March 17, 2024Laura Gonzalez: Interiors — the self-titled debut book by the French designer who is known for creating exuberant, pattern-mad, wildly colorful interiors — could just as easily be titled Joie de Vivre. The spaces she creates exude personality and whimsy, embodying her passion for mixing eclectic finds from around the world.
The 10 projects featured in this beautiful 256-page monograph, published by Rizzoli late last fall, include the sumptuous Lapérouse restaurant in Paris, Cartier’s radiant flagship boutiques in that city and New York, an apartment in an Art Deco building in the French capital to which Gonzalez gave a fresh spin and the designer’s own joyously decorated estate in Normandy.
Interior design was Gonzalez’s calling from an early age. The daughter of a French Algerian businessman father and an artistically inclined Spanish-born mother, she grew up in sunny Cannes, where her parents routinely took her on excursions to visit the region’s artisans, allowing her to see firsthand the crafting of ceramics, glassware and flowery fabrics.
“My childhood in the south made a huge impression on me,” Gonzalez writes in the book. “I got a taste for colors and light there.”
She launched her firm in 2008, when she was 24 and still a student at the renowned École nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais. She quickly made her stylish mark — and just as quickly gained a luxury-minded clientele — decorating soigné Paris nightclubs, including Régine and Le Bus Palladium.
Commissions soon followed from the world of haute hospitality, such as the luxe Saint James — an entire chapter in the book is devoted to this hotel, Paris’s only château-style stay — for which she fearlessly mixed Japanese-inspired Iksel wallpapers, 19th-century antiques and furniture of her own design, upholstered in resplendent fabrics by Pierre Frey and Le Menach.
As her book demonstrates, when it comes to minimalist design, Madame Gonzalez emphatically says, “Non merci.”
