By Julie Coe, Editorial Director |
The double-height sitting room in Ruth Rogers’ London home. On the wall is a collection of Mao screenprints by Andy Warhol. © 2026 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. |
Before she became a renowned chef and restaurateur, Ruth Rogers had an early career as graphic designer, working at Penguin Books and her late husband, Richard Rogers’s architecture firm. “It taught me how to think about color, about space, about how something looks and feels,” she tells executive editor James Haldane for our latest “Collector’s Item” column. “I’ve never really stopped thinking that way.” In 1987, she and Rose Gray opened The River Cafe, which became a London institution as well as a gathering place for artists, from Ed Ruscha to Cy Twombly to Tracey Emin to Damien Hirst. (Rogers and Ruscha even collaborated on a cookbook together.) So it’s not surprising that her home, a townhouse in Chelsea, brims with beauty, from a Warhol Mao series to a framed acrostic poem her granddaughter wrote using Rogers’ nickname, Ruthie. There’s also the first-ever menu from The River Cafe’s opening nearly 40 years ago and a spattered, dog-eared copy of “The Molly Goldberg Cookbook” inherited from Rogers’ mother. “You can judge a society by the way it feeds people—by how it treats children, how it treats those who need care,” says Rogers. “It’s part of how we look after one another, how we live together.”
There’s an echo of Rogers’ sentiment in Brunello Cucinelli’s philosophy of “humanistic capitalism.” The new feature film “Brunello: The Gracious Visionary,” directed by “Cinema Paradiso” auteur Giuseppe Tornatore, recounts how the Italian entrepreneur from a working-class background built a global fashion brand—in the process bringing new jobs and new life to the town of Solomeo, where the company has its headquarters. The inspirational story involves a bar Cucinelli calls his “university of the soul” and many rounds of the card game scopa. |
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Ruth Rogers on the Objects She Holds Dear |
By Ruth Rogers, as told to James Haldane |
“Yum” by Ed Ruscha, 2017, created for the book “River Cafe 30.” © Ed Ruscha. |
When I wake up in the morning and walk downstairs, I pass a drawing by Cy Twombly and a painting by Philip Guston. They remind me there is another part of the world we have to be in contact with—something we need to see and take pleasure in. Though I don’t look at them and think I’m going to cook something different, the things in a house should inspire. They shouldn’t feel separate from your life. |
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The Art of Summer Entertaining with Net-A-Porter
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Courtesy of Net-A-Porter. |
Despite their name, dinner parties have very little to do with dinner. Of course, you’ll do the polite thing and request the recipe as you’re saying your goodbyes to the host, but rarely is it the food you remember after the fact. Instead, it’s the company and conversation that linger. And creating the perfect conduit for those conditions lies not just in curating your guest list, but in curating you and your guests’ surroundings, too. |
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Brunello Cucinelli’s Cinematic Life |
Brunello Cucinelli playing the card game scopa. Photo: Stefano Schirato. |
There’s a point in the film “Brunello: The Gracious Visionary,” opening in North American theaters July 24, when Brunello Cucinelli recounts the “aha” moment that changed the course of his life forever. After overhearing his father—a lifelong farmer—agonize over the daily indignities suffered at his new factory job, the younger Cucinelli sets forth this resolution: “I’d like to try to live and work for human dignity.” |
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Our calendar of must-see exhibitions |
Dawoud Bey’s “Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky), AP2,” from the series “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” 2017, on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Image © Dawoud Bey. |
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