Cycling on Water

November 4, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Following the hydrofoil-surfing hybrid Fliteboard, here’s the next natural step in the chain: Manta5’s Hydrofoiler XE-1. “This bike will come into its own, marking the birth of a new sport,” says Red Bull of the world’s first water-bike (or hydrofoil e-bike) that replicates the cycling experience on water, ensuring that its future will be exciting, stylish and potentially an Olympic sport. 

Waikato, New Zealand-based Manta5 was founded in 2011 by two passionate and committed cyclists: Guy Howard-Willis (who co-founded New Zealand’s largest outdoor and adventure sports retailer Torpedo 7, which he sold in 2013) and bike designer Roland Alonzo. The original design brief presented no easy feat. As a high-performance bicycle, the pair envisioned a concept that was lightweight, fast, agile, and easy to transport and assemble. On top of all this, the rider would need to launch from the beach, jetties or deep water without settling for any existing bulky buoyancy or hulls. 

Early human-powered prototypes revealed a vast number of subtle complexities, especially the hydrofoils and propeller profiles. With no real precedent to draw on, the successful equation for a submerged launch continually eluded the pair. But after seven years, eight prototypes, and an endless supply of optimism and persistence, the Hydrofoiler XE-1 emerged from their design plans. Using the same technology as the boats for America’s Cup, the XE-1 opens up a whole new cycling frontier. 

Suitable for a wide range of fitness levels, riders can explore coastlines, train along waterways, or cruise lakeside with friends and family. It boasts a top speed of up to 12mph (or 22kph, similar to traditional sailboats) and weighs 63 pounds (29kg) when fully assembled. 

On the technological front, Manta5 has teamed up with activity tracker giant Garmin, which means you can track your speed, distance, heart rate and location. The bike features variable electric-assist modes – including training (low), cruise (medium) and performance (high) – allowing you to choose how you want to ride. 

Aromas of an Alien World

September 23, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Think of a gentlemen’s fragrance that defines generations of alpha males and you’ll summon the likes of Christian Dior’s Eau Sauvage, Chanel’s Pour Monsieur, Guerlain’s Vetiver, Ralph Lauren’s Polo for Men, Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet and Tom Ford’s Noir. But what would you wear in space? At the rate the Chinese National Space Administration, NASA and Elon Musk are launching missions to Mars, as well as Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic for suborbital spaceflights, it’s a valid question. On the flip side, what does space smell like?

A fragrance that smells like outer space, Eau de Space, will soon be made available to the public, a decade after first being developed to help astronauts adjust to the aromas of a world beyond. Typically, astronauts experience a high G-force centrifuge simulator for blast-off training, carry out extreme underwater training in zero-G weightlessness to prepare for when they reach outer space, and learn what to expect for everything in-between.

As part of its goal of simulated space training that eliminates any surprises astronauts might experience in outer space, NASA asked a specialist in 2008 to develop the “smell of space” to help prepare them. The man they contracted was British chemist, perfumer and Omega Ingredients founder Steve Pearce, and it took him four years to concoct his otherworldly potion.

The history of the “smell of space” has been chronicled, but not often discussed. However, ever since the first spacewalk, astronauts were shocked by the lingering odour when returning back to the spacecraft. Some describe it as gunpowder, rum, fruit, seared steak, raspberries or a barbecue. The first space tourists also noted a pungent aroma once the hatch opened, describing it as smelling “like burnt cookies”.

Retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, a former resident of the International Space Station, said in 2002 after her return to Earth that space smelled “kind of like a smell from a gun right after you fire the shot”. She elaborated: “I think it kind of has almost a bitter kind of smell, in addition to being smoky and burnt.”

Riding the New Wave

September 9, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

We all know the surfboard, and the more adventurous among us may have tried kitesurfing or wingfoiling. But what of the Byron Bay-designed Fliteboard eFoil in Australia? The electric-powered hydrofoil has been called the iPhone of Jetboards. “It’s amazing. It feels like you’re flying,” says former Formula I racing driver Nico Rosberg.

The board, on which you can stand or lie down, much like a conventional surfboard, gives a sensation of flying or gliding silently over water, irrespective of the state of the wind or the waves. A smart, streamlined 21st-century reworking of the calm-shattering jet ski, it’s fast, quiet, emissions-free, leaves no wake – and is woke. Retailing at about US$13,000, it’s the perfect high and represents water transport’s wave of the future.

