In addition to earning more than US$650 million at the box office, the Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl movie introduced the world to Johnny Depp’s eccentric Pirate Jack Sparrow character and generated four sequels, with a fifth in the works by producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The expansive vistas of the film’s fictional pirate world were filmed in the real Caribbean, including Little Pipe Cay, a gorgeous private island in the Bahamas, despite the fact that the movie’s principal sets were constructed in Los Angeles. The island also appeared in Casino Royale, a film from the venerable James Bond series, while Sean Connery’s Thunderball was filmed in a nearby cay. For USD 100 million, the 40-acre private paradise is now listed on the market.
Idyllic seafront home in Bahamas. Image: Engel & Völkers Bahamas.
Fine white sand beaches may be found on Little Pipe Cay, which also has waters that residents refer to as “Bombay-Sapphire Blue.” The tropical environment is home to a variety of exotic flora and marine animals including dolphins and sea turtles. The island has a helipad, a seaplane port, and a deep-water dock that can handle superyachts, making it the ideal luxurious escape for a celebrity or high roller. Over 22,000 square feet of interior space, including eleven bedrooms and twelve baths, are provided by a 5,300 square foot main residence, four guest cottages, and staff housing. Peaked roofs, high-beam ceilings, hardwood floors, and lots of glass provide a traditional design that makes the most of the area’s breathtaking views and pleasant climate.
Olympic-sized swimming pool on this Bahamas property. Engel & Völkers Bahamas.
An Olympic-sized infinity pool and beautiful gardens provide an alternative setting for unwinding and admiring the island’s tropical environment, even though much of the island has been left in a natural state perfect for attracting local birds and wildlife. The resort, which is now run as a vacation rental business with nightly rates ranging from US$75,000 to US$95,000, comes with kayaks and jet skis. The island, which may be used as a getaway for individuals or as an investment property, is also being sold with the right to further develop it.
The USD 100M Bahamas property enjoys panoramic sea vistas. Image: Engel & Völkers Bahamas.
The island, which is a part of the Exumas archipelago, is situated 70 miles from Nassau, the Bahamas’ capital. The chain of 365 islands, which has huge offshore coral reefs and is a fantastic location for snorkeling and scuba diving, is mostly uninhabited, with only 1,500 people living there full-time in George Town, the capital. The city was founded in 1783 by loyalists escaping the American Revolutionary War, and it bears King George III’s name. The group of islands was reputed to be a favorite of the infamous Captain Kidd and served as a haven for pirates up until the 18th century.
Currently, some of the islands are protected as part of the Bahamas National Trust park system, while others are privately owned and used for tourism. The global elite’s interest in private islands was rekindled by the pandemic, and some well-known owners of Little Pipe Cay’s adjacent islands include David Copperfield, Tyler Perry, and Johnny Depp.
The agent for this listing is Engel & Völkers Bahamas. Photos courtesy of Engel & Völkers Bahamas. For more info, head to : www.engelvoelkers.com
First impressions matter, particularly in business, which is why the right accessory can speak volumes about your personal style, professionalism, and attention to detail. Browse Von Baer’s top picks for luxury leather briefcases from the high-end leather accessories brand Von Baer, including business briefcases and laptop bags.
The No.1 is a strong briefcase for those who want to make a statement. It includes a spacious triple-gusset design, a dedicated laptop sleeve, and just the right amount of internal pockets. It’s made from the highest quality full grain Italian leather, handmade in Florence, Italy.
The detachable shoulder strap is excellent when moving between meetings, and the lockable main compartment helps to keep important tech and documents secure. The bag is ideal for business professionals, lawyers, accountants, and anyone else looking to make a strong statement. It is available in brown, tan, or black leather.
The CITY laptop bag is luxurious and modern, allowing it to fit perfectly into both a professional and casual setting, so you can use it all day, everyday. Made from full grain Italian leather, it will develop leather patina over time, adding to the bag’s unique character. It comes with a detachable shoulder strap, and can be personalized with a laser engraving.
The Exquisite has a really slim profile, which is ideal for those who want a more sleek and understated briefcase. Despite this slim design, it still has a dedicated 14 inch laptop compartment and a large internal section with extra zipped pockets. It comes with a detachable shoulder strap, and can be personalized with a laser engraving.
