She often finds the most incredible things in the most unlikely of places and loves bringing them to her readers. Jean has put together an exclusive New York download just for us!

Whether you’re a New York native or a frequent flyer, where is your New York hotspot? Join the conversation on Twitter @Mulberry_Editor or on our Facebook page.

Gramercy Park Hotel

New York has become home away from home the last few years. And while many have tried to convince me to do the bicoastal LA-NY thing officially, my NY home still involves hotel living! But as far as favorite’s go… Gramercy Park Hotel’s incredible service, cosy rooms, rooftop (perfect for brunch meetings and catch ups!) and location are hard to beat. I love curling up in the rooftop seating under the ceiling of lightbulbs or gorgeous green vines with good friends and delicious drinks.

On random rituals, I usually catch the direct flight cross country that gets me in to JFK around 8, hop in a cab to Gramercy Park Hotel, check in, drop my bags, and take a quick walk over to Shake Shack for a Coffee Frozen Custard and Shack Burger either in the park or back at the hotel… checking email and my sites while i walk.

Every city has its special shopping spots so unique to itself, that you’ll find products hard to discover anywhere else (though the internet does make this harder and harder every day!) my shops not to miss to browse design collections and unexpected surprises are:

ABC Home and ABC Kitchen

ABC Home: I can wander floor by floor for ages, there are so many beautifully curated home objects to lust after! And when the hunger sets in, there’s Jean-Georges’ ABC Kitchen where amongst the delicious food, you must try the Dragon Slayer elixir shot (wheat grass, jalapeño, cilantro, lime!)

Matter: Always a beautifully curated collection of design items and furnishings.

The Future Perfect: The Future Perfect was born from the desire to showcase the newest and best in decorative arts and design. At once it is a store, shop, gallery and mecca, mixing talent from New York and the world.

Kiosk: “Things from places” – they collect and transform the ordinary into the extraordinary as they create collections of products from various locations, in the past collections have come from Japan, Sweden, Mexico, Finland, Hong Kong, Iceland and more!

The Evolution Store

The Evolution Store: From skeletons and taxidermy to jewelry and unexpected gift items, it is like falling into a stunning Natural History Museum of sorts where everything can come home with you. I feel like you learn something new every time you walk through.

Fish's Eddy

Fish’s Eddy: It blows my mind every time i walk into the store and see the dishware stacked from floor to ceiling throughout the store. There’s always something fun to be discovered here.

MoMA Store: Not just another museum store… the MoMA Store’s destination collections remind me of Kiosk with their location themed product collections – currently featuring Mexico!

Clinton Street Baking Company

Oh, and one more thing i never miss – Brunch at Clinton Street Baking Company – you can’t go wrong with their Eggs Benedict and Southern Breakfast.

While this list could keep growing, and is making me miss NY even as i write it, think of these as just a starting point of some of my favourites for a NOTCOT day in NY!

NOTCOT is a visual filtration of ideas, aesthetics and amusements. NOTCOT.ORG houses a community of creatives, design lovers, and trendsetters – with the site serving as our studio bulletin board gone digital – each image and caption brings you to a place worth visiting.

We chose to reference our Spring Summer 2012 seasonal inspiration of candy colours and seaside treats so we dipped the crown in colourful ‘hundreds and thousands’ candy pieces, giving the finished version a distinctly sweet tooth!

The crown sits atop a bespoke cushion, created by Jessica Dance, made to look like a very English classic Victoria sponge cake.

Join the Del Rey conversation on Twitter and Facebook.

The bag

Inspired by singer Lana Del Rey, the Del Rey also pays homage to classic Mulberry detailing and style accents. It is refined and practical, and although it implies structure the leather is soft and tactile, able to hold everything you might need and be as dressed up, or down, as you like.

Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey’s beautiful voice and nostalgic style have captivated us on more one occasion. Creative Director Emma Hill found inspiration in her coquettish elegance and desire to mix high and low cultural references in her music and fashion. Lana has a bespoke Del Rey in White Ostrich, as Emma says: ‘The white with the gold accent suited Lana perfectly – it’s glamorous, and a little bit retro!’

