Issues

How Nonna Lietta’s founder keeps the brand woven with love

“The first designs that I created for Nonna Lietta were all inspired by my grandmother,” says Greek-Italian designer Lietta Kasimati from her Athens studio. It’s on a cobbled street that hedges the National Archaeological Museum, right in the bustle of the city. You can imagine Kasimati’s grandmother – a 1960s aesthete with Roman origins – walking down these alleys wearing a swipe of red lipstick, a fine knit and a pair of heels (always).

It’s the influence of grandmother Lietta – her granddaughter shares her name – that anchors the brand; its pieces have a handmade sensibility that’s classic and gentle, and are threaded with a little whimsy. “When my grandmother knitted, she liked to add small details,” says Kasimati. “If there wasn’t a pretty adornment, there was colour: bold splashes of it. She has passed down her love of knitwear to me.”

Nonna Lietta’s genesis came when Kasimati was at a crossroads in her life. She was living in Belgium, working in fashion retail, and had to decide between a progress-marked career path that stretched comfortably ahead of her or a riskier, entrepreneurial adventure. She returned to her native Athens and launched Nonna Lietta in 2018, while Greece was still riding the stormy waves of the financial crisis. Design and daily operations took place in Athens, while production was outsourced to Barcelona.

Eight years on, the brand has grown an international customer base (the US is its biggest market) and Kasimati has been able to turn her focus to Greek manufacturing, joining a growing group of young entrepreneurs who are helping to slowly revive the dormant sector. Nonna Lietta’s sheep yarn is sourced from high in the mountains of northern Greece, where the label’s current manufacturing partner works with shepherds from the area to source and spin wool exclusively for her. It’s raw, unprocessed and, says Kasimati, “as natural as it gets”. It’s then made into knitwear – slouchy vests, thick, woollen cardigans, delicately ruffled tops – in Athens.

The rest of the yarn, a premium blend of eco wool and alpaca, is sourced in Italy and the pieces are produced in Spain. Kasimati describes Nonna Lietta as an essentially Mediterranean label, with its combination of Italian, Spanish and Greek yarns, craftsmanship and sensibilities.

The newest collection includes elegant navy and pastel “winter bloom” hues, as well as playful star intarsias. “I want our pieces to remind our customers of their childhood, to take them back to that old feeling of warmth,” she says. Nonna Lietta is only sold via the brand’s website and various pop-ups. Kasimati travels to New York every year, as well as occasionally to London, Amsterdam and Paris, to host pop-up shops but her time spent in large-scale retail confirmed to her that wholesale shouldn’t be part of her business model.

She is also in the process of moving to a bigger studio to continue expanding the label’s production, slowly and steadily. “I never dreamed of a super-big brand,” she says. “My dream is really to keep being creative, to maintain our values, to keep it all sustainable.”

Next, Kasimati plans to take on Asia, to bring the message of fine Greek production and craftsmanship to further-flung shores, plus expand and experiment with more yarns. “I want people to invest in our ethos,” she says. “And not just buy for the sake of buying.”
nonnalietta.com

Editor’s letter: The power of determination

There are a lot of themes threaded through this issue – the potency of good design, legacy, our shifting perceptions of health and ageing – but when I looked at the final proofs, one word seemed to link many of the narratives that run across its pages: determination. This November outing of Monocle reads like a playbook on how to follow your own path, fight for your independence and ignore the naysayers.

Let’s start with the Expo. A few months ago I went to an exhibition at the Saatchi Yates gallery in London. It was the opening night and the space was rammed, guests spilling out onto the street to smoke and talk art. It was a cool crowd and, inside the gallery, the punchy, political canvases on show were being scrutinised by lots of twenty and thirtysomethings. These new works were not the creation of some fresh-faced enfant terrible but Peter Saul, an American artist who is still at the top of his game at 91. Later I spoke about the show with Sophie Monaghan-Coombs, who runs our culture pages. She pointed out that there is a whole host of artists in their eighties and nineties being championed by galleries and museums – many are women who are only now getting the recognition that they deserve. So Sophie put together a feature on seven in-demand senior artists who continue to push boundaries; who live through their work. It’s an inspiring tale of artistic determination.

Giorgio Armani, who died in September, ran an extraordinary business, not least because in an era when key luxury groups have come to control many of the most potent and important labels, he stayed independent – the sole owner of his empire. This allowed him to do things his way, whether that was telling models to smile and look happy or being the only spokesperson for the company. Our fashion director, Natalie Theodosi, was granted backstage access to report on the runway show for his final collection to see how his determination will live on. Her report is combined with the glorious photography of Andy Massaccesi.

A cultural shift is shaking up the health-and-fitness industry. Younger folk – well, a lot of them – see going to the gym less as a necessary evil to combat their daily excesses of food and booze, and more as a way of life. This cohort of clean-living Gen Z consumers will happily spend all day tending to their body’s needs. Enter the “super-boutique” gym, a place not just for taking a class but also for health tests, spa treatments, dining on virtuous meals and hanging out. For this issue, writer Grace Cook travelled to Brussels to meet entrepreneurs (and health advocates) Alexandre de Vaucleroy and Antoine Derom at their recently launched Animo Studios, a space designed to be the backbone of members’ fitness, social and even work lives.

Political, military and diplomatic determination also makes an appearance in this issue. In our Affairs pages, we head to Poland to see how the country is preparing to defend itself should Russia attack. We also sit down with former Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas, who now, as vice-president of the European Commission, is in charge of the EU’s foreign policy (even if member states are hard to align). In an interview with our foreign editor, Alexis Self, she explains why she is determined to stand up to threats from the East and unwanted challenges from Washington.

You will also read about the doggedness of art sleuths, the firm focus of three Pritzker Architecture Prize-winners and how Noura bint Mohammed Al Kaabi, minister of state for the UAE, is unwavering in her belief that we need to listen to everyone, while maintaining red lines. I hope that this issue will harden your resolve, as you look ahead. It’s an issue that shows you how you can stick to your principles and do good too.

The art of ageing: Inside the studios of seven in-demand artists in their eighties and nineties

Though crafts that rely on the dexterity of your hands become more difficult as you age, your decades of learning and life experience can imbue what you create with depth and unique perspectives. Here, we visit the studios of seven artists who continue to paint in their eighties or nineties, still staging big exhibitions, selling work and finding inspiration.

Isabella Ducrot
Rome, Italy

Isabella Ducrot’s craft is something of a patchwork. It incorporates textiles procured on her travels in Russia, Turkey, China, India and Tibet, and stories from her voracious imagination – Ducrot has been writing for far longer than she has been painting.

Born in Naples, Ducrot moved to Rome in her thirties, lured by the promise of freedom and anonymity. “Romans are indifferent,” she says. “They’re not particularly interested in each other. That’s a good quality.” In the Italian capital, Ducrot surrounded herself with intellectuals, including novelist Alberto Moravia and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

She picked up a paintbrush in her fifties and now, in her studio in the 16th-century Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, she paints on Japanese gampi, a fine, fibrous paper with a satin-like sheen and a fine weft. Made for etching, inking and painting, the delicate material is as recognisable a part of Ducrot’s output as her ochre, green and rust flower motifs, which are achieved with a brush tied to a stick.

