Need to Know
11 : 07 : 18

France – The historic French hotel Moulin des Ribes has commissioned local designers to update five of its rooms, drawing inspiration from the traditions of surrounding regions.

Artists and studios including Joachim Jirou-Najou, Studio Quetzal and Zanellato / Bortotto took part in the 5Rooms project, each demonstrating a different approach to creativity using traditional materials and techniques.

‘For this project, we delved into the nostalgic overtones of the Provence region’, explains Louise Naegelen, co-designer at Studio Quetzal. ‘Inspiration came from our memories of scents, light and weathered materials.’ The artists transformed their room with terracotta brick from Salernes, a town in the nearby Var region. Elsewhere, Zanellato / Bortotto decorated the walls with bright ceramics. ‘The traditional gathering of flowers in the hills of Grasse, with its warm palette of colours, give rise to the glazed, diamond-shape tiles covering portions of the floors and walls,’ explain the studio’s founders Giorgia Zanellato and Daniele Bortotto.

US – Created by the founders of digital fitness coach Moov, Sanity & Self is a new meditation app dedicated to women and mothers.

Building on its female founders’ personal experience of motherhood and marriage, Sanity & Self aims to be a destination for women to explore self-care. The in-app sections are led by female experts, and each is categorised according to user’s mood. Treat Yo’self features at-home beauty treatments and advice, while Energize provides exercise programmes ranging from two to 45 minutes.

‘The old model of self-care is broken. A SoulCycle class, a 30-minute meditation at a studio, a one-hour facial – all these activities are time-consuming, expensive and fail to help everyday women,’ explains Meng Li, co-founder and CEO of Sanity & Self. ‘[The app] works to solve this problem by helping women take just a few minutes out of their day for themselves with guided sessions in fitness, wellness, body, mindfulness, personal growth, sleep and more.’

For more on how the health and wellness market is developing, look out for our upcoming macrotrend, launching soon here.

Global – G.H. Mumm has developed a bottle and glass concept that facilitates champagne drinking in a zero-gravity environment.

The products have been created in collaboration with Spade, an emerging agency specialising in space design. The high-tech bottle design uses the champagne’s gas to release the drink in the form of bubbles, with the floating droplets hovering in the air until gathered up in the specially-designed glass.

With the launch of the world’s first commercial space station due in 2020, the concept of luxury space travel is fast becoming a reality. ‘For the last 40 years, space travel has been shaped by engineers rather than designers. Instead of seeing zero gravity as a problem to be solved, we look at it as a design possibility’, says Octave de Gaulle, founder of Spade.

With the global counterfeit goods market worth more than £331.8bn ($450bn, €375bn, source: OECD), the presence of fake goods on resale marketplaces could be set to rise. However, consumers are still struggling to identify the difference between real and fake goods. In a recent survey by customer data platform Red Point, 60% of online watch buyers said that they are somewhat confident in identifying fakes. After being shown pictures of fake watches previously sold online, 42% were no longer positive in their abilities.

In a bid to tackle counterfeit watch sales, luxury goods company Richemont recently acquired second-hand watch retailer Watchfinder, in turn boosting trust in the authenticity of pre-owned watch sales.