Positioning itself as an elevated alternative to standard vacation rental platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO, HIGHSTAY tenders a tightly curated collection of luxury apartments throughout Paris. Each is programmed with all of the hard and soft amenities one would expect from a 5-star hotel.

Much of this approach centers on tapping the French capital’s impressive raft of interior architects to outfit these one- to three-bedroom flats. The challenge for them, however, is to not just simply create pristine yet unlivable statement pieces but rather, ensure these temporary dwellings are both comfortable enough for a multigenerational family to take up residence.

The same thinking informed HIGHSTAY’s recent expansion into the Mediterranean market. Among two revamped estates, Villa Coachella emerges as a, what appears to be modest, stone-clad farmhouse perched within the lush Chemin de Saint Anne hills of Saint Tropez. With close to 3000 square feet of space, the “country home” unfolds as a deft interplay of relaxed coastal living and refinement. Comprehensively reimagined by Paris-based interior architect and furniture designer Stéphan Parmentier, the destination reflects his proclivity for contemporary art and civil aviation.

These reference points are introduced in a nuanced treatment; one that doesn’t overpower an especially site-responsive palette of earthy and off-white finishes best suited to frame the natural majesty of the surroundings. Woven textiles, mid-tone woods, off-white ceramic surfaces, and terrazzo inserts are carried across the property. Custom built-ins accompany carefully sourced furnishings and distinctive but not boisterous industrially inspired luminaires.

The rustic atmosphere is tempered by touches of precision engineering. Black steel framed windows are dressed in green shutters. Arched articulations in both architectural detailing and furnishings are as much a reflection of contemporary intervention as they are of ancient innovation. A robust collection of contemporary art ties everything together.

In the main exposed-beam living room, a puzzle-like coffee table sits below a large sculptural chandelier. The main fully-equipped kitchen is complemented by a state-of-art outdoor barbecue set-up. Villa Coachella comprises nine en suite bedrooms and expansive interior and exterior entertainment spaces that seamlessly blend together. In true South-of-France fashion, the oversized heated pool and alfresco dining areas give way to undulating vineyards.

Beyond its design-led approach, HIGHSTAY also champions a robust suite of experiential services. In Paris, these include private cruises along the Seine, perfume master classes at Guerlain, and helicopter tours of Versailles. In Saint Tropez, there’s an onsite boccia court, fitness center replete with top-line Technogym equipment, and a full spa rivaling a 5-star resort. Also cohesively staged by Parmentier, the facility incorporates a hamman, sauna, jacuzzi, and cold plunge. The home cinema is adorned in a starlit ceiling and features a foosball table.

Though able to accommodate up to 18 guests, Villa Coachella is large enough to facilitate quiet retreat. There’s enough amenity spaces and programming for guests to cut away for a bit. While children might splash around in the pool, their parents can partake in a guided meditation away from the noise. Private chefs are also on call.

What: HIGHSTAY’s Villa Coachella
Where: Saint Tropez, France
How much: Price upon request
Design draws: A sprawling, full-service residence along Saint Tropez’s hilly coastline deftly reimagined by renowned interior architect Stéphan Parmentier to both reflect the rustic setting and contemporary style.
Book it: Villa Coachella

Go virtually on vacation with more design destinations right here.

Photography by Clément Gérard.

Warped vinyl records can have a serious impact on playback quality – causing skips, pops, distortion, or even rendering sections of a record unplayable. Pro-Ject, a brand well-regarded for its high-quality yet relatively affordable turntables, now aims to solve this problem with the Pro-Ject Flatten It – a new vinyl flattening machine designed to breathe new life into your cherished record collection.

The concept is simple but impactful: you place your warped record inside the Flatten It, close the lid, and let the machine do the work. Using a precisely heated aluminum plate with custom temperature controls, the Flatten It gently and evenly warms the entire surface of the vinyl, helping to restore its original flatness without causing any damage. This controlled heat application is key, as improper heating methods can warp records further or degrade sound quality.

Pro-Ject emphasizes that the Flatten It is engineered for safety and consistency. The device maintains a stable temperature throughout the process to ensure even results from edge to center. Once the cycle is complete, users may notice a significant reduction in playback issues like skips and pops, with overall sound quality improved thanks to the flatter record surface. The machine supports records of all sizes and thicknesses, and although Pro-Ject hasn’t specified exactly how long the flattening process takes, it’s built for ease of use from start to finish.