Modern Leather Laptop Bags
For something a little more contemporary, consider the Essential and Elegant laptop bags shown below:
These bags combine the traditional full-grain leather material with a modern design. They are ideal for those in creative industries, or who don’t want to appear older than their time.
The Grand is ideal if you want to get changed at the office after your commute; or carry your suit with you on a business trip.
It’s a Duffel-style leather bag with a built-in garment bag, allowing you to zip up your suit inside the bag lining to prevent creases, while still having a carry-on size-compliant bag for the rest of your things.
Why Authentic Italian Full Grain Leather?
There are many reasons to choose authentic Italian full-grain leather:
Quality and Durability – Italian leather is well renowned for its high quality and exceptional durability. Full grain leather, in particular, is the top layer of animal skin, and so is incredibly strong and long-lasting.
Craftsmanship – Italy has a long-standing traditional of artisan craftsmanship, and they are well respected for their ability to make handmade goods really well.
Timeless Style – Italian leather products never go out of style, offering elegance and sophistication that’s a symbol of luxury.
Unique Aesthetic – the natural grain of full-grain leather products keep the imperfections of the skin intact, giving each accessory a unique look.
Leather Patina – over time full-grain leather develops a wonderful pattern called leather patina, further adding to the unique story of your bag.
How To Tell if Leather Is Real?
The best way to tell if leather is real is to read the authenticity label. All real leather products should be able to certify where the leather came from. For example, Von Baer bags include a certificate of authenticity with the trademark Pelle Conciata al Vegetale in Toscana to show it’s an authentic product made from Tuscan (Italian) Vegetable-Tanned Leather.
What Makes a Good Briefcase?
A good briefcase should have the following characteristics:
High Quality Leather – it needs to be made from high quality, full grain leather. This ensures it will look professional for many years, unlike cheaper or imitation leathers.
Stylish – the briefcase must be stylish, but also match your personal style, so it looks right with your favorite work outfits.
Practical – finally it needs to be able to carry your work essentials without bulging or becoming too difficult to carry. If you carry a laptop, it needs a dedicated laptop compartment.
The Laureato Absolute Chronograph 8Tech is powered by Girard-Perregaux's Caliber GP03300 -- a 63-jewel self-winding movement with a 46-hour power reserve.
The Butler Chair is crafted from laminated veneer with dowels glued into a couple of floating tenons supporting two back pieces: one to hold a jacket and the other a bag.
It has been long believed that the scent of wood engenders a sense of comfort, so much so that the Japanese have a name and ritual to match for the olfactory phenomenon. “Shinrin-Yoku”, translated roughly as “forest bathing” is the practice of spending time in a forest and immersing oneself in its atmosphere as a method of self soothing. In the context of fragrances, however, woodiness takes on darker, more sultry alter ego.
Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s Aqua Media Cologne Forte uses a musky wood to balance the lightness of bergamot, verbana, and jasmine. Shop it here.
Sandalwood promotes a sense of calm but is also used to entice and seduce when distilled into a bottle. Once used in money spells and to soothe inflammation, Patchouli is used as a sweetener of sorts to increase a fragrance’s intensity. We often imagine woody fragrances to be rich, warm and spicy, but waters are running crystal clear this fall.
Despite the olfactory transparency of wood, ginger, and sage, Issey Miyake’s L’Eau d’Issey Pour Homme Vétiver has surprisingly strong sillage. Shop it here.
The definition of transparent, “allowing light to pass through so that objects behind can be distinctly seen”, leads to the common misconception that opacity levels in a fragrance correlate to sillage strength. This is only true sometimes. Rather, we can think of fragrances like we do of a painting where the ingredients act in a similar way to coloured paint.
Calvin Klein Eternity For Men Reflections joins the Eternity family with classic notes like sandalwood and oak moss with a slight aquatic undertone which lends it a sparkling transparency. Shop it here.
A transparent fragrance works more like a glaze instead, where light can shine through each layer without any one ingredient overshadowing the another. In contrast, ingredients in a more opaque fragrance tend to stack over each other until a singular, strongest ingredient stands out to the olfactory senses.
