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Ilaria Ferragamo, Samantha Welsh, Catherine Gale and Natacha Jurgens photographed at the LUX Salon in Cora Sheibani’s home

The latest in the series of now legendary LUX Salons was elegantly hosted at the home of Cora and Kaveh Sheibani in London, and featured artist Annie Morris and Cora, a jewellery designer, in conversation, moderated by Darius Sanai. A selection of guests from the LUX community was held rapt by Morris’s candid stories and Sheibani’s intellectual inspirations for her designs

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Cora Sheibani, Marie-Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, Annie Morris and Lamya Al Saud

Jonathan Newhouse and Darius Sanai

Shirin Kouros and Jahanara Saigol

Oliver Gardey and Toby Foxcroft

Raimund Berthold, Arch Hades, Dr Paul Ettlinger and Samantha Welsh

Beatrice Schlumberger, Carla du Manoir, Marie-Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre and Laura Bordigato

Marie-Claire Agnew, Valérie Jurgens Jungels-Winkler and Abeer Ben-Halim

Photographs by Lamya Al Saud

A guided heritage walk through the Old City for Jaipur Arts Week

LUX reports on the much-anticipated Jaipur Arts Week, which continues to grow after its inauguration in 2022

The Pink City enjoyed colours of every hue earlier this year, as Jaipur Art Week (Jaw) took to its palaces, museums, parks and even coffee shops. This fifth edition furthered Jaw’s emerging-to-established local-to-global model, with a presentation by Parsons New York and a new-gen India exhibition, alongside solo and group shows and multimedia events. Its famed Open Call saw 100 artists selected by an eminent judging panel including Anita Dube and Aindrea Emelife. Jaw is at the heart of Public Arts Trust of India (Pati) and Founding Chair Sana Rezwan’s mission to bridge creative heritage and contemporary practice, revealing Jaipur as a beacon of cultural innovation.

publicartstrustofindia.org

Sana Rezwan, Founding Chair of Public Arts Trust of India, at Jaipur Art Week

The Portraits of Boogli and Her Mother by Gurjeet Singh x Jaipur Rugs

A Sacred Walk, 2025-26, by Poojan Gupta

Ascend Towards the Unknown, 2024-25, by Gigi Scaria

Joshua India block-printing studio, set for daily drop-in activities

Manthan installation, 2024, by Oliver Saurabh Sinclair at Alsisar Haveli

As We Rise: The Last Pillar of the Fort, 2025-26, by Aditi Aggarwal

Fractured Orbit (Waste Mandala), 2026, by Nataša Galečić

A walkthrough at the Amrapali Museum

The Earth Laughs in Flowers, 2025-26, by Kaanchi Chopra

What We Carry When We Cross, 2025-26, by Boris Colin Alphonse

Darius Sanai, Maria Sukkar, Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar and Dr Paul Ettlinger at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar

At the inaugural Art Basel Qatar this year, the hottest date on the first night was the LUX launch party at the atelier of Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar. Leading lights from across Asia, Europe and the US gathered to hear a panel including Dr Paul Ettlinger, Kulapat Yantrasast and Maria Sukkar speak about art and the Middle East. Art Basel Qatar took place before the recent incidents in the region

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Maria Sukkar with the latest issue of LUX, with Sassan Behman-Bakhtiar as the cover star and designer

Nasser Al-Khori and Maria Behnam-Bakhtiar

Hervé Mikaeloff and Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar

Sophie Neuendorf in conversation at the LUX opening night at Art Basel Qatar

Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar and Selcan Atilgan

Lucca Hue-Willams photographed at the LUX party

Dr Paul Ettlinger and Warly Tomei

Maria Sukkar, Dr Paul Ettlinger and Dina Kemal Marchant

Neda Kohan, Kourosh Kohan and Carlo Mirisola di Torresanto

Sassan Behman-Bakhtiar, Dr Paul Ettlinger, and Kulapat Yantrasast

‘Penfolds itself was established in 1844, and is thus a heritage brand as old as some of the finest European wine houses’

Luxury brands don’t come around very often in the rarefied world of fine wine. Penfolds Grange, now 75 years old, has established a foremost place among the vinous legends

To what extent is the world of luxury determined by heritage? Until recently, you could have convincingly argued that all luxury brands were heritage brands: from Hermès to Patek Philippe to Château Latour, they have been around for centuries.

