BEHIND THE SCENES:
MATHILDE BRETILLOT
Designs new offices for Parfums de Marly, Paris

Part I

Simplicity takes pride of place.

To be simple sounds so easy. Yet it is always the most difficult achievement for an artist, architect or designer. It takes a lifetime of self-editing to understand the rigorous difficulty involved with peeling things away. What is essential after all? Very little. The breath maybe.

We reflect on this differently in the slowed down gears of 2020. Do we need this? Do we need that? For a seasoned celebrated designer like Bretillot (early work with Sottsass, Michele de Lucchi, Martine Bedin, Ross Lovegrove, Philippe Stark) her signature is often one elemental curved line with a will to power. Empty space, hard edged colored mirrored surfaces mix wry elegant historicism with a fresh restrained minimalism. Bretillot’s eye is purposeful and certain, a designer who takes no short cuts and seldom embraces the decorative.

There is more to say about this practice that includes interior architecture and product design. Bretillot has worked with the best French houses: Christofle, DAUM, la Manufacture de Sèvres, Boffi. Currently designing the Musée de la Faïencerie de GIEN. Esteemed for passionate teaching at Camondo and now in Toulon, this jewel-like new office for a perfume house in Paris might pass easily under the radar.

But its pristine clarity, light, breath and simplicity makes us want to sit at the bespoke-two sided desks bathed by sunshine in central Paris. What Bretillot has not included makes these rooms strident and calm. What began as a question of raw space, the most basic of all, ends with a festival of surfaces, parallel and perpendicular that invite the eye to settle and relax. Not just in visual coherence, but a textural safety protecting the energies of a team working and thinking about something as ethereal as perfume; sheer artfulness here reflected in a few rooms where the invisible—in this case scent—is allowed to speak.

Part II

Bretillot plays with notions of refinement, detachment and non-conformist aesthetics, hovering along the knife-edge of modernism where the seduction of whiteness fuses with an unconventional flip of a desk’s edges. How to create intimacy in an open plan office amidst high ceilings and spartan elegance of double desks and a co-working space? Just flip up the edge of the desk so papers can’t sail into the room as clients pass. A touch of privacy along the table-top.

Bare minimum. Space and light sing. Graciously designed double sided desks with refined detailed edges mimic lightness in the overall plan. Elegance with promised functionality. Through the double doors into the office, an open aisle creates fluidity of movement, strolling down the center of everything then turning along the side office where two smaller desks face mirrored panels which catch the daylight reflections from the courtyard outside the opposite side of the office; to the right, just beyond is the view directly into the co-working space with its simply designed standing desk; solid oak on a honeycomb structure. Nothing more.

Bretillot has a talent for work surfaces; one of her custom built desks in aluminum and carbon, lacquered wood veneer and leather above embossed leather was created and selected for the Mobilier National collection in 2018. It is now in the office of a government minister. Here an appetite for luxurious materials treated in a formal reductive language sparks a complete satisfaction of surface texture and structure little seen today.

All photos by JSVCprojects