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It’s a sleepy August morning when I meet husband-and-wife design duo Mafalda Muñoz and Gonzalo Machado at their gallery Machado-Muñoz in Madrid’s Justicia, the fashionable barrio with a similar feel to Manhattan’s West Village. 

Muñoz and Machado met as teenagers in Madrid. Together for 16 years, they have been married for 11 and are parents to two children. They share a passion for design that was nurtured throughout their childhoods: Muñoz’s late father Paco established his design firm Casa & Jardin in 1951 (at its zenith it utilised the skills of more than 300 artisans) and eight years later founded the furniture company Darro. Many consider him to be the founder of modern Spanish design.

The gallery opened in May with a soft-launch party: it’s what Muñoz calls “an evolution” of the gallery of the same name the pair launched 10 years ago with a focus on contemporary design. The couple have a close, almost symbiotic connection, and there’s also a lot of laughter. “We are together on everything,” says Muñoz. “My parents used to work together too, so it was kind of natural.” The original gallery was about to move to a new city space when the Covid-19 pandemic struck and it was forced to close. But this did not stall the couple’s creative output, and their interior-design business Casa Muñoz has continued to thrive. Among its projects are the apartment of Spanish model Eugenia Silva, an Ibiza townhouse, the restaurant at the Fondation Beyeler art museum in Switzerland and the Casa Taberna hotel and restaurant in Pedraza, Spain, which is run by Muñoz’s half-sister, Samantha Vallejo-Nágera. 

Reopening the gallery after a five-year hiatus has allowed the pair to reflect on their singular perspective. “We feel more mature now,” says Muñoz. Machado adds: “At the time, we were fascinated with the contemporary design world. We wanted to give a voice to Spanish design. Now we want to be without restriction.” The curation at their space spans 20th-century classical design, antiquities, art and objets. “We feel that this is the kind of gallery we would like to visit. A place where you can be amused by an artefact, an artwork or a piece of furniture,” says Machado. “It’s more about our point of view on the arts.” 

The upholsterer we currently work with made my cradle

That viewpoint has garnered an illustrious following. “Gonzalo and Mafalda have an extraordinary sense of taste and definitive style, whether related to their work, their home or how they entertain guests,” says Marta Ortega Pérez, the non-executive chair of Inditex, Zara’s parent company, who is a friend of the couple. “I never fail to be blown away by their exquisite personal touch and encyclopedic knowledge of art, furniture and all aspects related to interiors, as well as their individualistic flair.”

This flair is evident as we walk through the gallery, a peaceful, inspiring but very comfortable space. We sink into woven cord Audoux Minet armchairs to appreciate the Machado- and Muñoz-designed furniture, placed beside both originals and re-editions by Paco Muñoz. Beside us is a vintage Danish cabinet displaying handblown glass orbs and a simple lamp, which catches my eye. Muñoz explains its provenance: “It’s a very important lamp by Paul Dupré-Lafon that was designed for Hermès. It’s one of the few with the original parchment lampshade.” The couple see the gallery as a platform to source furnishings for their interiors projects. Muñoz continues: “We can buy things for the gallery that we can later use.” 

The front half of the gallery is dedicated to rotating exhibitions. Currently displayed is the hand-carved work of Moisès Villèlia, the late Catalan sculptor known for experimenting with bamboo, and lighting by London-based designer Michael Anastassiades. His limited-edition piece from the Cheerfully Optimistic About the Future exhibition at the ICA in Milan works harmoniously with Villèlia’s mobile sculptures. “It’s different uses of the same material and we felt they work together incredibly well,” Muñoz explains.

Anastassiades refers to the pair as “passionate, absolute perfectionists”. Recalling his first meeting with them in 2015 when he was invited to participate in their inaugural exhibition, he says: “I knew from the start that what they intended to deliver was going to be of exceptional standard. We have continued to work together ever since.”

As we continue our tour, Muñoz pauses at a re-edition of her father’s stainless-steel shelves. Paco Muñoz’s legacy, an archive of more than 20,000 designs, is a frequent source of inspiration. They also have plans to relaunch the brand Darro in its entirety in the near future. Several of the craftspeople who made her father’s furniture now make the couple’s bespoke furniture. “The upholsterer we currently work with made my cradle,” Muñoz says.

