Treasure Hunting
Travel guidebooks for the design geek with a serious case of wanderlust.
With the World Wide Web, and now, an endless number of travel applications, at your disposal, the once-essential printed travel guidebook has been condemned as backward, that is, unless they offer more than your predictable list of attractions or tourist-frequented destinations. Remember when you stumbled upon the coolest hidden local bar six months into your overseas stay, or when your best friend's friend took you to all those offbeat gems you never ever read about in standard guidebooks? Well, we've collated for you a worthy selection of travel guidebooks that does just that, compiled and written by local residents comprising designers, who's-who of the party scene, and then some - essentially, people who have lived and breathed theses cities and who offer you atypical travel trails that you will be more than proud to boast about to the rest of them boring, uninformed travellers upon your return.
A Weird And Wonderful Guide To Barcelona
Right from the contents page, the Lecool series of guidebooks excites with their unconventional template. Categorised not by typologies or areas, but hours of the day recommended for each activity, it reads more like a personal travel journal, with insider suggestions like playing pool in the dome of a former theatre, or getting a haircut in "the penthouse flat of a modernisme building...equipped with a cocktail bar". All these suggestions are scribbled as tongue-in-cheek rambling against irreverent photographs. Basically, if you want stories to guide your travel instead of lists of sugar-coated, PR-prescribed information, this guidebook is for you. An offset of the Lecool successful online weekly city guide, the guidebooks are available for Amsterdam, London, Lisbon and Madrid, with more in the works. The pioneer Barcelona version was recently updated in November 2010 and is suitably complemented with hand-drawn maps and a directory with succinct and humorous one-liners.
Melbourne Design Guide
Inspired by the Lecool travel guidebooks, The Melbourne Design Guide is a more polite and design-centric version of its European counterpart, and an insightful treasure trove of leads to the city's famed design culture and little neighbourhoods. The popular guide was first released in 2006, followed by a similar Sydney version a year later. Updated in 2009, the 450-page tome consists of two parts: the first, The Explore Section, details design spaces and art and food recommendations by creative residents. The second, The Learn Section, is selectively curated to introduce local designers and behind-the-scene snippets of their work. Find out local secrets, like where to buy the works of Melbourne ceramist, Bridget Bodenham, or where you can muse about architecture over beer in a car park sheltered by umbrellas.
Tokyo By Tokyo
Which guidebook will tell you where to visit "real restaurants featured in manga", "modernist spots where the pre-war esprit of high society lives on", or "memories of places where strangers gather"? Published by boutique hotel, Claska, Tokyo by Tokyo is an engaging collection of over 200 recommended places and activities by 70 savvy, creative Tokyoites. Contributors include film director Makoto Sasaki and designer, Masamichi Katayama, of famed interior design firm Wonderwall, as well as foreign residents like Postalco's Ike Abelson. Each recommendation in the bilingual guide comes with Google Map coordinates for fuss-free navigation. To simplify this even further, an app version was recently released in November 2010. In thorough Japanese fashion, it comes with an added bookmark function for your favourite spots, with distances from your current location is displayed to ensure you don't miss out on any of the real Tokyo experience.
Amsterdam: Made By Hand
In light of the recent attention given to craft, it is essential that we make a mention of Amsterdam: Made by Hand, written by stylist and photographer Pia Jane Bijkerk. The Australian, having made her home on a boat in Amsterdam, creates ten "wanders", or routes through the historic city of canals and cobbled streets, quietly celebrating the artisanal to bring us to the ateliers and craft boutiques she regularly seeks out for styling props. In the same style as her first Paris guide, Amsterdam: Made By Hand reads like a glimpse into each area rather than an extensive shop list, featuring a selection of spaces filled with handmade jewellery, home furnishings, antiques and collectibles. And after your trip is done, the beautiful photographs and narratives of the shops and their owners make for a wonderful keepsake to remind you of your own journey.
Superguide
If you consider yourself a design-savvy globetrotter, shame on you if you have not heard of the Superguides - a portable, elaborated version of its online presence, Superfuture. An "urban cartography for global experts", it profiles major cities with über-cool content. Although the page formats leans towards the more traditional compared to the other guides mentioned, the concept is anything but. Literally available at the click of your mouse in the form of PDF downloads you personally print out, they contain, among other information, suggested daily itineraries, reviews by informed design experts and detailed, customisable maps. And the best thing? The guides are regularly updated - some monthly and others, like the Shanghai Superguide, quarterly, preventing shop-closure disappointments. In keeping with the times, a GPS-based app of the Tokyo guide was released in August 2010, a move that will hopefully be applied to the other guides.
Text by Luo Jingmei
Images courtesy of respective publishers unless otherwise stated