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But then came the disruptors – new luxury brands such as Richard Mille and Alaïa. In sectors where innovation plays its part, the role of new luxury is even stronger: Pagani and Koenigsegg have shaken the world of supercars.

But has not the world of wine, where innovation arguably plays less of a role than historic vineyards, remained a heritage preserve? Up to a point. To the pantheon of centuries-old greats such as Romanée-Conti and Château Margaux, a new fine-wine luxury brand has been established that commands respect and desirability among top collectors.

Max Schubert created the iconic Grange 75 years ago, from the Shiraz (Syrah) grape variety

Penfolds Grange is not new in absolute terms – the first vintages were produced in the 1950s, but that makes it relatively new in the wine world, and all the more remarkable for its ascent to that pantheon of greats. It helps, of course, that Penfolds itself was established in 1844, and is thus a heritage brand as old as some of the finest European wine houses.

Luxury is an industry in which marketing can be even more important than quality to establishing reputations. But for a fine wine, quality is paramount. There’s no getting away from what’s in the glass. Also, consistency: if you create one great vintage then nine average ones, you won’t find a place in collectors’ cellars.

Read more: Riding with the Porsche 911 C4 GTS Cabriolet

Grange is innovative for the wine world. It is made from Shiraz grapes, known as Syrah in France, which, in the Rhône valley, makes the celebrated Syrah wines of Côte-Rôtie and Hermitage. But unlike most of the world’s great wines, Grange is not created from grapes grown from the same plots of land each year.

It is a blend of the best grapes chosen each year by the winemaker – wine-world legend Peter Gago, who was inducted into the prestigious Decanter Hall of Fame in 2021 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the influential Meininger Awards this year.

The Penfolds barrels

Coming from different plots each year ensures quality but also an intriguing variation.

Grange is Australian and expensive – older vintages fetch thousands of pounds, dollars and euros per bottle – and it is, of course, unusual in not coming from the same plot of land every year. But what does it taste like?

Grange is an ethereal, hard-to-pin-down wine, with power but also a lightness of touch and delicacy, which, added to its complexity, make it utterly captivating for collectors.

Read more: We visit the E1 race on the water in Monaco

On its 75th anniversary this year, Gago commented in characteristically sharp, colloquial style to LUX, “Grange, three quarters of a century young. Without a vintage miss. Annually attempting across treasured South Australian vineyards to best reflect what Mother Nature sends our way. So far, so good. Respectful of the proven Grange stylistic template, every year we try harder … to make a better vintage than the legendary ’52, ’53, ’55, ’63, ’71, ’76, ’86, ’90, ’96, 2010 … The tweaking continues – in vineyard, in winery!”

Oh, and good luck in tracking down a bottle of that 1952. A true luxury item indeed.

penfolds.com

A portrait of Rolf Sachs

Designer, artist, investor and a major force in the European aristocratic social scene, Rolf Sachs is both an enigma and a celebrity in his homeland of Switzerland. He meets his intellectual match in LUX Contributing Editor and collector Rachel Verghis and her distinctly direct questioning style

At the heart of Rolf Sachs’ practice lies the inescapable human impulse to touch. His art does not simply use materials; it plays with them. Paper is crumpled, plastic is warped, metal is punctured, felt is twisted – crafting a physical experience of his work where materials remember what they once were.

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Rachel Verghis: In Heu, Wolle, Mist and Ross (2023), you used hay, wool, manure and horsehair. What is your creative process?

