5 places in paris for people who love design.

one of my favourite restaurant interiors in paris. le dauphin was designed by rem koolhaas and clément blanchet at oma, the same studio behind fondazione prada in milan. it is also the only restaurant in france designed by rem koolhaas and oma.

the room is basically an obsession with white marble, mirrors and reflection squeezed into a tiny space. it should feel cold. somehow it does not. what i like is that it never feels like a restaurant that hired a famous architect to look designed. it feels like an architectural idea that happens to serve dinner.

paris 11e·131 avenue parmentier·restaurant

if i am already sending you to lafayette anticipations, i am also sending you downstairs. pluto feels like part of the institution rather than the restaurant somebody remembered to add. the space was designed by studio hugo haas with custom wood furniture and frama chairs, and it sits inside the rem koolhaas architecture of the foundation.

i like that the room is considered without becoming precious. you can have lunch, stay for coffee, go upstairs to the exhibition, come back down, meet someone. good design is sometimes just the reason a place lets you behave naturally for longer.

paris 4e·9 rue du plâtre·inside lafayette anticipations

this is where i would send someone who says they love french design but mostly means they can recognise a perriand chair. the 300 square metre gallery was designed by jean nouvel and specialises in jean prouvé, charlotte perriand, pierre jeanneret, jean royère and le corbusier.

go slowly. the useful thing here is learning the difference between recognising an icon and actually looking at how it was made. the gallery also holds the largest collection of jean prouvé's demountable houses, which makes furniture and architecture feel like parts of the same sentence.

paris 11e·5 rue des taillandiers·mon to sat, 10h to 19h

i normally lose interest the second somebody tells me a house is important. maison la roche survives the word. le corbusier and pierre jeanneret designed it between 1923 and 1925 as both a home and a gallery for collector raoul la roche.

the fun part is that colour, furniture, light and circulation are all being used to manipulate how you move through the rooms. this is where le corbusier first developed the idea of the promenade architecturale. it is basically an argument about interiors that you have to walk through.

paris 16e·tue to sat, 10h to 18h·online booking required

this one is still on my own list, so i am not pretending to report back yet. but it is much more specifically a chanel project than the name initially suggests. founded by chanel in paris in 2021, le19m brings together 11 maisons d'art and nearly 700 artisans and experts working across the métiers d'art of fashion and decoration.

the history is the part that makes me want to see it. chanel began acquiring specialist ateliers in 1985 to preserve and develop their savoir-faire, and le19m feels like the architectural conclusion of that idea. lesage, montex, lemarié, maison michel, massaro, goossens and the other resident maisons work with chanel and with other fashion and design studios. this is less a brand museum than an ecosystem built around the people who make the things fashion eventually turns into an image.

even the name is doing too much, which i approve of. 19 is both the arrondissement and one of gabrielle chanel's favourite numbers. the m stands for mode, mains, métiers d'art and maisons. rudy ricciotti wrapped the building in a concrete façade that reads almost like an enormous vertical textile weave. if architecture is allowed to be literal, this is a fairly convincing case for it.

paris 19e·2 place skanderbeg·open only for the current programme