Opening a museum has an irresistible allure. Then comes the public. 

When Steve Oliver and his wife, Nancy, commissioned the first of many monumental artworks to grace the landscape of their 100-acre sheep ranch in Sonoma County, Calif., they did not foresee a future where they would admit a bus full of visitors a day, three days a week, to tour the grounds in the spring and fall. “It was never my intent,” Oliver says. “It started rather innocently. Now I think we’re booked on every Satu…

Modena, Italy—home to supercar makers including Ferrari, Maserati, and Pagani—recently welcomed its latest automotive brand. Last month, Ares Performance, a new tuning house founded by Dany Bahar (a former CEO of Lotus Cars) and a team of automotive industry experts, unveiled its first range of customized vehicles.

For this new venture, Bahar recruited talent from some of the automotive industry’s top marques, including the former Mercedes-Benz AMG COO Wolf Zimmermann and Lotus’s former lead designer, Mihai…

Earlier this summer, the motorcycle racer turned designer Erik Buell debuted the Erik Buell Racing EBR 1190SX, a naked version of his Wisconsin company’s flagship 1190RX race bike, which launched last year and is competing in the World Superbike Championship. Better suited for the road than the racetrack, the new installment in the 1190 series (priced at $16,995) uses the same 72-degree liquid-cooled V-twin engine as the RX variant, delivering 185 hp and 102 ft lbs of torque. The SX “superfighter,” as Buell ca…

Sure to be one of the highlights of the many automotive events leading up to the famed Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, RM Auctions’ August 15–16 Monterey sale will bring to the block a 1967 Ferrari 275 GTB/4 that was originally owned by the late, great actor and motorsports enthusiast Steve McQueen.

A replacement for his first Ferrari 275—a GTB NART Spyder that was totaled shortly after delivery—the 275 GTB/4 was ordered while McQueen was filming The Thomas Crown Affair. The actor customized the vehicle t…

Northern California’s Sonoma Valley is hosting the first annual St. Regis Polo Cup, taking place at the Wild Oak Saddle Club on September 20. The polo icon Nacho Figueras will play in the Sonoma match and meet with fans. The $350 spectator entrance fee and proceeds from various charity auctions will benefit the Giant Steps Therapeutic Equestrian Center for children with disabilities.

The St. Regis San Francisco, about a 2-hour drive from the Wild Oak Saddle Club, is offering the St. Regis Polo Cup Aficionad…

With the new Vanguard collection, the Swiss watchmaker Franck Muller introduces a bold, sporty new design. The numerals decorating the dial of the watch are exceptionally large and rendered in appliqué relief, giving the watch a three-dimensional appearance. Its hour and minute hands are skeletonized, while its seconds hand features a red tip that gives the mostly black dial a splash of color. In addition to its basic timekeeping function, the watch is equipped with a date window at 6 o’clock, and a version is…

The French clothing brand Cremieux, known for its preppy, brightly colored men’s attire, has opened its first boutique stateside, in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. The two-level space is the exclusive home to the brand’s first-ever American-made designs, which include velvet loafers ($495), hand-knit pocket squares ($95), and ties ($115). The new store also carries Cremieux’s line of European-made cotton sweaters (from $170), lightweight cotton jackets (from $435), and dress shirts (from $160). Many items are a…

While San Francisco’s Quince is temporarily closed for renovations this summer, the Michelin two-star restaurant will move to the city’s Hedge Gallery for a five-week pop-up dinner series. Uniting the visual and culinary arts, curATE will transform the Jackson Square gallery into a dining room cum art exhibition from July 30 through August 30. The dinner series will merge the locally sourced Northern California cuisine of chef Michael Tusk with diverse artwork from some of the city’s most acclaimed curators, i…

For over 30 years, New Jersey’s VPI Industries has been making some of the world’s finest belt-drive turntables. With its new Classic Direct-Drive Turntable, the company takes a different design approach. Introduced in the late 1960s, direct-drive turntables use a motor placed directly beneath the record platter and attached to it. (The motor of a belt-drive table, by contrast, is offset from the platter and spins it using a connected belt or band.) Direct-drive tables typically offer superior stability and re…

The City That Never Sleeps and the City of Lights are a good pair, mixing Paris’s je ne sais quoi with New York’s straight-shooting style. There are plenty of French bistros in New York City, but not all are worthy of mention. In classic New York style, we’ll get right to the point: Here are the five bistros worthy of your attention during your own domestic Tour de France.

Into the Fryer

Sure, you can get steak frites most anywhere, but very few establishments carry a full-time french-fry attendant….