Rolf Sachs: This work was created for my show in a 500-year-old barn, and the four monumental vitrines perfectly capture the essence of Alpine culture. For me, no artist can beat nature, like how no sculptor can beat the beauty of a tree. There was also the irony of using manure for an exhibition titled ‘So ein Mist!’, which translates roughly as “what bullshit!” in German. I love the humour in the pieces.

Heu, Wolle, Mist and Ross, 2023, by Rolf Sachs

RV: Melted steel folded into soft shapes is a staple of furniture pieces like your 1990 Unruhe (Restless), contradicting its long history as an industrial material known for its strength. Is steel something you still work with?

RS: I forged this myself in the early 90s, at a time when quite a few artists made decorative steel furniture. I wanted a more conceptual direction. I tried to give this material some dynamism and movement, as if it was dancing. It is a charming, free piece, which really counters the attributes of the material.

RV: In Memory of an Encounter (2025), texture is staged and then sealed under glass. What interests you about denying the touch you’ve so carefully provoked?

RS: It’s not about the physical touching as much as it is about touching the soul. What also interested me was transforming the two dimensional to three dimensional. And, of course, it touches very much on my concept of the “aesthetics of coincidence” – ie, the pure coincidence of it coming together.

Can’t Sit Still, 2006, by Rolf Sachs

RV: You seem to have the most fun with very soft materials, like wax, rubber, resin and silicone. Can you tell me more about Can’t Sit Still (2006)?

RS: I like materials with a soul, with a bit of “wabi-sabi”. I also like objects made of very common materials, like Horgen Glarus chairs, which were my school chairs. They are a plain canvas, without design but a memory of childhood. I then try to empower them with sculptural expression, infuse them with vulnerability of character – they become stronger in every sense.

Read more: A review of BMW’s M5 Touring

RV: What inspired your experiments with metal buckets and light, like Pompidou Fire Bucket (2006) and Rain in a Bucket (2006)?

RS: In these works, the material is actually secondary. It is really the shape I like – my relationship to the utilitarian beauty of the bucket. I put the little holes in so you would imagine a shower – but instead of pouring water, it pours light.

RV: When you borrow a material, like an army blanket, how much of its former life do you want to remain visible or “audible”?

Unruhe (Restless), 1990, by Rolf Sachs

RS: I use fabric that is not usually used in furniture. Army blankets as upholstery evoke memories of military service, for example. I always try to use something in my work that has a little bit more stamina, a little bit more oomph – that, however, conveys an extra sensitivity.

RV: You’ve called your practice empirical. What does “testing” look like in your studio – and what counts as failure?

Read more: Riding with the Porsche 911 C4 GTS Cabriolet

RS: I’m an extremely curious person. I am like a child who is trying new things all the time. With my first froissage [deliberate crumbling of paper] works during Covid, I wrote messages to friends on this paper, boxed and sent them as Christmas cards. The unfolding, the reading, the bringing it back to life is the result of an empirical process. This sits at the centre of my practice now.

RV: What comes first, the material or the object?

Memory of an Encounter, 2025, by Rolf Sachs

RS: The object comes first. A rake is a very simple but beautiful object, which has a huge utilitarian importance in the mountains. I replicated the rake in slate and then in bronze to really give this object – which was once so important but is now fast being replaced by machines – a physical permanence.

RS: Do you still think about taste, or do you design for something slower?

RS: Hopefully, I am a person with taste, but it doesn’t play a role when I do an object. Quite the contrary, you try not to put something out there which has “a” taste or which is the zeitgeist. You might indirectly, but you want to get away from any decorative aspect.

RV: You often combine unconventional materials that seem to intentionally create friction. What does friction offer a life that comfort cannot?