Ducrot says that she came to painting so late because of an early education that instructed her to respect tradition and not make changes to the world around her. “It took many years for me to dare to begin this unusual adventure,” she says. Today, at the age of 94, her adventure continues.

Peter Saul
Germantown,USA

“Except for occasionally talking about modern art to college students, I haven’t done anything but paint pictures since 1959,” says Peter Saul. Those pictures are hard to forget. Saul’s subjects bend, distend, wriggle and writhe across the canvas, transforming into colourful, twisted monstrosities along the way.

Those subjects have changed with the times too: the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump. American life – its vividness and its vulgarity – is a loose theme. That and, as Saul puts it, “bad guys”. “I have more freedom to distort, invent motivation or do anything I want to bad guys,” he says. “Whereas with ‘good guys’, the artist is supposed to follow the rules.”

Saul works from preliminary sketches that have a sense of “freshness”, which can be developed as he paints. As he adds his cacophony of colours, he thinks about how to make the painting interesting to the highest number of people. “The picture has to live in the world,” he says. Saul’s work has done just that for a long time but the critical response to it has become far warmer in recent years. While he is appreciative, the change has had little effect on his practice. “Unlike most artists I know, I don’t seem to respond much to encouragement,” he says. “As long as I’ve got the art supplies, I’m going to paint a picture.”

Rose Wylie
Kent, UK

When a particularly big globule of paint falls off Rose Wylie’s brush, she’ll simply cover it with a sheet of newspaper to stop it getting on her shoes. “I’m not a precious worker,” she says as we stand in her studio. A soft layer of newspaper carpets the floor, paintbrushes stick out of cans stacked on chairs and colourful splatters obscure the skirting board. Wylie’s unruly garden has crept up the side of the house and into this first-floor room – a jasmine plant pushes through a window in one corner. “Mostly you’re criticised if you don’t tidy up,” she says. “But if you get through a certain threshold, it becomes iconic.”

Wylie’s artistic training went unused for years while she raised her family but, since returning to painting in her forties, she has become a critical and commercial darling of the art world. She is currently working on a painting that features a large, “nonchalant” skeleton. It will appear in her upcoming exhibition at London’s Royal Academy in early 2026, her biggest show to date.

Wylie’s bold canvases often combine text and figures from history, mythology or contemporary pop culture. And while Wylie’s process can be messy, she is exacting about her practice, regularly working late into the night wrestling with a painting. “Often it’s horrible, slimy, trite, pedestrian,” she says. “There are 100 things that can go wrong, particularly with faces, and then, for some odd reason, suddenly it’s alright.”

Read more about Rose Wylie and her exhibit at Royal Academy London

Martial Raysse
Bouniagues, France

When Monocle meets Martial Raysse at his home in Dordogne, southwest France, the chill of autumn is creeping in, giving the light a quality that we can’t quite put our finger on. “In Paris, the shadows are blue but here they are pink,” says Raysse. “That’s what seduced me.” Though at 89 he is focused on painting “in strict obedience to the great masters”, the multidisciplinary artist can look back on a remarkably diverse body of work.

Raysse is cryptic about his artistic awakening but, according to his gallerists, he was already painting and writing poetry at the age of 12. By the time the Centre Pompidou put on a retrospective of more than 200 of his works in 2014, Raysse’s artistic expression had taken on dozens of forms, from poetry and painting to neon sculptures and cinema. “The interaction of these different forms enriched my artistic practice,” he says. “But I haven’t adopted any digital tools. I prefer pencil, which I think gets much closer to rendering emotions faithfully.”

Raysse is considered one of the earliest French champions of pop art. In 2011 his 1962 painting “L’année dernière à Capri (titre exotique)” fetched €4.8m at auction, for a time making him the highest-valued living French artist. But as a testament to his constant evolution, today he describes his association with the movement that made his fame as “a youthful error”, denouncing it as an “avatar of ready-made culture”.

Is creativity linked to longevity, we ask? “Unfortunately, creativity doesn’t extend your life,” says Raysse. “But with experience, what you do gain is progress.”

Frank Bowling
London, UK

At 91, Frank Bowling is still searching for new ways to let paint speak for itself. “I’m always following my instincts,” says Bowling, who has painted, poured, sprayed, stained and stitched vivid colours onto unprimed canvases for more than 70 years. “There was a time when I didn’t have a dealer and museums weren’t buying,” he says. “Now, my paintings are in more than 70 museums around the world.” His work is currently on show at the Bienal de São Paulo 2025 – a full-circle moment for the South America-born artist in the bright throes of his twilight years.

A Bowling artwork begins on the floor. Every cotton-duck canvas receives its first colours in the form of drips of paint that fall from an earlier in-progress painting hanging above – a sort of artistic assembly line. “Then my assistant fills a bucket with paint and water and pours it down the canvas while I direct the flood,” he says.

When Monocle visits his studio in South London, Bowling is directing his son, Ben – who’s armed with silver glitter-laced spray paint – from a wheelchair. “Brighter,” says Bowling of a long white streak that cuts down the canvas like a coastline, “all the way.” When Ben reaches a patch of empty space, Bowling reacts instinctively. “Put red in it,” he says. But the painting is still not finished. Later, it will appear “on the ceiling of my room”. Bowling’s imagination never rests. “I’m preoccupied with the search for something new in painting so I’m always working in different ways.”

Inson Wongsam
Lamphun,Thailand

Inson Wongsam is a key figure in the history of Thai modern art and the scene’s evolution from staid and traditional to colourful and contemporary. The son of a temple goldsmith, he studied under influential Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci, who changed his name to Silpa Bhirasri.

“Professor Silpa once told me: ‘Inson, if you wish to be an artist, you must sketch and work every day,’” says Wongsam from his studio and private museum in Lamphun, a small city near Chiang Mai. Wongsam has been an artist his entire adult life, creating metal sculptures and wood carvings in the 20th century and, in recent decades, wood block prints and paintings. His days begin at about 04.00, drawing in bed with watercolours or red and green pens or pencils. This is followed by some stretching, breakfast and more drawing in his studio. “When I cannot work, such as on days when I must visit the doctor, I feel uneasy,” he says.

Wongsam celebrated his 91st birthday in September with an exhibition at Bangkok’s Nova Contemporary. “Age has never affected my determination because I believe that the spirit is more important than the body,” he says. “As I grow older, I aim to make my work even more vibrant – never dim or lifeless.” Wongsam is currently working on an exhibition that is planned for next year. “I have reached a point in my life where everything feels clear,” he says. “I don’t need to look elsewhere for inspiration. Ideas come from me, pushing my work forward.”

