the peninsula x v&a | art in resonance 2026 hong kong

Italian sun, excellent cuisine and breathtaking views over the turquoise-green sea of the bay from the spacious suites and expansive gardens: Perched dramatically on the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast, 90 metres above sea level, Borgo Santandrea is one of those rare places where architecture, landscape, and lifestyle exist in perfect harmony.

Overlooking the fishermen’s hamlet of Conca dei Marini, renowned as Jackie Kennedy’s elegant summer retreat in the 1960s, the impressive mid-century hotel is built directly into the coastal cliffs. A steep staircase (or a lift) leads down through the lush terraced gardens, designed by hotel manager and landscape architect Tano Amato himself, to the private beach and the chic Marinella Beach Club.

While its setting alone is breathtaking, it is the hotel’s interiors, and especially its masterful use of tiles, that leave a lasting impression. Here, design does not simply decorate the space — it defines the emotional rhythm of the entire experience. Originally built in the 1960s and recently renewed, Borgo Santandrea feels both timeless and distinctly Italian in spirit, embracing a philosophy of “quiet luxury,” where craftsmanship, texture, and material authenticity are key. The result is an environment that feels elegant yet intimate, curated yet never showy.

The hotel captures the essence of mid-century Mediterranean style, deeply inspired by the legacy of design star Gio Ponti. Throughout the hotel’s 52 rooms and suites, Ponti’s signature geometric patterns appear in bespoke ceramic floor tiles, produced by local artisans in a palette of Amalfi blues and soft neutrals. The ceramic tradition on the Amalfi Coast is one of the oldest and best-known crafts in southern Italy, dating back to ancient times. It combines Mediterranean influences, maritime history and local raw materials – and remains a hallmark of the region to this day.

Tiles are the soul of Borgo Santandrea’s interior identity. Handmade ceramic tiles appear in guest bathrooms, corridors, terraces, and pool areas, each surface treated like a canvas. Rather than using uniform patterns, the designers curated tile compositions that feel artisanal and personal. Some feature classic Amalfi motifs, floral flourishes, geometric borders, or subtle Moorish references, while others are delightfully irregular, with glazes that shift in tone depending on how sunlight hits them throughout the day.

Gio Ponti is not the only designer who influenced the hotel’s aesthetic. Borgo Santandrea boasts an extraordinary selection of pieces by designers including Carlo Mollino, Frederick Kayser, Hans Wegner, and Isamu Noguchi. These works are carefully integrated across the hotel’s public spaces and dining venues, including the clifftop Plumbago Bar – bringing a museum-level design sensibility to a relaxed coastal setting.

No Italian holiday is complete without extraordinary food: Borgo Santandreas culinary offerings include three restaurants. Alici, the hotel’s Michelin Starred fine dining restaurant, offers pasta-anchovy risotto to inventive “Mediterranean Cappuccino” with blue lobster, served on a cliff-side terrace with panoramic Tyrrhenian views. Delicious fresh produce, vibrant Med flavours and eye-pleasing presentation are served at Marinella Restaurant whilst along the beach front, The Beach Club offers a relaxed counterpoint: woodfired pizza – like the Sole di Amalfi crowned with lemon zest and bottarga, alongside fresh seafood platters.

Should guests wish to venture beyond this beautiful setting, the hotel’s new fleet of private boats offers seamless sea transfers to Naples and Salerno. Not to be missed is a boat trip along the Tyrrhenian coast, discovering hidden coves and the centuries-old villages of Amalfi, Atrani and Minori. On the way, a lunch stop at waterside restaurants such as Il Pirata in Praiano, an iconic family-run establishment serving guests for over 60 years, completes this “Amalfi-Glow” experience.

words. Bettina Krause

Winning a local car show is nice, but taking home a trophy that declares your vehicle superior to every other top-tier winner on the planet is a different league entirely. The Peninsula Paris became the centre of the automotive universe this week as it crowned a 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B with ‘The Peninsula Classics Best of the Best Award.’ This is the sort of accolade that settles arguments before they even start, marking the car as the undisputed monarch of the classic circuit.

Qualifying for this award is harder than getting a table at a new hotspot on opening night. To even be invited, a car must have already won ‘Best of Show’ at a major international Concours d’Elegance during the previous year. This specific Alfa Romeo punched its ticket by dominating at ‘The Amelia 2025’ before arriving in Paris for the gala on 26 January. The event drew a crowd as high-profile as the machinery, including Nicole Kidman, who watched as the Italian thoroughbred took the top honour.

Sir Michael Kadoorie launched this initiative in 2015 alongside co-founders William E. ‘Chip’ Connor, Bruce Meyer and Christian Philippsen because they shared a desire to celebrate the best of what defines the automotive world. They wanted to create a global benchmark that brings the elite of the international concours scene together in one place. It serves as a way to honour the highest art of restoration while ensuring these mechanical cultural assets are preserved for future generations to appreciate.

Most collectors would settle for any 8C, but this chassis comes with a backstory that sounds like it was written for cinema. It was originally owned by Giuseppe ‘Nino’ Farina, the man who etched his name in history as the first official Formula 1 World Champion in 1950. While many of its siblings wore Touring coachwork, Farina kept it in the family by commissioning Stabilimenti Farina to sculpt the body. The result is the only 8C 2900B in existence with this specific design, making it a singular piece of motoring history.