RS: I love friction. I love attraction. As with couples, attraction and friction are the oldest attributes we know. I very often use polar opposites in my objects: warm or cold, if it is sensual or harsh, if it is hard or soft. And comfort is not really in the equation.

rolfsachs.com

The BMW M5 Touring: ‘A worthy successor to the original, a car not to mess with, and unique’

BMW’s M5 Touring combines the practicality of an estate with the performance of a 727 hp hybrid V8. With decades of Motorsport heritage behind it, this is a car built for both everyday driving and serious speed. LUX gets behind the wheel of BMW’s latest M5

If you are the kind of person who is inclined to spot cars, cast your eye around any prosperous location in the world and note the proportion of BMWs that also carry a supplementary red and blue badge labelled simply with the letter “M” on their bodywork. You would be forgiven for thinking that the M is simply a fairly random model designator as carried by every car brand – like a D for Tesla or a G for Mercedes.

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You would, however, be wrong in one fundamental way. The M stands for Motorsport, and while now it is in many cases simply an indicator of a mainstream BMW model with some extra equipment, its origins and heritage are truly quite special. In the 1970s and 80s BMW had its own racing outfit, and in 1978 built its first and, to date, only supercar, the M1, which used a new racing engine created by its Motorsport division.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, if you bought a BMW with an M on it, you were generally buying a product created by this division in a separate factory, with a handmade racing engine and suspension and other accoutrements to match. BMW supplied M with the body shell, M did everything else.

‘It also has numerous driving modes to suit your mood, skill and geekiness’

The engine and other parts from the M1 were used in the first BMW M5, released in 1984, which took the shell of the executive four-seater, four-door 5 Series sedan and gave it the spirit of a track racing car. It was one of the first times this had ever been done by a car manufacturer, and each new iteration of the M5, and its smaller sibling the M3, would be awaited as eagerly by car enthusiasts as a new Ferrari model line. After all, this was a car that had the performance to match a Ferrari or a Porsche 911, but could also function as a taxi if you wanted it to.

All of that may be lost in the sands of time for today’s consumer, who, in any case, has the choice of electric cars that offer Ferrari-style speed, if not the excitement, for a fraction of the cost.

Read more: Riding with the Porsche 911 C4 GTS Cabriolet

But the BMW M5 keeps going, through iterations that included a wild, V10-engined machine around 20 years ago, and now this latest iteration, posting 727 hp, significantly more than twice the muscle of its 286 hp original ancestor. Like the V10-engined variant of 20 years ago, it is available both as a saloon and as an estate, so you can in theory move your antiques around the country at breakneck pace.

The 727 hp is not achieved, thankfully, solely by an electric motor, but by a twin turbocharged V8 with electric hybrid assistance. The latter fills in the gaps during the times the turbochargers are spooling up – fractions of a second, but that matters in fast driving – and add an enhancement drug-style extra punch when the engine is going great guns.

BMW’s M5 Touring can move your furniture across Europe at frightening speeds

And it certainly does that. This is a car with a passionate sound from its “real” engine, as well as aggressive looks that, very unusually for a wagon, have the roadside YouTubers in London swinging their cameras in your direction. It also has numerous driving modes to suit your mood, skill and geekiness. Set to the more aggressive of these, it shoots around corners sharply and enjoys the challenge of a sweeping country road.

Read more: We visit the E1 race on the water in Monaco

If your furniture frequently needs moving swiftly around tight country lanes, you should be aware that this is a big and heavy car and so trades off some of the agility of its predecessors in favour of sheer power and heft. It’s roomy and comfortable inside, although not as luxurious as the top of the range and bigger 7 Series BMW, and LUX would like to see a couple of extra special touches in the interior to elevate it even further.

All in all, though, a worthy successor to the original, a car not to mess with, and unique.

bmw.co.uk

The 911 C4 GTS is huge fun despite its tech-laden specification, and a return to form for the GTS line of Porsches

LUX gets up to speed with the latest Porsche 911 C4 GTS Cabriolet

No car brand attracts quite as much debate as Porsche, and no Porsche attracts as much conversation as the 911, the iconic model introduced 63 years ago that is still the North Star for sports cars. The 911 of 2026 is, of course, a very different car even to that of 20 years ago, let alone that of 60 years ago, and each iteration attracts some controversy from diehards who say it is not as involving or sporting as the previous one.

