The grand ambitions of the little corner, the HABILE toilets are in the spotlight
This is the last room we're talking about. These few square meters are now filled with light and are the focus of all the designers' attention.
I'm very proud of our restrooms, says Camille Andrieux, co-founder of Habile, a hybrid space that is a restaurant, a delicatessen, and a point of sale for their eponymous clothing brand (Paris 10th).
The current situation has forced us to spend a lot of time at home. We're more apprehensive about going to the restrooms in public places. We wanted our customers to feel comfortable there. Moreover, contrary to usual practice, we started work with the toilets to ensure we had sufficient budget. The chick-yellow bathroom houses two small mixed corners with a matching throne: one coral pink overlooking the rooftops of Paris, the other fir green for a tropical forest getaway.
It's often said that the restrooms are the showcase of a restaurant, says Tigrane Seydoux, co-founder of Big Mamma trattorias. Customers appreciate our efforts to make this space more pleasant. And today, a restaurant is designed and experienced as a 360° experience. We pay attention not only to the food, but also to the tableware, the lighting... Details in general, and the restrooms are more than ever a part of this. We have our own in-house design studio, based in London, and we spend hours thinking about how to make our restrooms real destinations.
I'm very proud of our restrooms, says Camille Andrieux, co-founder of Habile, a hybrid space that is a restaurant, a delicatessen, and a point of sale for their eponymous clothing brand (Paris 10th).
The current situation has forced us to spend a lot of time at home. We're more apprehensive about going to the restrooms in public places. We wanted our customers to feel comfortable there. Moreover, contrary to usual practice, we started work with the toilets to ensure we had sufficient budget. The chick-yellow bathroom houses two small mixed corners with a matching throne: one coral pink overlooking the rooftops of Paris, the other fir green for a tropical forest getaway.
It's often said that the restrooms are the showcase of a restaurant, says Tigrane Seydoux, co-founder of Big Mamma trattorias. Customers appreciate our efforts to make this space more pleasant. And today, a restaurant is designed and experienced as a 360° experience. We pay attention not only to the food, but also to the tableware, the lighting... Details in general, and the restrooms are more than ever a part of this. We have our own in-house design studio, based in London, and we spend hours thinking about how to make our restrooms real destinations.
In 2015, they installed one-way mirrors on the toilet doors at their second address in the capital, Ober Mamma (Paris 11th), confusing visitors in search of privacy. The firm then made its mark at La Felicità, an XXL food market opened in 2018 within Station F (Paris 13th). Here, each cabin transports the user into a different universe, radically contrasting with the guinguette spirit of the surroundings: a mountain chalet and its trophy deer, a Berlin nightclub and its multicolored neon lights, a candy-pink cocoon with organic shapes...
To go even further, Habile and Big Mamma joined forces with the young brand Trone, which offers colorful sanitary ware with original lines and a strong aesthetic, a sort of UFO in an ocean of white ceramic. The brand's two models, one of which features a transparent tube-shaped reservoir, are available in a variety of colors and finishes—speckled, two-tone, and more. Passionate about design, founder Hugo Volpei surrounds himself with a team of interior designers and tackles the design of his clients' bathrooms. He enjoys creating surprises and unsettling visitors: Popine, a Parisian pizzeria in Ménilmontant, gave us carte blanche. We aimed oversized fake surveillance cameras at the throne. Using neon lights, the user feels as if a laser is pointed directly at them. According to the owner of the establishment, many were confused, and some immediately left to make sure they weren't being filmed. We like this provocative side, without it turning into a joke, because the goal is above all to make this room and this object desirable. The idea for these unusual bathrooms first came to Hugo while he was dining at Sketch in London and visited the bathroom designed by Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance. The thirty-year-old was dazzled by the egg capsules, the futuristic atmosphere, the ceiling with colorful tiles... And extremely disappointed when, pushing open the door to the pods, he found himself face to face with an ordinary ivory-colored toilet.
Cabinet of curiosities
Colorful toilets are from the 1930s, and were at the height of fashion in the 1970s and 1980s, says Sam Powell, founder of The Bold Bathroom Company - their vintage-look toilets available in a multitude of colors were chosen by Luke Edward Hall for the Les Deux Gare hotel (Paris 10). After decades of white, there is a growing resurgence of interest in bathrooms with character. Especially since the first lockdown and remote working imposed by the pandemic, people are desperate to bring excitement and color to their homes. Staring at four chalky walls all day can be boring, and the bathroom is the perfect place to let your imagination run wild. Besides, the majority of our clients are individuals.
Stylist Marion is one of those who puts the emphasis on their offices: We put as much care into decorating our bathrooms as we did the rest of our home. During a trip to Brazil, I discovered an extraordinary toilet in a restaurant that contrasted radically with the rest of the place, which inspired me to do the same. So, she overloads the small corner with second-hand objects, transforming it into a cabinet of curiosities bathed in subdued light when the rest of the ground floor is a place of immaculate purity. On a large surface, this bias could have proved oppressive.
Pop culture
De plus en plus d’aficionados de pop culture profitent des W.-C. pour afficher leur passion pour des films, des séries ou des livres, de Star Wars à Harry Potter en passant par Spirou. La youtubeuse Léa Camilleri aux 484 000 abonnés a ainsi redécoré ses cabinets en avril dernier : «Je suis une grande fan de Jurassic Park et j’ai accumulé beaucoup d’objets qui finissaient cachés dans une boîte. Je voulais trouver un moyen de les exposer et les toilettes m’ont semblé l’endroit idéal.» Guère bricoleuse, elle préfère s’atteler pour son premier chantier à peu de mètres carrés. Papier peint façon jungle et planches de bois, plantes luxuriantes et merchandising en tout genre - Jeep logotypée en Lego, tête de T. rex en peluche, faux passe VIP, carte de l’Isla Nublar, enceinte diffusant le générique et les répliques emblématiques à chaque ouverture de porte... La vidéo de l’avant-après postée par Léa sur Instagram cumule les 800 000 vues, devenant la plus regardée du compte de la jeune femme.
Les photographies de toilettes singulières fleurissent sur les réseaux sociaux, créant un buzz non négligeable pour les restaurateurs. «Un soir, une jeune femme est restée dans nos W.-C. un certain temps, au point que nous nous inquiétions, continue Camille Andrieux, du restaurant-boutique Habile. Je suis allée voir : elle avait emporté plusieurs tenues et se photographiait devant notre miroir surplombé d’un néon vermillon.» Les W.-C. ne sont plus des endroits négligés, redoutés, mais des lieux où l’on se sent bien et où l’on aime passer du temps. Un passage obligé pour les amis de Léa : «C’est une pièce que l’on découvre seul, où l’on ne fait qu’une seule chose. J’entends souvent mes invités y rigoler. Ils aiment s’y photographier, s’y filmer. Faire de ce lieu peu glamour un endroit divertissant permet de dédramatiser le côté toilettes.» ■
Madeleine Voisin - Le Figaro - vendredi 25 février 2022