Deborah Keller accepted the prize for the Keller Collection and noted that the car “embodies the golden era of Italian automotive design and outstanding craftsmanship.” The vehicle was in a partially restored state when acquired but underwent a complete transformation finished in 1995. Since then, it has been busy collecting silverware at Pebble Beach and even winning the ‘Parade of Elegance’ after completing the Rally Monte Carlo. “Every time I see it, I am reminded why such magnificent automobiles deserve to be preserved and celebrated,” Keller said.

Taking the title required fending off six other nominees that represent the absolute peak of collecting. The Alfa had to outshine heavyweights like a 1936 Mercedes-Benz 500K Spezial Roadster and a 1954 Ferrari 375 MM. The jury panel responsible for this difficult decision included industry titans such as Gordon Murray and Jay Leno. Co-founder of the awards, Christian Philippsen, described the winner as “the pinnacle of pre-war high-performance engineering,” and it is hard to argue with that assessment.

Anyone hoping to see this masterpiece in the metal can head to Rétromobile from 28 January to 1 February. Find out more here.

photography. courtesy of Agence Pancake, Peninsula Paris
words. Gennaro Costanzo

“The human gesture carries memory. It is imperfect, singular and embodied. In a world dominated by repetition and automation, gesture becomes a space of resistance.”

Pauline Guerrier says this plainly, without romanticising it, and it neatly sums up why her work feels so at home inside ‘Beyond Our Horizons,’ the exhibition opening at la Galerie du 19M from 29 January to 26 April 2026. Presented by Chanel’s métiers d’art hub between Paris and Aubervilliers, the show arrives in France after a successful run in Tokyo and centres on a dialogue that is slow, physical and deeply human: Japanese and French craftsmanship in conversation.

But if you want to understand the soul of Le19M’s latest blockbuster exhibition, you don’t start in the pristine, Rudy Ricciotti-designed gallery itself. You start down the road, in a former perfume factory filled with concrete dust and drying paint.

This is POUSH, the sprawling artists’ incubator in Aubervilliers and the current workspace of Guerrier. The French artist, a Beaux-Arts de Paris alumnus who cut her teeth under the legendary Giuseppe Penone, is the perfect guide for this journey. Her practice is built on what she calls the “anthropology of the gesture,” trekking from Italian glassblowers to weavers in Benin to rescue ancestral techniques from oblivion.

Those two rhythms came together at Le19M, Chanel’s purpose-built home for its eleven Maisons d’art, including Desrues, Lemarié, Lesage, Montex and Maison Michel. Together with nearly thirty French and Japanese artisans, they have turned the gallery into a space of wonder and exchange. Curated by a collective of five creatives – including Momoko Ando and Aska Yamashita – the show has expanded for its Paris debut, with ten new designers joining to push the limits of how heritage and innovation can feed off each other.

“This exhibition embodies the dialogue between the French artisans of the Maisons d’art of le19M and their Japanese counterparts. It illustrates how heritage and innovation can coexist and feed off each other,” says Bruno Pavlovsky, President of le19M.

When Guerrier first entered the workshops, the connection was immediate. “At POUSH, my practice is raw – I don’t go looking for precision right away,” Guerrier tells us. “But then that energy gets filtered through the hands of the artisans. It’s not a conflict; they need each other.”

Her contribution to ‘Beyond Our Horizons’ is distilled into the Tako Tsubo series, which encapsulates the exhibition’s wider ambitions. The starting point was a small but deeply personal object: a mother-of-pearl music box found years ago at the Saint-Ouen flea market. That discovery pushed Guerrier towards Japanese techniques such as marquetry and lacquer, and philosophies including kintsugi and wabi-sabi. 

“What is sacred is this return to the object itself, to its capacity for repair, and to the idea that a fracture can be considered a strength rather than a flaw.” For Guerrier, the music box remains a tangible meeting point between French craft history and Japanese thought.

To translate these ideas materially, she worked with Maison Desrues, the historic house known for crafting Chanel’s buttons and costume jewellery. Guerrier delved into their archives, selecting precious and semi-precious beads to explore the art of repair. The reference to kintsugi is clear, but never too literal.

“The beading acts like a reparative skin,” she explains. She isn’t hiding the cracks; on the contrary, she’s making them visible and precious. It’s a direct translation of the wabi-sabi worldview (finding beauty in imperfection) executed with the hyper-precision of French luxury.

The exhibition space itself refuses to be a typical white cube. Designed by architect Tsuyoshi Tane, the scenography treats the gallery as a living home – or an “artist’s house.” Lantern-like structures guide visitors through worktable environments and interior gardens, making the experience relatively more intimate.

This emphasis on inhabiting the space reflects a reverence for the long game. Guerrier speaks with genuine admiration for Japan’s ‘Living National Treasures’ – masters recognised for their lifelong dedication to a specific skill. It is a system that values the repository of knowledge within a human body over the final product. Even without direct collaboration for this specific series, that spirit saturates her work. In an age obsessed with the instant, her practice, and indeed the entire exhibition, acts as a cultural brake.

“I would like visitors to leave with a heightened awareness of gesture and the time it requires. That they perceive, beyond the forms, the sum of hands, skills and attention necessary for these works to exist,” says Guerrier.

“If something is to remain, it would be the idea that this exhibition is a living material. That behind each piece lies a story of shared gestures and transmission, which continues to live beyond the exhibition itself.”

‘Beyond Our Horizons: From Tokyo to Paris’ runs from 29 January to 26 April 2026 at la Galerie du 19M.

Discover more here.

photography. courtesy of Clarisse-Ain
words. Gennaro Costanzo