Martha Jungwirth
Vienna, Austria

At 85, Martha Jungwirth remains as industrious as she was when she first appeared on the art scene in the early 1960s. Her belated recognition (she only began attracting serious attention and staging large solo exhibitions in the 2010s) and the attendant title of grande dame of Austrian art have not made her aloof. Instead, she is kind and inquisitive, asking as many questions as she answers. Jungwirth works in watercolour or oil on paper rather than canvas and her style is marked by colourful abstraction, with pinks and reds at the fore.

Jungwirth’s wanderlust has taken her across the world, though in recent years she has favoured Greece, which she first visited with her late husband, art historian Alfred Schmeller. “When you travel, you meet people, you eat differently and you feel that you don’t understand anything,” she says as she shows Monocle a series of watercolours from Bali, comprising her impressions of the custom of placing small, stylised houses outside homes. “That activates you again.”

In Jungwirth’s large, light-filled studio, pride of place is shared equally between her current works and her sources of inspiration: reproductions of baroque paintings (classical art has always moved her), alongside newspaper clippings and photographs scattered among countless paint tubes. “I don’t even know what colours are in them,” she says. It is this disorder that drives her to keep working and exploring.

“I always try to surprise myself. Otherwise, you stiffen up and get stuck.”

Why Donald Trump’s ‘beautiful architecture’ mandate could make Washington look worse

In August the US president, Donald Trump, signed an executive order titled Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again in which he declared that future federal buildings nationwide – from courthouses to office blocks – must employ and be built in approved historical styles. From now on in Washington, the default language of public architecture will be classical, unless an exception can be justified.

While Trump’s taste has often been called into question, this move, which solidifies an order issued in the final weeks of his first presidency, shows that he’s well aware of the capacity of architecture to unite, divide, project power and create a link to an imagined past.

Supporters, including the National Civic Art Society, frame the order as simple common sense. Classical architecture, sympathisers insist, is America’s God-given birthright. Its colonnades, cornicing and corbels carry the weighty associations of legitimacy, inspiration and timelessness. There is much to be said for classical architecture but surely it’s faintly ridiculous, short-sighted and lacking in imagination to mandate it as the capital’s only permissible style? Such sweeping edicts politicise taste and curtail conversation or innovation. Washington has long been a showcase of contrasting styles and, by extension, a democracy of ideas played out in its structure and streetscape since it was first planned (on a marsh, not a swamp) in the 1790s. We have come a long way since then, in engineering and thought, and the built environment should reflect this.

The city’s strength has always been its pluralism, in architecture as in politics – from Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial and Edward Durell Stone’s Kennedy Center to IM Pei’s National Gallery of Art East Building and Gordon Bunshaft’s Hirshhorn Museum – reflecting a diversity of expression. Privileging nostalgia over experimentation risks producing pastiche: a watered-down echo of the countless times when bullies have tried to impose a unified architecture on cities. See Mussolini’s attempts to link his fascism with the grandeur of Rome or Saddam Hussein’s Babylonian-inspired reworking of Baghdad. Today, there are other strongmen hard at work reforging their capitals and seats of power, from Putin’s Cathedral of the Armed Forces to Erdogan’s Ak Saray palace in Ankara (about four times the size of Versailles) and Modi’s new-look New Delhi that replaces colonial associations with historic Hindu and nationalist motifs.

It’s too early to see the results in Washington but Trump’s mandate asserts centralised control over federal aesthetics and seeks an architecture portraying hulking power with precious little nuance. Instead of leaving it to competitions or a respected advisory process, the White House now dictates which forms are worthy of housing American democracy. It’s a patently subjective and problematic idea: are the president and his yes men now suddenly qualified to rule on what makes a building work?

That said, a return to classical architecture could well create good, even great, buildings, providing that architects respect traditional craft, proportion and materials, which is not a given in today’s uncertain construction market. The risks such sweeping legislation possesses are literally colossal too. From botched efforts to corner-cutting or projects palmed off to cronies, commissions might quickly descend into over-scaled kitsch, boring imitation or ill-suited structures aimed to appease aesthetically rather than serve, elevate or enlighten.

Without true architectural investigation and denied the freedom to disagree in the debate around urbanism and public buildings, the architectural discourse – much like the political and social ones – could stray from thoughtful invention into blind partisanship. Columns, pediments and porticoes might look like progress to some but making them the only option will drag architecture back to antiquity.

Sam Lubell is a New York-based architecture writer and book editor.

Read next: Trump biographer Michael Wolff on the ‘moron’ president’s ‘incredible incompetence’

What Macron’s Dior habit says about the politics of presentation and the smell of success

There’s an entire industry of consultants working on what national leaders look and sound like – but the question of how they smell is less frequently pondered. Not many voters get close enough for it to matter.

At least one current national leader does reportedly care about scent a great deal, however. According to a recent book, The Tragedy of the Élysée by journalist Olivier Beaumont, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, slathers himself in sufficient Dior Sauvage for his staff to detect his approach from an Élysée palace corridor away. In so doing, Macron observes a national tradition. Napoleon Bonaparte had a standing order with his preferred perfumer, Chardin, for 50 bottles of eau de cologne per month. Louis XIV, who was reputedly frightened of bathing, commissioned his perfumer to design a different scent for every day of the week and had his shirts rinsed in a potion of rose-water, jasmine, musk, nutmeg and much else.

Conventional wisdom suggests that smell is the most powerful sense in evoking primal emotions. The historical record certainly suggests a long-established and pretty much universal belief that scent is a potent communicator of power: palaces and temples have dazzled and dominated visitors and worshippers with the deployment of odour since antiquity. Egyptian pharaohs pleased their gods – and demonstrated a connection to them – with offerings of incense. Chinese emperors were so preoccupied with perfume that Mao Zedong seized on it during the Cultural Revolution as symptomatic of the decadence that he wished to extirpate. (Mao’s personal hygiene was legendarily dreadful – his doctor, Zhisui Li, recalled him never bathing, as well as brushing his teeth with tea – though it remains unclear whether this was some cunning olfactory intimidatory tactic.)

Personalised scents of state have now largely faded, with a few exceptions. The late Sultan Qaboos of Oman collected and commissioned perfumes and presented them to his guests. He also founded a fragrance brand, Amouage.

Less majestically, Donald Trump includes perfumes among his hefty range of self-branded merchandise. The Victory 45-47, which comes in a bottle adorned with a little gold statue of him, retails at $249 (€213) – or $398 (€340) for two bottles and $597 (€510) for three. Perhaps the importance of scent in the mass-media age hasn’t dissipated entirely.

Are Poland’s efforts to bolster its defences enough to deter Russia?

As part of Monocle’s November 2025 report on Poland’s defence capabilities, writer Julia Jenne and photographer Jedrzej Nowicki travelled to a US-run ballistic-missile defence base on Poland’s Baltic coast, which had been inaugurated the year before. The base is a key point of defence for Europe. As the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles hitting Europe has made recent headlines, we are republishing this piece to give readers insight into the fragility of the defence pact between the US and Europe, and how the continent’s capitals are walking a diplomatic tightrope to keep their security intact.