Aesthetically, the Flatten It is sleek and modern, with a minimalist metallic design that should complement any vinyl setup. It features an easy-to-open lid, rear-mounted controls, and a small digital display that shows both the current internal temperature and the target temperature. The interface is clean and intuitive, making the process approachable even for beginners.

Of course, not every vinyl enthusiast will see the need to own a record flattener. At $999 / €799, it’s a serious investment – though one that may be worthwhile for collectors with large or valuable record libraries. Even if it doesn’t make it into every home, there’s potential for widespread benefit if more record shops and listening bars begin offering flattening services to their customers.

While vinyl record flattening isn’t a new concept, devices that do it effectively and safely have been relatively rare and inaccessible – until now. The Pro-Ject Flatten It is now available at project-audio.com.

Photography courtesy of Pro-Ject.

The green marble arrived before the foundation. This single fact reveals the priorities that would shape this Ontario home, designed by Studio Brocca, where Italian heritage and contemporary design sensibilities converge with thoughtful clarity. Standing on land once occupied by a 1940s property, the new residence serves as a prelude to the French chateau visible beyond, yet its soul speaks unmistakably of Tuscany.

“The green marble is the first item we selected for the home, before we broke ground – and we did anything to make it happen,” Samantha Brocca says. The homeowners continue by saying, “Greens are not only our favorite color but they associate them with the beauty of the Italian countryside, rolling hills, and deep green cypress. Seeing as the house is set in a matured green space, greens also complement the exterior feel. The green marble was also brought in in the open concept closet in the bedroom, visible from all sizes surrounded by black metalwork to frame the opening and create a feeling of a light partition and interest in materials.”

The 3,500-square-foot residence represents a balancing act between two design languages. Minimal architectural lines provide structure, while curves and arches create counterpoints of softness. This tension between linearity and fluidity manifests throughout the space, from circular light fixtures to the pickets of the staircase. What emerges might best be described as ‘warm minimalism’ – a term Brocca uses to capture the home’s essence.

The palette draws directly from the Italian countryside, with deep greens reminiscent of cypress trees, and rust tones of terra cotta. “We feel that the color palette reminds us of the Tuscan wine country and rolling hills, but the contemporary touches bring the Tuscan palate into modern design,” the family says. “The overall feeling resembles and relates to multiple regions we have been so lucky to enjoy and keeps the gray months of Canada richer with warmth and color. The stacked wood framed openings in the bedroom give the feeling of rows of trees in Tuscan wine country.”

For more information on Studio Brocca, visit studiobrocca.com.

Photography by Lauren Miller.

The lives of most Wii consoles ended sometime in the early 2010s, left to collect dust in dorm rooms and parents’ dens, having run their last Just Dance disc long ago. But at least one Wii is finding another life hosting a website. 

Security engineer Alex Haydock found a discarded “sacrificial Wii” at the 2024 Electromagnetic Field festival swap shop, he wrote on his blog (which is now running on that Wii). He took it home intending to use it to emulate and homebrew games, but he’d noticed while browsing the website for the open-source operating system NetBSD—which has options for installing a Unix-like operating system on devices like Dreamcasts, Amiga and Atari machines, and many more—that it had an option for a Wii installation. 

“As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it,” he wrote. “That workload is the blog you’re reading now.” 

Haydock wrote set-by-step instructions on how he softmodded the Wii on his site, which you can check out for yourself if you have a sad old console lying around and a need for a web host. You’ll need the Wiimotes and sensor bar, he notes, because a lot of this process relies on installing channels (applications on the Wii menu, for the unfamiliar) on the Wii itself. 

“Part of it is of course simply the fun of taking a piece of tech people are very familiar with and trying to get it to do something it was never designed to do,” Haydock told me in an email. “But I also find that the fastest way for me to learn new concepts and technologies is when something breaks and I end up having to fix it. If I follow a tutorial and something 'just works', it's almost like losing an opportunity to really appreciate the complexity of what's going on underneath.” 