With the studio and gallery, the pair’s output is prolific: they juggle 10 or so interior projects at any one time. Their time is split between two offices, one in Madrid and the other in Gstaad, Switzerland. And they keep expanding their interests. They are currently working with Belgian lighting brand Authentage on a line of architectural lights. “And we want to do faucets next,” says Machado, hinting they also have interior work in the pipeline from Madison Avenue to Madrid. 

The duo, however, bring their own talents to each project. Muñoz is a skilled interior architect, while Machado, who also studied interior design, is a successful photographer who honed his skills as an assistant for Mario Testino before establishing a career shooting editorial for magazines. He acts as the studio’s creative visualiser. “Gonzalo has special vision,” says Muñoz. “It’s super-intuitive and very impressive.”

“I’m always framing. It’s a disease,” laughs Machado, who enjoys work assignments but finds photographing his own work “torture”. His perfectionism means he sometimes refuses to release the images. Thankfully, Muñoz is more than understanding: “We think precision is one of the most important things when you create.” 

Abrdn Adviser has today (3 October) announced the appointment of Derek Smith to the newly created role of chief technology & product officer.

The CTPO role will bring together Abrdn Adviser’s technology and product teams.

Smith will be responsible for executing the technology strategy and ensuring the continuous enhancement and scalability of the Abrdn Adviser business.

He will join in November from Morningstar Wealth, where he is currently chief technology officer, a role he has held for the past two years.

His previous roles include head of engineering at Virgin Money and Lloyds Banking Group.

Smith’s appointment follows a busy few weeks on the recruitment front for Abrdn Adviser.

Last month, it announced that industry veteran Verona Kenny will join as chief distribution officer and Louise Williams as chief financial officer.

Abrdn Adviser CEO, Noel Butwell, said: “Our ambition is to deliver a market-leading proposition with exceptional client service and we’ve set out to create the best senior leadership team in the market to achieve this.

“Technology is a critical enabler in realising our goals and aligning to continuously evolving customer needs, and Derek brings a wealth of experience to the role of chief technology & product officer.

“He will lead the implementation of our strategy and next phases of platform upgrades as we embark on our next stage of growth and evolution during a period of disruption and digital transformation in the market.”

Smith added: “I am thrilled to join Abrdn Adviser at such a pivotal time.

“My passion lies in leading the creation of innovative digital solutions and journeys that empower financial advisers to deliver high-quality, personalised service to their clients.

“Together, we will build solutions with service excellence and interconnectivity at their heart, supporting advisers to navigate and thrive in the ever-evolving financial landscape with confidence.”

TOURIST attraction owners and hoteliers break their backs to get spotless reviews online, often go above and beyond to please demanding customers.

But it turns out all you really have to do is…. nothing. Because there’s a place in Wadhurst, East Sussex, with a faultless run of five-star reviews – called simply the ‘Magic Bench’.

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The pictures online show an ordinary-looking bench, a memorial one, and one that’s perhaps seen better days.

But bizarrely, it has five stars on Google and gleaming reviews spanning back three years.

Is this a targeted campaign by a bunch of locals or an in-joke among mates? Quite possibly, but three years is an impressive length of time to keep a campaign going.

Someone who visited this year wrote: “The most magical bench I’ve ever sat upon. Beautiful view, lovely serene setting and magic all round!”

They visited on a weekday, experienced no wait time, but did recommend reservation.

Other visitors wrote: “If sitting is your thing, then this bench is a must.”

Also: “A wonderful place! An absolutely magical view over the lake! The highlight in the UK.”

And: “Believe the hype! Truly magical!”

Baffled by such positive words, I had to go check out the bench for myself, to see if it truly was magical or just an online hoax.

The bench can be found by Bewl Water – a location attraction which is a great place for walks or water activities.

The best way I found to get to the bench was to park at The Old Vine pub and to follow the track there leading down to the reservoir.

