Ferembal House in the Tuileries

This year, the Paris FIAC (a contemporary art fair) includes 28 installations in the Jardins des Tuileries. One of my favourites is the Ferembal House, displayed on the Terrasse des Feuillants. It was originally designed by Jean Prouvé, the French engineer and designer who created Modern furniture and prefabricated housing before and after the Second [...]

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Renovation of Parc André Citroën

Parc André Citroën in the 15th arrondissement is one of my favourite Paris parks. Opened in 1992, it was designed by landscape architects Gilles Clément and Alain Provost, with architects Patrick Berger, Jean-Paul Viguier and Jean-François Jodry, members of the two winning teams from a Europe-wide competition to find the best park design for this [...]

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Autumn – the year’s last, loveliest smile

We have enjoyed a glorious Indian summer in Paris, lingering well into October, with temperatures in the 20s and bright sunny skies almost every morning. But the trees know. Shorter days and cooler nights have signalled the changing seasons to them. Here is one beautiful example from last weekend, in our local parc Monceau. I [...]

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Rond point, Champs-Elysées

Recently I wrote an article for Gardens and People on Bernard Lassus and his extraordinary (and never-realised) proposals for the Jardins des Tuileries. I struggle to describe the range and depth of Lassus’s design interests, from suburban cottage gardens and motorway landscapes to historic restoration, reinvented housing estates and contemporary parks. Now in his eighties, [...]

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Chanel’s garden

Despite living in the middle of Paris, I usually take little interest in the couture shows, or in fashion more generally. (My post on New York Fashion Week only talked about the trees that had been destroyed to make way for the tents.) But when I read that Chanel this week had created a garden [...]

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Potager du Roi: from stinky pond to king’s kitchen

When Louis XIV decided in 1678 that he wanted a potager (kitchen garden) near his palace in Versailles, where he could bring visitors to admire the abundant produce, the site chosen was unpromising marshland, known as l’étang puant, or the stinking pond. Five years of work and perhaps a million francs later, the plot had [...]

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Nuit Blanche

Tomorrow, October 2nd, is Nuit Blanche in Paris, a city-wide contemporary arts festival that takes place over the course of a single night. Installations, performances and videos will spring up around the city, often outdoors, from Saturday evening, and all will be gone by early Sunday morning. Organised by the mayor’s office, the entire event [...]

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Jardin Atlantique

The City of Paris has just completed a customer satisfaction survey, which showed that 98% of visitors to the city’s parks were happy with their experience. The top reason given was ease of access. Ironically, I read these results on a noticeboard in the Jardin Atlantique, which must be the hardest park in the city [...]

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