane’s Museum gets a glittering new twist

The latest exhibition by British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor has been installed in the Bloomsbury townhouses of 18th-century architect Sir John Soane, with her canvases arranged amongst his Grand Tour collectables and imported antiquities. Viktor draws from equally eclectic sources, her paintings patterned in 24-carat gold leaf and using symbols from Australia, Mesoamerica and west Africa. In the crypt of Soane’s house, Viktor’s Ritual Throne works glisten against the dark stone and statues, while upstairs the works are brighter, integrating pale silks, ceramics and plains of red gouache. Marion Willingham

DRINK

North London welcomes a new natural wine bar

London’s De Beauvoir neighbourhood is now home to Goodbye Horses, a new natural wine bar and restaurant from Alex Young and George de Vos, formerly of Dalston-based Japanese restaurant Brilliant Corners. Designed with the Swiss architect Leopold Banchini, the space features murals by Cornwall-based artist Lucy Stein, an audiophile-quality sound system and 10m-long timber bar made from a single oak tree. The wine cellar is stocked with European natural wines and the food menu will change from week to week: the current list features sardine toast and oxtail ragout and broken rice. They have also opened a coffee shop, Day Trip, next door, and an ice-cream parlour will follow later this month. Inès Cross

shop

Ellen von Unworth’s Bavaria

What happens when the fashion photographer Ellen von Unwerth, known for her playful, high-glamour style, takes on the green fields and humble wooden waldlerhauses of Bavaria as her subject? Heimat, a new book of mischievous, erotically tinted images shot against the dramatic countryside of the German state. Von Unwerth takes readers on “a tour of the dairy” where the maids “still enjoy morning-fresh milk”, opens the door of the “homely and typical” German kitchen where fräuleins play with sausages, captures the “hard but honest work” of farm girls in Dirndl dresses and lacy lingerie and moments of “bonding in the great outdoors” as they sled down snow slopes and frolic behind barns. Von Unwerth moved to Bavaria from Frankfurt when she was 12 and, at the time, found that her “hippie” nature clashed with the region’s conservative traditions. Heimat became the photographer’s way of exploring this conflict, by gently parodying the pastoral idyll of her childhood. The result is an unofficial, tongue-in-cheek guide to her homeland. Annachiara Biondi

SEE

Hospital Rooms and Hauser & Wirth’s mental health initiative

Sue Dunkley was known for the pop-art-flavoured, primary-coloured paintings that she made in her Islington home through the 1960s and ’70s. The artist, who died in 2022, often painted women (as in this image of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) in states of repose: in the car, at home, walking along a beach arm in arm or gathered around a table. Her interest in the mundane was said to be inspired by her love of Vermeer. Until 10 September, this painting will be on show in a new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London in collaboration with Hospital Rooms, a charity that works to bring art into mental health hospitals. The show, also featuring work by Do Ho Suh, Nengi Omuku and Sutapa Biswas, will culminate in an auction raising money for the charity’s work, including a new initiative offering artist-led workshops to every NHS inpatient mental health site in England. Baya Simons

BUY

A colourful art auction in Aspen

Aspen’s annual ArtWeek returns for its fourth edition with pomp and ceremony. Organised by the Aspen Art Museum, a schedule of events includes a party helmed by Bottega Veneta and a performance by artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin atop Aspen Mountain. The week will culminate in an auction with more than 70 artworks up for grabs, including My Mountains Vase works designed by the late Gaetano Pesce and colourful works on paper by multimedia artist Betty Woodman. Inès Cross

SEE

Get bookish in Queen’s Park

Queen’s Park, the leafy pocket of north-west London named in honour of Queen Victoria, has been home to many writers over the years, from Barbara Pym to Zadie Smith. The area’s annual book festival, held in the park from 31 August to 1 September, celebrates their literary history and welcomes a host of contemporary writers for a weekend of talks. This year, Elif Shafak will discuss her new novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, which traverses ancient Nineveh to Victorian London, Alan Bennett will reflect on life at 90 and Jay Rayner will reveal which restaurant dishes he attempts to recreate at home. Baya Simons