On a single 90-minute charge, the eFoil can reach speeds of up to 28mph (45kph) over an 18-mile (30km) range. It can travel over any body of water more than three feet deep – so oceans, seas, rivers, lakes and bays are all your new playground. Created using digital wind-tunnel technology, and made from carbon fibre, aircraft-grade aluminium and high-quality wood composites, the unibody-powered fuselage glides on the water like a knife through butter. All of which you command with the Flite Controller, a handheld remote that provides real-time performance as you glide.

Naturally, it’s inducing waves of adoration on Instagram. “Flow state, also known colloquially as being ‘in the zone’, is the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process,” writes first-time user and Bachelor in Paradise star Helena Sauzier. “My first experience of electric hydrofoiling was flow state at its peak. What an incredible, exhilarating and crazy-fun experience! I’m still on such a high from it!”

Intergalactic Egg

April 15, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

From otherworldly sci-fi lemon squeezers to Café Costes, the French designer and architect Philippe Starck has seemingly done it all. Now, he has been given the go-ahead to start work on the interiors of the habitation module for one of the first space tourism programmes. NASA has selected Houston, Texas-based Axiom Space for access to the Node 2 forward port of the International Space Station (ISS); in layman’s terms, that means the Axiom segment of the ISS will become home base for professional astronauts and private explorers, and will enable universal access to living and working in space.

Building on the legacy and foundation established by the ISS, Axiom aims to make humanity’s venture into Earth’s orbit a permanent frontier for innovation, economic development, scientific discovery and future manufacturing. The station will expand the usable and habitable volume on-station and upgrade it with a 360-degree windowed Earth observatory.

“Axiom focuses on space research and trying to find solutions to democratise space,” says Starck. “I’m thrilled to play a part in this project. Space is the intelligence of the future.” His vision is to create a nest – a comfortable and friendly egg that would feature materials and colours stemming from a foetal universe. The walls are sprinkled with hundreds of nano-LEDs with changing colours as a continuation of the view of the universe through the large windows. “Just as all the shades of lights and colours of day and night, the egg will also live to the mood and biorhythm of its cosmic inhabitant,” says the designer.

The Agony of Choice

March 4, 2020 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above:  The inn’s jaw-dropping exterior

Surprises abound – so many and so dense – when stepping foot into the newly renovated 19th-century Victorian coaching inn The Fife Arms in the scenic village of Braemar, Scotland, it’s nearly impossible to know where to look first. The entrance to the hotel sets the bar sky-high. What looks like a copy of a Pablo Picasso piece on the right wall is, in fact, an original Mousquetaire Assis (1967) and would likely fetch in excess of US$20 million at auction. On a wall opposite hangs an innocuous-looking pencil and watercolour of a stag’s head in a frame – and yes, it’s an original by an enthusiastic artistic amateur more commonly known as Queen Victoria.

As your eyes ascend the staircase in this semi-baronial hall meets hunting-lodge atmosphere, a neon orb composed of bagpipes and glass antlers cascades from the ceiling over the banisters; Red Deer Chandelier (mighty Instagrammable it is, too) is a commissioned piece by Los Angeles-based artist Richard Jackson. You could explore nothing else at The Fife Arms but this space, safe in the knowledge that few hotels in the world, if any, could induce such heady and immediate aesthetic delirium.

Cities of the Future

September18, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Lawrence Lek, Pyramid Schemes (2018)

The concept of a utopian, digitised future is difficult to imagine in this era of diminishing natural resources, climate change, social and economic turmoil, and rapid technological advancements; while opening up the possibility of humans migrating to the moon or Mars, these may also be progressing beyond the bounds of our control. As such, the task of mapping and producing calculated projections of present societies within a global context has become the new challenge in art and architecture. 

Our imaginings of the “future” are most fully realised in our cities, as epitomised in Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film masterpiece Metropolis, which was considered so futuristic in its day. Times have changed at breakneck speed since, and contemporary cities have become vibrant, multidimensional spaces full of buildings and people, increasingly distinguished by the digital infrastructures that characterise contemporary living. In the same way that futurism was inspired by the technological innovations of the early 20th century and embraced futuristic aesthetics, today we conceptualise our ideas of “the city” as a “smart environment” built around automated vehicles, screens and systems. 