Shop the Del Rey online, and choose between Black and Deer Brown – two timeless colours that will age beautifully.

Watch our videos of Lana performing Video Games and Born To Die live at Chateau Marmont.

Find out more about John Ahearn.

John: So how, where, when did we meet?

Robert: It was 1979. Through a cousin of mine, he was a taxi driver. He worked by the studio! He dropped by and I think he brought David?

John: Yes, David!

Robert: and he did a cast, it’s the one in front [of the Frieze displays] – with the mouth open and then he brought me over.

John: David came first!

Robert: And then what, we just started working together? I think so. Easy.

[more laughter]

John: There’s more though. I’d like to say, sometimes [people] like to say that downtown artists brought culture to the Bronx – that’s such a false statement, such a misunderstanding of everything going on. You brought quite a bit to the table considering you were still in high school. – For example, your uncle Raoul had a major statuary factory near by in the Bronx where they mass produced popular sculptures of all conceivable images you could imagine, imaginary voodoo gods, Elvis Presley, everything, right? For general consumption!

This happened to be, at the time when, in downtown, in many intellectual circles the thought was that bad popular art was the cool thing to go after, such as something you would buy in Coney Island. Artists were trying to do this kind of thing. Soon we were showing Uncle Raoul’s sculptures at Fashion Moda, at the gallery, and then you took materials that I was using out on the streets to cast the faces just on the sidewalk, in front of the building. You were casting the neighbours while I was in Fashion Moda!

Robert: I just took it from indoors to outdoors…all the way back in ’79. I took the idea out into the open. There’s nothing to hide in this process. Let everyone see what’s happening. There’s no secret to our work, it’s out there, It uses people. Everyone wants to do it once they see it, that’s why at Frieze we are giving people the opportunity for the live castings, to see something happen.

John: People like to say we ‘work together’ or ‘collaborate’. We help each other as much as possible during the casting process. Is there such a thing as one person’s art and then another person’s art? Yes there is! If you look in this book right here there are specific artworks that are called John Ahearn, some are called Rigoberto Torres, now what is the difference? When we help each other? First of all, whose original impulse was it to make this particular idea or image? Who had the idea? Who said it first?

Robert: Well we sometimes argue over that…

John: Ha! I’m the senior member so it’s my idea, haha!

Here’s the thing, don’t you think. Once we help each other do the life casting usually whoever touches the piece just as the plaster is going into the mould, by then its already too late, it’s already one of ours! You might work next to me but you’re not my assistant, you don’t get to carve things or saw the plaster on my pieces. If it’s mine it’s mine. It’s the same with you though, you’re much worse!

[laughter from Robert]

You are so territorial that when you gets an idea you don’t tell me anything about it until it’s all finished!

Robert: It’s just not true… we’ll have to tell them about your temper tantrums soon.

John: I was thinking Robert, back to the first question, when we met we had a very odd but special relationship: I didn’t know what your phone number was, where you lived, who you was with, anything, you just showed up everyday and then left!

Robert: I was working on a piece, with my family, as well.

John: I didn’t know, and then I saw it presented and it just knocked me… it’s conceptually and aesthetically and spiritually on a very high level. It’s like a pyramid or something.

Robert: Don’t forget I worked for my uncle, in the factory, which is where I learnt mould-making for outdoor pieces. That was my link to you outside of our work. The skills I have from that developed the work that you and I did. All the outdoor pieces in the Bronx.

Do you think we argue most of the time?

John: Don’t say that Robert!

Robert: We work well together, even with any arguments or misunderstandings.

John: Well we don’t work side by side always. That’s the thing. I live in New York and you live in Florida. When you moved we were already in the middle of a piece, which we continued without stopping. We would organise a meeting point such as Sao Paulo airport at a specific moment in time and we would start! Or we would meet in Taipei, and meet at the airport again and begin a project. We were doing projects that didn’t need to be ‘based’ in New York and so it didn’t matter that much that we weren’t always near. Does it make a difference you not being here? Yes, of course, it’s a big loss, but that’s life.

Robert: it’s not like we miss each other!

John: Oh I’m as happy as a clam!

