Returning felt both familiar and new.
There were things I remembered immediately, others I seemed to be noticing for the first time. Maybe the city had changed a little. Certainly I had. Life, work, time…they always have a way of changing what catches your eye.
There was a feeling of becoming reacquainted. With Paris. With myself in Paris.
We came for Céline. A few good friends and I planned the trip around seeing her perform, leaving the rest intentionally loose. Galleries. Shopping. Eating. Walking. So much walking. A destination is almost beside the point in Paris. It gives the walk a reason. The rest is what happens between here and there.
Maybe that is what travel does. It brings mystery and wonder back into the ordinary.
At the Bourse de Commerce, photography caught my attention in a way it hadn’t for a while. I spent some time with the Irving Penn collection and suddenly found myself thinking about it deeply. Photography was the first art I really collected. I used to surround myself with much more of it. Pictures of other lives. Pictures of my own. I like the idea of a memory taking up space. A little piece of time, still in the room.
What I noticed was the composition. Where each subject stood in relation to everything around them. The clothes, poise and scale were brought together in a way that I found myself thinking about design. It felt familiar. A space finds its balance the same way as those compositions: through time, reflection, and more practice than anyone would ever think. Once it's right, it never looks like effort.
Revived curiosities followed me out of the museum. Into the streets. Into the shops.
I love finding things I wouldn’t have thought to look for. Rubirosa drew me into Lauren Rubinski’s colorful, offbeat vocabulary of pajamas, shirts and socks. Alexandra Golovanoff drew me to rich butter-yellow corduroy and cashmere. Charvet offered something else entirely: the satisfaction of patience. I had made an appointment three months in advance, time set aside to be measured and presented with a shirt made specifically for me. It was wonderfully out of step with the speed of everything else. Slow and intentional. And Astier de Villatte, shelves of white-glazed ceramics following their own wonderfully imaginative logic.
If I can, I want to walk into the place. See the pieces in conversation with the space they were imagined for. Understand the choices that make an artist’s world feel like theirs. Feel the idea before taking a piece of it home.
Their version of the world, with a door you can walk through.
Some worlds open with a door. Others with a song.
Céline.
I knew seeing Céline Dion would mean something to me. I’m not sure I understood how much until I was sitting there.
Growing up in Canada, Céline was always there. On the radio. A song in a movie. Titanic. A Canadian voice that traveled far beyond Canada, attaching itself to moments, memories, whole chapters of people’s lives. A voice both personal and universal. And now, all these years later, I had traveled to Paris to hear it. There was something grounding about that. A strange circle I hadn't known I was drawing.
There was so much joy in the room, but she never used it to disguise anything else. Sadness was allowed in too. Humor. Vulnerability. Whatever she was feeling seemed to become part of the evening rather than something she had to perform around.
What stayed with me wasn't the voice, or the fame. It was the life around it.
Watching a woman my age on that stage, doing the thing she loves after everything life has asked of her, felt less like a concert and more like a conversation. She makes it look easy. It isn't. The discipline and perseverance with the concsious decision, made again and again, to keep going. She has said it so many times: you have to do it. And there she was, doing it.
Somewhere in the night I stopped seeing a star and started seeing someone I could talk to about life. The hard parts. The work it takes to build the life you want. The joy you go looking for, then give away. She lifted the room, and the room lifted her right back.
And the clothes. Insane. With immense purpose. Couture not sitting on top of the performance, but moving through it with her. Another layer of expression. There's a line of hers I think about: “I don't drink, I don't smoke, I shop”. I understand that completely. You work for the things you love. There's a lot that comes with it. And it's still okay to love them.
Paris got smaller again afterward.
Twelve tables at Chez L’Ami Louis. Perfect red and white curtains with warm orange tablecloths. A salad arriving in one large bowl for everyone. Chicken and frites. Another evening, a banquette at Bar des Prés and the best chocolate cake of the trip…a category we had researched with considerable dedication.
The suitcase came home a little fuller, naturally. Clothes. Perfume. Soap. A room spray from Hôtel Madame Rêve, where we stayed. Cedar and rose. By the end of the trip, the scent had become part of coming home each night. I wanted a little of that feeling to come home with me. Scent can make elsewhere feel briefly…here. Another fragrance I found in Paris is already making its way into a bathroom we’re designing in Palm Beach. A small piece of one place becoming part of another.
But the real souvenirs are rarely things.
I brought home the time with my friends. The kind you know you’ll talk about years from now. And Céline. A night that somehow carried me all the way back home. Art I’m still thinking about. Material expressions I want to explore. The feeling of having nowhere more important to be than wherever we were walking next.
Reacquainted with sweet Paris.
And reacquainted with myself a little, too.
xx