On Wednesday, his Wii blog made it to the top of technology forum Hacker News, meaning potentially hundreds of thousands of people clicked through to the site at the same time—a load that could easily hug any lesser website to death. But the Wiiweb held up. “This is where the Wii really managed to impress. Watching the graphs as the post went live was great fun. I spent a few hours watching as the load spiked, trying to work out where the post had been shared to cause each of the sudden bursts in traffic,” Haydock told me. The page spent about four hours at the number one spot on Hacker News, he said, and was on the front page for 20 hours. 

“At its peak a few hours in, the Wii was serving around 40 requests per second, and it was still serving a steady 10 requests per second near the end of the front page run. I was shocked but the Wii kept up amazingly well the entire time. It could easily have handled more,” he said. “Based on the figures I've got, I'm pretty sure the (not great) upload speed on my home connection would become the bottleneck way before the Wii itself would.”

He said he hopes to bring the Wii back to the festival where it started in 2026, and continue to serve the blog from it, in the middle of a field. 

“Originally I expected I'd run it like this for a few days or weeks, until I got tired of fixing it when it fell over,” Haydock said. “But it's been so stable that I do now plan to run it like this indefinitely. Especially now that some helpful folk have pointed out how to get it to boot directly into the NetBSD environment. Although I did quite enjoy having a production Wiimote.” 

Adam Chace picked a pretty good time to create a data archiving product for turbulent times. I first saw an ad for PrepperDisk on Reddit soon after the election of Donald Trump: “Take lifesaving websites into any emergency,” and “Be SHTF (Shit Hits the Fan) Proof,” the ads read. 

PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse.

I was interested in PrepperDisk because I care about data hoarding and archiving more broadly, but I wanted to talk to Chace after it became clear that a lot of his sales seemed to be a direct result of Trump being elected president. 

“Sales increased dramatically in the early part of the new administration as economic uncertainty and even uncertainty about government data prevailed,” Chace told me. “Elon Musk is pulling data off of federal websites, and we want to make sure people realize is like, ‘Hey, this might have a use case even when the internet itself remains up, but there might be political reasons why that data isn’t available.” 

“The National Institutes of Health, we have their entire website on our device, and some of their information has been pulled off the internet,” he added. "We have gotten a lot of questions about the content that’s getting deleted. The National Library of Medicine is one we get asked about a lot as it has had content deleted. We’ve had customer ask about whether the Prepper Disk copy of Wikipedia would continue to have entries that ‘might get deleted by the government.’ Yes. Our copy of FEMA’s emergency management website, Ready.gov, has gotten a lot of questions as that website was part of the DOGE sweep. Amusingly I had a customer also ask what the Gulf of Mexico was called on our maps [it’s still the Gulf of Mexico]. It is clear that folks are looking at the overall permanency of data on the Internet and our product as a way to control some of that.”

PrepperDisk is similar to a DIY, open-source project that started in 2012 called Internet in a Box and which has become popular in rural areas in developing countries where internet access is sparse. The idea is basically that you can carry around an external hard drive-sized, mini version of the internet with you that creates a local network your phone or laptop can access. 

I was also interested in PrepperDisk because, unlike a lot of “prepper” products, PrepperDisk’s marketing is relatively understated. Chace doesn’t consider himself to be a prepper, and generally doesn’t sell the product in apocalyptic or conspiratorial terms. It feels more like a project designed to preserve and distribute vulnerable data from the internet than a project designed for the end of the world.

“I personally wouldn’t categorize myself as a prepper, though I’m the son of an Eagle Scout and was a Boy Scout myself, and I’ve always been a sort of ‘be prepared’ kind of guy,” Chace said. “I was discussing with my son that, especially in the current climate, there’s a threat to the persistence of information, things we always thought would be available, like government resources from FEMA, suddenly there’s a question mark around that information.” 

Chace admits that an enterprising person could (and many do) build similar DIY products with a Raspberry Pi and an external hard drive. But his goal was to build something accessible to nontechnical people. 

“Our goal has been to take what some open source products do and make it more of a refined, commercial-grade consumer product,” he added. Despite the name, Chace said a lot of his customers aren’t necessarily preppers, they are largely people who are worried about important websites going offline. Others are people who want to take a smaller version of “the internet” camping in remote areas.Then there are, of course, people who store them in go bags.

“We do have the kind of classic, ‘I’m getting it and putting it in an EMP bag and putting it somewhere safe and hope I never need it,’” he said. “And then we have a customer who bought it basically to have it be available for his kids to use when they’re on vacation.”