< PreviousINVEST by nick scott Investments can be unpredictable, but not so with these four winners, which we have handpicked to provide you with sound and secure appreciation — aesthetically, spiritually and financially. Th e Leica SL2 To anyone who has marvelled at Slim Aarons’ shots of high- societal ambrosia at Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc and Palm Springs’ Kaufmann Desert House (documenting, as he put it, “attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places”), yet not delved further into the American photographer’s career, it will come as a surprise that he spent three years in military fatigues pointing his lens towards the second world war’s grizzliest episodes in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. His camera of choice? Rejecting the cumbersome Speed Graphic camera handed to him on his arrival in Europe, Aarons, at his own expense, opted for a small point-and-capture Leica that would enable him to document ongoings around him with the urgency required when horrors of war are played out. Three-quarters of a century later — and more than a century after the first camera by the Wetzlar, Germany-based company was produced, in 1914 — Leica remains the go-to brand for serious snappers who want to have and eat their proverbial cake. In other words, to achieve the highest possible quality of photography with cameras that are versatile, wieldy, compact, resilient and beautifully designed. The latest SL2 — the first mirrorless system that can switch effortlessly between photography and videography modes — packs almost twice the resolution of its 24-megapixel predecessor (47.3 megapixels, to be exact). At 835g, it’s also lighter, while other improvements include an auto-focus system that adapts to a subject’s movement, vastly improved optical image stabilisation, and a friendlier user interface thanks to a 3.2in touchscreen and OLED electronic viewfinder. As for video mode, its 60 frames-per-second surpasses the previous 24 frames-per-second original in Cine 4K mode, and the whopping 180 frames-per-second offered in full HD mode will make footage taken on even the latest smartphone release look inferior. The Austrian photographer Patrick Domingo has said that this function “opened up a whole new creative path for me, by allowing me to present my images in the form of moving pictures”. As for the camera more generally, Steve McCurry — an American photographer renowned for his ability to capture the human condition via an evocative use of colour — has praised its “unbelievable picture quality”, adding, “You really have to see it to believe it”. And as for Slim Aarons? Well, we can assume that, had the SL2 arrived on the scene half a century earlier, those famous visual encapsulations of the jet-set lifestyle would contain an even more vibrant, pin-sharp kind of glam. It could be argued that a premium-quality camera — its job being to document the highlights of our lives, along with our creative mojos — is the ultimate emotional investment. And with collectors keeping track of the German brand’s wares (a rare, vintage Leica IIIg sold earlier this year for $480,000, having been purchased at auction in 2019 for $24,000), it could prove to be a financial investment, too. 48 www.leica-camera.com TRME_48-49_Atelier Invest_11914748.indd 4830/12/2021 01:28:45 PMwww.asprey.com 49 If you’re not convinced that the much touted ‘Death of the Physical Retail Space’ is hyperbole, you’ll soon change your mind if you pay a visit to Asprey 240, a new 10,000-square- foot retail space on Mayfair’s storied Bruton Street (a stone’s throw from the birthplace of Queen Elizabeth II). Naturally, first-time aficionados of the brand will find what they came for: fine jewellery, emblazoned with diamonds and other gemstones; vividly hued scarves made from fine English fabrics; handbags and goods for au courant men in bullskin, crocodile and other exotic leathers; and silver glass pieces crafted by Britain’s finest artisans. They may be more surprised, though, to encounter what is effectively a piece of immersive retail theatre. “The idea was to be fairly subversive, in terms of creating a space which felt calming and indulging and where you could spend a lot of time just enjoying the beauty that surrounds you,” says Robert Storey, an alumnus of London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the mastermind behind the interior design. “We wanted to excite customers and immerse them in the brand by using very alluring and uplifting colours, linked to the typical moor