Paris-based Festen Architecture (Charlotte de Tonnac and Hugo Sauzay) have built a reputation for interiors that feel inevitable rather than invented. Their rooms are composed with restraint—chalky plasters, burr woods, veined stones, deep greens and ambers—yet the effect is intensely atmospheric. Festen’s signature is not a look so much as an attitude: listen to the building, edit hard, and let materials age with dignity.
What unites the studio’s hospitality work is a precise reading of place. Hôtel Rochechouart at the foot of Montmartre revives Parisian Art Deco without pastiche: strong geometry, disciplined color, and custom furniture that sits lightly against restored bones. Across the city, Château Voltaire tempers 18th-century gravitas with modern comfort—panelled rooms, tactile textiles, and lighting that confers a club-like hush. Nearby on the Left Bank, Verneuil shows Festen’s softer register: intimate, literary, beautifully edited.
On the Riviera, Les Roches Rouges captures Mediterranean clarity with honest materials—stone, timber, limewash—and an elemental palette that folds sea and sky into the interiors. In Portofino, Splendido Mare (Belmond) is recast with Ligurian references and artisan detail, from hand-finished surfaces to tailored joinery, achieving the rare blend of glamour and ease.
New openings continue to broaden the language. Hôtel du Couvent distils monastic calm into contemporary hospitality; Hotel Balzac rethinks Parisian luxury with a quietly cinematic mood; and Richelieu explores classical rigor through warm, human scale. Beyond hotels, Festen’s cultural and brand collaborations—Hennessy, Mikado Dancing, AD Intérieurs 2019, and Carte Blanche AD Magazine—reveal the same curatorial discipline: each project is an essay in proportion, light, and craft.
Festen work like archivists of feeling. Plans are spare, junctions resolved, acoustics controlled; textures carry the narrative. A straw marquetry panel meets a honed marble sill; a silk shade pools amber light onto a lacquered desk; a terrazzo tread is set to the fraction so a staircase reads as one continuous line. The luxury is in the editing—and in the confidence to leave space around the beautiful.
For travelers, their hotels offer a form of cultural clarity: rooms that decode a city’s character without shouting it. For academics and design professionals, Festen’s practice is a study in typology and time—how to draw forward the aura of a place while meeting contemporary standards of comfort and service. The result is work that does not date; it deepens.
Selected Projects: Hotel Balzac · Verneuil · Hôtel du Couvent · Richelieu · Château Voltaire · Splendido Mare (Belmond) · Rochechouart · AD Intérieurs 2019 · Mikado Dancing · Hennessy · Carte Blanche AD Magazine · Les Roches Rouges
Explore more at festenarchitecture.com.
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