FESTEN

Artists have an unstudied way with their own interiors that nonartists find terribly seductive. Propped paintings and messy daybeds, nude studies and souvenirs from sunbaked islands — these tropes can be pure gold in the right creative hands. FESTEN, the young Paris-based design team of Charlotte de Tonnac and Hugo Sauzay, achieves similar insouciance in this artist’s workspace imagined for a recent French showhouse. The woven-rush desk chair is an Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann beauty from dealer Jacques Lacoste, and the standing ashtray was found at another Parisian gallery. Approaching the lyricism of James Brown’s large-scale painting are totems and sconces by Guy Bareff. And the Perriand stool? That’s FESTEN’s own. The chosen objects, for all their uniqueness, each contribute to a singular sense of place. As the designers point out, “Beauty is subjective, but places have a soul.”