It’s a blustery day on Poland’s Baltic coast, where Monocle is being shown some SM-3 interceptor missiles. We’re at the Aegis Ashore Poland base and our US guides joke around as they open up containers housing 1.5-tonne rockets, which can travel through the air at speeds exceeding 4km per second. With the missiles out of their case, the mood becomes more serious. “We have the capability to defend all of Europe,” says Captain Michael S Dwan, who is overseeing the command of the base at the time of our visit.

The opening of Aegis Ashore was also a stormy affair. First mooted in 2002, the base became a source of tension between the US and Russia – the latter seeing it as a major provocation, despite what Washington and Waraw insisted were purely defensive capabilities. When it was finally declared active 22 years later, during the dying days of the Biden administration, Warsaw had good reason to feel vindicated for the decades spent lobbying the Americans to build it.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow’s aerial assaults on the country have sometimes spilled over into neighbouring Poland. In September, Russian drones made it as far west as Olesno, with Nato jets scrambled to shoot them down. Aegis Ashore, then, is a key pillar of Poland’s military deterrence, founded on both a centuries-old suspicion of Russia – a nation that has invaded on several occasions – and a post-Cold War alliance with the US. When the base opened, America’s commitment to Polish and European defence appeared unshakeable. But now there’s a very different president in the White House. Donald Trump has made no secret of his intention to pare back the US military presence on the continent and has even refused to defend its Nato allies in the event of an attack. The fact that US reticence has come at a time of Russian belligerence is particularly concerning for Poland.

After the end of communist rule, Warsaw went all in on the transatlantic alliance, cosying up to successive US administrations in a bid to establish a permanent American military presence in the country. Today there are about 10,000 US troops stationed here. But given the geopolitical climate, Warsaw has had to seek alternatives. In just two years, it has become Europe’s largest military spender as a percentage of GDP and built the continent’s biggest land army. Poland’s defence budget has increased by 50 per cent since 2023; while in 2024, it commanded 205,000 military personnel – third only to the US and Turkey (countries with far greater populations) among Nato member states. But with Vladimir Putin hovering and Trump wavering, the question remains: is it enough?

When Monocle speaks to veteran politician Michal Kaminski, he’s clear that warm relations with the US are still essential to Poland. “Being anti-American is impossible,” he says. “There’s a feeling that our liberation in 1989 was thanks to the policies of Ronald Reagan.” Yet behind closed doors, contingency plans are being made. “Though it can’t be declared officially, there’s a growing scepticism about America among Poland’s political elite,” says defence and security analyst Tomasz Pawłuszko. Such scepticism, born of a history of invasion by larger powers, is what has fuelled the recent military expansion. “The first thing that you need to know is that the Polish people are prepared to face Russia, even alone,” says Pawłuszko. “I wouldn’t have even begun to imagine it during the Biden administration but this is the style of political thinking that we have adopted.”

In 2025, Poland will spend almost 5 per cent of its GDP on defence, the most among Nato countries, including the US. The country is also debating a law to allow Polish forces to shoot down (without prior Nato or EU approval) Russian objects flying over western Ukraine. “Poland is, along with Finland, among the best [militarily] prepared countries in Nato,” says Pawłuszko. “We have the biggest army on the eastern flank and good co-operation with our biggest allies.”

Pawłuszko says that a major sea change in Polish military thinking happened in 2016. “Russia had annexed Crimea two years earlier and our politicians decided to throw their support behind our army,” he says. “Under Trump’s first presidency, the government aimed to please Washington by buying US weapons.” Yet, even then, there were signs of US fickleness. “The Americans weren’t willing to share military technology with us. Even PIS [the far-right, Trump-friendly Law and Justice party] realised that they had become a little arrogant,” he says.

So, Warsaw began to look farther afield to meet its growing materiel needs. Since 2022, the country has spent more than $20bn (€17bn) on South Korean arms, including hundreds of K2 tanks, light combat aircraft and heavy-artillery systems. For the Poles, this partnership has plenty of upsides. Quick turnaround times are coupled with the fact that South Korea has proved a willing partner in sharing technological know-how. Lengthy supply chains have been circumvented, with companies including WB Group and Hanwha building missile-production facilities in Poland.

Monocle sees some of the South Korean K2 tanks in action at a large military exercise in Poland’s northeast. Alongside troops from the US, Lithuania and the Czech Republic, Polish forces are simulating an attack on the Suwałki Gap – a land corridor wedged between Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave, and Belarus, a Kremlin ally – which has been called Nato’s Achilles heel. Military analysts believe that this picturesque region would be among the likeliest places to be struck, were Russia to attack the alliance. Venture close enough to the border with Kaliningrad and one will receive an unnerving SMS proclaiming, “Welcome to Russia.”

But during the exercise, codenamed Brave Boar 25, mobile-phone service is scant. Deep inside a thick forest, we hear jets roaring overhead. The exercise is intended to co-ordinate the full panoply of Nato aerial and land capabilities on Polish terrain. “The landscape that we’re training on here is completely new to us,” says one Czech captain who Monocle speaks to on condition of anonymity. We meet him in a mocked-up town surrounded by pines and thicket; while we talk, his men drill how to capture one of the larger buildings, creeping along roads and pathways modelled on a typical Polish settlement.

“At first, our tactics are a little different but after a few hours, we start to co-operate with more ease,” he says, explaining the importance of conducting exercises on unfamiliar terrain. “What we have seen during our time here is very impressive, especially the large numbers of soldiers and equipment. Poland’s command and control is on a high level.”

Leading today’s exercise is the Polish Armed Forces’ 16th Mechanised Division, which is based near the Suwałki Gap. Captain Karol Frankowski, a press officer, tells Monocle about the recent improvement in his country’s defensive capabilities. “When I came to the military in 2017, our division had seven units,” he says. “Today we have 11.” He reels off the names of some new pieces of equipment that the brigade has gained in the past few years, including K2 tanks and HIMARS rocket launchers.

Once a successful sports journalist, Frankowski joined up after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. “In 2014 a kind of information war started,” he says. “I realised that I needed to be a part of this structure to help Polish citizens.” In many ways, Frankowski’s career change mirrors the way that Poland has shaken itself out of its post-Cold War slumber in response to the growing Russian threat. Now, the press officer is tasked with attracting others like himself into fatigues, leading a government-backed initiative with the aim of recruiting 100,000 volunteers by 2027. In online videos, Frankowski attempts to appeal to Gen-Z Poles. “I explain that it is an adventure and that you get the chance to prove yourself,” he says. “People pay money to train in the gym – but here, you get paid to do physical exercise.”

Frankowski’s Instagram posts are part of a wider drive to make military training available outside the armed forces to hundreds of thousands of civilians. There is a recognition that Poland lags behind other front-line Nato countries, especially the Nordics, when it comes to civilian preparedness. “For many years, officials have been informing people that we are building our military power – that we’re buying tanks and helicopters, and creating new divisions,” says Pawłuszko. “But at the same time, people aren’t prepared for typical wartime threats such as bombs or rescue operations, let alone hybrid threats.”