landscape, in a way that shifts — so we’ve used colour gradients and ombrés in each room. There’s a sense of colour rising up, from the floor into the walls. So there’s this feeling of simultaneously rambling through nature, through heather landscapes, but also being inside a contemporary Asprey mansion.” With its sterling silver stag’s head stopper, this special- edition crystal decanter, hand-made in the London Asprey workshops, is a fitting protagonist within the bucolic narrative Storey alludes to here. To say that the production process behind the piece is arduous does little justice to what actually goes on in Asprey’s hotspot of artisanal endeavour (overlooking New Bond Street) when producing it. So high are Asprey’s standards, even with the most skilled of glassware makers on the case, melting down and blowing the very finest lead-free crystal, that the failure rate is around 90 per cent, meaning that only approximately four are created per year. The sterling silver stopper — hand-carved with a similar fastidious approach to achieving perfection — has to be individually fitted to each decanter (how elegant a detail is that inevitable morsel of error committed by the eternally gifted artisan?), while the stag is just one creature in a range offered by Asprey that adds a spot of zoological elegance to your home bar. Look out for it, in all its cervine glory, on that first tour of a premises that evokes the rustic joy of the British countryside. INVEST Asprey Stag decanter TRME_48-49_Atelier Invest_11914748.indd 4930/12/2021 01:28:57 PMACCORDING TO PAUL; GANDYPANTS AND JUMPERS; ITALIAN STYLE; LET’S GET KRAFTY. articles ARNALDO ANA YA-LUCCA TRME_50-51_Features Opener_11914753.indd 5012/01/2022 04:36:58 PMTRME_50-51_Features Opener_11914753.indd 5112/01/2022 04:37:13 PM52 TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 5230/12/2021 01:32:39 PM53 THE PERSONAL TESTIMONY OF PAUL Paul Bettany has known tragedy and bliss; his career has nurtured let-downs and mega hits. Through it all, the 50-year-old Londoner has remained one of the most dynamic and versatile actors of his generation. With his next project, A Very British Scandal, on T.V. screens, nick scott finds him in ebullient mood… photography kathryn boyd brolin fashion direction grace gilfeather stylist andrea serrano special thanks to Kiawah Island Golf Resort TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 5330/12/2021 01:32:47 PM54 Opening spread: Suede suit and knitted polo neck jumper, Ralph Lauren Purple Label; gold Rolex Day-Date and L.G.R spectacles, Paul Bettany’s own. This page: Denim western shirt, Ralph Lauren Purple Label; raincoat, Ten C at M. Dumas & Sons; Persol sunglasses and necklace, Paul Bettany’s own. TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 5430/12/2021 01:32:52 PM55 Zoom-imposed teething troubles dealt with, greetings complete, Paul Bettany — perched at a desk in a rented house in South Carolina, next to a golf course flanked by an alligator-infested lake — squints hard at his inbox. “Hang on… Where is it, where is it? I’ve just got to check my talking points… ” “Talking points?” “‘Don’t mention the war’ stuff. Things I’m not supposed to say. There’s always a list. When I did press for The Da Vinci Code, in which I played an albino Catholic murderous monk, I was told I couldn’t talk about albinism, Catholicism or murder. Hilarious.” Bettany clearly intends to defer, during our interview, to the list of off-limits topics routinely supplied to celebrities by Hollywood publicity professionals (he reads the checklist studiously, aloud, but in a lilting hum rather than articulate syllables). Having to be judicious about what he says to strangers, though, doesn’t quite chime with his innate candour. Bettany, you see, is no closed book. He has talked openly about how, prompted by the horrors of 9/11, he proposed to Jennifer Connelly, his co-star in A Beautiful Mind, on the phone from Tuscany before they’d ever dated. He has shared pictures of their sons, Kai (Connelly’s son with photographer David Dugan) and Stellan, at the graduation of the latter (who is named after Bettany’s friend Stellan Skarsgård, the Swedish actor). He’s talked about his Oscar-winning wife’s love of playing Twister in her pyjamas, and how the family like to turn their cellar into a roller-disco. He’s even shared his reflections on “a thousand years of therapy”. Bettany is the type of person who last October was happy to spend Halloween “sitting on the porch waiting for alligators to eat golfers” instead of enduring the forced pageantry