For Edition 02: “Proposition d’une synthèse des Arts”, Estelle Dévé undertook a research trip through the Côte d’Azur of Southern France and Spain’s coastal towns of Cadaques and Portlligat. An evocative homecoming, the trip inspired memories of childhood, summer vacations and seaside living.

The birthplace and adopted home of modernism’s most prolific practitioners, this slice of the Mediterranean provided the backdrop for much mid-century art and design. Dramatic, fertile and enigmatic, its landscapes helped inspire an era of biophilic design and a new synthesis between nature and modernism. For designer, Charlotte Perriand, embracing nature also birthed a new philosophy of synthesis, not only between the disciplines of architecture, painting and sculpture, but between the industrial and mass produced, with the artistic and handcrafted.

From literal references to shells, to abstract sculptures evocative of organic material, designs are characterised by undulating contours and elegant silhouettes. Finished in complimentary combinations of lapis lazuli, onyx and snowflake obsidian, this collection offers a tribute to the period’s amalgamation of nature and culture.