Poland’s defence minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, emphasises the importance of involving all members of society in preparing for war. “Our priorities are a strong army, a strong society and strength in the Nato alliance,” he tells Monocle. “I would like elements of defence education to become more widespread in schools and workplaces, and for the private sector to be more deeply involved in exercises and resilience planning.” This would involve a huge societal change. “The armed forces rank among the institutions with the highest levels of public trust,” says the minister. “ This shows a sense of shared responsibility for security. At the same time, we recognise that preparing society is a long-term process. That is why we are preparing voluntary universal training; we are running educational campaigns in schools and information campaigns in the media. It does not mean living in fear – it means confidence and calmness in the face of challenges.”

However, an aversion to joining up persists in many sectors of Polish society – a lingering effect of communist rule, which eroded trust in the state. This is exacerbated by acute political polarisation. Today only a third of Poles view the government positively. A lack of trust was evident after Russia’s drone incursion in September. According to a poll in the immediate aftermath, a third of Poles believed that Ukraine was to blame, rather than Russia. This wasn’t helped by mixed government messaging, which initially claimed that a Russian drone had struck a civilian house, when it could have been a Polish missile fired by an F-16.

After the incursion, which the prime minister, Donald Tusk, said had brought Poland closer to war than at any time since 1945, worried citizens took to social media. “What does a drone sound like?” asked one Facebook user. “How do I know if it’s flying close or far away from me?” Such questions are signs that the government’s crisis messaging isn’t getting through – as is the fact that many civilians affected by the air alert did not receive adequate instructions.

On Poland’s northern coast, the Aegis Ashore site continues to operate under US personnel and Captain Dwan is eager to stress that things, for now, remain business as usual. “Our mission has not changed,” he says. The base is equipped with SPY-1 radar, which offers a round-the-clock detection range of more than 300km. Still, many Polish politicians are privately wondering if capabilities such as this are of any use. In March, Washington informed its European allies that it would no longer participate in military exercises on the continent – though in a meeting with Poland’s president, Karol Nawrocki, in September, Trump said that he had not considered withdrawing US troops from the country.

The definitive year in Poland’s historical memory is 1939, when the country was divided between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany despite the rhetoric of Western allies. Today the situation is different. As the defence minister points out, European Nato allies, including Italy and the Netherlands, were involved in shooting down September’s drone incursion. “Poland is not alone,” he says. But Warsaw knows that if it is attacked, actions will be more important than words. The country is leading the way when it comes to European rearmament but it cannot afford to be complacent.

How Animo is leading the rise of new super-boutique gyms

What if the gym was more than just a place to sweat through a workout? A new generation of “super-boutique” gyms is challenging the fitness market by offering environments where you can take classes and chase a new personal best but also run work meetings, eat in healthy restaurants and stock up on athletic gear in concept shops. It’s a shift that’s aimed at a new generation of people for whom fitness is a way of life and central to their social lives.

“Classic gyms have no vibe,” says Alexandre de Vaucleroy, the 32-year-old co-founder of Animo Studios in Brussels, the latest super-boutique to flex its muscles in this emerging sector. “Crossfit doesn’t always come with good facilities, while places such as Barry’s only do one kind of thing.” A former analyst at management consultants Bain & Company in London, De Vaucleroy teamed up with Antoine Derom, a business and economics graduate who had previously founded a dating app, to launch Animo in 2020. This four-floor site – their biggest yet – opened in March.

“We always wanted more from the gyms that we went to,” says De Vaucleroy, clutching a flat white as we sit in the Animo café. He and Derom spent much of their spare time exercising and saw a gap in the market for something more ambitious than what was on offer. “We wanted to add food, recovery and a social aspect,” says Derom.

Animo feels a little like an all-inclusive holiday resort for fitness enthusiasts. In the lobby, there’s a shop selling sports kits, a coffee shop and protein-shake counter. Upstairs is the gym, which balances an industrial aesthetic with lush plants and is drenched in natural light from the numerous windows. Then there are separate studios for classes offering workouts such as Reformer Pilates and rooms used by the on-site physiotherapists. Down two flights of stairs, you’ll find saunas, steam rooms and ice baths, plus a beauty salon and spa offering facials and massages. It’s the gym as a destination.

Its opening was the culmination of five years’ work and is perfectly timed to mine a rich and evolving fitness market. Gym use is rising, with more than 100 million people in Europe expected to have a membership by 2030 (though that figure will include many who pay a fee but fail to get up from their couch). Some 77 million Americans were signed up to a gym or studio in 2024, up 20 per cent from 2019, according to global trade organisation the Health & Fitness Association. But it’s findings such as those of McKinsey & Company’s 2025 report on the $2trn (€1.71trn) wellbeing industry that show where the money really is. The management consultancy concluded that millennials and Gen Z consumers consider wellness to be a “daily, personalised practice” rather than just a matter of “occasional activities or purchases”. Animo leans into this trend.

“Everything is here so it saves me time,” says Dali Jelassi, a 40-year-old member who works in education technology. “I can get a massage, use the sauna and have lunch.” Earlier, he also had his VO2 max test, which shows how much oxygen your body can use during intensive exercise. “I don’t have to go to a therapist somewhere else and it’s easy to try new things,” he adds.

De Vaucleroy uses a term that he believes sums up the Animo offer. “We are a Social Wellness and Performance Club,” he says. Indeed, he and Derom have even trademarked the phrase. “It’s about responding to the way that people want to live their lives now.”

Since the height of the coronavirus pandemic – when many people took part in “couch-to-5K”-style initiatives – the fitness boom has snowballed. Marathon participation, for example, is now at an all-time high and concepts such as Hyrox, a gym-based competition launched in 2017, are now part of a global fitness movement.

After our tour, De Vaucleroy and Derom lead us back to Animo’s café, a calming space filled with boucle sofas and armchairs. It’s 12.00 on a Monday and members are eating açaí bowls and basil-topped fruit salads served on stainless-steel tableware, while tapping away on their laptops. Flat whites and matcha lattes come in handmade ceramics; protein shakes are served in glasses. “It’s about giving members a better experience and value for their money,” says De Vaucleroy, as he sticks a fork into a lightly peppered, beetroot-dyed egg. The business shares a kitchen with Seven, a Brussels all-day café that’s on the ground floor and is open to the public.

The path to Animo has not always been easy. In 2019, De Vaucleroy and Derom each invested €50,000 to launch Animo and a year later unveiled a studio for classes. After just 45 days, however, it was forced to close because of lockdown restrictions. “Our bank accounts were absolutely wiped out but we hired out our spin bikes and delivered them to people’s apartments,” says Derom. “We did what we could.” While many traditional gyms were shuttered and never reopened, things turned around for Animo in 2021. People were desperate for real-life experiences. “As soon as we reopened, we were very busy,” says Derom.