On until October 19 at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester, England, the exhibition Future Cities: Technopolis & Everyday Life examines how these evolving technologies have affected our interactions with the physical geography of cities, natural resources and domestic environments. Future Cities comprises artistic and architectural practices within an inspired setting designed by Lu Andong, a professor at Nanjing University. As such, it sits somewhere between speculation and reality, unfolding the impact of digital revolution on our perception of everyday life and defining the terrains of a global urban future. It also stimulates urgent issues within metropolitan development. 

The project comprises a handful of artists and collectives – Lawrence Lek, Hsu Chia-wei, Liam Young, Zheng Mahler and CineMuseSpace – who consider all aspects of our urban environments through a new lens, including the current discourse around the ways and rate at which cities are changing, and its potential impact on the future. 

Urban areas house more than half the world’s population and cities are often alluring playgrounds for the individual, but CineMuseSpace shows a different side, shining a spotlight on homogeneity within domestic spaces in our cities. Pyramid Schemes, a video essay by Lek, scrutinises cultural and political ideologies through the visual language of architecture, and speculates on architecture’s role as a mode of communication where culture and politics are inextricably linked to its development and realisation. 

In a society obsessed with the visual, there’s an increasing tendency to evaluate architecture through its image alone. Perfect renderings printed on glossy billboards have not only colonised global cities, but are also used to approve, evaluate and sell new construction projects. These digitally constructed, imagined landscapes become real before reality; their shiny presence merges with the existing urban environment, masking the raw construction sites they overlook and forming a representation of a future city in citizens’ minds. 

Liam Young’s Seoul City Machine is a symphony from the urban landscape of tomorrow. Narrated and scripted by an AI chatbot trained on smart-city data sets, the film is a love letter from the City Operating System to the citizens it affectionately manages – an urban space in which machines and technology are the dominant inhabitants. The film is an abstract sequence of a future Seoul where the hopes, dreams, fears and wonders of emerging technologies have come true. The present-day city is overlaid with cinematic visual effects to depict an autonomous world of machines, in which everyone is connected to everything. 

Nostalgia Machines: Point Cloud Architecture is inspired by Zhang Mahler’s 3D film of the same name, which explores how the Asian metropolis is instrumentalised by dystopian sci-fi narratives of the West, and how these techno-orientalist narratives obscure the realities of technological progress in Asia. The sculpture has been created with visual structure from motion (visual SFM) software that extracts point cloud data from thousands of frames of Chinese architecture, which are in turn sourced from online search engines. Sci-fi 3D assets are then assigned to each point in the cloud, resulting in a unique, speculative architecture, rather than the usual homogeneity of global urbanism. 

Meanwhile, Jiu Society’s multimedia installation Lost in Shenzhen takes over Gallery 2. The society comprises three young artists – Fang Di, Ji Hao and Jin Haofan. The trio creates work about the collective experience of the city, characterised by burgeoning economic growth, rapid urban regeneration and a coalescence of cultures. As the first generation to be born and raised in Shenzhen after China’s economic reforms, they have witnessed the transformation of the Pearl River Delta megalopolis, newly rechristened the Greater Bay Area, which comprises the rapidly developing cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai alongside Hong Kong.

Lost in Shenzhen consists of neon lights, sculptures, photographs and short films housed within the installation Shenzhen Grand Hotel, an imaginative recreation of hotels built from the 1980s to 1990s that catered to migrant labourers and sex workers. By using lucid colours and kitsch imagery, the installation partly mocks the absurdity and seediness of such establishments while simultaneously provoking nostalgia. Lost in Shenzhen offers a fresh perspective on the life of Chinese megacities by illustrating both the marvel and chaos contained within. 

Home is Where the Heart is

June 26, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

“With our properties, it’s all about how you feel when you first step in,” says Ou Nopadon Baholyodhin, the chief creative officer of upscale Thai property developer Sansiri. “Residents have told us that words can’t describe the feeling of Khun by Yoo [in Bangkok, see images]  - whether it’s the sense of peace, calm and quiet, or the feeling of being very assured and well looked after. It’s one of those intangibles that’s hard to put on paper.”