The walk takes about 20 minutes, and once you reach the circular track that goes around the water and start walking anti-clockwise, you’ll find a small opening between the bushes and trees.

It was easy to find and a welcome sight after a tricky walk down in wellies.

I took a seat and waited to see if some ethereal feeling came over me.

It didn’t.

But with no other benches nearby, and after a fast-paced walk down to find it, it was a great place to perch and rest and admire the view.

The bench is tucked in close to the bushes, so feels very much secluded.

And the view is amazing overlooking the still stretch of water, with nothing but the sound of birds and the wind rustling through the leaves…

Maybe this is what everyone meant when they described the bench as “magic”.

Whether the online reviews are a joke or actually real I think is yet to be determined.

Nonetheless, if you’re looking for some beautiful walks and cosy pubs to warm up in this Autumn, I definitely recommend visiting Wadhurst – named ‘Best Place to live in the UK’ by The Sunday Times last year.

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Good morning. The answer to who the Conservatives should pick as their leader is, I think, screamingly obvious.

There’s one candidate in the race who has held two of the great offices of state, is one of the few politicians of either party to emerge from the Home Office with his reputation as a competent administrator and effective secretary of state unscathed; has shown an ability to get through tough media rounds under a series of leaders; has throughout this leadership campaign correctly identified that the first thing the Conservative party needs to fix is that too often it sounds weird, angry and unpleasant; and recognises that the party first of all needs to start sounding as if it likes the country it seeks to govern.

There’s one candidate who more than any other is singled out by politicians outside the Conservative party as the one they think would pose the greatest challenge to them.

The superior candidate in this contest — James Cleverly — further underlined his credentials by delivering the standout speech of the conference season yesterday. It electrified and energised previously gloomy MPs on the party’s moderate wing. It won the largest standing ovation at the conference and improved his odds. And, as both our reporters and the BBC’s World At One programme found, it shifted the opinion of some activists watching in the hall towards Cleverly.

And yet, and yet . . . I still feel as if this contest is ultimately going to be won by someone else, in large part because it’s such a familiar movie. A political party is turfed out of office after an economic shock. The party, given a choice between one of its more distinguished senior members and a candidate who tells it that its defeat was down to having been insufficiently radical, chooses the latter, then loses the next general election.

It’s an old, old, old story in British politics. There are two candidates offering that myth in this contest, and I suspect that history will repeat itself this time. Some thoughts on why that myth is just that — a myth — below.

Familiar fictions

In her speech to the Conservative party conference yesterday, Kemi Badenoch blamed the party’s defeat on having allowed itself to be bound “by a Treasury whose rules were written by Gordon Brown and a legal system re-engineered by Tony Blair”, adding for good measure that “when we went after Labour votes . . . we lost our own!”

There are a number of holes in this theory. The first is that the Treasury’s “rules” were quite extensively rewritten by George Osborne. He created the Office for Budget Responsibility, and by changing a lot of departmental budget lines from annual managed expenditure (AME) to departmental expenditure limits (DEL), he changed the relationship between the Treasury and spending departments in a number of important ways. It just isn’t right to say that the Treasury in 2024, or the UK’s broader fiscal arrangements, have not changed since 2010.

And the fruits of Osborne’s changes are clear to see: as chancellor, he successfully unpicked a great number of Brown’s tax rises and defunded, scrapped and rolled back much of New Labour’s policy programme. Theresa May, Andrew Lansley, Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling and Michael Gove oversaw significant changes in how policing, immigration, health, welfare policy, criminal justice and education were delivered and managed.

Opinions will vary about the effectiveness of these reforms. Personally, I think some were brilliant and others disastrous, but that’s irrelevant because regardless of what you think about the record of these Cameron-era ministers, what you can’t dispute is that a) they happened, and that b) with the exception of what Michael Gove did at the Department of Education, they can hardly be seen as continuity Blairite or New Labour measures. They were significant, far-reaching and in many cases quite rightwing policies.

The same apparently ‘leftwing’ fiscal and legal framework doesn’t seem to have stopped the Conservatives implementing Brexit, a hammer blow to an essential aspect of the Blair-Brown economic model.

