Precedents and The Like - L'Eclaireur

L'ecalireur, Le Marias, Rue Mahler, Paris

Very French and Very Experiemental.

I love this designer, the store and the brand. It's cool and eclectic. There's a bit of the Romantic ideal of the globe-trotting, treasure-hunting Indiana Jonesesque lifestyle in the artifacts that are positioned throughout the store. It's dark, mysterious and sexy - again, very French. We get a glimpse of where Anthropologie might have gotten their french-vintage-cabinet-of-curiosities-aesthetic.

The tones in many of hte spaces are warm. There's an ample use of leather and animal skins, glass, steel, and stone. The space relies heavily on monumental architectural details drawn directly from the Parisian cityscape. Skylights in a central room create a cool contrast to the surrounding rooms and draw the eye toward the center of the room. This room has a distinctly different feel and is pared down to shelving, manequins, mid-floor displays where clothes lie stacked ona flat surface. There is one long hanging rack and a modern shelving unit made of reclaimed wood. The room is largely a passageway from one wing of the store to the other so the center of the room is kept as a wide-open aisle. Again, the lighting in this room serves as a good model for how to work with artificial and natural light together in one space. Track lights cut through the natural light flooding through the skylight and still cast hot spots on hanging garments. This, along with the inclusion of a large spot light on a tripod give this room the impression of a movie set.




A video tour around L'Eclaireur, Paris