of Halloween in the family’s New York neighbourhood — to film Harvest Moon, a bittersweet comedy he co-wrote with his close friend Dana Brown. It is about a child’s poignant attempts to reunite his estranged parents during Covid lockdown. “It’s based partly on a script I wrote about 20 years ago,” Bettany says, “but also on… ” Barely controllable mirth — something we’ll both experience, frequently, during our exchange — forces him to pause. “… Well, Dana, a dear friend, recently had a horrible divorce. He has two children. Finally they separated and then lockdown happened and they all had to move in together.” For the record, Bettany’s now wheezily uncontrollable laughter is tinged with sympathy for his creative partner’s predicament. “So I said, ‘Let’s write this thing now’. Every night after we got Zoom schooling over with, and the kids had gone to sleep, we would stay up till three o’clock in the morning writing this script about the nadir of his life. He was really depressed, but I thought it was really funny, and so consequently a sort of dramedy emerged.” For Bettany, this kind of conflict is the creative equivalent of how friction produces a pearl. “It’s sort of like having one foot in a grave and the other on a banana peel,” he says. “It’s a tone that I really — I really like. It’s got something in common with Little Miss Sunshine and a lot in common with the sort of seventies American comedies I grew up watching, which always had that element of drama and of heart in them.” And the Neil Young reference in the title? “The kid sings it in a Zoom talent show in order to galvanise his parents — if we can afford it we’ll have the actual song in there, too.” The release date for Harvest Moon is unknown at present. Over the festive period and beyond, though, Bettany has been in the spotlight because of a project already wrapped: A Very British Scandal, a three-part series from the makers of (though not a sequel to) the critically extolled A Very English Scandal, in which Hugh Grant starred opposite Ben Whishaw in a dramatisation of an alleged murder plot that rocked British politics in the 1960s. Written by Sarah Phelps, A Very British Scandal examines one of the most notorious divorce court cases in history: that between the Duke (Bettany) and Duchess of Argyll (played by Claire Foy), a saga that involved a very specific type of early of revenge — salacious polaroids stolen by a lavishly bribed locksmith — and a list of 88 men (including two government ministers and three members of the royal family) with whom, the Duke insisted, his wife had ‘consorted’. Bettany portrays the dastardly duke with typical nuance: a broth made up of superciliousness, scorn and sense of entitlement that doesn’t so much simmer as fizz. “I think there is, if not psychopathy, then definitely sociopathy there in the character,” he says. “I think he was unable to see things from any other perspective than his own. He enjoyed the game aspect of the whole saga, and had a very sort of cruel sense of humour, I think.” The programme, Bettany says, contains myriad themes from post-war Britain, not least attitudes to gender, that are thankfully (almost) alien to us now. “Had that scandal happened now, the judgment placed on her would have been very, very different,” Bettany says. “Everybody focused on what this woman was doing and not what had driven her to it.” In what way was the divorce and its societal impact, as the title asserts, a distinctly British kind of affair? “I don’t think that sort of behaviour just happened, or happens, in the British Isles, but I do think there’s something about the aristocracy closing ranks and her being an outsider. Her father was a self-made man, and she battled and climbed her way into the ranks of the aristocracy. And when the chips went down, the aristocracy, men and women alike, surrounded and protected him and definitely sort of cleaved her from the herd. They protected their own position and the class structure.” Having to be judicious about what he says to strangers doesn’t quite chime with Bettany’s innate candour. TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 5530/12/2021 01:33:00 PM56 Denim western shirt and jeans, Ralph Lauren Purple Label; raincoat, Ten C at M. Dumas & Sons; suede Chelsea boots, To Boot New York at M. Dumas & Sons; gold Rolex Day-Date and Persol sunglasses and necklace, Paul Bettany’s own. TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 5630/12/2021 01:33:05 PM57 TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 5730/12/2021 01:33:16 PMNext >