What’s Happening: Malls are dying, the loneliness epidemic is surging, and major design retailers like Ikea and Muji may have a solution for both.

The Download: First, Ikea downsized to go downtown, opening compact city-center stores that ditched circuitous layouts and pared down its extensive product offerings. Now, the Swedish design giant known for its sprawling big-box stores and affordable flat-pack furniture is headed back to the suburbs with a newfangled ambition: rescue the struggling shopping mall. Once a titan of American consumerism, malls have fallen from grace owing to plummeting foot traffic, the conveniences of e-commerce, and a retailer exodus to strip malls. Developers are exploring out-of-the-box solutions to repurpose what are essentially warehouses surrounded by acres of pavement, leading to malls welcoming healthcare facilities, affordable housing, and marijuana farms in former Foot Lockers and Hot Topics.

Where does Ikea come in? Ingka Group, which operates most Ikea stores, has assembled a mall empire spanning China, Europe, and the U.S. Its strategy involves expanding its portfolio by anchoring struggling malls with Ikea flagships and populating vacant stores with non-retail amenities designed to lure would-be shoppers. Malls are failing, but retailers and consumers are gravitating toward dynamic shopping destinations in what Cameron Baird, an SVP at San Francisco real estate firm Avison Young, describes as a “flight to quality.” Instead of simply buying things and leaving, he tells the WSJ, “people are looking for a lifestyle center.” They can rent desks at Hej! Workshop, a shared-office space fully decked out with Ikea products, and grab Swedish meatballs at Saluhall, the company’s new Nordic food hall concept. Both are slated to open in an Ikea-anchored mall in Downtown San Francisco in the spring.

Ikea isn’t the only design retailer reinvigorating dreary public spaces. Muji has stepped up to breathe new life into Japan’s sparsely populated housing complexes known as danchi, which the postwar middle class once viewed as aspirational but soon became stigmatized as the country’s wealth increased. The minimalist brand has been renovating danchi units for upwards of a decade, stripping them of dated fixtures and tattered tatami flooring to attract younger residents, but is now widening its scope to common spaces and surrounding facilities. Working with the government to incentivize businesses to open on nearby shotengai, or shopping streets, Muji hopes the projects will also tackle the loneliness epidemic. The first, Hanamigawa danchi in Tokyo’s Chiba prefecture, is slated to house 21,500 people upon completion this year.

In Their Own Words: UR, the semi-public entity in charge of some danchi properties across Japan, recognizes the solution involves more than clean-lined minimalism. “The project started with an idea to renovate common spaces in the same style as Muji’s apartment units, and to build a community,” Irimura Makoto of UR’s housing management department, told Bloomberg. “For the place to become attractive to people, it’s necessary to have some kind of community activity and liveliness.”

Surface Says: Well, now we never have to worry about the death of Mallsoft.

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In the heart of Madrid’s bustling Justicia District, Plantea Estudio has fashioned Acid Shop into a sanctuary of warmth, calm, and quiet. The studio’s work on the coffee shop and bakery walks the line between a renovation and restoration and is deeply rooted in the former gem shop’s character. Bronze window detailing frames a cozily intimate vignette: original black terrazzo flooring was unearthed and repaired, while existing wooden shelves were sanded and refinished in warm tones. An application of gray lime wash bathes the interior in soft light.

Thoroughly contemporary finishings, including furniture by Frama, and light fixtures by Frama, Vitra, and Ferm Living, all balance out the shop’s period touches. Past the coffee bar, a dramatically illuminated lounge lends itself well to enjoying long conversations, or perhaps a book, over cardamom bullars, cinnamon rolls, croissants, and monthly pastry specials like Swedish semla and chocolate sea salt tarts.

On a recent trip to Madrid, the musician St. Vincent and visual artist Alex Da Corte visited the Museo del Prado and became transfixed by Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings. Created at the end of his life, around 1820, the works reflect the Spanish painter’s embittered attitude toward humanity through dim lighting and haunting themes like a Titan feasting on bodies or a coven cowering before a goat-headed devil. “You see Saturn eating his sons, the witch’s mask,” St. Vincent, whose birth name is Annie Clark, told NME in an interview. “We walked into this claustrophobic room and saw the paintings that Goya made at the end of his life. He didn’t necessarily want them seen, but these were paintings that he had in his house. Alex and I looked at each other and it was electric.”

Goya’s macabre meditations inspired the visuals for St. Vincent’s seventh studio album All Born Screaming, which arrives on April 26. Da Corte’s visuals grace both the cover and the video for lead single “Broken Man,” in which flames rise and fall along the edges of the singer’s figure while she jerkily dances to industrial guitar riffs and menacing lyrics like “On the street, I’m a king-sized killer / I can make your kingdom come.” The record, she describes, is “black, white, and all the colors in the fire, because it’s about life and death. Life and death is pretty binary—you’re alive or you’re dead.” It’s an austere departure from Da Corte’s typically vivid films and sculptures that play on pop culture, but the effect is compelling enough to see what else the duo has in store.

Years spent dreaming up bespoke pieces for lavish projects like Portuguese villas, Victorian homes in London, and art-filled mega-yachts motivated Marion Stora to branch out and launch her debut furniture collection that reflects the warm and harmonious atmosphere of her interiors. The result is Open Acts, a tightly curated group of furnishings that draw from the innovative woodworking of Pierre Chapo but are imbued with contemporary Parisian sensibilities.

Last week, New York’s society set turned out at Lincoln Center to support the New York City Ballet–affiliated school of dance. The evening, with support from Chanel, honored Suki Schorer and Coco Kopelman and treated 1,400 guests to an evening-length performance by School of American Ballet students, with a finale by alumni and New York City Ballet principal dancers Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia. Afterward, 500 attendees were joined by City Ballet dancers on the gilded promenade of David H. Koch theater for dinner, wine by Epoch Estate Wines, and dancing to celebrate $1.7 million raised for the school’s next generation of dancers.

When was it? Feb. 26

Where was it? David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center

Who was there? Arie Kopelman, Jonathan Stafford, Wendy Whelan, Jill Kargman, Joshua Greene, Sophie Sumner, Evan Mock, Fe Fendi, Paola Saracino Fendi, Chun Wai Chan, Unity Phelan.

When: Until March 30

Where: Grimm, New York

What: White continues exploring the romanticized American dream with his signature wryness by bringing its psychological paranoia to the fore. In this new series of vignettes, a female character seeks spiritual enlightenment through television and the TV Guide, documenting her journey from the living room into the woods, where she uses the guides as a sacrament to help ground herself with the rhythms of the natural world. In doing so, he lampoons our collective media obsession and the endless churn of content, probing beyond the commercialized facade of the TV screen to figure out what the agenda behind entertainment truly is.

The Robern brand was born in 1968 and has since become an American tradition. To answer customers’ increasingly upscale tastes, Rosa and Bernie Meyers reinvented the standard medicine cabinets and vanities of the day—from cold, steel, utilitarian—into coveted décor.

Surface Says: There’s long been a dearth of aesthetically inclined vanities and medicine cabinets, but Robern’s are fit to complement thoughtfully furnished interiors elsewhere in the home. With options for dwellings from pieds-à-terre to rural farmhouses, there’s something for everyone in the fabricator’s curated lineup.

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