Porous Revival
Amélie Pichard, artistic director for the September 2025 edition of Maison&Objet (image: courtesy of Maison&Objet).
“Having carte blanche is a huge privilege,” reflects Amélie Pichard, the French designer who was earlier this year appointed as artistic director for the September 2025 edition of Paris’s Maison&Objet trade fair. “For someone like me who works instinctively, it’s a gift,” she continues. “I simply followed what I would have loved to see myself when visiting Maison&Objet.”
On first glance, Pichard is an unconventional choice to lead a trade fair devoted to interior design and furniture. She made her name in the 2010s within fashion design, where she was feted for her work with shoes and accessories. Yet recent years have seen Pichard expand her design practice outwards, launching projects that often question how and why we make and consume material culture. Her creative agency, Synthetique, works across disciplines, for instance, billing itself as “a REcreative bureau that brings objects or ideas to life with a distinctive impact”. Meanwhile, her digital gallery Pichard sells only one object at a time, proudly declaring itself “closed 300 days out of 365” while its founder researches and curates its next offering.
The Seletti Superchair, designed by the Hello Again design collective, and exhibited at Maison&Objet (image: courtesy of Maison&Objet).
“Labels are very hard to shake off!” Pichard explains when asked of the tendency for her increasingly varied work to still be perceived through the lens of fashion. It is for this reason, she explains, that she is excited to assume the artistic directorship of Maison&Objet, and to work within a commercial context that has the potential to bring together designers, brands, curators and audiences of different stripes within the vast scale of the Paris Nord Villepinte Exhibition Centre. “My background goes beyond fashion – for 13 years, I’ve been questioning craft, the reason for making things, and whether or not we should keep putting new objects into the world,” Pichard says. “That’s what I’m trying to express in this new September edition.”
It is an apt conversation to have. The September edition of Maison&Objet is devoted to platforming new voices and conversations within design, and exploring interior spaces as being ripe for experimentation and questioning of social conventions. In this vein, the September show has been themed around the idea of “Revival”, which Pichard sees as providing a gateway into reflection on the contemporary value of design. “The world is changing very fast and not always in the right direction,” she says. “But thankfully, many positive initiatives are emerging, resonating with far more people than we might imagine. Today, we have new tools for communication, for sharing, and to help us create differently. We need to use these tools for good innovation. Renewal is a starting point, a blank page, and I’m happy to illustrate it through a sort of neutral vision of our relationship with objects and the hands that make them.”
An AI-generated teapot on a poster created by Pichard – the design will now be realised by ceramicist Blumen (image: courtesy of Maison&Objet).
One of these tools is the rapid emergence of AI and its implications for how visual and material culture will be created in the 21st century. It is this technology that forms a central part of the poster that Pichard has developed for the fair to signal her curatorial intentions. The design shows a ceramic teapot in the shape of a fairytale home, emblazoned with the phrase “Ceci n'est pas encore une théière” (“This is not yet a teapot”). The teapot, at present, exists only as an AI creation, but was inspired by a real-world object created by ceramicist Blumen (Elisa Benchetrit), who will in turn reinterpret the AI design back into a physical object for the fair. Blumen’s savoir faire has been filtered through machine learning, which will in turn feed back into her own practice – “a kind of conversation or exquisite corpse between AI and the human hand,” Pichard explains, which she sees as building “a bridge between tradition and innovation”. The decision to play this dialogue out in the form of a house, she explains, was a desire for “a very strong, very literal image.” The home, the poster seems to suggest, is a space for radical reinterpretation.
Welcome Home, Amelie Pichard’s installation for the fair (image: courtesy of Maison&Objet).
One area in which this suggestion will play out clearly at the September fair is Welcome Home, a 150m² space that Pichard has curated to serve as a house, albeit a “deconstructed, open house that’s still in progress”. The space will include experimental works from artists, designers and brand such as Anne Krieg, Non Sans Raison and Morgane Tschiember, with an emphasis on porous spaces that blur conventional typologies and disciplines – rooms will flow into one another, and the space will encompass furniture, sculpture, homeware and more, all presented on an equal footing, and all intended to ask questions around our conception of what a domestic space ought to be. “It questions our obsession with perfection, why do we always need to finish things?” Pichard explains. “It’s a house with no final walls, where the objects themselves are in transition. Some are functional, some atypical, some look unfinished. This house has no manual. Everyone is free to engage with it in their own way.”
In this respect, Pichard’s installation tallies with her broader ambitions for the fair’s direction. The September edition is to be divided into six different sectors (‘Cook & Share’, ‘Decor & Design’, ‘Craft’, ‘Fragrance & Wellness’, ‘Fashion & Accessories’, and ‘Gift & Play’), with a central role within this overarching structure given to Design District, an area of the fair that will platform emerging talents through initiatives such as Future On Stage, The Rising Talent Awards, and The Factory – programming which champions new brands and designers. The creative direction for this section of the fair has been given over to Hall Haus, a French collective whose work crosses jewellery, materials, ceramics, architecture and furniture, and who have themselves previously exhibited as part of Maison&Objet. “We believe in a future of design where creativity, sustainability, and innovation come together to redefine the spaces of tomorrow,” the collective announced when selected. “The Design District, as an incubator of creative energies, will play a crucial role in highlighting the young guard and the trends of tomorrow.”
Hall Haus, the creative directors for Design District at Maison&Objet’s September edition (image: courtesy of Maison&Objet)..
Hall Haus’s cross-disciplinary nature is, it seems, emblematic of Pichard’s own ideas about how younger generations of designers are now working, and represents the kind of design ethos that she hopes the fair can reach out to more widely. Maison&Objet was founded 30 years ago, but it can continue to reach and remain relevant to new talent, she explains, “by putting them forward. By showing that a new kind of design, innovative and respectful of people and the planet, is not only possible, but essential. And by breaking out of silos.” Much like her own interpretation of domestic space for Welcome Home, Pichard hopes that the wider fair will embrace the fluidity and ambiguity of contemporary practice. “Today’s designers are multi-form, multi-medium,” she says. “The fair needs to reflect that porosity.”
Images highlighting the different sectors planned for the fair (image: courtesy of Maison&Objet).
In turn, Maison&Objet has influenced Pichard. As artistic director, her work entails consideration of all aspects of the fair, bringing together its diverse installations, designers, brands and audiences. While her own practice as a designer is laudably broad, Maison&Objet has enabled her to extend it even further into the realm of curation. “For years, I’ve been evolving in the world of design, inspired by my interior designer friends, and I was happy to position myself this season as a curator rather than a designer, to highlight the work of other talented designers,” she says. “While curating Welcome Home, I reflected a lot on what curation means. I had to compose with the thousands of exhibitors already present. And I realised that this exercise, choosing from a mass of objects, is what all of us do, in our own way. We must relearn how to build a personal eye, a personal style, in a world where our gaze is now shaped by algorithms.”
As culture engages further with AI and other digital technologies, Pichard’s iteration of the fair adopts an agnostic view. Her work embraces new tools, as seen in her partnership with Blumen, but she also sounds a note of caution around an uncritical embrace of digital culture. “We think we’re choosing freely, but we’re not. We think we’re unique, but we’re all looking at the same things,” she says. “Whereas the world, and the world of design, is much wider than that. That’s where the boldness lies: in relearning how to make our own choices.”
Maison&Objet will take place in Paris from 4-8 September 2025. Tickets may be booked here.
This article was made for Maison&Objet.