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It’s true that the latest generations of the 911, the 991 and 992 series from around 2011 onwards, are significantly bigger and easier to drive than before, partly driven by safety regulations, and partly by chasing a bigger market than the enthusiasts who want an edgy experience at the expense of day-to-day comfort.

But there is a 911 for almost everyone if you look hard enough, and the GT models are still focused on delivering serious driver experiences with much less consideration for comfort or luxury.

‘Some might criticise the car for being too comfortable and luxurious inside’

Somewhere in between those and the regular models for the past 15 years has been the GTS model, which is a sharper version of the normal 911 that now floods every city with a significant finance bro population (the children, presumably, of the original yuppies who drove 911s in the 80s – see, not that much has changed).

The latest GTS has also attracted its own fair share of controversy, as it is no longer a “pure” petrol-engined car but a petrol electric hybrid. What would it be like? And would it be more like a compromised everyday car, losing some of its unique character?

Read more: Back to Oxford

In a word – no. We drove the GTS over a series of wet winter days, taking it out into the empty lanes of the English countryside to drive it as Porsche intended. There is a little dial on the bottom right of the steering wheel that you can set to different modes to suit your driving style, and when we switched the GTS to “Sport”, we found it recreated the thrill of early 911s quite brilliantly, allowing the back of the car (the engine of the 911 is in the boot, allowing a pendulum effect as you swing around corners) to slip out most engagingly, challenging you as a driver, although the difference between this and early 911s is that if you don’t quite manage to have the driving skills to catch the car yourself as it lets go, the electronics will do so (unless you switch them all off).

‘We found it recreated the thrill of early 911s quite brilliantly’

It’s also very fast, the hybrid electric motor filling in the gaps before the turbos on the engine kick in and, more importantly for us, the new engine has a real character and edge to its sound and feel that the 3.0 litre twin turbo engine these cars have had in various guises for the past 10 years simply did not have. It feels gruffer, tougher, more 911. We also liked being able to whip down the roof electronically as soon as the sun came out briefly, and the snug but spacious feeling when the roof was up.

Read more: We visit the E1 race on the water in Monaco

Some might criticise the car for being too comfortable and luxurious inside – although it’s no limousine, and there are better cars for highway cruising – and because the hybrid also means the GTS does not come with a manual gearbox option. Still, we enjoyed it immensely, and, rather unexpectedly, it might just be our favourite 911 GTS since the original, introduced in 2010: in fact, we may even prefer it, which is high praise indeed from Porsche diehards.

porsche.com

LUX Editor-in-Chief Darius Sanai at dinner at the Oxford Union

Darius Sanai returns to Oxford University to experience an innovative new immersion course into the humanities, ancient and modern, at his alma mater

Returning to university after your experience. Who or what is still there, what has changed? More than that, though, you are in a place that was defined by its people, and by the experiences you had with those people – classes, tutorials, seminars, parties – and none of those experiences can be replicated, even though you are in the same physical space.

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Which is what made the new humanities experience at Wadham College, Oxford so engrossing. I attended Wadham as an undergraduate, studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). Years later, in 2024, the college launched something called the Wadham Experience, a residential intellectual retreat for leaders.

Darius Sanai returns to his alma mater, Wadham College at The University of Oxford

It invites all comers to apply and go through a selection process, which, while rigorous, is nothing like as challenging as getting into the university as a student. Successful applicants are then immersed in classes, seminars, talks, dinners and other experiences, many of which mirror the life of an Oxford student (and some of which do not, as we will see below).

So it was with great curiosity that I sat in a set of rooms at Wadham dating from the early 17th century, facing an Oxford don (academic) speaking about a subject we would have learnt about as undergraduates, with a group of individuals I had just met. It was just the same as the first term as an undergrad – being immersed in the the kind of curated knowledge that only comes with human experience as an academic in this institution.