To launch a more ambitious space, they needed to raise funds. “That was always the goal but there’s no way that two [then] 27-year-olds could bootstrap a project like this,” says De Vaucleroy. “We had to prove our concept first.” The pair raised €1m from various sources. This money helped them take on a new site, a multistorey car park that the duo transformed into their state-of-the-art premises. In its first five months, the club has signed up 1,500 members who pay between €209 and €249 a month.

Among them is thirtysomething brand consultant Marine Lambert. As she picks up an iced Americano, she tells us that she likes Animo because the classes here are “very difficult”. She proudly pulls out an Animo water bottle from her Animo tote bag. “I was given the bottle after 100 classes,” she says. “I got the bag after doing 200 classes. It made me feel special and appreciated.” After 1,000 classes, Lambert received a gift box, which also includes a hoodie.

Gyms have traditionally been function first, with unflattering lighting and ugly machinery. Animo, however, is furnished like an upscale hotel, with a custom scent that wafts through the air, vases of fresh flowers and plenty of modernist furniture. There’s also a fridge that’s filled with eucalyptus-scented facecloths. It’s far nicer than most offices – and possibly many members’ homes.

The duo have created a space that aspires to be a little “sexy” and borrows lessons from the world of hospitality. De Vaucleroy’s CV includes two years as the head of brand for a global luxury-hotel portfolio and the influence of that time on his way of running Animo is clear. “Staff members are instructed to remember faces, names and orders,” he says. “That’s really important. For some people, that 30-second ‘Hi, how are you?’ might be their only real-life interaction that day.”

Animo’s social focus is central to the operation. One member, Jelassi, tells Monocle that he met about 90 per cent of his friendship circle through Animo since it first opened. This is especially important in a freelance economy, in which many people don’t have regular colleagues. It’s partly why members use the café as an on-demand workplace.

In the gym, I spot a member wearing a black tank top emblazoned with the Animo logo. It’s part of an own-brand line that includes dual-layer shorts for men, bras and leggings for women and unisex Pilates socks. “Our socks business is insane,” says Derom. “We sell 500 pairs a month.” The Animo kit is sold alongside shorts from On Running, Normatec compression boots from Hyperice and Swedish laundry detergent made especially for gym kit.

De Vaucleroy and Derom have big dreams for Animo, with their sights set on Paris. For now, pay a visit to the Brussels location, where visitors can buy a €70 week-long “discovery” pass. Been there, flexed that, bought the grippy socks.

Following specialist investigators on the hunt for Nazi-looted works of art

When Dutch journalist Peter Schouten rang the doorbell of a house in Mar del Plata in early August, he didn’t know that it would unleash a global media storm. Schouten had travelled to the Argentinian city at the behest of a colleague, Cyril Rosman. For a decade, Rosman had been on the trail of a trove of missing artworks; the story of which reads like a thriller, with an intriguing cast of characters and a plot that spans geographies and generations. Rosman’s investigations centred on the family of Friedrich Kadgien, a financial adviser to Nazi politician Hermann Göring, who escaped to South America after the Second World War. Rosman had long suspected that Kadgien’s two daughters, Patricia and Alicia, might have knowledge of artworks looted during the Nazi regime from Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker. The latter’s heir, Marei von Saher, is in her eighties and lives in New York; she has spent much of her life searching for her father-in-law’s collection.

A dog barked inside the house but no one answered the door to Schouten. As he waited, he noticed a “For sale” sign and took a photo on his phone. Later, while having dinner at his hotel, he found the listing for the property online and spotted an image of a gilt-framed painting hanging above a green velvet sofa. He sent the link to Rosman in the Netherlands, who, the next morning, replied with excitement that he was reasonably confident that the artwork was the 1710 painting “Portrait of a Lady”. Over the next couple of weeks, Schouten was able to confirm that the painting was still in the house and tried to contact Patricia Kadgien through multiple channels. He received some ambiguous replies before being blocked on social media. Schouten’s story about the discovery was published on the Dutch news site Algemeen Dagblad (AD) on 25 August. “And then the rollercoaster started,” he says.

Along with the world’s media, multiple law enforcement agencies – Interpol, the FBI and the Argentinian police – quickly became involved. But when officers raided the Kadgien house and four other properties a few days later, the painting seemed to have vanished. The artwork’s second disappearance did nothing to quell the interest and the local general attorney assigned 15 people to work on the case. Eventually, the collective pressure of the media and the police yielded a response from the Kadgiens. On 3 September, the family handed over the painting and it was put on view at a media conference.

A criminal investigation has since been opened, which will focus on Patricia and her husband, and whether they attempted to obstruct justice by hiding the painting. “Portrait of a Lady”, meanwhile, will most likely make its way to New York and to Marei von Saher. “To dedicate your life to getting back all of your family’s possessions must be unbelievably tough,” says Schouten today, who was in regular contact with Von Saher throughout the saga. But he wishes that he could have spoken to the Kadgien sisters and heard their side of the story. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a father like that,” he says. “You are not to blame for your parents’ behaviour but you carry it with you your whole life.”

The Nazis are thought to have looted about 20 per cent of Europe’s art between 1933 and 1945, much of which – at least 100,000 objects – has yet to be returned. Of course, their regime was just one perpetrator of art theft. Schouten’s story made headlines across the globe but the everyday work of hunting for (and occasionally finding) lost or stolen artworks usually takes place with less fanfare.

On a quiet lane in central London is the unassuming office of the Art Loss Register (ALR), an organisation with the world’s largest private database of stolen art, antiques and collectables. Unlike Rosman’s quest to locate artworks from Goudstikker’s collection, the ALR checks individual items entering the market to investigate their provenance and demonstrate due diligence. The register currently features more than 700,000 lost or stolen artworks and the ALR performs about 450,000 searches on items prior to their sale. These are carried out on behalf of the likes of governments, law enforcement, museums, auction houses or private individuals.

“What we are looking for is some proof that the item can be sold on the open market,” says Olivia Whitting, the ALR’s head of cultural heritage and client manager. The organisation also registers the theft or loss of items and helps to reunite some of them with their owners. “It’s quite exciting because it’s the kind of detective work where you end up knowing so much about random parts of history, such as the great telephone exchange of the year 2000,” says Whitting. “That was when London phone numbers went from starting with ‘0171’ or ‘0181’ to ‘020’. If a document is from before 2000 but it has the newer telephone code, you might question whether it’s real.”

The work of registering objects on the database – or trying to match items to them – is usually done digitally. But when Monocle visits in early autumn, among the desktop computers, coffee mugs and copies of the Antiques Trade Gazette is an extraordinary artefact. In the corner of a room, under a blanket, is a 14th-century cenotaph. The grave marker was handed over to the ALR for restitution by an antiques dealer who had been tipped off that it was probably stolen. The ALR is now researching its origin to enable its return. The organisation has ascertained that it is probably from the late-medieval Timurid empire and from the grave of a young man or a child. The next step will be to approach the relevant embassy and investigate whether it can be returned to its country of origin.

