Hermès Looking for Lightness: Inside the Water Tower Pavilions

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 8 min

Hermès built four lantern-like towers inside a former Basque pelota court in Milan, each one shaped like the water towers that usually announce a factory or a farm. The pairing was deliberate: a building made to survive a ball travelling at 300 kilometres an hour, filled with an argument about weightlessness. Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry, eight years into directing Hermès’s home collections together, used the contradiction to make their clearest case yet for lightness as a material property rather than a mood.

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Milan Design Week runs on spectacle, and most of it is forgotten within a season. Hermès’s 2022 instalment was not, and the reason is specific rather than atmospheric. Between 8 and 12 June 2022, the house filled La Pelota, a former fronton in Milan’s Brera district, with four freestanding structures built from ash wood and coloured paper, each modelled on the silhouette of a water tower. Lit from within, they turned the hall into something closer to a set of enormous paper lanterns than an exhibition stand.

The scenography was directed by Charlotte Macaux Perelman, founder of the Paris and New York studio Studio CMP, working with the curator Alexis Fabry. The pair have led Hermès’s home universe together since November 2014, across the house’s furniture, textile, porcelain and glassware lines, and by 2022 “Looking for Lightness” was one entry in an unusually long-running body of work rather than a one-off event. The lighting, which did as much of the argument as the architecture, was designed by Hervé Descottes of L’Observatoire International.

What follows is an account of a specific design decision and why it works: taking one of the heaviest, most utilitarian forms in the built landscape, and using it to demonstrate the opposite quality entirely.

Four towers in a room built for a 300 kilometre an hour ball

La Pelota takes its name from what it was built to do. The building on Via Palermo, in Brera, was constructed in 1945 and opened in 1947 as a sferisterio, a fronton for the Basque ball game pelota, or jai alai, in which players hurl a rubber ball against a wall hard enough for it to reach speeds of around 300 kilometres an hour. Spectators sat behind protective netting. Players wore helmets. The sport had a genuine casualty record, and by the time betting on jai alai peaked in Milan in the 1970s, the hall had become one of the more serious sporting venues in the city. It closed as a sporting arena in 1997 and reopened as an events space, later hosting Vitra and, in 2021 and 2022, Hermès.

That history matters to what Hermès built inside it. A room engineered to contain a projectile is not a neutral shell. Its proportions, its long barrel vault, its raw industrial finish all still read as a space built for force and speed. Into that hall, Hermès inserted four structures that did the opposite of everything the building was designed to survive: light rather than heavy, translucent rather than solid, glowing rather than braced. The contrast was not commented on by the house at the time, but it did not need to be stated. Anyone standing in that hall, under a lit paper tower, in a room built to take the force of a hard rubber ball, felt it.

Water towers, rendered in ash and paper

The four structures took their form from water towers, a type chosen precisely because it carries the opposite of lightness as a piece of architecture. A water tower exists to hold several tonnes of water above the ground, and every version of the form, whether a Brutalist concrete cylinder or a riveted steel tank on stilts, communicates its own structural burden. Hermès reproduced that exact silhouette in the least burdened materials available: frames of ash wood, wrapped in sheets of custom-dyed, translucent paper.

Each tower took a different geometry. One was a cone. One stacked two cubic volumes. One rose to a pyramid. One sat on a hexagonal base, clad in yellow and blue. Each stood roughly eight metres tall, and together the four enclosed around 100 square metres of interior space. LED chandeliers and spotlights inside each structure lit the paper skin from within, so that from outside the towers appeared to glow rather than stand, and from inside, daylight and artificial light both arrived filtered and coloured through the paper. Hervé Descottes of L’Observatoire International, who designed the lighting, has described the effect as being like standing inside a Noguchi lamp: the light source and the object it illuminates become the same thing.

The formal joke, if it can be called that, is precise rather than glib. A water tower’s entire job is to hold weight up. These four held up nothing but coloured light. Charlotte Macaux Perelman put the underlying idea more simply: “The lightness is reflected in the materials we have used, for example, the paper. It is also in the simplicity of the shapes.” The paper cladding and the paper pulp platforms used to display objects inside the towers were recycled back to the manufacturer for papermaking once the show closed, so the material argument extended past the five days of the exhibition and into what happened to it afterwards.

