Villa Malaparte, Guillaume Brahimi and other August luxuries

Travel, cars, food, fashion, property ... if it’s worth aspiring to, it’s in this month’s Wish magazine.

Villa Malaparte, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy. Picture: David Meagher

To borrow a line from John Steinbeck’s book Travels With Charley, it seems that one goes not to see but to tell afterwards.

Steinbeck’s book about a road trip he made around the US was published in 1962 and it’s safe to assume that if he wrote it today, his observation would be more along the lines of “one goes not to see but to post to Instagram”. Don’t get me wrong — I use Instagram to share photos of my travels — but it does seem like the sharing for some travellers is more important that just being there. What is a selfie stick for after all, but to prove that you were there when the photo was taken?

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Earlier this year I took a month off work — something I’ve not done before — and went on a holiday. Looking back on my photos from that trip there’s hardly any with people in them. There’s a few of my partner and a few photos of both of us together and hundreds of photos of buildings and gardens and food and various other miscellanea.

One of my photos is featured above. It’s of a house on Capri in Italy called Villa Malaparte. I shared it on my personal Instagram while I was travelling and it was a photo that got more likes and comments from followers than anything I’ve ever posted.

I have been fascinated with this house ever since I saw it in a magazine as a child. It was designed by Adalberto Libera for Curzio Malaparte and built in 1937. The house, which sits dramatically on a rocky promontory overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, is considered to be one of the best examples of Italian Modernist architecture. The house can only be reached by boat or by foot and the walk there is not for the faint of heart (although it is an incredibly beautiful one).

Seeing this house was something of a pilgrimage for me and one of the reasons we decided to spend a few days on Capri.

You can’t go inside the house, as it’s still essentially a private home; but seeing it in the flesh rather than a book gives you a great appreciation for the vision and effort undertaken in order to build it in the first place. And it’s a day I’ll always remember — the house creeps up on you through the bushes as you walk along the steep and winding path around the eastern side of Capri.

When we were putting this travel-themed edition of WISH together we figured other people might feel the same way about finally seeing buildings or monuments they have studied from afar for so long. So Milanda Rout asked some of our most celebrated architects to name their top architectural pilgrimages. Her story includes contributions from Peter Stutchbury, John Wardle and Kerstin Thompson among others. Some of the buildings they’ve chosen are well known and others less so, but all of them we hope will give you inspiration in planning your future travels.

This edition also includes our annual Travel Hot List of our picks of the best places to stay and visit — and how to get there — over the coming year and into the near future. We also meet chef Guillaume Brahimi and fashion designer Kris Van Assche, and hitch a ride on the Mille Miglia.

And then there’s our home story: a look inside what is without doubt the country’s most spectacular apartment. Owned by John and Marly Boyd and designed by Blainey North, it occupies three levels of the ANZ tower in Sydney and must be seen to be believed.