Garance Vallée: Architect of Fluidity, Poet of Space.

In a cultural moment increasingly obsessed with hybridity, Garance Vallée stands not as a trend-follower but as a cartographer of new terrain. Born in 1993 and based in Paris, she is a multidimensional force—architect, artist, designer, and scenographer - who reshapes the world not by building walls, but by dissolving them. Her practice is less about fixed definitions and more about thresholds: between disciplines, between past and future, between body and space. If traditional design is a map, Vallée’s work is a topographic poem - each curve, pigment, and texture a line in an ongoing verse about intimacy, ecology, and time.

A Living Dialogue Between Body and Space

Garance Vallée’s creative universe hinges on a radical idea: that space is not an inert backdrop to life but a sentient counterpart to the human body. She draws influence from choreographers like Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, who explored the body's relationship to gravity and geometry with profound subtlety. Likewise, Vallée imagines architecture as something that should breathe, flex, and respond - not unlike a dance partner anticipating your next move.

She doesn’t just design spaces; she stages conversations between flesh and form. In her installations and objects, one senses a choreography unfolding - a movement of matter that mirrors human emotion. A sculptural chair may lean forward like someone offering a secret; a console table might echo the stoic grace of standing stones worn by centuries of wind and touch.

This approach has led her to work with global brands like Adidas, Nike, and Perrier-Jouët, but her ethos remains rooted in craft and intuition. Her creative process begins not on a screen but in her hands: sketching, shaping cardboard, layering plaster. The rawness of these materials is never polished out; instead, it is celebrated. The final work bears fingerprints, tool marks, and irregularities like a living skin - each imperfection an invitation to connect.

The Past as Portal, the Future as Canvas

Vallée’s style reads like a palimpsest, layered with echoes of ancient civilisations and modernist rigor. There’s something archaeological in her aesthetic - forms that feel unearthed rather than invented. Her references range from Cycladic figurines to Le Corbusier’s brutalism, from Mediterranean ruins to Bauhaus lines. But rather than mimic or quote, she metabolises these histories into new, hybrid languages. She is not a revivalist; she is a translator.

Her 2093 collection, designed in collaboration with gallery Monde Singulier, is a case in point. Described as “a futuristic dream marked by my past,” the collection comprises a bed, lamp, armchair, console, and candelabra - each piece sculpted with the precision of a relic and the vision of a science fiction novel. The bed, in particular, is a masterstroke: enveloped by a wooden shell, it contains niches of brushed metal like sacred compartments in a temple. It is less furniture than sanctuary - a vessel for rest, memory, and metamorphosis.

In this collection, Vallée opens the door not just to a room, but to the philosophical terrain of the bedroom itself: that most intimate, liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness, public and private, present and future. The pieces use materials like baby blue leather and blackened steel to conjure a speculative world that is both deeply tactile and eerily otherworldly. It’s as if Ettore Sottsass had time-travelled to collaborate with an ancient Roman artisan in the year 2093.

Craft as Philosophy

More than a maker of objects, Vallée is a defender of process. Her work champions craftsmanship not as nostalgia, but as resistance - to the disposable, the homogenous, the soulless. She frequently collaborates with skilled artisans, from plaster workshops in Barcelona to French stonecutters and metalworkers. She appears to be committed to highlighting and making the craftsmanship visible in her projects. These collaborations do more than execute her vision - they enrich it, grounding her ethereal forms in human labor and material truth.

Her material palette - plaster, concrete, metal, wood, natural pigments - feels like it was borrowed from the earth itself. Each surface speaks of origin: stone’s sedimentary past, wood’s fibrous timekeeping, plaster’s pliable immediacy. These are not just materials but metaphors - reminders that design, like life, is a series of compressions, erosions, and sculptural acts.

Spaces That Speak

Across scenography, architecture, and furniture design, Vallée’s work often reads like spatial storytelling. Her scenography for Maison d’en face at Théâtre du Châtelet did not merely set a stage - it sculpted an emotional landscape. Likewise, her installations for New Balance and Adidas in Paris are not brand activations but spatial essays. She weaves narratives in the voids between objects, in the shadows cast by curves and alcoves.

Her use of modularity - of forms that adapt, shift, and invite participation - suggests a belief in space as something alive, not fixed. It’s as if her environments inhale and exhale. They do not dictate how we live; they ask us how we might want to feel.

The Allegory of the Nest

If Vallée’s work could be distilled into a single allegory, it would be the nest. Like a nest, her designs are simultaneously primitive and futuristic, soft and structured, personal and protective. They are built from found and natural elements, shaped by intuition, yet engineered for precise function. A nest is not merely a shelter - it is a statement of belonging. And Vallée’s work tells us: to belong in a space, we must first feel it belong to us.

In a world of sleek digital renders and algorithmic aesthetics, Garance Vallée returns us to the soul of design: the quiet alchemy between mind, body, and matter. She reminds us that a chair can hold memory, that a lamp can suggest emotion, that a room can breathe with you. She builds not monuments, but metaphors. Not objects, but oracles.

Through her, design becomes a kind of dreaming - a way to imagine how we live, how we love, how we evolve. And in that act of dreaming, we may find the courage to remake the world.

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Words by AW.

Photos courtesy of Ludovic Balay.