Champagne offered before you make your way across the quad

This was the first morning of the experience, and my fellow “students” – philanthropists, captains of industry and just the curious – were, variously, scribbling notes or listening agog. Polite questions were asked towards the end.

Read more: Mercedes-Maybach S-Class Review

In the coffee break, before coming back to experience more of this new type of Oxford world, I and a couple of other alumni were asked what the difference was between our own sessions on similar topics as undergrads and what we had just seen. Two things, I reflected: I thought the tutor was, if anything, even more engaged and enthused about the process than our (generally brilliant) tutors had been when I was a “real” student.

Wadham Experience “students” enjoy dinner with the dons in the college’s Jacobean dining hall

And, secondly, being at Oxford trains you to ask awkward, challenging questions. Despite the fact that the room was full of individuals who were extremely significant in their various fields, the questions were polite, informed and educated, but not challenging, argumentative or awkward. Maybe that would come later.

Learning about the humanities cannot just be done in a tutorial, however august the surroundings. Over the next four days, we were taken around the back rooms of the city’s celebrated Ashmolean Museum and given classes on how to differentiate between objects of different eras, and to guess exactly what the function of various artefacts from Greek and Roman times was, by passing them around a table, wearing white gloves, and examining them. A couple of our “students” proved quite brilliant at this, for the rest of us many of these objects, obvious in retrospect, remained a mystery.

Studying Greek and Roman artefacts at the Ashmolean Museum

We had dinner at the Oxford Union, a phrase that might make the flesh crawl of many Oxford students, when thinking about this famous but divisive institution that has seen Prime Ministers from William Gladstone to Boris Johnson to Benazir Bhutto debate there as students. For the first-time visitor, the most impressive debating society in the world is astonishing, with photographs of all its significant alumni on the walls and its mini Parliament debating chamber alongside.

Read more: We visit the E1 race on the water in Monaco

A highlight of most evenings was dinner in Wadham College Hall, also dating from the early 17th century and adjoined to the beautiful chapel. It’s a serene space that by dint of not being quite as old as some of the college halls, dating one or two centuries before, is almost overlooked in the rarified Oxford world, where being the second best, or the second oldest, just isn’t really good enough.

Taking new approaches to the arts through the Wadham Experience

The Wadham Experience has been created by my old college partly to increase exposure to the importance and brilliance of the humanities at Oxford and, importantly, of course, to raise funds. There was some worrying about whether it would be attractive to ask people to spend this amount of money on something that is not quite a leadership course and too short to be a further education course. In fact, by all reports, it is a victim of its own success, oversubscribed and with corporations asking for a privatised experience of their own.

I think it is successful precisely because it is not a leadership course and nor is it some second-thought sideline into academia by academic staff who have other things to do. Everyone we came across was not just enthusiastic but enthralled by being part of the course: tutors, museum curators, “students” and college staff. For me, the most special aspect was being back in my old college without any of the stress or social anxiety.

The Wadham Experience offers multisensorial classes to its “students”

I stayed in a rather luxurious bedroom in a building overlooking the second quadrangle of the college. From one of the windows I had a view up Parks Road to the leaves of the parks and the back of Trinity College opposite. After dinner, it was like a retreat. And because the college, is, well, a college, your morning commute was across a quadrangle, whose 17th-century clock was probably gifted by Sir Christopher Wren, architect of St Paul’s Cathedral and a Wadham alumnus.

My only caveat is that Wadham College is historically and famously liberal, which can mean sometimes rather alarmingly left wing. The radical traditional liberal and the hyper left do collide in the college, and if you are on the right of the political spectrum, you should be an open-minded type in order to enjoy it properly. But that’s what education – and the humanities – are all about. Or should be.

I shall be returning to this magical experience, if it’s not all booked up by the LUX community.

we.wadham.ox.ac.uk