The Collectors: David Prior
At his home in Milan, the founder of Prior has fruit trees, seeds, plants, and a kitchen garden with herbs and flowers
With his culturally driven travel company, Prior, which now includes the podcast Traveling Through, David Prior spends much of his time on the road, hopping from one exotic location to the next. However, he’s also excited to return to his home in Milan, where he’s cultivated an expansive terrace with views of the Duomo and the Alps. It’s there that he sees the output from his collection of seeds and plants, including fruit trees (15 varieties of citrus alone), a kitchen garden bordered with herbs, and flowers such as Magnolia grandiflora, osmanthus, and dogwood.
“Sometimes the best collections, particularly related to travel, are the ones that you don’t even realize you’re gravitating toward always,” says Prior, who likes to start his visit to a new destination by heading to a market to get a sense of local ingredients and traditions.
Site specific: “When plants are from a certain place, I feel you can travel through them because they belong to that area and environment for a reason. I’ve recently been looking at all the radicchios of the Veneto; each one is named after a different town such as Castelfranco and Treviso.”
Green thumb: “I thought I would be terrible at gardening, because I’m not patient. But the terrace faces exactly south and it’s northern Italy, so it’s like a Jack-and-the-beanstalk veranda. I could have fed a Greek village with the cucumbers and tomatoes I grew.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Late Fall Issue in the section “The Collectors.” Subscribe to the magazine.