One should not belittle clearer wood fragrances to be thin or weak, as they often strategically make use of synthetics which can enhance sillage and longevity. Amouage’s Purpose contains Mystikal — a clearer-smelling version of frankincense that radiates gently on the skin while providing depth to airier adjacent ingredients like bergamot, papyrus and rose.
Meanwhile, the “watery” notes in Kenzo Homme Marine adds a crystalline clarity to what would otherwise be an overpowering blend of vetiver, ginger and clary sage.
What does the House of Loewe smell like? Apparently, it’s sandalwood, peony, pear and a unique “LOEWE accord” that’s slightly herbaceous and tangy. Shop it here.
In a more pellucid manner of speaking, a question to posit to those keen to try their hand (or rather, nose) at woody fragrances might be: “Do you want a fragrance that smells good or a fragrance that makes you smell good?”
Yet, there are perhaps no clear answers when dealing with the enigma of how we perceive each other on the neuro-chemical level. After all, how good a person is perceived to smell often starts from one other thing — himself as the main ingredient.
Fall has only just begun, but the fashion world is already busy with the new season’s ready-to-wear collections, the big four fashion weeks and of notable interest, yet another luxury collaboration. This time, all eyes are on the two Houses of Prada — Miu Miu and Church’s.
Photo: Miu Miu
The collaboration introduces a refresh of two of the English heritage shoemaker’s long-standing dress shoe models — the oxford and double monk strap — for Miu Miu’s 2023 Fall/ Winter collection. Miu Miu says the collection is meant to espouse the Italian womenswear House’s “signature play between the traditional and the contemporary”, featuring a deconstructed presentation of archetypically formal womenswear in vibrant hues and shimmering embellishments. Overlaid jewelled panties on exposed stockings, three-dimensionally floral-embroidered cardigans and elegant collared dresses in a polka-dotted sheer finish are of the few sneak peaks the House has offered at its new season on social media.
The Church’s shoes take up this play on disrupting the traditional, opting for the more recognisable as well as eye-catching brogue finish on both pairs along with the Miu Miu logo, playful in its own design, embossed on the tongue and the sides of the soles which are themselves made of functional non-slip, flexible rubber instead of the traditional heavier leather.
More than Meets The Eye
The campaign appears exciting in the onset, but those in the industry know better about the underlying flows of commercialism which drive fashion partnerships. Collaborations may be touted as a transient design platform to reinvent and reinvigorate, but many often fall short of the mark when serving mostly to combine market audiences under a single campaign or product. This might be the case for Miu Miu and Church’s, both Prada subsidiaries whose mutual success is of vested interest to the Prada group. Rather than an Italian luxury house making the effort of reaching out to a 150 year-old Northampton shoemaking pioneer from one end of the continent to the other, the collaboration could have easily been decided upon in a corporate board meeting on how to sustain better profit margins.
The corporate narrative is especially resonant when you consider Church’s falling popularity in recent times, one part of a larger shift away from traditional men’s tailoring and formal dress. The decline of Church’s has been a slow burn, with news stands talking about how the shoemaker has “lost some of its lustre” as early as 1999 when the Prada made headlines with its USD$170 million acquisition shortly after purchases of Jil Sander and Helmut Lang. The gradual decline had eventually led to the exorbitant brand-wide price hike of around 40 to 50 percent in 2021, packaged as a reframing of Church’s shoes as a true luxury good.
The storied shoemaker may have lost a fair share of its fans and aficionados in the past two decades since the Prada takeover, but it remains undeniable that Church’s is near synonymous with traditional men’s tailoring and English shoemaking at large. Church’s was famously James Bond’s shoe of choice, worn by Pierce Brosnan throughout the late 1990s as he shot scene after scene of suave car chases and rooftop stunts all in tailored suits and various pairs of Church’s dress shoes.
Pierce Brosnan in The World Is Not Enough, wearing a pair of Church’s Presley single monk strap oxfords in black paired with a Brioni suit. Photo: Danjaq LLC, MGM, United Artists
Corporate agenda aside, it still stands significant then that a luxury womenswear line would choose to spotlight an English heritage brand historically rooted in formal menswear, merging the figures of the contemporary femme fatale and traditional gentleman in the form of a pair of brogues.
