HTSI editor’s letter: cleaner living with Courteney Cox

Courteney Cox is many things – a brilliant comic actress for one. As the uptight, controlling, obsessive Monica in Friends, Cox had to deliver a less sympathetic set of characteristics, and yet Cox’s clever blend of quiet self-deprecation and bonkers energy saw her emerge as one of the more vulnerable and fondly remembered pals. Likewise, Cox’s post-Friends career trajectory has been intriguing and unexpected. This month, she reprises her role as the shellacked, pugnacious Gale Weathers in the horror franchise Scream, the only character to have appeared in every iteration of the film. 

Cox doesn’t go for easy roles, nor play coquettish popsies – she leans towards the kooky, the curious, the oddball. At home, she’s also full of surprises: follow her on Instagram and you’ll discover that she’s an accomplished pianist and musician, a pretty good singer, that she does a lot of cooking and loves a dorky viral challenge. For this issue, she spoke to Jackie Daly about her latest venture, a range of domestic natural cleaning products called Homecourt she claims are so refined and gentle she would use them on her skin. It is just one new brand in a burgeoning market that is anticipated to be worth some $13.2bn by 2030. But Cox must have the edge in this new luxe cleaning game – the idea of neat-freak Monica bringing out a range of products is, after all, a marketer’s dream. Cox is deadly serious about her ambitions and commitment to the Homecourt cause, and to convert us to the ideology, she gives us a tour of her very tranquil, very tasteful and very tidy LA home. 

The architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron would surely approve of her holistic vision of modern living. Despite having created some of the world’s most complicated, dynamic structures, the Swiss duo are preoccupied by what can augment existing urban space. Many of their projects are governed by the established infrastructure: “You need to understand the city as a social system and not introduce something alien to it,” observed de Meuron at a forum three years ago.

The most brilliant artistic visions only improve with age

Now the focus of an upcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, tracing the evolution of some of their 600 projects, the duo discuss the changing city with HTSI and what we want from properties today. They find us less evolved than we might think. “The ’60s fantasies of what the home of the future might look like, such as Archigram’s idea we’d be living in a bubble, have just not happened,” says Herzog to Lisa Freedman in an exclusive interview. “Even surrounded by mobile phones, humans still love lofty spaces and cave-like cosy rooms.”

Humans, it seems, are comfortable with the familiar; far more conservative in our appetites than we might first appear. Neither have we moved on all that far sartorially. This week sees Andy Harrington and Jermaine Daley shooting that most perennial of wardrobe classics: the summer stripe. As groundbreaking as a summer floral, the stripe remains a constant feature of the wardrobe, and with good reason – it looks as chic, fresh and elegant as ever in our shoot. 

Incidentally, stripes are also a major component of a new exhibition at the Musée National Picasso-Paris where, to mark the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death, the museum has undergone a major rehang under the artistic direction of Paul Smith. As part of a motif running throughout the huge exhibition space, Smith has used bold graphic stripes on many of the gallery walls, creating a modern backdrop against which the masterpieces really pop. If you are in the Marais in the next few months, I urge you to visit. It’s a cool affirmation that the most brilliant, brave artistic vision only improves with age. 

@jellison22