A Small House in the Bompard District Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, and Renovated by the Architect Manon Gaillet

I’m a freelance graphic designer and art director, born in Aix-en-Provence.

I am a painter born in Haifa.

After studying graphic design in Aix-en-Provence, I moved to Paris, where I worked with Cléo Charuet (Cléoburo) and then for different agencies. On a trip to New York, Partners & Spade asked me to stay. It was the richest and most beautiful professional experience. I learned everything, or rather, I unlearned everything! I lived there for three years and became a freelancer. I worked both for agencies and institutions, including Apple and Facebook, and for fashion clients like Ulla Johnson and Andy Spade for Sleepy Jones and in the design world for Domino Magazine. I met some great people there, and it was also there that I met Guy.

I studied at Parsons School of Design for a year and then went to the New York Studio School the following year. I survived it for a year and then went north to Armherst, MA, to read more books and hone my personality. I was quite unhappy there too, but my father forced me to finish and graduate. Then I moved to Tel Aviv, where I worked as a graphic designer and opened a very small gallery for artists who were not being shown in Tel Aviv. In 2006, I realised that I could make a living from my own practice as an artist, and I have done so ever since.

The fascinating thing about Aurore and me is that our upbringing is 180 degrees apart. She was born in the same apartment where she lived until she was 18, and where her mother still lives. I had lived in four different apartments in Haifa before I was seven years old. In Boston, we moved three more times before we got to know New York. Aurore has been immersed and is steeped – probably unconsciously – in the history of French painters, French cinema, French literature and, most importantly, the French lifestyle. I borrow and edit my sources from so many different directions. The establishment of our publishing house, which combines historical awareness with being completely contemporary, results from a combination of us both, the down-to-earth and the ephemeral. As a teenager, before social networks and technology, I was passionate about skateboarding, graffiti, counter culture and punk rock. All of this led me to art. I don’t try to influence my children by saying that one taste is better than another. Our home is filled with the kind of books, art, music and food that define us. I hope it’s the air they breathe.

I grew up in my grandmother’s bookshop / stationery / perfumery / leather goods shop, and everything I do today is drawn from that world. My memories of old books, postcards, notebook covers, perfume labels and papers in their thousands. It was a magical place with custom-made wooden bookcases from floor to ceiling and a spiral staircase leading to the galleries. Display cases with mirrored backs filled the walls, displaying Guerlain and Roger Gallet bottles. Every month we went through the distributors’ stocks to buy books. Paper became an obsession. This is my favourite part of making a book, the transition from the conceptual idea and its content to the translation into an object. I feel completely at home in any print workshop anywhere in the world. Being born and raised in Provence is also an incredible source of culture for me. I grew up among the fields of cherry trees and at the Sunday flea markets in all the Luberon villages that my mother and I used to go to. Later, I worked as an usherette in theatres, contemporary dance centres, and at a Lyric Art festival to pay for my studies. It was very inspiring to be able to attend the performances every night.

It is part of a group of three small, terraced houses built on the rock about 200 years ago as a brothel. Over the years, the ones next to ours have changed drastically, with altered facades, new windows and doors and extensions. But this one had remained intact except for an Ikea kitchen and bathroom, PVC double glazing and plasterboard covering all the walls. The idea was really to strip the space and give it back its true value, with its wealth of original materials. To replace the lino that had broken up in some places with old terracotta tiles, the metal shutters with Provençal-style shutters, and then to remove all the plasterboard: my absolute enemy in this so-called “modern” world. The big surprise was finding the original old windows of the house the neighbours had just thrown away and replaced with PVC! Pure chance. Before we found this place, we had rented the same house, which we liked very much, several times during our stays in Marseille. We had asked the owner which architect had done the renovation, and that’s how we discovered the work of Manon Gaillet. Manon has a particular sensitivity to materials. She designed all the lines and curves of our interior. She worked with different craftsmen skilled in red brick, Tadelakt and other lime coatings. The biggest job was making the outbuilding under the terrace habitable. The vaults used to store water in the past have become rooms, and the water tank is now a magnificent staircase designed by Manon, which leads to the old ‘lavoir’, once used for washing, now transformed into a bathtub. We are also lucky enough to be good friends with a great architect (François, to name but one) who has given us lots of valuable advice on interior and exterior design. And especially the garden.

We have very little furniture. Among the items we do have is the sideboard Charlotte Perriand made for her Les Arcs project (which we found antique hunting), Borge Morgensen chairs, a table and bench by our friend Marina Bautier, a Paola Navone sofa, some Alvar Aalto stools and an antique marble column we came across.