Galactic Suite is a bio-inspired orbital station that is attempting to bring space tourism to the masses, as long as you can afford the three million euro price tag.

A new invitation-only site called Rent the Runway lets members rock Badgley Mischka on a Banana Republic budget through an online borrowing system.

BMW is developing an application store specifically for in-car use.

While pondering how to help tell stories using the sense of smell, We Love You So came across some interesting finds – two perfumers who offer evocative scents that have very little relation to their traditional counterparts.

Tyler Brule’s team invited Piers Fawkes to contribute some thoughts to the Style Survey 09/10 supplement that accompanied the October 09 issue of Monocle magazine…

North Carolina based Raleigh Denim sources 98% of their materials from North Carolina, including the vintage machines they use.

Yesterday, Rugby debuted its new “Make Your Own” iPhone application at their store Greenwich Village store.

Artist Sebastian Bouchard attempts to transform the commonplace Calabash into a commodity in his new piece, C’est la Crise (Crisis Time).

Joey Roth, a designer based in San Fransisco, recently unveiled a new design for a pair of ceramic speakers.  The simple form contains 4″ full-range drivers in a white porcelain and cork enclosure.  For curious audiophiles, the speaker system is based on the Tripath 2024 T-amp and include both RCA and 1/8″ connections.  The uncomplicated design is common in Roth’s ultra modern approach and set his products apart from the competition.
Roth built some serious design credibility and got loads of press for his unique, modern teapot design called the Sorapot.  Since that first foray into the professional design world, Roth [...]

In the latest report to track China’s wealthiest people, we learn that Beijing has the most multimillionaires in China. The Hurun Report’s newest publication titled “China’s New Aristocrat Consumption Threshold Report” lays out the details on Beijing’s estimated 143,000 multimillionaires and 8,800 billionaires. In comparison, Shanghai has 116,000 multimillionaires and 7,000 billionaires.
The typical rich Beijing family profile is that of a couple in their 40s with a teenager. Annual spending for Beijing’s rich is roughly USD 850,000, including an estimated one-fifth of that going to charity. Tokyo and Osaka are top travel destinations, while BMW and Mercedes Benz are the [...]

Photographs of boxing legend Mike Tyson’s abandoned 1980s mansion in Southington, Ohio, have been widely circulated on the Internet in recent years (see here). Last August, however, photographer Danny Wills ventured to the vacant Ohio property for an impromptu photo session and has given new life to Tyson’s former home in a haunting new series of portraits.
The sets, titled “Mike Tyson and his abandoned mansion” and “Mike Tyson and his choice of decor,” examine the boxer’s former home, exposing its faded grandeur in a new light. Wills’ lens captured big screen television sets with punched-in screens; broken telephones [...]

Royal Pains, a new show on the USA Network, follows the course of a fictional doctor who makes house calls to the rich and famous.  House calls are a foreign concept to most modern health care professionals, but in Manhattan there is a so-called “concierge doctor” named Ronald Primas who whips around the city in a luxury Range Rover with a bag full of necessary instruments.
Dr. Primas, 49, has a group of wealthy longtime patents who crave this unique attention in the comfort of their own homes, but Primas also ventures out to make house calls for as little as [...]

Image credit: Getty Images, Todays like no yesterdays/Flickr
In her book Payback, Margaret Atwood writes that loans are “like air, it’s all around us, but we never think about it unless something goes wrong with the supply.”  The similarly intangible internet is expanding to bring a pawnshop to consumers struggling in the United States.
Enter Internet Pawn, a new website that offers a range of loans based on personal assets.  Simply FedEx your valuable and the company will determine their value and offer a loan ranging from $500 up to $250,000.  The loans can take as little as 24 hours to be [...]

Image credit: Getty Images, bancoposta/Flickr
With sales of luxury goods declining in Japan, an article in the Financial Times argues that we might be witnessing an evolution, or at least permanent change, in consumer behavior there. In the article, Michiyo Nakamoto says that Japan became a mass-luxury market in the 80s and 90s where owning a Louis Vuitton bag or Hermes scarf was a middle-class rite of passage – but mow consumers have grown confident in mixing and matching luxury items with cheaper ones:
“This is not a blip. This is a long-term shift in the market,” said Brian Salsberg, the author [...]

PSFK had noticed that earlier this year that the number of the Monocle magazine video podcasts had declined and the lifestyle-meets-business-meets-travel publication had even experimented with video podcasts which had slideshows of images with accompanying narrator rather than moving image. Meanwhile the weekly and summer special podcasts had become popular and we wondered if the change had been made just because it’s easier and cheaper to produce audio than video content . In an interview in the Independent, Moncole magazine editor Tyler Brûlé shines some light on this topic as he discusses how they have taken the Monocle approach to [...]