Thailand’s luxury retail market has grown 7% annually from 2012 to 2018 and will continue to rise, according to Knight Frank’s latest The Wealth Report. Bangkok-based Sansiri, with 35 years in the business and now championing a new era of super-luxury suffused with contemporary curation and intimate customisation, has been central to that shift. The company recently coined a new moniker, Sansiri Luxury Collection (SLC), to represent a trophy quartet of its next-gen residential projects in Bangkok: The Monument Thong Lo, Khun by Yoo, Baan Sansiri Pattanakarn and the group’s flagship, 98 Wireless. 

It’s a far cry from the old-school developer mentality of selling units off-site. Instead, Sansiri prioritises the art of storytelling like a luxury purveyor. “We focus on creating emotional connections to customers and a unique experience from the moment they enter our gallery,” says Baholyodhin. 

Such post-millennial design thought has seen Sansiri enrol some big names, including the likes of Belgian decorator Gert Voorjans, who creates interiors for Dries Van Noten and Joyce in Hong Kong; Spanish designer Lorenzo Castillo and his classic-meets-contemporary designs for Loewe; American interior and jewellery designer Hutton Wilkinson, who will conjure up special units and the penthouse at The Monument Thong Lo; and British designer Mary Fox Linton, who will oversee some of Baan Sansiri Pattanakarn. 

For its coup de grâce, Sansiri has enlisted acclaimed French designer Philippe Starck to design the entire Khun by Yoo. Set in the heart of Bangkok’s celebrated Thong Lo Soi 12, the neighbourhood is home to a new hipsterville of tiny sushi counters, noodle parlours, coffee shops, bars and artisans. Khun by Yoo marks Starck’s first residential project in Thailand and buyers will move into the completed lifestyle shrine from November. 

Indeed, Khun by Yoo is all about you; high-key architecture, design and fittings, a Bang & Olufsen-equipped cinema room, state-of-the-art Technogym facilities, a billiards and games room, and a 30-metre infinity pool floating on the 24th floor, surrounded by constellations of stars in the form of Starck’s wall lamps and underwater fibre optic lights. “Elegant, intelligent and accessible – that’s our aim,” says Baholyodhin. This intimacy distinguishes the SLC approach. “Rather than a big launch, we like word of mouth… an ongoing programme that’s more meaningful and engaging on a personal level. That’s what people want.” 

On that front, Sansiri has delivered. Recently, the developer brought the acclaimed perfumer Douglas Little to a gathering at The Monument Thong Lo. “He creates scents for people through one-on-one sessions; he created the scent for Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop,” says Baholyodhin. “Normally when you have an event, people just sit back and play with their smartphones. But everybody listened to every word Douglas was saying, taking it in, mesmerised. We’ve had so many text messages from residents thanking us for introducing him to them. And we now have a Sansiri scent for the collection.” What are its notes? “Figs, with a base note of vetiver – and then he’s sneakily gone away and used lots of secret potions, so I don’t know what everything is!” 

During Bangkok Design Week 2019, the developer presented The Alphabet of Joy by Sarah Corynen; for the Belgian illustrator and pattern designer’s first exhibition in Southeast Asia, she created a floating installation on the Chao Phraya River. Corynen’s dynamic creations have graced brands including fashion label Comme des Garçons in Tokyo and the Habitat design and furniture store in London. “Sarah’s a bright young thing who does cartoon-like flowers, birds, et cetera… so that was more targeted at a younger crowd in Bangkok,” explains Baholyodhin. “We try to be inclusive and not just do super-luxury, but across-the-board appeal.” 

Pal for Life

June 12, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

If the future promises to be fully autonomous and sustainable, as seems inevitable, then you’ll need the right kind of navigation to get you through its developing narrative. 

So what better way to steer a course than with your new best friend, PAL, a prototype for an intelligent, modular personal transport system that embraces artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to offer flexible and convenient “last-mile” travel for Chinese electric vehicle maker NIO and its Nomi system, an advanced AI assistant for its line-up of smart electric cars. 