Robert: It’s hard in a way. I’ve worked in many museums and have been doing so in Florida, but it’s not the same as being in New York. But I don’t love New York. I like Florida.

John: Florida is a nice place for asthmatics! I love to be on my feet, in New York you can just walk everywhere and I feel free.

Pictures courtesy of Frieze New York and Construct London.

On Saturday myself and a group of artists from the New York Academy received tickets from Mulberry to check out the Frieze art fair…

Look at this huge piece from Amanda Ross-Ho. She warmly reminds us that we’re all going to die.

And this hand stitched note resembling a sheet of legal paper from artist Simon Evans at the James Cohan booth. His nimble fingers must have toiled for countless hours for that exquisite joke.

Here is a project where the artist Jorge Mendez Blake gathered all of the Borges texts available in the New York Public Library system and entombed them in a large wooden box for a week. These books are held captive. You get to witness the temporary perversion of the cultural commons.

There was also shiny stuff. Here is a ‘pimped out’ hydraulic car by Liz Cohen at Salon 94. Next to it is a John Chamberlin sculpture that’s curatorially saying – ‘hey, look, this thing is like that thing, sort of.’

How about this Joshua Abelow installation at James Fuentes? If paintings could dance these babies would be the Electric Slide.

Outside the tent, literally, there was something called Frieze Projects. These were commissions for free public and interactive works. There were tumble weeds and folded mirrors and kids playing and carnival games as art. There was a performance highlighting Randall Island’s history as a hospital for ‘Children and Idiots.’ I wandered around in a kind of art coma and eventually found the boat again and drifted back with the madding crowd.

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“Lisa Williamson’s new works presented by Shane Campbell Gallery take Trendland’s top Frieze honours for perfectly cleansing our palette after a day of boisterous visual impact.

I’m not sure if it was the poised combination of powdery blues, pinks and yellows, or if I was reacting to the cleansing and meditative effect it held over me, but either way, the pieces were open and clear, non intrusive, and could be interpreted in a way that one could naturally follow the inner logic of Williamson’s head. Williamson’s work is familiar, yet at the same time feels forward, a notion that is highly relevant in pop-culture when achieved this seamlessly. While Frieze had plenty to say about the trends running amok in the art world, Williamson’s work reminded us of the value of simple and concise aesthetics.

Monochromatic, structured, yet drapey and sculptural at the same time, Williamson’s works are meant to be materially ambiguous, focusing primarily on the form. Her use of colour gives hard structures fluidity. High Tilt, featured above, sums up her work perfectly — just the right amount of tension and balance.”

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During the weekend we took some time out from the fair to meet one of the Project’s artists – Joel Kyack. Joel created an interactive piece called “All Games are Lost” – a creative take on fun fair games.

The Mulberry-sponsored Frieze Projects is a not-for-profit initiative featuring commissioned artworks around the outdoor space of Randall’s Island, which are accessible to all visitors to the area.

Find out more

The artists involved with Frieze Projects attended the dinner, held at The Crown restaurant on New York’s Upper East Side, joining guests Lana Del Rey (who sang an exclusive set for our guests), Alexa Chung, Lauren Remington-Platt and the Courtin-Clarins sisters Claire, Jenna, Virginie and Prisca as well as Frieze Projects curator Cecilia Alemani.

Emma carried the Double Handled Lily in Flame Exotic Tweed – on a sneaky outing before its main release during late summer. Lana carried her namesake Del Rey in Black, which is launching soon.

Lana Del Rey and Emma Hill

Alexa Chung and Emma Hill

Frieze Projects curator Cecilia Alemani

Derek Blasberg and Alexa Chung

Jenna, Virginie, Prisca and Claire Courtin-Clarins

Fashion Editor Vanessa Friedman

Stefano Tonchi and Emma Hill

Lauren Remington Platt

Albert Hammond Junior and Emma Hill

President of Bergdorf Goodman Josh Schulman and Jim Conley

Alexa Chung and Mark Holgate

Lana Del Rey sings

Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp

Emma Hill

Alexa Chung

Shala Monroque

The dinner was held in honour of Frieze Project artists

Ready for dinner