ART DE VIVRE #2

PENELOPE’S celebrates the French Art de Vivre – the art that naturally blends refinement, practicality and pleasure, the art that transcends time without ever losing its obviousness. More than a style, the art of living is a way of inhabiting the world: a focus on everyday gestures, our relationship with objects, the way we receive, travel and share.

At Hermès, the materials speak for themselves: Kelly in alligator, Plume travel bags in woven horsehair or Victoria Grizzly in doblis calfskin and barenia. Leathers that tell the story of a way of traveling with elegance and lightness.

The art of the table, a department created at Dior by Christian Dior himself, was entrusted to Roger Jean-Pierre in 1955. For almost forty years, he developed an acute sense of detail and savoir-faire, turning the table into a veritable aesthetic territory. His precise, poetic approach continues to shape the aesthetics of French luxury today.

In the late 1990s, Doris Brynner took over as head of the Maison et Objets division. Here, she imposed a line of French elegance, functionality and discreet refinement, weaving subtle bridges between design, culture and everyday life.

Around them, these obsolete, almost forgotten, yet so charming words are reborn: bonbonnières, ice-cream holders, vegetable dishes, ravioli dishes, butter dishes, jugs, candelabras, pourers, milk jugs, gratin or soufflé dish holders… Gentle music that reminds us that the art of the table has long been a language.

And even if everyday life pushes us towards the easy way out, it’s important to play down refinement by imagining dialogues and contrasts, as in fashion. This is what the art of living is all about: the freedom to combine, to play, to entertain, to assert a style in everyday life and to reinvent the old-fashioned.

A collection of dummy perfume bottles – delicate relics of the great French fashion houses, some of which have disappeared; cozy linens and a collection of books devoted to the history of fashion.

A sale conceived as an invitation to slow down, to give new meaning to simple gestures, to make the home a place of expression and pleasure. A reminder that Art de Vivre is not a definition, but a way of being in the world.