France

Architecture / 15 Jun 2018

What’s next for Kengo Kuma and Associates?

Based in Tokyo and Paris, Kengo Kuma and Associates is known for its large-scale timber architecture inspired by Japanese construction techniques and styles – the stadium for Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic games is an example of the lengths and widths to which the studio...

Art / 6 Jun 2018

The contemporary art museum making waves on a French Riviera island

A visit to the newly launched contemporary art museum, the Fondation Carmignac hidden away on the island of Porquerolles along the French Riviera, is somewhat of an odyssey, which is exactly what its founders intended. ‘It’s a kind of striptease...

Design / 17 Nov 2016

Raw-Edges, Jasper Morrison, Patricia Urquiola and more get a theatrical backdrop

‘No designer creates a piece of furniture just to see it shown in a museum,’ says Constance Rubini, curator at Musée des Arts Décoratifs et du Design in Bordeaux. ’The objects are intended to have a life in the...

Lifestyle / 28 Sep 2016

Hermès gallops in with a new equestrian themed fragrance

Horses and Hermès go together like... well, like a horse and carriage, you might say. So the latest full-scale launch from this most refined of French luxury brands marks a return to the company’s equestrian heartlands. ‘Galop d’Hermès’ is the...

Art / 15 Aug 2016

Parallel universe: Laurent Grasso’s beguiling reinvention of a Corsican Beaux-Arts museum

The Palais Fesch, an imposing 19th century building on the waterfront of the Corsican capital of Ajaccio, houses France’s largest collection of Italian paintings outside the Louvre. There are works by Botticelli, Michelangelo, Titian, Veronese and many others – interspersed...

Travel / 11 Aug 2016

The scaffolding has finally come off the Ritz in Paris

Costing €400m, the four-year top-to-toe refurbishment of the Ritz required the hotel to close for the first time since it opened in 1898, during which architect Thierry Despont overhauled not just the plumbing, heating and electrics, but he reduced the...

Design / 22 Jul 2016

Dynamic duo: Atelier Sauvage explain why two minds are better than one

Paul Demarquet and Albane Salmon met when sharing a bench at Paris’ École Boulle. As well as a workspace, the dynamic duo shared an upbeat, positive attitude towards design that made them perfect partners. ’We’re both from the south of...

Art / 19 Jul 2016

Sky high: Venet Foundation welcomes two iconic installations by James Turrell

A temple of light; a temple of silence. James Turrell’s new installations – collectively grouped under the title ’Inspire the Light’ – at the Venet Foundation are one (well, two) of a kind. Staged in the middle of sumptuous Mediterranean...

Art / 11 Jul 2016

Le voyage à Nantes: western French city becomes an epicenter of eccentricity

’Nantes has changed, very much so,’ says architect Thomas Cantin, who has watched his home city’s creative community flourish over the past 12 years. Cantin forms part of Nantes-based artist collective Fichtre, just one of a growing number of...

Art / 8 Jul 2016

À Ciel Ouvert: Felice Varini transforms the MaMo into a series of optical illusions

Felice Varini has applied his optical illusion art on such a wide range of international buildings and spaces over the last three decades — from gothic churches to commercial plazas — so the opportunity to confront the work of Le...

Art / 6 Jul 2016

’Deus Ex Machina’: Katerina Jebb rips up the photographer’s rule book

Filled with magnetic layers of chiaroscuro and a seductive sense of negative space, the British artist Katerina Jebb’s photographs are made with a digital flatbed scanner and break almost all the rules of traditional photography. She calls them ‘scan-ography’. They form the...

Art / 7 Jun 2016

Water works: Olafur Eliasson creates a deluge at Versailles

Investing in the great expanse that is the Chateau de Versailles and its sprawling gardens is no mean feat, as the environment-focused Danish-Icelandic visual artist Olafur Eliasson found out. The artist, who has showcased his work around the world –...

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