When Chanel returned to the Grand Palais for its runway present final October, there was the collective feeling that the home had come residence after 4 years displaced. However the reopening of the constructing’s hovering glass-ceiling nave, timed to the Summer season Olympic and Paralympic Video games, marked solely the primary of two main phases of the Grand Palais’s monumental restoration.
As of this week, the second part is full sufficient that guests will now arrive through the principle entrance on the refurbished Sq. Jean Perrin, the place allegorical statues adorning a fountain are gleaming white. As soon as inside, they are going to behold the splendor of the constructing—each its unique structure and reimagined areas—like by no means earlier than.
Led by Chatillon Architectes, the challenge is especially exceptional for the truth that it concerned no extra constructing. But there’s a huge quantity of latest, usable house—or, at the least, house that the general public is ready to expertise for the primary time.
Past the doorway is a 3,000-square-meter space the place individuals can wander freely (and without cost)—one which has not existed for the reason that constructing was divided into three sections in 1937. Right here, luminous panels operating the size of the ceiling create an virtually futuristic really feel amid the circa-1900 riveted metal beams painted reseda inexperienced—a shade as signature to the Grand Palais as orange is to Hermès. There’s a cafeteria on the mezzanine, a modular boutique, and seating staggered all through—all the fixtures and furnishings realized by L’Atelier Senzu, recognized for its ecological strategy to design.
The principle attraction, nevertheless, is a view of the nave by means of three floor-to-ceiling home windows. It’s framed by an infinite curtain of 9 suspended panels in gradient inexperienced, conceived beneath the path of Studio MTX (one of many 12 homes inside Chanel’s artisanal community, Le19M) with extra ornamental components from six different ateliers. Conveniently and cleverly, the curtain will stay closed when Chanel is making ready for its reveals.
The Grand Palais was conceived by a collective of architects—Henri Deglane, Louis-Albert Louvet, Albert-Félix-Théophile Thomas, and Charles Giraud—as a stage for French patrimony and tradition when Paris hosted the Common Exhibition in 1900. It additionally encompassed the Palais d’Antin, which later grew to become the Palais de la découverte, a type of science discovery museum that remained open, albeit drained, till the renovations started in 2021.
