The Beirut-born, Paris-based architect has beaten a list of top candidates to redesign the museum’s Western Range. It will be the latest in a series of compelling creations which ‘get all the senses engaged’

The British Museum, behind its purposeful and orderly front, gets more and more complicated the deeper in you go. It has grand spaces – the white stone and shadowless light of the Norman Foster-designed Great Court, the classical halls designed by its original architect Robert Smirke to display statues of Pharaonic scale, and the Parthenon-sized Duveen Gallery, built in the 1930s to house the marble sculptures from the famous temple. Beyond and between them is a tissue of spaces and passages, hard to navigate, like the back corridors and lumber rooms of a stately home, in which exquisite vases and reliefs languish in dim cases and on dull walls, over floors tiled in the bureaucratic beige of a 1970s revamp.

Overhead there’s a hodgepodge of skylights and valley gutters, accreted over time, prone to leaks, which doesn’t strengthen the museum’s case when they resist calls to repatriate those marbles, and other exhibits acquired by dubious means. Heating and ventilation systems are antiquated. For all of which reasons the museum would very much like to renew and partly rebuild the Western Range, which houses some of its most famous objects and accounts for 35% of its total area.

• Australian Ryan Peake served five years in jail for assault
• Former Rebels gang member wins New Zealand Open

Former motorcycle gang member Ryan Peake described his New Zealand Open triumph as a life-changing moment after victory booked his spot at the Open Championship.

The Australian claimed a one-shot win at Millbrook Resort in Queenstown, shooting a final-round 66 to finish on 23 under par. Peake’s victory comes after he served five years in prison for assault when he was a part of the Rebels biker gang.

Sticky onion tarts and sweet potatoes that can’t be rushed

There’s a pan of onions on the hob. Slices of fat, brown-skinned onions, now peeled and sliced and on their long, long journey from crisp, white and pungent to sweet, golden and soft enough to crush between thumb and forefinger.

I am not exaggerating when I say the process is slow. Try to hurry, or forget the occasional stir, and your onions will end up hard and singed. Take your time and they will emerge sticky and golden, with the bonus of a thin layer of sweet goo on the bottom of the pan.