For this project, NIO has partnered with British industrial designer Benjamin Hubert, founder and creative director of Layer, a design agency working across product, digital, brand and installation design. Through experience, the mobile lifestyle PAL becomes accustomed to a user’s routes over time and, eventually, becomes autonomous in taking its user from point A to point B. 

From a design perspective, the graphene-coated carbon-fibre vehicle aims to express lifestyle sensibilities, rather than using an overtly tech-driven language, creating harmony between the way people think about home and transport. Even the battery is a sleek pod that has been designed to be seen – and can be swapped out when needed. A smartphone app hooks up to the scooter’s electronics, which displays speed and battery life remaining. Your best PAL then responds to voice commands. 

Tiptoe Through the Tulip

May 29, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Aerial mock-up of The Tulip as it towers over London

We always thought tulips were from Amsterdam, though let’s not forget that the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century was the original market bubble that precipitated a huge crash. But now, in a place little related to the flower, an architectural tulip has just been granted planning approval by the City of London Corporation. The structure will rise higher than any of the current crop of slender supermodels in the capital and will sit adjacent Foster + Partners’ Stirling Prize-winning skyscraper at 30 St Mary Axe, also known as The Gherkin. That’s both ironic and fortuitous; Foster is also building The Tulip and both properties have the same developer, J Safra Group. 

This icon-to-be of the increasingly crowded capital cityscape, a 305.3-metre-tall concrete shaft topped by glass viewing platforms, will provide panoramic views of London, with restaurants, conference centres and exhibition spaces. It will become a “symbol in its own right”, according to renowned Foster + Partners founder Norman Foster, and not unlike its neighbour in some respects. “Like The Gherkin nearly 20 years ago, it is inevitably controversial,” he says. “But like The Gherkin, it has the possibility of being a symbol beyond its host city.”

Since the turn of the millennium, London’s immense skyline has grown to incorporate high-rise towers reflective of its global financial weight. The City of London Corporation has been driving proposals to enliven the Square Mile by creating a Culture Mile with world-class tourist facilities; up to now, however, the area has always been somewhat dour and unimaginative. 

Certainly, the viewing galleries will offer visitors an engaging and novel experience. Sky bridges, internal glass slides and gondola pod rides on the building’s facade will no doubt be a huge draw. Complementing that will be the obligatory restaurants and sky bar, offering 21st-century metropolitans a vista beyond compare. 

But it’s not all touristic, as Foster’s playing a large philanthropic hand, too. The big sell is the “classroom in the sky” educational facility, which would include 20,000 free places for London’s state-school children each year. This educational resource, provided by the J Safra Group, will deliver national curriculum topics using innovative tools to bring the city’s history and dynamism to life, inspiring the creative minds of tomorrow. 

And, of course, today’s bottom-line considerations. Consulting firm Deloitte estimates the project would yield economic benefits to London amounting to nearly £1 billion in monetised value by 2045, along with 600 additional permanent full-time jobs over 20 years of operations. 

But the floral-inspired structure has also met with fierce criticism. Detractors have highlighted the tower’s unorthodox shape and soaring height, which risks encroaching on numerous other iconic views, such as the Tower of London, just a ten-minute stroll away. Historic Royal Palaces claims “The Tulip’s design would make it the most visually intrusive element” in London’s Culture Mile district and that “its effect would be both major and adverse”. 

What is clear is that for such a statement-maker, The Tulip’s soft bud-like form and minimal building footprint reflects its reduced resource use, with high-performance glass and optimised building systems reducing its energy consumption. Heating and cooling is provided by zero-combustion technology, while integrated photovoltaic cells generate energy on-site. 

In a poll conducted by online forecaster ComRes, 65% of Londoners said The Tulip would be an attractive addition to London’s skyline, while 69% thought it would have a positive impact on “the city’s attractiveness as a visitor and cultural destination”. Foster + Partners anticipates construction to begin in 2020 and for the project to finish in 2025. 

Idea-logical Future

May 29, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: Elaine Yan Ling Ng, 2018 Marco at WOW Productions

British-Chinese designer Elaine Yan-ling Ng founded The Fabrick Lab in 2013. A graduate of Central Saint Martins in London, where she earned her MA with distinction in textile futures, her unique practice brings together textiles, electronics, biomimicry and installations. Ng’s work has been exhibited at the V&A and the Science Museum in London. She has worked with international companies such as Nissan Design Europe, Nokia Design Beijing and Swarovski, and she recently collaborated with UBS Evidence Lab on Nexus, an interactive sculpture that explores global air quality.