Just as importantly, it is not clear when this era in which the Conservative party “went after Labour votes and lost its own” happened. In 2010 and 2015, David Cameron made a conscious effort to woo Labour and Liberal Democrat voters. In 2010 he captured more additional constituencies in a single night than any Conservative leader since Stanley Baldwin and won the first Tory parliamentary majority since John Major in 1992. In 2019, after Boris Johnson embraced net zero and promised to spend more on the public services — both measures designed to woo Labour voters — he won the party’s biggest majority since 1987.

When you look at what harmed the Conservatives, it was a combination of personal failures, the fallout from Partygate and the conscious political decision to move to the right, not to the left. The Truss experiment destroyed the party’s reputation for economic competence. Then Rishi Sunak, having enjoyed political success with a series of centrist budgets as chancellor, led the Conservatives into an election in which he distanced himself from Boris Johnson’s pledges on net zero and public services — going into an election promising further tax cuts funded by a squeeze on government spending. His opening offer in that campaign was to bring back national service — a sop to Reform voters, not Labour ones. The result was the worst defeat in Tory party history.

It is just wrong to say that the Conservatives did not make big and significant changes to the Blair-Brown model of governing, and it is wrong to say that the party lost because it wasn’t rightwing enough.

But defeated political parties tend to respond well to this argument, a slicker version of which is on offer from Robert Jenrick, the candidate most likely to benefit from it. Is a strong speech from James Cleverly enough to convince enough Tory members not to do what so many defeated parties have done over the years? Over the course of the next month, we’ll find out.

Now try this

(Georgina) One of the little, bonus pleasures of an author talk is getting to hear how other readers perceive their work and worlds. And speaking last night at Foyles, novelist Alan Hollinghurst said two close friends were deeply split over his protagonist in the Line of Beauty: Nick Guest, a gay graduate who moves into the home of a Conservative MP in the 1980s. One “absolutely detested [Nick] from the first page” while another “got behind him the whole way”. So it was fascinating to hear Hollinghurst, launching his book Our Evenings, discuss how this delights him — and his hope for readers to experience shifts in mood or genre in one story, often from the comic to the dark.

(Stephen) I’m horrified to learn that there are people who don’t side with Nick! What a terrific novel The Line of Beauty is.

Top stories today

• Knight-errant | Green energy magnate Dale Vince, who has donated more than £5mn to the Labour party, has been accused by his estranged wife of seeking to finalise their divorce in “haste” because he expects to receive an honour from Downing Street and wants to deprive her of a title.

• Delay repay | The prime minister has repaid £6,000 of gifts and commissioned a new set of principles on hospitality to be published in the updated ministerial code, following a raft of revelations about clothing and other donations to senior cabinet members.

• Conservative crossroads | Tory think-tanks are split over how to survive now the Conservatives have been ousted: should they try to shape the party in opposition or pivot to Labour?

• Fiscal rule-breaking | The chancellor faces an economy mired in low growth, ballooning national debt and creaking infrastructure. But she’s also up against her own, self-imposed fiscal rules. Can Labour find a way out of its own Budget traps?

SELF-employed workers have been urged to submit their tax returns now if they are looking to move home in the coming weeks or months.

From October 5, the majority of mortgage lenders will ask for 2023/24 tax returns as proof of earnings.

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HMRC doesn’t require the 23/34 year’s tax return to be submitted until the end of January 2025, meaning that many workers will not have yet completed it.

“Lenders see documentation over 18 months old as too historic to accept,” said Chris Sykes, technical director at mortgage broker Private Finance.

This means that anything relating to the end of the tax year April 5 2022/23 becomes out of date from October 5,

Chris said self-employed borrowers get caught out by this every year as the date isn’t advertised by lenders.

He added: “This will affect any self employed borrower looking to buy their first home, move house or remortgage over the next few months.

“Unlike an employed borrower just on a salary, a new year’s self employment figures can significantly change the borrowing upwards or downwards.”

Nicholas Mendes​​​​, technical manager at broker John Charcol agreed that this is a big issue for self-employed borrowers and they often oly become aware when starting the mortgage application process which can then create delays.

