Two important events on the summer design calendar, Design Miami/Basel and Nomad Capri, focus on design for the wealthy collector, with guests flying in on private planes to Basel or mooring their mega-yachts off the island of Capri. Meanwhile, Design Parade Hyères nurtures emerging talent.
It is held in Villa Noailles, an early modernist building high above the town of Hyères, in the south of Provence. It was constructed in the 1920s by Robert Mallet-Stevens for Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles to host their creative circle of artist friends including Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dalí. The house was a first for both the architect and the couple who commissioned it, becoming the focal point for their life of arts patronage.
Today, Design Parade Hyères offers ten young designers a showcase and prizes that include one-year research residencies at the International Glass and Visual Arts Research Centre in Marseille and the Sèvres ceramics museum and manufacturing centre, as well as participation in the competition as a jury member and a personal exhibition at next year’s Design Parade.
Many of this year’s finalists, including Danae Dasyra and Joe Bradford, going by the name of Astronauts, focused on novel construction techniques. Dasyra and Astronauts hydro-form shapes by filling pillows of metal with high-pressure water. Juliette Rougier, the Public Prize City of Hyères winner, collects Provençale cane discarded by wind instrument reed producers to create marquetry from waste; Gabriel Hafner, winner of the Tectona prize, makes folding screens from paper and beeswax; this year’s Grand Prize of the Jury winners Sacha Parent and Valentine Tiraboschi create novel decorative forms with sand and gravity.
Unusually for the era, the Noailles home included a gymnasium, squash court, tennis court and indoor pool, and the artists who stayed in the 13 guest suites were encouraged to take part in physical activity when they were not working in the on-site studio. They also decorated these leisure spaces. Yassine Ben Abdallah, the 2023 winner, presented his residency projects in glass and ceramic in the gymnasium and the head of this year’s jury, Fabien Cappello, himself a finalist in the first edition of Design Parade in 2006, covered the squash court with a giant mural and furnished the former indoor swimming pool with vintage furniture reupholstered in graphic patterned textiles, as well as accessorised it with Mexican-made objects in zinc.
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Not far from the main site, at Hotel Le Provençal, in a perfect location (at least for my waterside house of dreams) with a 180-degree sea view, a canopy of glorious Mediterranean pine trees and an orchestra of cicadas cooling themselves in the sun, Porsche — a new partner of the festival — presented their touring design series, the Art of Dreams. In place of an artist using a car as a canvas (that belongs strictly to BMW Art Car), Porsche — in the true nurturing spirit of Villa Noailles — commissioned a 34-year-old Dutch artist, Thomas Trum.
Trum works in large scale and colour, which he applies to canvas using a very wide felt tip pen — when I say wide, I mean four to six metres wide — using a contraption that was inspired by road marking machines. With this method he created a series of giant canvasses and, by mixing blue and magenta, arrived at a kind of Provençal lavender. This work was produced and then presented in his temporary outdoor studio in the hotel’s tennis court. Trum painted the court’s floor with another custom-made contraption (this one with wheels and a spray gun). The same machine was used to paint the swimming pool and the four giant sails of a 22m yacht moored just in front of the hotel that took festival guests and VIPs out for short trips.
A hundred years on from the villa’s inception, this corner of the south of France continues to be a crucible for innovative art and design, as well as the perfect place for a spin on the med in a yacht with lavender-hued sails.
Design Parade 2024 exhibitions at Villa Noailles run to Sept 1; villanoailles.com