For those who saw your collaboration with Swarovksi at Art Central two years ago, and now the Nexus air-quality project with UBS for Art Basel in Hong Kong, how much has your design mindset changed? 

People who saw both of them were quite surprised at how different they seemed. But when you look at the Swarovski work, which was about collecting sound, that still requires the collection of data, as does this project with UBS. So, it’s just a different way of having data function, whether that’s numerical, analogue or physical in the way that it’s being performed. The UBS project was different in the sense that I wanted to create layers between notions of how humans/art and artificial intelligence can be combined for how we will live in the future.

How do you intend to exploit the immediate future? 

I’d like to make a sculpture with textiles on a larger scale – something really big that people can walk through and under, so that it becomes part of an environment. A piece like Nexus could be incorporated into a more social setting whereby people could monitor air-quality changes. It would become a part of their natural life and they could become more aware. These projects could become like air-quality index machines in public. I’d love to see one put in the middle of a roundabout, for example. It would be fun to find out how Ferraris or Lamborghinis change the reading on the index. 

What’s the best advice any designer has given you? 

Thomas Heatherwick gave me some good advice this year about the best materials to use outdoors. He was so spot-on in terms of what does and doesn’t work, and it was encouraging to get his feedback. Ross Lovegrove saw me in London and passed on his advice, too. For any young designer, it’s really important to have those opportunities to meet experienced designers. Neri & Hu gave me really good insight on how they work with heritage and create a narrative within their scope of work. 

What are your immediate plans? 

Next year I’m turning 35 – I feel I’ve not done enough and time goes by so quickly, so I want to do something special for myself. I was trained as a weaver and I want to pursue more ideas related to that. I have invested in new machinery from Norway, and took my staff there to train with me and put up a loom in a traditional jacquard room. I’m really passionate about textiles and create them in a different way – by working with emotions and how we react with interactive textile designs. That’s where my heart is set. Or we can weave with different types of material. We’ve worked with carbon fibre and industrial-performance materials, so we are really trying to strengthen the material consultancy side of the business. 

Is there anything you’d like to design that you haven’t yet? 

My next project would be cars. In the project with UBS, we developed the console and the dashboard, and I think it’s interesting how a car is like a mobile home or office. So I do have ambitions that way, but I don’t know how far I can take them. 

Do you already know your schedule for the next 12 months? 

I’ve been working with Lane Crawford and Links of London, and I’m getting a pop-up store soon at The Mills, which focuses on their heritage products. I’m also having an exhibition with Chow Tai Fook Art Foundation at PMQ, designing some jewellery pieces. I have mentored for them, using digital technology with beads based on some traditional patterns. This year we’re also creating products we can sell – jewellery, evening and daywear, and some items for Kapok. I would like to build an e-commerce platform. 

Scribe and Sword

May 15, 2019 / by China Daily Lifestyle Premium

Image above: One of the three views of the Samurai Pen of the Year

They say the pen’s mightier than the sword, but a new Graf von Faber-Castell writing implement combines the best of both worlds. The Samurai Pen of the Year features captivating elements reminiscent of the appearance of the famed Japanese warriors. The barrel of the pen is made of dark-stained magnolia wood that imitates the samurai’s longsword, embellished with an engraving in 24K gold varnish inscribed with Japanese characters that read: “Today I win against myself of yesterday” – a quotation attributed to the great samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi. 

The end cap is engraved with the tsuba (hand guard) created by Musashi, which represents loyal soldiers who offer protection. Both the cap and the hand-forged grip are coated with ruthenium and delicately decorated with artistic inlays inspired by Japanese sword sheaths. 

Complementing the Samurai is the Samurai Black Edition, the black lacquered metal barrel of which is coated with 24K gold and embossed with tapered lines to imitate the armour of Japanese warriors. “Cultivate both – your spirit and wisdom”, another quote by Musashi, is engraved on the Black edition, which comes with a titanium cap and grip coating, and an 18K gold nib coated with ruthenium.