Culture Lounge by ASSOULINE

In this episode of Beyond the Cover, Mario Codognato takes us inside the story of Casa Codognato and the making of Codognato Masterpiece. Founded in Venice in 1866 by his grandfather Simeone, the house has long lived by one conviction: without excess, beauty cannot exist. Skulls and serpents, ancient intaglios and cameos, echoes of Byzantium, Rome and the Renaissance. These are jewels of memento mori, worn by Gabrielle Chanel, Jean Cocteau and Diana Vreeland, and today by Tilda Swinton. In a city where everything reflects on water, this book captures more than 160 years of Venetian splendour.
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In this episode of The Decisive Moment, master jeweler Glenn Spiro reflects on a life shaped by risk, reinvention, and devotion to craft. He left school at 14, abandoned a budding child-actor career, and found jewelry almost by instinct, going on to pioneer titanium in fine jewelry with large, feather-light pieces women could finally wear with ease. He speaks to walking away from his own business to join Christie's, his creative director approach, the kinetic Papillon ring made famous by Beyoncé and now permanently in the V&A, and the family and resilience running beneath it all.

In this episode of the Culture Lounge podcast, recorded at Assouline's New York headquarters, Jeannie Cho Lee, the first Asian Master of Wine, and chef Brian Kim, founder of Oiji Hospitality and chef-owner of the Michelin-starred Oiji Mi and bōm, come together to consider what it means to eat and drink beautifully today. Friends for more than a decade, they trace the winding routes that led each of them into food and wine against their parents' wishes, and the years spent learning the grammar of flavor: fermentation and the hundreds of kimchis that live in a Korean kitchen, acidity and tannin and the way a full-bodied red will keep chili burning on the palate twice as long.

In this episode of Savoir-Faire, Alex Assouline is joined by founders Prosper and Martine Assouline to revisit the Impossible Collection of Wine, ten years after its release.

Together they explore treating a book as an object as much as a text, the painstaking process of hand-replicating vintage labels for the world's 100 greatest wines, and their collaboration with co-author Enrico Bernardo, the world's youngest "Best Sommelier in the World."

They reflect on what makes a collection truly impossible, and why this title remains one of Assouline's most-collected.

In this episode of The Decisive Moment, designer Ken Fulk steps into the Assouline archive room in New York to trace the spark that turned a boy with illusions of grandeur into one of America's most theatrical creative minds. Fulk shares how every project begins with words, why he refuses to repeat himself, and the laundromat encounter that changed his life 35 years ago. A conversation about the moments, little and large, that make a life worth designing.