When something is registered as lost on the database, the ALR will ask for proof of loss (such as a crime reference number) and of ownership. This might be an acquisition invoice or insurance document but it could also be a family photo featuring the artwork. Whitting was recently sent an image of a three-year-old girl having a tantrum on the floor in front of a Palmyrene sculpture and another picture of a Roman bust dressed in a tinsel crown at Christmas. “It’s a window into someone else’s childhood,” she says.

The ALR database of missing artworks reflects the breadth and strangeness of the wider market. It includes a toy car (an Aston Martin replica), JMW Turner’s death mask and a set of George Washington’s false teeth. “When human remains come up, that’s often when we think, ‘I wish this wasn’t on the art market,’” says Whitting. She recounts how a Belgian zoo recently wanted to look up a human head that had somehow, years ago, ended up in its collection. The ALR refused to search it and advised the zoo to try to return it to the Polynesian island from which it originally came.

Items on the register – paintings, vases or the occasional body part – might have been taken in a burglary or looted as the spoils of war. In the estimation of James Ratcliffe, the director of recoveries at the ALR, about a quarter of the database consists of works that were lost during the Second World War. “That doesn’t even touch the sides of what was taken by the Nazis,” he says.

Others are looking for these objects too. In Magdeburg, the German Lost Art Foundation acts as the country’s central body overseeing looted cultural property. It oversees hundreds of projects exploring Nazi looted art and manages its own register, the Lost Art Database. “We always have to keep in mind that we’re not only talking about the works of Pissarro, Picasso and Cézanne,” says Andrea Baresel-Brand, the head of the documentation and research data-management department. “We’re also talking about everyday things: knives, forks, cups and plates. For a family, they could mean everything.”

The story of looted art is tied to history but shaped by the present. In Germany, that often means contending with right-wing political parties that, says Baresel-Brand, “prefer not to deal with the past”. Elsewhere, attitudes in the art market have changed when it comes to dealing with items from colonised countries. “It’s interesting to think about the new frontiers of repatriation and the moral side of acquisitions,” says Ratcliffe. “Ten years ago the colonial history of an object was a curiosity. Now there’s a recognition that it’s an issue that needs to be addressed.” It’s a complex environment and Ratcliffe believes that the art market is sometimes a scapegoat for bigger questions facing society. “We’re calling this decolonisation but it’s not,” he says.

The field of looking for lost artworks is changing in other ways too. There has been a move towards “positive registration”, with the cataloguing of artefacts in museums that might be in danger because they are in a region at risk of conflict. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is expected to improve the image-matching process but it will take longer for it to perform the intricate work of due diligence. It’s also likely that technology will be used to create fraudulent documentation. “Say you have an export licence for a Roman mosaic from Lebanon in the 1970s,” says Ratcliffe. “Suddenly it’s possible for that document to appear with another mosaic. Tech will help people fighting against art crime but will also help those committing it.”

Combining the knowledge of an art historian with the nous of a detective, solving art crime is a complicated business. From the ALR’s database of artworks, three to five matches a week are made, while another department – the organisation’s busiest – looks into stolen watches and logs about 15 matches a day. Meanwhile, finding a “just and fair solution” to the question of what to do with a found stolen object is often not a straightforward process. Legal technicalities clash with the beliefs of individuals and, sometimes, the history of entire nations. As Schouten has discovered, the simple act of ringing someone’s doorbell can have sweeping consequences. It seems that the past, with all its painful memories and unresolved questions, is closer than we think.

How Villa Ervi in Helsinki preserves Finland’s mid-century modernism

What’s the best way to protect architecture of note? One solution is to seek heritage listing, which would help to prevent demolition or unsightly additions. “Often protected buildings are made into museums,” says Mauri Tommila, who established Tommila Architects in Helsinki in 1984. But Tommila decided to take a different approach when he and his wife, Aila, bought Villa Ervi in 1990.

The building was looking somewhat tired and didn’t reflect its status in design circles: the former residence of prominent mid-century Finnish architect Aarne Ervi, it’s a notable example of the country’s postwar residential modernism. Mauri, now 74, says that if the structure had been listed or turned into a museum, small alterations to make it liveable would have been almost impossible. “There would always have been someone looking over your shoulder,” he adds, explaining that, without any interference from a heritage body, he has been able to maintain the building’s original function – that of a residence and architecture studio.

The first part of the structure was built in 1951, the year when Mauri was born. Ervi wanted the site to function as both a family home and a studio (an office annexe was added in 1962). Amid a maritime landscape in the Finnish capital’s Kuusisaari neighbourhood, the villa has a white, plastered façade that is softened by lush vegetation, and is positioned to take advantage of sea views. The roof is made from clay brick and stone tiling appears on the thresholds, where large windows open onto a garden planted with alpine roses and a Japanese maple, with the water visible beyond.

When Monocle visits, Mauri and Aila are waiting at the wide wooden front door – their usual spot when welcoming guests as they reach an entrance hall that has curved ceilings rising high overhead and natural light flooding in from skylights. Elements such as oak cabinetry with patinated brass handles feature in the foyer, which has a floor lined with handmade Italian tiles. The effect is both ethereal and earthy.

From here, the interior unfolds in a sequence of staggered, interlinked spaces: the living room, the dining room, the kitchen and the bedrooms. Each has large windows with views of the garden, sky and sea. Natural materials and a connection to the elements are prioritised. The living room has a central, open fireplace; in the kitchen, you’ll find sapele mahogany cabinets; bedrooms can be closed off by sliding timber doors and feature the original oak cupboards; the bathrooms are defined by deep-green tiles. Transitions are marked by columns wrapped in rattan cord and doors provide direct access from the kitchen and living room to the garden.

Mauri tells Monocle that the building still works well as a home, decades after its construction. It is human in scale, delivering comfort without ostentation. “Villa Ervi was built to be a home and should be used as one,” he says. The kitchen and living room, with an original Aalto table and a smaller side piece by Ervi, are still where most of the family’s everyday life takes place. The long and welcoming dining table is surrounded by 1950s Fanett chairs by Ilmari Tapiovaara, with Paavo Tynell’s lighting fixtures and Unikko-patterned Marimekko textiles dotted throughout the space.

Meanwhile, the garden is used during summer, as is the swimming pool, whose form echoes the staggered footprint of the office annexe. The sauna, an anchor of Finnish life, is in regular use, thanks to a 1995 renovation that restored its original patinated iroko-wood façade.

The office annexe now serves as the home of Mauri’s architecture practice. As in the residence, there is a strong focus on embracing the site and the use of natural materials. “It’s the most Japanese building in Finland,” says Mauri, as he walks Monocle through the low, long structure, which is defined by a Oregon pine façade. Its proximity to the home means that work often overlaps with personal life; staff meetings take place in the garden and over long dinners at the weekend.

It’s a situation that has benefited Mauri and Aila’s daughter, Miia-Liina. Now the CEO of Tommila Architects, she was immersed in her father’s practice while growing up in Villa Ervi. “I was surrounded by it all and it shaped how I think about space,” she says, recalling how she used to look into the garden, perching on the building’s broad windowsills and noticing how the changing light would alter the appearance of the walls and wood grain. “It made me an architect because I understood the value of good architecture early.”

