Anyone capable of conceiving five hundred white shirts each season certainly isn’t lacking in imagination. French designer Anne Fontaine has done just this, twice a year for the past fifteen years (that’s fifteen thousand white shirts) and carved out a very considerable niche for her trademark wardrobe staple, opening sixty-five shops worldwide in the process.

2007 marks a move away from her signature garments, and the designer’s first foray into the world of beauty, with opening of the Anne Fontaine Spa in the retail haven of Rue Saint-Honore, Paris. Designed in collaboration with Andree Putman, the challenge was how to translate such a strong brand identity from fashion into beauty, heightened by the fact that the spa was to be housed in the basement of her new fashion boutique.

Anne Fontaine

Click here to see more of the spa.

The pair fell upon water as a unifying concept. A Hainaut bluestone wall forms the backdrop for a waterfall over both shop and spa storeys. Urban and organic elements, trademark aspects of Fontaine’s fashion ethos, are subtly combined in the interior design of the space: the flooring is divided between parquet and white resin, a vast glass and wood case displays cuts from Fontaine’s material archives and descending the stairs to the spa the combination of wood, stone and water gives the impression of entering an exclusive urban grotto.

Taking their cue from the natural materials Fontaine uses for her shirts, the signature treatments available in the spa go by the names of cotton, silk and wild bamboo. Tying in with the opening of the spa, Fontaine also launched two cosmetic lines – Natural Linen and Silk Performance – which provide the core materials in the treatments, together with a wide range of essential oils. The inspiration behind the series of luxury treatments comes from the designer’s time spent in the Amazonian rainforests as a teenager, hence the very ritualistic names of the treatments on offer, such as Amazonian Baptism or Bath of the Goddess.