Why Festen Architecture is in the Design 100

Charlotte de Tonnac and Hugo Sauzay met while studying interior architecture at the École Camondo, and opened Festen together in Paris. The practice has built its name on hospitality: Hôtel Pigalle in the ninth arrondissement, Château Voltaire across three joined buildings on the Right Bank, and Les Roches Rouges, a former motel reworked into a hotel on the Mediterranean at Saint-Raphaël. Each project favours the same restrained language: timber, plaster, natural stone and a palette that reads as considered rather than styled, built around the character already present in a room.

That approach has carried Festen from Paris apartments to hotel commissions across the south of France, London, New York and Mexico, work that treats hospitality design as a craft discipline in its own right. In an index built around distinctive practices, Festen’s inclusion recognises a studio that has kept its material vocabulary consistent across a decade of increasingly varied commissions, and made warmth the thing clients now come to them for.