This month Meghna and I are celebrating 15 years of marriage, with a trip to London, Paris and Amsterdam. The kids are home with their grandparents.
Paris is the break. We gave it five days, and I’m so glad we did.
As a designer, I could walk around here all day and never run out of things to look at. There’s a café or a restaurant on almost every corner, and they’re always full, with people sitting outside for hours. The streets are busy from morning till late, and there are people everywhere.
And it’s so colorful. Every block looks a little different from the last: a green door, a yellow shopfront, flowers on a balcony, striped awnings over the café chairs.
Even the everyday things here feel designed: a marble café table with a gold rim, a croissant drizzled in chocolate, a yellow shopfront founded in 1849 with fans in the window.
At the Musée d’Orsay I kept stopping at details: the brushwork on a painting, a carved frame with a medallion set into it, a settee whose wood curves up into a shelf.
The art isn’t only in the museums, either. It’s on the walls, in the metro, in the shop windows. There’s so much to do: you can rent a bike and ride from one neighborhood to the next, and every few minutes there’s something you want to stop for.
Nothing here feels like it was made just to be efficient. It feels like someone cared about how it looks and how it feels to use. That’s what I want my own work to feel like, and I’m leaving with a camera roll full of ideas.
From here, we fly on to Mumbai.