Shomaking’s Legacy
It is perhaps only the famed leather shoe that wields the power to transverse such boundaries of identity and style. Parisian house Hermès for all their expertise in luxury leather goods chose to invest in acquiring historic English shoemaker John Lobb’s Paris outfit in the 1970s, operating parallel to the original family-owned shop in London till this day. It stands that shoemaking has always been a trade ubiquitously agreed upon to be best left to its master craftspeople.
At the Church’s Northampton factory. Photo: Church’s
Before wars throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and the consequent industrialisation age gave rise to mass production, shoes used to always be “bespoke”. Long before “bespoke” meant luxury, it was virtually necessary for the earliest shoemakers which did not yet have international size charts and could only commence crafting shoes after doing individual measurements. One would visit a shoemaker to get shoes made for oneself, rather than visit a store in hopes of finding a pair which could only approach the “best fit”.
A Church’s craftsman carefully stitching on the welt. Photo: Church’s
It is then perhaps a collective amnesia which has displaced the fact that shoes have always been made specifically for comfort. While leather dress shoes or boots today get a bad reputation for being brick hard, blister-inducing and difficult to “break in”, leather rose to prominence in the earliest shoes precisely because it was sturdy yet flexible. Its versatility as a material was a rare one which met the demands of a variety of uses like horse riding, military combat and eventually, formal dress.
The Shoes Make The Man
The power of a well-fitted pair of shoes to elevate one’s gait and even esteem was not lost on famed stiletto proponent, Christian Louboutin. Louboutin had always insisted that a good pair of heels with the necessary skills required to walk confidently in them could transform the way a person looked, felt and acted, designing shoes with the goal of making legs look as long as they possibly can. Louboutin’s imprint can be found all over haute couture throughout the 1980s when he designed shoes for the likes of Chanel and Saint Laurent before founding his own studio in 1991, his influence and love of the stiletto reaffirming the forgotten truth of shoemaking — a trade crafting not mere accessories, but pieces central to both dressing and feeling well.
Think of the ubiquitousness of now classic silhouettes like that of Nike’s Air Force 1s or Adidas’ Stan Smiths — these leather-crafted performance shoes were the first of their kind for their respective sports of basketball and tennis, going on to become some of the most worn shoes in contemporary street culture. While performance technology has gone leaps and bounds ahead, these early sporting pioneers were exceptional for their time and featured heavily on the feet of professionals and street-side amateurs alike.
The late Kobe Bryant playing for the Los Angeles Lakers in a pair of Nike Air Force 1s. Photo: Complex Networks
Having the right shoes for the job is perhaps of paramount importance in sporting performance, but it speaks to something more ethereal to feel changed simply by putting on a pair of shoes. It speaks to not only the trust that we place in the shoemakers who made them, but also the sheer gravitas a pair of well-crafted shoes can imbue in a person. As that timeless — if not slightly outdated — adage goes, “the shoes make the man (person)”.
The Verdict
A science for its craft and an art for its spirit, shoemaking’s legacy continues to draw fashion back to its craftspeople for the final say on what makes a good pair of shoes. In that vein, it seems almost necessary for Miu Miu and Church’s both to seek out such a collaboration. For Miu Miu, it is perhaps a required salute to the art-science of shoemaking in their inclusion of such a timeless figure in their contemporary collections; whereas for Church’s, it is perhaps an opportune time to cast themselves back into fashion’s limelight and remind the industry why they are the masters of their craft — a two way revival.
Miu Miu fans hesitant to try on such formal dress leaning footwear will be relieved to read that the collaboration has opted for a silhouette “rounder and broader in shape than the originals that inspire them”, perhaps in efforts to lower the barrier for entry for buyers new to Church’s, and maybe also lost Church’s aficionados keen to reconsider investing in a pair of Church’s brogues without the growing pains of breaking in the shoes. As quoted from the official collaboration page, it is “the reassurance of the familiar… at once celebrated and subverted — undone — to create something new”.
