Pars Design Week
There is something about Paris in September. The city feels as though it is beginning again. Summer is slowly giving way to autumn, people are returning to their routines, galleries are reopening and the streets seem to carry that particular energy that comes with a new season.
This year, Paris Design Week took over the city from 10–19 September, bringing together designers, makers, galleries, brands and institutions across more than 450 locations.
Rather than being contained within one exhibition space, the week moves through Paris itself — into showrooms, boutiques, workshops, museums, restaurants, hotels and the places in between.
Perhaps that is the best way to experience design.
Not as something you are necessarily looking for, but as something you encounter.
A beautifully considered chair in a quiet corner. A shop window that makes you stop walking. The texture of a stone surface. An unexpected combination of colours.
A gallery tucked away on a street you have walked down before. A café where someone has thought carefully about the cup in your hand, the table beneath it and the light falling across the room.
The details become part of the experience. And design weeks have a way of making you notice them.
They offer an excuse to wander without quite knowing what you are looking for. To walk into places you might otherwise pass.
To spend an afternoon moving between exhibitions, shops and cafés, collecting little references along the way. Not everything has to be purchased or photographed. Sometimes it is enough to see something once and remember how it made you feel.
That is perhaps the joy of travelling for culture and design. You return with more than the things you found & often with ideas. A different way of arranging a room. A new appreciation for a material. A colour you hadn’t considered.
That is perhaps the joy of travelling for culture and design.
You return with more than the things you found & often with ideas. A different way of arranging a room. A new appreciation for a material. A colour you hadn’t considered.
A way of serving coffee — a restaurant that made you want to linger. A reminder that the everyday can be made more thoughtful without being or becoming complicated..
On each of our visits we always find that Paris has particularly good way of making even the ordinary things feel worth noticing.
And this year’s Paris Design Week gave even more reason to look closely.
Perhaps that is what makes these events worth travelling for — not simply what is being exhibited, but the opportunity to step outside your usual surroundings and see things differently.
To wander somewhere unfamiliar, take your time, notice what catches your attention and return home with a few new references tucked away in your mind.
And bring home a gentle reminder that design doesn’t just belong in galleries or showrooms.
It’s also in the everyday spaces we inhabit, the objects we use, the places we gather and the rituals we repeat every day.
The table you sit around every morning, the cup you reach for without thinking. The room you have walked into a hundred times.
The things we live with, return to and perhaps no longer notice quite as closely as we once did.
Maybe that is what makes a week dedicated to design so interesting. It gives us a reason to pause, look again and appreciate the details that quietly shape our everyday lives.