The family-run practice now works on strategic planning, and regeneration and repair projects – architecture that’s not just about building but also maintaining and evolving an environment. Its approach is partly a response to what Mauri and Miia-Liina see as a tendency among developers to demolish old buildings, even when they still have plenty of life left in them. “We should preserve the layers of architecture in our cities,” says Mauri. “They are layers of our culture.”

It’s this outlook that continues to inform Mauri and Aila’s hopes and dreams for Villa Ervi. With their children grown and no longer at home, the scale of the residence exceeds their daily needs. As such, the property has been put up for sale, though not aggressively. The couple is particular about potential future owners – and for good reason. The property’s future custodians will not only inherit walls and windows but a way of being, an architectural legacy of care and a collection of historically significant buildings that remain in constant use. It’s not, according to Mauri, architecture to be preserved as an exhibit – it’s to be lived in.

“If it sells, it sells,” he says. “If not, we’ll stay. What matters is that this place continues to be used – not turned into a museum.”

Poltrona Frau is the €120m powerhouse behind luxury car interiors

Halfway down Italy’s Adriatic flank, inside a bustling factory in the municipality of Montegranaro, car parts are zipping off the production line. Stacked on moveable shelving while awaiting the next step, every piece will be shifted around an open-plan space to different workstations. In one area, people wearing masks are spraying a blue adhesive that will be used to bind the leather upholstery to the panel through a combination of heat and pressure. This plant, which was founded four years ago, might seem like a car manufacturer’s home base. But it actually belongs to Poltrona Frau, a storied design brand that dates back to 1912 and is better known for furnishing living rooms than the insides of sports cars.

“The company has transformed in the past few years,” says senior designer Luca Bellomarì as he takes Monocle on a tour of the buildings. Bellomarì is talking about Poltrona Frau’s In Motion business, which provides pristine leather-wrapped products, including seat covers, for high-end vehicles. While Poltrona Frau is a household name as a maker of sofas and armchairs, collaborating with such design luminaries as Gio Ponti and Pierluigi Cerri, In Motion has been quietly – and rather successfully – working away from the limelight.

Founded as a standalone business division in 1985, In Motion’s first automotive project was on the Lancia Thema, which had a Ferrari engine. Today the business’s client list includes Range Rover, McLaren, Pagani, Lamborghini and Ferrari. But glance inside the leather interior of a Ferrari and you won’t see a Poltrona Frau logo anywhere, even though it has decked out all of its vehicles since 1998. And though automotive is its biggest segment, In Motion also has a footprint in the yachting and aviation sectors.

As Monocle passes workers dressed in Poltrona Frau T-shirts, some of them wearing sweatbands and gloves, Bellomarì explains that In Motion’s biggest shift has been its decision to start supplying what he calls “systems”. Rather than just upholstering pieces sent to Poltrona Frau, the business now makes everything from headliners – a car’s inside roof – to door panels. “We co-design with the original equipment manufacturers,” he says.

Though there’s plenty of powerful machinery at the plant, it’s clear that In Motion fits out vehicles in the same way as the rest of the Poltrona Frau business approaches furniture. That means it wouldn’t be anywhere without skilled artisans stretching, smoothing, cutting and checking the quality of the hides by eye. Red lasers projected onto the leather might help stitchers to maintain a straight line but technology is only intended as an aid to those carrying out the work. “We still work with our hands,” says Bellomarì. “This is something that often doesn’t get contemplated in the automotive industry.”

Later in the day of our visit, Monocle leaves Montegranaro for the brand’s headquarters, a short drive away in Tolentino – home to a brand museum designed by Michele de Lucchi. On hand to meet us in its café is Giovanni Maiolo, the general manager of Poltrona Frau In Motion. Maiolo joined the company in 2019 and has been responsible for much of its recent success. “Before our change of business model, we were just the last step in the value chain,” he says. “We have completely transformed our approach and started to work with the customer at the beginning of a project.”

In Motion has the advantage of servicing a luxury car industry in which the vehicles are often limited editions and maintain or increase their value over time. This makes the business largely recession-proof. Demand in the segment outstrips supply and Maiolo says that while there was a global slowdown in the furniture market last year, In Motion has been moving in the opposite direction, with an expected turnover of €120m this year. “We have increased turnover by 100 per cent in five years,” he says. “We are now considered a pillar of the group.”

In Motion is clearly a well-oiled machine – and it has to be in a business where a competitor doing something better or more quickly could lead to the loss of a vital contract. Its leather needs to behave in a different way to furniture upholstery too. Designer Bellomarì talks about it being more rigid and “having a completely different characteristic”. In the boating, car and aviation worlds, Poltrona Frau must strike the right balance between craft and performance. Exactly how hardy it needs to be becomes apparent at a testing lab, where leather is exposed to temperatures ranging from -30C to 115C and put through a stress test of being repeatedly tugged for as many as 100,000 cycles – an attempt to cover all bases for the sorts of extremes that the leather might be exposed to in its lifespan.

Daniele Gardini, the R&D leather manager, says that In Motion has about 10 leather collections and can provide the client with everything from digital printing to microembroidery to complete a custom look. The search for innovation is constant. Gardini says that metallic leather is a recent addition, something that has clearly been borrowed from the fashion-accessory world. One major breakthrough has been Poltrona Frau iBreathe, a product that came out of development in 2024. “We have been working on the lightness of leather,” he says. “Removing 10kg from the weight of a vehicle is a good saving for speed and fuel consumption.” It weighs less because there are wider spaces between the fibres in the fabric. Aesthetically, however, you wouldn’t know the difference.

Innovation is crucial to In Motion’s survival. If a declaration of intent were needed, it came in June 2024 when it bought a majority stake in KJ Ryan, a UK company based in the city of Coventry that makes high-end automotive components. It was Poltrona Frau’s first overseas acquisition. With Italy and the UK producing more than 80 per cent of the world’s luxury cars, it was a shrewd move from In Motion, which has worked in the country since 2007 and has clients including Rolls Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin and Range Rover. “The UK was already a market that we knew in some way,” says Maiolo. “But what we were missing was all the rest – everything connected with the culture.” The plan is to eventually shift more production to Coventry for local clients.

With more than 600 employees now spread between Italy and the UK, In Motion continues to move through the gears, even if its touch, in many ways, remains light. Poltrona Frau doesn’t make a song and dance about the work that it does at In Motion but Maiolo jokes that he needs to start talking about it to keep winning more clients and ensure a resilient future – which he has started to do more now that the “hardware” of the business model is airtight. With it, he hopes that the work of In Motion will soon be as recognised and requested in cars as a Bose stereo or a Brembo braking system. “Our goal is that in five years’ time, when you shop for a luxury car, the first thing you ask when looking inside it is, ‘Is this made by Poltrona Frau?’”