Inside Mathieu Lehanneur’s new Paris studio

Since the beginning of his career, Mathieu Lehanneur has been the definition of multidisciplinary. He’s created interactive street furniture for the city of Paris, conceived speculative electric cars for Renault, designed marble tables for Carpenters Workshop Gallery, and led the design team at Huawei. Lehanneur is the sort of designer that can easily meld his sensibility to any brief, dreaming up ideas for wildly disparate sectors like it’s his second nature. One of his most recent commissions came from the world of sport, when the International Olympic Committee chose his torch design for the Paris 2024 Games. 

Mathieu Lehanneur’s new HQ

With the unveiling of his latest endeavour, a gleaming new HQ in Paris’ Ivry-sur-Seine neighbourhood, Lehanneur plans to narrow his focus and build up his practice as an independent brand in its own right. Lehanneur and his team moved into the former electricity station – an 800 sq m, two-storey, gabled roof brick building that more closely resembles a schoolhouse than an industrial plant – nearly a year ago after a months-long hunt for a more spacious headquarters. Accessible only via a small alleyway, the building sits sandwiched between high-rises and a football pitch that offers a dynamic backdrop (and boisterous soundtrack). ‘We’re like a small island,’ says Lehanneur, sitting at his oblong, black-stained desk, which serves as a plinth for piles of sketches, samples and various ephemera.

When searching for a new space, Lehanneur wanted somewhere that would foster the firm’s new way of working; after a fruitful career spent collaborating with blue chip companies and high-end galleries, Lehanneur had decided it was time to break course. Although he loved the challenges associated with client work, the clash of priorities between stakeholders often left him dissatisfied. 

The solution? To bring it all in-house. His studio would take on fewer new commissions, instead developing and producing everything themselves. ‘When you work with a brand or gallery, you have no contact with the final client, who will eventually live with the object,’ he says. ‘And I need that connection because I learn so much from it.’

Just outside Lehanneur’s new office door sits a dedicated gallery space, which hosts several of his recent furniture projects, while down a short set of stairs is a material library and workspace. There, he can work with clients to customise commissions, or simply just bounce around new ideas with the team. 

At the moment, they are playing with a new lighting system, which pairs a frosted blown-glass bulb with a rod wrapped in sea green decorative passementerie cord. Not for a particular project, Lehanneur says, just to experiment. ‘Being autonomous gives you the freedom to go where you want with your business,’ he muses. ‘You have to be ready for failures, but you also have to be ready for potential success.’

Designing the Olympic Torch

However, the new business model hasn’t completely precluded new collaborations. He understandably made an exception for the Olympic committee, which chose his design for the torch from an open call in December 2022. ‘It’s so rare to have the opportunity to work on an object that is a part of history, that’s both a ritual and politic object,’ he says. 

Since the torch couldn’t be more than 2kg (so that even the youngest racers could carry it with ease), and needed to be completely weather- and accident-proof, Lehanneur and his team worked with ‘an engineer that specialises in kerosene stoves for extreme alpine adventurers,’ he says.

The final design is almost exactly the same as the initial sketches: a champagne-coloured, stainless steel sceptre with an upper portion formed of streamlined, matte brushed metal, and lower half polished and moulded to resemble rippling water, an element Lehanneur says was inspired by the Seine, which will play an essential role in the opening ceremony. The only additions were a small vertical slit allowing the flame to burn horizontally in high winds, as well as a circular air inlet at the centre that Lehanneur has incorporated into the Paris 2024 logo. 

In just under a year from now, the torch will be making its way from Greece, where the lighting ceremony is held, to the French capital. But for now, it’s sitting on a small table in the new studio, waiting for its big moment.

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