paris design week 2026: the things i'd cross paris for

anniversary exhibitions can feel a little like linkedin inside a room.

this one doesn't.

dach&zephir went through ten years of archives, photographs, texts and materials and rebuilt the memory rather than politely displaying the résumé.

it is also inside the private boardroom at galeries lafayette champs-élysées, and apparently “normally you cannot go in there” remains one of the most efficient sentences in the french language if you want me to attend something.

paper is normally where an object begins.

here it has developed an ego.

hanji is traditional korean paper made from mulberry fibre. hanjimania gives it to designers and artists who turn it into lamps, furniture, screens, sculpture and objects large enough to make the word “paper” feel slightly dishonest.

studio ko, pierre yovanovitch, constance guisset, aline asmar d'amman, jérémy pradier-jeauneau, harry nuriev. very few people involved appear interested in restraint.

i went. loved it.

also: hôtel de la marine remains annoyingly beautiful.

good taste is mostly repetition with better lighting.

tout est en ordre is interested in the moment the rules become invisible.

swedish order, restraint and neutrality get moved around until they become faintly suspicious. fashion next to sculpture, mannequins queuing for no reason, objects behaving almost correctly.

i spent years professionally deciding what should sit next to what, so naturally i enjoy an exhibition suggesting that taste is not neutral and never was.

very validating.

where does the body end now?

glasses. jewellery. prosthesis. corset. filler. phone. filter. implant.

“natural” has become one of those words everybody uses very confidently considering nobody seems to agree on what it means.

design museum den bosch has been building a posthuman collection since 2017, which is what made me save this. not a trendy theme. an ongoing obsession.

i trust obsessions more.

this is in my top three.

i went expecting to look at anthony guerrée's furniture and ended up liking the fact that sometimes i stopped noticing which objects belonged to him at all.

the pieces are scattered through bourdelle's studios, sculptures and garden: stained glass, wood, jacquard, terracotta, furniture.

nothing screams “contemporary intervention.” it just moves in.

the stained-glass screens around the sculptures are beautiful, but i liked the studio most. moulds, old tables, new objects. everybody sharing a room without an identity crisis.

also, free.

paris occasionally apologises.

this is almost offensively tailored to me.

a professional gallery dedicated to andrée putman, inside a former school in the 7e, opens to the public for the first time.

there are archive pieces, re-editions, newer work, large reception rooms and a garden completely invisible from the street.

there are probably more educational ways to learn about putman.

i want to see the house.

important and deeply french inconvenience: weekdays only, 14h–17h.

i had mentally retired the arc de triomphe from my paris to-do list.

then someone put an exhibition in the staircase.

la tempête appears through the monument as you climb: furniture, sculpture, craft, scent, attic, terrace.

which means the exhibition is basically bribing me into seeing a monument i thought i already knew.

effective.

normal arc admission gets you in. there is no separate exhibition ticket.

a vacuum cleaner. skis. a television. a chessboard. luggage. chairs. bikes.

harry nuriev puts dozens of extremely normal objects into an extremely strict grid in a seventeenth-century courtyard and waits for them to become strange.

annoyingly, they do.

his whole transformism idea is basically that perhaps we do not need another object. perhaps we need to look at the existing one long enough for it to become interesting again.

very inconvenient philosophy for anyone who likes shopping.

free courtyard access.

wood behaving like ribbon.

that was more or less enough to get this onto my list.

joseph walsh has put enormous curved forms in wood, bronze and gold through the courtyard, garden and orangerie of hôtel de sully.

magnus rinn is a giant ring of bronze and gilded oak that looks both prehistoric and extremely expensive.

a useful one for anyone who reads this late: it stays until october.

architects making their first furniture collection always makes sense to me.

they have spent years worrying about rooms. eventually something has to go inside one.

jonathan stene and elena alexopoulos work between paris and athens, and the materials do most of the talking here: greek cipollino marble, red travertine, walnut, steel, pewter.

almost no decorative colour.

stone already went to the trouble.

a sundial with a design degree.

mirror-polished steel, a translucent membrane, a circle inside the jardin du palais-royal and an installation that changes depending on whether paris has decided to provide sunlight.

the structure reflects the trees until parts of it almost disappear.

this is one of the few things on the list i would actually plan around daylight.

9pm technically works.

morally, no.

giant flower.

no apology.

uchronia took the floral motif already on the floor of the rotonde d'antin and made it stand up: illuminated petals, circular seating, grand palais architecture competing for attention.

i went.

the room was already dramatic, so naturally the correct response was to put something enormous in the middle of it.

restraint would have looked nervous.

this one almost escaped the original list, which is exactly why i’m adding it now.

hauvette & madani have taken over galerie gastou with la 23e heure, building a soft, slightly decadent interior somewhere between art deco and after-hours.

their own pieces sit with the gallery’s collection, so the whole thing feels less like a furniture presentation and more like walking into somebody’s very specific private world.

it is also exactly the kind of thing design week is good at: the room is part of the idea.

and because paris enjoys deadlines, you only have until the 19th.

12 rue bonaparte. free. go before this becomes another thing you saved one day too late.