After The Giraffe Suite, Russian House and Mun, Paris Society struck again. At the head of a collection of restaurants nestled in prestigious locations, the group inaugurated Bonnie, its latest address housed at the top of the brand new hotel So/Paris. The place consists of three distinct spaces, including a restaurant with a terrace enhanced by a work by the artist Olafur Eliasson with Sebastian Benhmann. This poetic achievement, baptized “The Seeing City”, captures the view in a shimmering effect reminiscent of a kaleidoscope and thus allows you to admire the panorama from a singular perspective. On the 16th and last floor are a club and a bar. The entire decor of Bonnie is thought of in a past recomposed by Jordane Arrivetz, founder of the Notoire agency. The interior designer recently signed the revival of Tartan in Saint Tropez and the Hotel Nuage in Paris. She realizes here one of the major places of the year. Interview to learn more about his intervention in this atypical place.
How did you approach this project, the view of which is particularly spectacular?
The view is a quality of the site, but you can’t bet everything on it. We know places in Paris that attract tourists for this reason only but are neglected by Parisians. This one in particular can have a cold and vertiginous side, which must be compensated for by working on a very warm decor, and which gives its identity to a place of life. People have to feel good here, and want to come back, not just for the view.
Has Olafur Eliasson’s work influenced your creative process?
These installations are very present in the spaces that we treated so we had to create a dialogue. This was the origin of our Space Age inspiration because Olafur Eliasson works a lot with the notion of space in his work. Its games of reflection are taken up and declined in our project with antique mirrors, brushed stainless steel, mirror polish, lacquered glass. In return, we have brought in a lot of very warm and textured materials – velvet, plush – as well as patterns – carpets – which give contrast, softness, and are reflected in the rest.
Bonnie consists of a club, a bar and a restaurant. How did you design each space? What were your different inspirations?
We imagined this project as a personality of the 60s, free, feminine, futuristic, sophisticated, spontaneous. Each space must have something to tell, and in addition to the three main spaces, there are the corridors, the staircase, the smoking room, and even the toilets! We had fun declining the common thread of the contrast: the shiny/the textured, the smooth/the soft, the line/the curve, the cold/the hot, with increasing intensity over the course of the customer journey, and by creating surprises everywhere.
The place looks different day and night. How did you manage to make it enjoyable for both lunch and dinner?
There has been a lot of design and production work on materials and details so it shows, and this has been completed by accessorizing work in the bookcases and on the tables, it gives life, with lots of things to look at, to touch. For the evening, we worked a lot on the lighting by designing custom-made lamps with Garnier and Linker, this gives a different relief to the space, and all the light points in the interior echo the lights of the city, which are reflected on the ceiling, and on the Seine.
Bonnie, 10 Rue Agrippa d’Aubigné, 75004 Paris.
Bonnie’s retrofuturistic decor by Jordane Arrivetz – MilK Decoration