Maison Thoumieux

With hotelier Thierry Costes, .PSLAB has collaborated again with India Mahdavi to light the rooms and dining area of a newly renovated boutique hotel in Paris, France. The products, which were designed and manufactured exclusively for the hotel spaces and Jean-François Piège restaurant, respond to the physical constraints of the site and integrate with Mahdavi’s strong design style. In this site, .PSLAB’s emphasis was on the relationship between the viewer and the light provided by the fixture, creating a specific mood that will engage the viewer with the products. On the hotel room walls, India Mahdavi’s choice of strongly hexagonal embossed wallpaper would interact strongly with any lighting fixture. There was also no possibility of recessing the product into the walls to conceal the technical elements of the fixtures. In the dining area, the hotel’s ceilings were unusually low, producing a specific design constraint. .PSLAB created a product that could be used as a small version in the hotel rooms as a wall fixture and on a larger scale as a ceiling fixture in the dining area, so providing a sense of continuity. The product was a set of three concentric curved ‘ribs’ around a central cavity, fashioned in brass. The bulb was placed in the central cavity, and topped with a reflector that refracted the light back into the fixture before it exited into the space, giving a softer glow. As the hotel room walls could not be recessed, the products’ technical wiring was concealed in an offset which created a gap between the product and the wall. The fixtures could be applied at different levels and alone or in groups of two or three according to the demands of the space. The reflectors in these fixtures were made of perforated black steel. A design challenge was met in scaling up the fixtures from their size in the hotel rooms into vast 80cm ceiling fixtures for the dining area. The black steel reflector in these objects was not perforated, reacting to the different light requirement. The products responded effectively to the constraints of the space, and also stood alone as products which provided a sense of continuity between the small versions in the hotel rooms and the large ones in the dining area. Overall, a sense of intimacy and harmony was provided by the fixtures, which nevertheless provided a visual interruption to the highly patterned interior design. These unique products, imagined according to the constraining physical factors of the site, will also find life through their availability as part of .PSLAB’s products archive, which they enter on completion.