THE JOURNAL
White makes a pristine backdrop in the Holiday Boileau designer’s colourful Parisian workspace.
In a quiet street in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, the French art director Mr Franck Durand has hung a swinging plaque above his offices announcing his atelier as though it were a doctor’s office, or perhaps a chic patisserie. Its all-white exterior is punctuated by frosted windows and a matching wooden door – an unassuming façade for a veritable design powerhouse whose sophisticated clients range from the likes of men’s labels Éditions M.R. and De Fursac to Balmain, Giuseppe Zanotti, Chloé and the jeweller Aurélie Bidermann.
For years, Mr Durand’s unabashed passion for all things Parisian has been his calling card and a driving force behind his pared-back, elegant graphic design. Today, he’s translated that into a suite of projects, not least the 2014 relaunch of the American travel magazine Holiday (1946-1977), with each issue dedicated to a different geographic region. (Denmark was the latest, preceded by other far-flung locales from California to Scotland and Argentina.) In the Holiday project’s subsequent roll-out, Mr Durand’s entrepreneurial spirit has manifested itself in both the Holiday Café (in his beloved “Boileau” district in the 16th arrondissement’s southern corner), and Holiday Boileau, the unisex clothing line he oversees, yet is reluctant to call “fashion”.
Mr Durand’s open-plan workspace is lined with desks and a central allée leading to his private office out back. The floor and walls are white, as is the ceiling (an unremarkable observation, but wait – there’s a theme), yet the space feels warm and lively, watched over by a colourful Mr Arnold Goron mobile suspended from above.
“We’ve been here for about six or seven years now,” says Mr Durand, as we sit around an Eero Saarinen Knoll table, its grey marbled top complemented by a full set of spindly Gio Ponti leggera chairs in a rare, unlacquered ash finish. “Before, it was a pretty unattractive space. I love to take over spaces and transform them, and every second I am thinking about what I can do to restore the value of different places. It’s almost psychotic. There were other people in the street I knew who had already dismissed it as a possibility, who didn’t see it the way I did. It was really ruined here, but it’s a beautiful space, in a fantastic location. I recently painted the floor of the basement in yellow. It’s where my library is and all of our archives, like the pieces that we make for special projects, which I like to put on display and then pack away. It changes. I move things, and pack other things away. We also use one of the rooms downstairs as the Holiday Boileau showroom.”
A wall of white bookshelves is punctuated with dozens of matching scarlet folios, each marked with the name of a prestigious client and a heraldic crest he designed himself. “Ever since I was little, I loved the idea of painting everything white before adding little things, little bits of colour,” he says. “It’s a recurring theme in the way I furnish a space. In the same way, when I work I always put a white border around images, so it became a sort of leitmotif in my work. I love the freshness of white. After I start with a base of white, colour tends to intervene afterwards. I love colour. I love sky blue, red, yellow, green.”
A giant postcard hangs on an adjoining wall. It’s a pixelated image of a Formentera beach scene mounted on sheet metal. “It’s been there since the beginning, from a time when Emmanuelle [Alt, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris and Mr Durand’s wife] and I used to holiday in Formentera in August. I still love it just as much as I did then. It’s been there since before I started working on Holiday, but that’s just proof of the way that everything I do is ultimately linked.”
That postcard is the dominant graphic feature in an otherwise subtle interior, one populated with design objects and working paraphernalia, yet still far from cluttered. On his desk nearby, more than a dozen small bottles sit in one corner. Most are boutique perfume flacons (a few designed by him, he remarks), but a closer inspection reveals hand cream, air freshener and a speciality honey. “It’s an accumulation,” says Mr Durand. There was one, then two, then a dozen. Things arrive at the office and sometimes they just end up on my desk. But I do love perfumes.”
Behind, a drawing from his son is framed alongside Murano glass paperweights, while a threadbare, antique chair heaves with art and design tomes featuring the work of everyone from Ms Viviane Sassen to Mr Henri Matisse. Close by, a Texas-themed issue of Holiday from 1958 is framed in pristine white, yet sits on its own leaning against a wall by a radiator.
“I travel a lot for work. The US, Italy, the UK. Depends on the client,” says Mr Durand, when prompted about his own sense of wanderlust. “But for Holiday I never visit the destination before we start an issue. The last one was Denmark. If one issue is in the northern hemisphere, we will most likely go south for the next one. It’s like a game of ping pong. By chance I went to Japan around the same time as that issue, but I didn’t let that interfere with the direction that the magazine was taking. I like to sublimate the idea of a place. It is called Holiday but at the same time it is a bit Disney. There is a fairy-tale side to it. We are presenting an imaginary idea of a place. It is systematically positive, like an idealised reality.”
That utopian attitude extends to the perfectly proper Holiday Café, and to the Holiday Boileau collection, too, both ventures Mr Durand insists must remain pure and separate. “We don’t photograph Holiday Boileau clothing in Holiday magazine,” he says. “It’s a rule. And the Holiday Café is a real café, it’s not a clothing store that sells coffee. And the clothing is real clothing, it is not merchandise.” And he’s right. Holiday Boileau is no cruise collection, but a witty selection of staples for men and women that riffs on the perennial wardrobe of the Parisian, whether that’s a pastel raglan sweatshirt or an AMI-collab denim jacket or (of course) perfect bone-white jeans.
“It’s a sunny label,” says Mr Durand. “Whether or not it’s a winter or a summer collection, what we make is sunny somehow. In the end, it is a small collection of high-quality pieces in very nice materials, but it is not designer fashion. It fits in our ecosystem, and people can make the link with Holiday, the magazine, in their mind if they want to. Either way, there is always the idea of travel and holidaying there, whether that’s in hot or cold climates.” And where does Mr Durand jet off for his own holidays? “We were in Marrakech for Christmas. But the next issue of the magazine is about Jerusalem. It’s out in late March.”