At Design Parade, France’s Rising Talents Take the Spotlight—Here Are the Standouts

By Nicolas Milon

Every year, French contemporary art mecca Villa Noailles hosts Design Parade, with coinciding celebrations in Toulon for interior architecture and in Hyères for design. Founded and directed by Jean-Pierre Blanc and chaired by Pascale Mussard, the festival has become a preeminent voice of new contemporary creation.

That’s primarily thanks to the annual Design Competition, which this year featured juries helmed by Aline Asmar d’Amman and Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance. Late last month, the public learned of the prize winners among the spotlighted young talents. Read on to learn more about the noteworthy recipients and their inspired works.

Designer Clément Rosenberg

A graduate of the DSAA Mode et Environnement department at Duperré and ENSCI-Les Ateliers, Rosenberg chose the cicada, the Mediterranean motif, for his installation dubbed Chambre Tapissée Pour Cigale en Hiver, which translates to “carpeted room for cicada in winter.” The cicada spends most of its life buried and protected before spreading its wings and filling the southern landscapes with its powerful song. He associates the insect with an imaginary coat of arms of the Mediterranean, which would unite Occitanie and Provence under symbolic colors—indigo, terracotta, yellow—that he imbues in tapestries, draperies, and hangings. The result is a supple, delicate medieval bedroom in a sensitive and referential understanding of southern France.

Chambre tapissée pour cigale en hiver, the winning project by Clément Rosenberg

Architect Mathieu Tran Nguyen

Wicker, raffia, raw silk, and woven bamboo are the materials used throughout L’Oseraie, Tran Nguyen’s creation that pays homage to basketry and the wickerwork typical of the Provençal imagination. The architect, who has worked in the offices of Philippe Starck and Rodolphe Parente, gathered insights from the rigorous lines of Jean-Michel Frank and the hotel designed by Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles in Paris, bringing them to fruition as wall treatments, furniture, and lighting using plant fibers. A refined inspiration and a geometric composition, brilliantly executed.

L'Oseraie by Mathieu Tran Nguyen

Architects Emily Chakhtakhtinsky and Marisol Santana

Both graduates of the Ecole Boulle, Emily Chakhtakhtinsky and Marisol Santana crafted a dry-stone hut, a Provençal sanctuary for meditation. Vernacular architecture and ancestral know-how come together in this refuge for bees and humans, directly inspired by Provençal apiés (also known as bee walls). Of their inspiration for Lou Cabanoun, the emerging makers tell of their thinking around caring for the land and the people who inhabit it, in the broadest sense of the word—in the face of one harsh climate after another.

Lou Cabanoun by Emily Chakhtakhtinsky and Marisol Santana

Architects Théophile Chatelais and Hadrien Krief

In Les Heures Chaudes, or The Hot Hours, form follows function: A curtain that gets wets through capillary action is placed in front of a window to cool the room, while water gently laps in the background. It’s a sublime visual anecdote to evoke the Mediterranean and its hot summer days: The blue of the sky and the sea, flattened by the sweltering sun, are reflected in matte granite tiles. As time stretches, the freshness soothes.

Les Heures chaudes by Théophile Chatelais and Hadrien Krief, winner of the Audience Award from the city of Toulon

Designers Arthur Ristor and Anaïs Hervé

Hervé and Ristor—who studied at the Arts-Déco school, training in tapestry and stained glass respectively—call upon beach memories with Le Palais de Sable. In this fantasy seaside château, mosaics of glass and multicolored tiles trim the ceiling and dot the raw, stone-like material that shapes the mantle. Elsewhere, the glassy tiles form a series of perches reminiscent of rock formations, each topped with shell cushions and pearl seaweed. A joyful, communicative universe ensues.

Le Palais de Sable by Anaïs Hervé and Arthur Ristor

Designer Yassine Ben Abdallah

What remains of the history of sugarcane cultivation when the material objects used by enslaved laborers and field workers have disappeared? Sugar. The enduring material takes centerstage in Mémoires de la Plantation. Ben Abdallah molds the material—now cultivated with more advanced technology—to re-create a series of crystallized machetes—denoting their ephemera in both form and legacy. In three artifacts, the artist and designer (a graduate of Sciences Po and the Design Academy Eindhoven) questions the preservation of heritage and its social class bias in a soberingly direct yet evocative way, wielding a creative power that convinced both jury and public alike.

Mémoires de la Plantation by Yassine Ben Abdallah

Architects and designers Lucien Dumas and Lou Poko Savadogo

Playing with scale, Lou Poko Savadogo and Lucien Dumas create Au dixième, a chest of drawers and a china cabinet that take cues from architectural construction processes. The pair of “constructions” is structured and assembled using weaving principles, with the wooden pieces held together by a paper cord. Clapboard serves as drawers, and burnt wood makes up the finish. The sum of these parts is a use of natural materials that places Au dixième among timeless designs.

Au dixième by Lucien Dumas and Lou Poko Savadogo

Bois sensible floor lamp by Vital Lainé

Table lamps Erreur 404, James Haywood, Design Parade Hyères

At Design Parade Hyères, designer Vital Lainé calls upon a selection of local wood species and sawmill scraps, a material classified as having defects, to create simple, geometric pieces. Here, it’s the character of the wood that creates the object. With its light-letting cut-outs, Bois sensible combines purity of design and material with emotion and poetry.

James Haywood’s Erreur 404 replaces traditional concrete with blast-furnace slag and construction debris. In his workshop in the south of France, this former aerospace engineer creates brutalist lamps that are simultaneously familiar (think totems, hydrothermal chimneys, or organ pipes) and futuristic.

Lighting within the Melitosfex installation by Madeleine Oltra and Angelo de Taine, Design Parade Toulon

Meanwhile, at Design Parade Toulon, last year’s prize-winners and members of this year’s jury, Madeleine Oltra and Angelo de Taine, reference the inner world of a beehive for Melitosfex, which the creative duo envisioned as being “the Queen Bee's secret chambers.” Working with yellow brass across the installation's furniture and lighting fixtures, the designers seek to mimic the precious honey produced by these equally precious bees.

Tegula by Joséphine Balayn at Design Parade Toulon

Le Jardin secret de Bleu Chardon by Paul Bonlarron at Design Parade Toulon

Architect Joséphine Balayn transports guests into a patio of Provençal tiles and antique columns with Tegula, which translates to tile in Latin. The architect, who graduated from École Bleue and then moved on to RF Studio, chose old tiles for their coral hues and imperfect terracotta variations, creating an antique-like peristyle that surrounds a pool. In an effort to totally transport viewers, she finished the vignette with sounds of water and insects, as well as aromatics of immortelle and sage.

Last year’s winner of the National Furniture Prize, Paul Bonlarron, employs mise en abyme on a cabinet aux mirages, a Renaissance cabinet of secrets. Placed in the center of the room, his cabinet conceals 1,001 drawers and compartments. In a psychological twist, Bonlarron creates identical niches along installation walls as though to make visitors feel they are wandering within the maze-like cabinet.

Design Parade Toulon, exhibitions on view through November 5, 2023.Design Parade Hyères, exhibitions on view through September 3, 2023.