I’ll be honest: Harland Miller looks a little scary. And his house, a 16th-century cottage in Norfolk, with its low ceilings, gothic details and animalia, is a little like a lair. At first I didn’t associate the louche bohemian with the clean, spare works that delight the art cognoscenti. Of course, when he gets talking, the sardonic Yorkshireman begins to make more sense. “When I first came here I didn’t like the house, but I liked the vibe,” he tells Beatrice Hodgkin, who visits him in advance of an exhibition at the Design Museum.

Miller’s Penguin book cover-inspired works have become a flex. No contemporary billionaire home is complete without one of his titles – Women Without Men, I Am The One I’ve Been Waiting For – hanging on their walls. But Harland himself is rather ambivalent about his classics. As he tells Hodgkin, most artists “probably dream of being defined by something. However... When you have been defined by something you do sort of want to say: ‘Here’s what I’m doing now.’” Nevertheless, his love for “words on paintings” is unabated. He is still obsessed with type. This visit offers a sneak peek at a new series of paintings, due to go on exhibition in Munich next year. 

Flynn McGarry was once dubbed the food world’s Justin Bieber, a strangely precocious child who was serving guests at his pop-up when he was just 11 years old. Now a 26-year-old veteran, McGarry has opened another restaurant, Cove, bringing the West Coast flavours of his childhood to the dining tables of New York. For this issue’s How To Host It, he wobbles through an early service to test out the kitchen’s flow. It’s good to discover that even seasoned professionals get flustered when dishing up for family and friends.

A continuing preoccupation: are you doing the right kind of exercise? Different schools advocate for different methods, though the longevity experts concur that we should be doing at least 150 minutes of vigorous exercise per week. Alex Bilmes, now approaching the halfway point in his longevity experiment, has been getting busy with the press-ups and kettlebells. See what happened when he upped the ante and took up HIIT.

Lastly, to Burgundy, one of the quieter corners of the world. The French region remains somewhat blessed by “undertourism”, says the FT’s innovation editor John Thornhill, who bought a small house there in the 2000s and has been an ardent admirer ever since. Those who consider Burgundy sleepy, he argues, have completely missed the point. For Thornhill, the landscape is the embodiment of the good life: a terroir of fine wines, an abbey (that features in Cyrano de Bergerac, no less) and – for he is an FT editor – a wealth of cycling paths… 

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THREE MORE STORIES TO READ THIS WEEK

Effortless men’s style with Eliot Sumner With Sting as a father, the model and singer knows reinvention is a necessity  Which, in truth, is your vermouth? Sweet, saline, dry or more developed: there’s a bottle for every taste this season Calling all Jean-Michel Frank fans: these trinkets are for you Parisian proportions meet New York polish in a new range by Alyssa Kapito and Savette

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