Some weeks the internet hands you a theme. This week it handed you a lucky bag — and buried inside are a few genuinely trip-worthy finds.
Start with the dreamiest: a pink 18th-century bastide above Cassis, on the Provence coast, currently listed for €2.79 million. It's a restoration project, not a turnkey holiday home — 227 sqm of house, five bedrooms, and a 1,779 sqm garden — but the setting alone does most of the selling. Cassis sits between Marseille and the Calanques, so any fantasy renovation comes with limestone creeks and vineyards attached.
If €2.79M is a stretch, there's a cheaper way to make a crossing memorable: skip the Eurostar tunnel and take the catamaran ferry between France and England instead. The pitch is simple — make the journey part of the holiday. You get sea air, a deck, and the slow arrival that trains can't offer, and bookings are open now.
Culture lovers get options on both sides of the Atlantic. In Bentonville, Arkansas — yes, really — artist Lucy Sparrow has filled a gallery-scale supermarket with more than 20,000 felted objects in an 1980s-inspired installation called The Beginning of Convenience, on at The Momentary through 11 July 2027. In London, the National Gallery's Imaginarium offers a deep digital rabbit hole for anyone who'd rather explore paintings from the sofa. And Paris devotees can lose hours in an online archive of lesser-known Robert Doisneau photographs, all the candid street poetry without the famous postcard shots.
Elsewhere in the roundup: photographer Langdon Clay's night portraits of parked cars in 1970s Manhattan, collected in a Steidl book that doubles as a portrait of a vanished New York; medieval beekeeping gear with woven wicker face masks that look plucked from a folk-horror film; and Pullman's folding sleeper-train sinks, still reproduced today in cast iron and porcelain — a niche obsession waiting to happen.
There are DIY ideas too. The Free Blockbuster project shows you how to turn an old newspaper box into a neighbourhood video-lending spot, complete with logo stencils. A project called Intertapes collects found cassette tapes from around the world — voice memos, mixtapes, field recordings — like eavesdropping on strangers' holidays. And graphic designer Radhika Chitalia has been filling her late father's unused passport with paintings, turning a forgotten document into a travelling memorial.
Why care? Because roundups like this are where trip ideas start: a bastide you'll now mentally furnish, a ferry route you hadn't considered, a detour to Bentonville that suddenly seems justified. None of it requires a booking today — but the ferry and the felt supermarket have dates attached, so maybe start there.