Wanted

From July 30 to August 2, the Sandton Convention Centre will be remade through rooms intended to lower the pulse. Milky ivories, oat tones, clay, muted olive and washed blue make up Decorex Africa’s 2026 palette, colours chosen to diffuse light and ease visual tension. The show has dubbed its theme The Soft Life, a phrase carried from social media into a rejection of lives organised around pressure. Its danger is that the idea too easily becomes another purchasable look.

LRNCE began quietly. What started as Laurence Leenaert’s personal exploration of textiles and ceramics in Marrakech has, over more than a decade, grown into an internationally recognised design studio spanning furniture, art, objects and hospitality. The brand has built its global identity by remaining firmly rooted in Morocco, where its work is produced in collaboration with artisans working with pottery, zellige [traditional handcrafted Moroccan tile], plaster, metal and wood.

Danesfield defies the literal translation of its name, “Danish ditches”. The gleaming Neo-Tudor mansion with its crenellated towers and red-brick chimneys stands as tall as the majestic conifers lining the landscaped gardens that stretch to 30m chalk cliffs. It is as aesthetically far removed as the Iron Age encampment, which once occupied the same sacred turf.

The all-inclusive holiday has shed its old reputation for buffet lines and poolside daiquiris. Once dismissed as a mass-market, unadventurous category, it has become one of the fastest-growing and most reinvented segments in global travel — visible for South Africans, in particular, in the enduring pull of Mauritius. Modern travellers are worn down by decision fatigue. Between flights, transfers, restaurant bookings and daily spending choices, a holiday can start to feel like a second job.

If, as literary scholars argue, there are only a handful of stories in the world, then Trésor Riziki’s is one of the oldest: the hero’s journey. It has all the elements of an epic — reluctant departure, impossible trials, unlikely allies, profound loss and a triumphant return. Running through it all is the redemptive power of music.

Getting home, and turning back the clock, has long been at the root of Christopher Nolan’s films. The astronauts of “Interstellar” painstakingly lose 23 years in space travel, almost the same length of time Odysseus is away from home in “The Odyssey”: a decade fighting the Trojan War, a decade trying to return to Ithaca. So, to a remarkable degree, Nolan’s “The Odyssey” — faithful as it is to Homer’s epic poem — feels, down to its nonlinear DNA, like a Nolan movie.

In a column earlier this year, I borrowed Manchester painter LS Lowry’s comparison between the north and south of England to make an offhand remark about Johannesburg and Cape Town. Lowry didn’t like the south because it was “too beautiful” and “harmless”, lacking the “guts” of the north. The dots seemed to connect themselves. But I’ve just spent a few days in the north of England, and I’m sorry to report that my attempt to rope Johannesburg and Manchester together was misguided.

There is a specific kind of magic that happens when high gastronomy meets the unpretentious joy of a spring festival. Over the past two seasons, The Luxurious Marble Circus has quietly perfected this balance, carving out a space on the South African cultural calendar where sophistication is taken seriously, but the guests are encouraged not to take themselves seriously at all.

Cape Town’s award-winning pan-Asian restaurant, Tang Waterfront, has once again partnered with Moët & Chandon to raise a toast to the remarkable women who shape our world as its eagerly anticipated Women’s Month event returns for a fourth year.

SA’s MasterChef second-season winner Kamini Pather’s debut cookbook features everyday “Indian-ish” good-mood food, including her take on calming bowls of delectable dhal and one very special one her dad introduced her to. What is dhal, you ask? Dhal is the collective word for dried pulses that have been split, such as lentils, peas and beans; these are used extensively in South Asian and Indian cuisine to make a gorgeous, steaming bowl of thick soup or stew.