He said: “We see this issue arise quite frequently with self-employed clients—many are unaware that, even though HMRC gives them until January 2025 to file their 2023/2024 tax returns, lenders may not accept their older 2022/2023 tax returns after October 5 of this year.

“This mismatch in timelines often catches applicants off guard, leading to unexpected delays or issues in securing a mortgage.

“It’s a significant challenge because while the HMRC deadlines are designed to be lenient, lenders operate on much tighter expectations regarding financial documentation.”

If you can’t submit your tax return until later in the year, self-employed borrowers need to race against the clock to get a mortgage application in before lenders start rejecting their 2022/23 return.

Chris said there are some exceptions as a few lenders have a slightly longer window – but these are usually specialist lenders.

Specialist lenders often charge higher rates than mainstream lenders which means borrowers could end up paying more for their mortgage than they would otherwise.

The deadline for registering for a tax return for the first time for the 2023/34 year is also October 5.

There’s no penalty for registering after this, but if you haven’t signed up, filed your tax return, and paid your bill by January 31 you will be fined.

How to get a mortgage when you’re self-employed

Self-employed people can sometimes find it harder to get a mortgage as income can be more changeable than when you’re employed.

You will usually need at least two years of accounts and lenders will use these figures when deciding how big the mortgage offer will be.

Chris added: “We more often than not find self employed people don’t understand how a lender will look at their income, many think they are judged on their turnover when they are judged on their profit.”

Lenders may want to see more evidence of your income since you don’t have an employer to back you up.

This means all your accounts will need to be in order. It can be worth using an accountant if you don’t already to help you do this.

Lenders like to see consistent profits, and consistent earnings levels where possible. If there are fluctuations it needs to be understood why that is the case.

Keeping your financial documentation up to date can significantly increase your chances of a smooth mortgage application process and help avoid unnecessary stress or delays.

An independent mortgage broker can help advise on the process and give you an idea of any additional documentation you may need to get your application through.

In some cases, self-employed workers might find they need a bigger deposit and a strong credit score to get a home loan.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Asset manager Jupiter has poached a team of fund managers overseeing £800mn of global equities from a smaller rival in a bid to cut its reliance on UK stocks, which have fallen out of favour in recent years.

The FTSE 250 asset manager has recruited the investment team from Origin, a London-based investment boutique focused on global equities, including emerging markets. As part of the deal, about £800mn of assets will be transferred to Jupiter.

The move comes as Jupiter battles to cut costs and widen its range of assets. Like its mid-sized UK rivals, Jupiter’s business model has been undermined by the rise of cheaper, passive investing as well as UK investors wanting to diversify out of the London market.

The £800mn of assets Jupiter is acquiring as part of the Origin deal include funds from institutions in Europe, Canada, and Australia.

The Origin team joining Jupiter is led by Tarlock Randhawa and manages global emerging markets strategies as well as global smaller companies funds and international stocks. Origin was bought in 2011 by US firm Principal, which runs more than $500bn in assets.

Kiran Nandra, head of equities at Jupiter, said the deal meant Jupiter could start offering funds focused on global smaller companies while boosting its emerging markets exposure. Origin’s Randhawa said “the transition for our existing clients will be seamless”.

The decision to recruit the Origin team comes as Nick Payne, Jupiter’s lead investment manager for global emerging market equities, plans to leave the asset manager.

Matthew Beesley, chief executive of Jupiter, told the Financial Times over the summer that he was seeking to make “bolt-on” acquisitions but ruled out larger deals.

Jupiter manages about £50bn in assets, of which £42bn is on behalf of individual investors.

The asset manager, which counts Silchester among its largest shareholders, acquired Merian Global Investors in 2020 for £370mn under Jupiter’s previous chief executive Andrew Formica.

One of Jupiter’s top fund managers, Ben Whitmore, is set to leave at the end of the month. Whitmore, who was managing about £10bn for Jupiter, is leaving to set up his own firm.

Jupiter has poached Alex Savvides from JO Hambro Capital Management to manage Jupiter’s UK Special Situations fund.