Charlotte Macaux Perelman and Alexis Fabry, eight years into one argument

The pairing behind “Looking for Lightness” is worth naming properly, because Milan Design Week coverage of luxury brands routinely credits the house and skips the people. Charlotte Macaux Perelman trained as an architect at the Paris La Seine and Paris Belleville schools, then spent the early part of her career inside other people’s ideas of restraint: with Philippe Starck’s studio from 1997, including work on Ian Schrager’s Sanderson Hotel in London, then with the Rockwell Group in New York, then with André Balazs on the renovation of the Raleigh in Miami Beach. She founded Studio CMP, with offices in Paris and New York, in 2005, working across hotels, restaurants and residential interiors before Hermès appointed her, alongside the curator and photography specialist Alexis Fabry, as co-artistic director of its home universe in November 2014.

That appointment covers three separate Hermès houses: Hermès Maison, the silversmith Puiforcat and the glassmaker Saint-Louis. By June 2022, Macaux Perelman and Fabry had been setting the design direction for all three, together, for close to eight years, and “Looking for Lightness” sits inside a sequence of annual Milan installations that each took a different formal idea as its instrument: graphic, coloured chambers the year before, an iron cage the year after, an installation built around the idea of a quest for the object by 2025. Read as a series rather than a single event, the water towers are one chapter in a longer, deliberately varied argument about what a house best known for leather and silk scarves can say about domestic objects when it is given a building to think inside.

Architects, artists and craftspeople, not house stylists

The pieces staged inside the towers extend the same logic: bring in people whose primary discipline is not homeware, and let their instincts shape the object. The ‘Oria’ chair, in curved oak with canework and leather detailing, is by the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, a Pritzker laureate better known for museums and courthouses than for seating. A low stool with a caned structure and leather seat, its proportions closer to a piece of Japanese furniture than a European one, is by Álvaro Siza, another architect with a body of civic work far larger than any single chair.

Textiles carried the largest share of the “lightness” argument. A cashmere throw titled Construction, developed with the artist Gianpaolo Pagni, assembled cashmere panels using techniques borrowed from ready-to-wear tailoring rather than traditional weaving. A bedspread called Surface, by the American artist Carson Converse, built a hexagonal patchwork of cashmere and combined it with quilting, so that the pattern read differently depending on the angle of the light coming through the tower walls. Porcelain plates, painted with stylised, sun-coloured motifs, were designed by Arielle de Brichambaut. A T-shaped table lamp called Coulisse, with a bamboo frame wrapped in parachute fabric, was designed by Tomas Alonso, a lighting and product designer whose own studio work runs toward exactly this kind of structural economy.

Leather table centrepieces were hand-painted with geometric patterns applied freehand, brush to hide, rather than printed or stamped, which meant no two were identical. Every object in the show, from the porcelain to the canework, was raised on stacks of paper pulp or set along simple wooden rails, so that the display furniture used the same material vocabulary as the towers around it.

What the room proved

“Looking for Lightness” answers a question that is easy to ask about a luxury house’s design week installation and hard to answer well: what is it actually arguing? The answer here is unusually direct for the format. Weight is not a property of scale; it is a property of material and structure, and the two can be separated. A water tower is not heavy because it is tall. It is heavy because it is built to carry something. Remove the load, keep the silhouette, and change everything the form implies, without changing the form itself.

That is a genuinely useful idea outside a Milan showroom, and it is the idea Macaux Perelman and Fabry have been developing across a decade of Hermès homeware: that restraint in a domestic object, a chair, a plate, a throw, is not the absence of ambition but a specific kind of structural discipline. The towers made the abstraction physical and, for five days in a room built to survive a very fast, very hard ball, impossible to miss.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to file “Looking for Lightness” as another well-funded luxury spectacle timed to Milan Design Week, one of dozens that fill the Brera district every June and mostly blur together by autumn. That reading misses what made this one specific. Hermès did not simply decorate a building; it picked a building with a physical history that argued against its theme, and let the tension do the work.

What actually happened at La Pelota was an argument about material honesty, built by an architect and a curator who have now spent close to a decade making variations of the same case across three different Hermès houses. Weight, they demonstrated, is a decision, not a given. A water tower can be made to hold nothing but light. A chair by a Pritzker laureate can be reduced to cane and leather without losing its authority. A porcelain plate can carry colour without carrying decoration for its own sake.

That is the argument the room made, and it is the reason five days inside a former Basque ball court, under four glowing paper towers, are still worth writing about years later.

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