For six years, the former bishopric of Toulon has hosted the Design Parade interior architecture festival. On this occasion, an interior designer is redeveloping the floor of this 15th century building with an ephemeral scenography open to the public. This summer, it is Rodolphe Parente who invites the visitor to stroll in a “counter-evening”. The designer has transformed the showrooms into an apartment whose adjoining rooms would be visited by a living room where an invisible party would be in full swing.
We wander between a bedroom, a hallway, a bathroom or a kitchen, carried by a sound design developed with the composer Charlie Trimbur. “We imagined two soundtracks, that of an off-screen party from which bursts of voice and electronic music escape,” explains the interior designer. Another, more contemplative, where we hear the decorator and designer Andrée Putman [with whom he worked] evoke dawn and light on a hovering sheet of sounds. Specialized in the creation of custom furniture and the renovation of private houses, he delivers here his first public project.
“I chose to explore the theme of the party, because I love to gather, to receive people. But what interests me is always the step aside, in this case the care given to the peripheral rooms where the evenings also take place. This evocation prevents me from falling into the caricature of a festive moment, to suggest the feelings and sensations, “explains the forties.
In this subtle scenography, he has cultivated his specialties: the combined use of noble and poor materials – a table shaped in stainless steel and mirror-polished brass, a bathroom cabinet in construction wood panel associated with a very sophisticated; but also the work of light, filtered here by two large vertical walls in pleated dichroic film which bring out colored shadows.
An atmosphere carried by paintings by Jean Claracq or Claude Viallat – on loan from the FRAC and galleries –, but also by vintage furniture, such as a turntable by photographer and designer Willy Rizzo, an absolute symbol of 1970s glamor, or a Floor lamp by Ettore Sottsass in the bedroom, of which he designed the stair bed: a piece inspired by that of Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy, and that of the clip Around the World, by Daft Punk. An aesthetic that is both multi-referenced and very personal.
