Raffles 1887
Philippe Starck, legendary creator
The celebrated architect and designer PHILIPPE STARCK, who conjured up the extraordinary interiors of Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris, has over his long career brought visionary inventiveness to multiple domains, from architecture and naval engineering to furniture and everyday products. His vision is that every creation, in whatever form, must improve the lives of as many people as possible: a philosophy that has made him a pioneer of ‘democratic design’. Here, in his own words for RAFFLES 1887, he describes his relationship with Paris, the city where he was born.
I WAS born in Paris, but I lived abroad a lot, and now we live in Portugal. I have never been a man of the city, so I stay a few days but then have to go back to my ‘middle of nowhere’, to nature where I feel at home. However I feel French: I am a European with French origin.
I was a solitary kid. I spent my childhood daydreaming in class, hiding under porches, exploring the ‘grey areas’ of the city, as the great French writer Modiano would later call them. When I was 16, my mother suggested that I enrolled at the Nissim de Camondo school. I studied design there for a few months, never very diligently, before starting to work on my own projects. At that time, I was practically the only person doing design in France, which made things very difficult. Design used to be only Italian, made by Italian master designers and editors. However, I was lucky to meet an extraordinary man, named Arturo Punto del Punta Cristiani, who owned a design store near Centre Pompidou; he changed my life. He trusted my work and showed it to various companies. This is how I really became a designer, from Paris but working with Italian and soon with international partners. Somehow, it is not you who decides to build an international career – it is the world that calls you.
"Le Royal Monceau is not just a hotel, but an exploration of the French spirit – a living, poetic space where mind, memory and art replace mere decoration or style"
I have imagined many hotels and restaurants in Paris; each one having its own identity, its own little music, but all filled with emotion, fertile surprises and mental games. At Brach Paris there is a raw and modernist romanticism warmed by multicultural influences from Africa, Asia and South America. Too Hotel is the story of a castle suspended above Paris, levitating, while Le Royal Monceau is not just a hotel, but an exploration of the French spirit – a living, poetic space where mind, memory, and art replace mere decoration or style. I have always fought for the democratisation of design, wanting to bring a service to my community.
Because I was never really a city type, I was always attracted by the outskirts of Paris, and I have often wandered through the heart of the Saint Ouen Flea Market. I fell in love with it for the extraordinary objects I discovered there, which told strange stories and riddles, as much as for the love of what it is and represents.
It is the society of the Saint Ouen Flea Market that I love, and to which I dream of belonging. When I visit the flea market, I always stop by the Remix Gallery that specialises in 1980s furniture. I sometimes find some of my pieces there. Since the 1980s, Jousse Gallery has also dedicated itself to reviving forgotten designers and honouring the leading names of the 1970s and 1980s with thoughtfully curated exhibitions.
The Musée des Arts et Métiers is a science and engineering museum where visitors can see the original Foucault pendulum. This is an extraordinary invention through which, observing the simple oscillation of the pendulum, the French physicist Léon Foucault demonstrated the rotation of the Earth. I am fascinated by the evolution of our animal species, by us. I love and admire in particular the finest specimens of human intelligence, like the great scientists of early science such as Ptolemy, Archimedes or Eratosthenes who, using their brains, a camel, a well and a stick, were able to measure the size of the Earth with only 2% error.
My daily life is extremely well organised, wherever I am. This allows me to work all day according to my own biorhythm. I start my day with one of the most efficient ways to give birth to new ideas: taking a very hot shower followed by a very cold one, which provokes the dilation and contraction of the brain. The whole process lasts three to five seconds and is incredible. It speeds up my mind and, suddenly, an idea blooms. Then I know exactly how to organise these ideas – how to check them, filter them and develop them precisely to turn them into a vision. Then, all I have to do is to I print them on my tracing paper. In truth, I am more a printer than anything else.
When I am in Paris, I meet with my teams and partners; and when I don’t, I always spend hours walking with one rule: turn each corner right, then left, then again right, then left, and it leads me always to discover places I never suspected. Caffè Stern is a UFO that landed in Paris by chance. It is a small Venetian bacaro located in the Passage du Panorama, very poetic and very mysterious with its chimeras, hidden rooms and other surprises. It is also where I met the Alajmo brothers, the owners, whom I love dearly, and who are the youngest Michelin-starred chefs in the world. It is my second home when in Paris. I also love 116 Pages which represents to me the perfect balance of intelligent comfort food.
Is there an interior in Paris that I wish I could redesign? Yes; an airport.
"Political, ethical, subversive, ecological, humorous: this is how I see my duty as a creator"
Philippe Starck
PHILIPPE STARCK AND LE ROYAL MONCEAU – RAFFLES PARIS: A FEW HIGHLIGHTS
For Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris, Philippe Starck was invited to reinvent a contemporary palace for Parisians. In 2010 he transformed the classic palace-type hotel into a bohemian Raffles haven.
A wall of mirrors around the main staircase revitalised the 1930s Baccarat crystal chandeliers, poetically conjuring up the hotel’s illustrious past as home to guests such as Josephine Baker, Walt Disney and Ernest Hemingway. According to Starck, the ambience possessed “an elegant light-headedness.”
He also gave light and edge to the Long Bar by commissioning Parisian glass specialists Perrin & Perrin to create a long table made of white onyx and glass and then teaming it with leather and wood barstools. Restaurants, too, had to be as individual as the hotel’s historic clientele. In Matsuhisa, the colourful glass wall – formed with sake bottles – nods to the restaurant’s Japanese fare. Meanwhile Stéphane Calais’s playful ceiling painting, Un jardin à la française, demonstrated Starck’s ingenuity in using original art as decoration.
In the suite bathrooms, the melange of marble, steel and mirrors were a new definition of contemporary cool, helped considerably by the vintage photographs slipped behind the mirrors as a homage to the hotel’s fabled past. It was also Starck's work to install eye-catching red lanterns and a red glass marquee at the palace entrance.
Raffles Hotels & Resorts
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