Humbert & Poyet’s Nocturnal Smoking Room: neo Art Deco built around a conversation

EXHIBITIONS · PARIS

Reading time: 9 min

A smoking room in Paris in 2018 could not be a room for smoking, because smoking indoors had been illegal there for a decade. So Emil Humbert and Christophe Poyet built something else: a room organised entirely around talking at night, with a lacquered bar as its centre, a plaster ceiling doing the work overhead, and six French workshops behind every surface. It stood for under three weeks.

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The Nocturnal Smoking Room was a room named after something you could not do in it.

Smoking has been prohibited in French cafés, bars and restaurants since 1 January 2008. Humbert & Poyet founded their studio in Monaco that same year. Ten years later, invited to build a room for AD Intérieurs in Paris, Emil Humbert and Christophe Poyet chose the one interior type whose original activity had been legislated out of the room.

That is the interesting decision, and it is the whole piece. A fumoir was never really about tobacco. It was about what happened while people smoked. It was the room you moved to after dinner, low-lit and acoustically soft, where the conversation got better and the company got smaller. Take the cigarettes out and the brief is still there, and it is a design brief rather than a nostalgic one: build a room that makes people want to stay in it and talk.

Everything in the Nocturnal Smoking Room follows from that. The bar is the piece the plan turns around. The seating is low and upholstered. The floor is a crimson rug and the ceiling is white, serrated, and modernist. And the woman the room invokes, Marie-Laure de Noailles, was famous for exactly one thing: getting things made.

The room was built inside a building site

The setting is the part usually left out, and it changes how the room reads.

AD Intérieurs 2018 moved out of its usual home and into the Hôtel de la Bûcherie, a fifteenth century building on the Left Bank that was mid-renovation at the time, on its way to becoming the home of the Compagnie des Philanthropes the following year. Exposed vaults. Bare walls. The magazine gave its designers a brief drawn from that condition: brut et précieux, raw and precious.

Fifteen interior designers each built a room inside it. The show ran to 23 September 2018, which gave the whole thing a life of under three weeks.

Humbert & Poyet answered a construction site with the most finished room they could make. Glazed lacquer. Patinated bronze. Marble. Crystal. Hand-tufted carpet. A plaster ceiling. Not one surface left in its raw state, in a building where every other surface was.

That is the correct answer to that brief, and it is a braver one than meeting the rawness halfway. A room that borrows exposed stone from the shell around it flatters the building. A room that refuses to takes a position: this is what a finished interior is, here is the distance between the two conditions, and the distance is the point. The crimson rug against a fifteenth century vault is a bigger idea than any amount of sympathetic patina.

What neo Art Deco actually means here

The studio’s own term for what it does is neo Art Deco, and the room is the clearest demonstration of it they have built.

Neo Art Deco is not a motif exercise. There are no sunbursts, no chevrons, no fluted zigzags. What the room takes from the 1920s is structural rather than decorative:

Symmetry and a single anchor. A marble carved fireplace holds one end, the bar holds the other, and the seating is arranged between them. Art Deco rooms were planned around a fixed focal object in a way that most contemporary lounge design is not.

A dark ground under a pale ceiling. The crimson floor and the muffled palette press the room down; the white serrated ceiling, made in plaster and rooted in modernist rather than decorative tradition, lifts it. That vertical contrast is a 1920s device and it is doing more work here than any surface pattern would.

Materials chosen for weight. Marble, bronze, lacquer and crystal are heavy, cold and slow. They are the opposite of the light, quick, matte materials that dominate contemporary interiors, and they behave differently at night, which is when this room was designed to be seen.

The lineage is one Humbert has named himself. He cites Jean Royère, whose collections he describes as extremely modern and now timeless, and Gio Ponti, who for him represents the architecture of joy. He has also said that visiting Carlo Scarpa’s Brion cemetery at eighteen showed him a complete modernist world. Royère, Ponti and Scarpa are not Art Deco designers. They are the generation that came immediately after and kept the discipline while dropping the ornament, which is a precise description of what this room does.

It is also worth remembering that Art Deco takes its name from a Paris exhibition, the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Making an Art Deco argument inside a temporary Paris exhibition room is not a coincidence. It is the original format.

The bar is the piece the room turns around

Ask what the room is for and the bar answers.

It is the conversational piece, in the studio’s own description, and it is built from platters of glazed lacquer and patinated bronze, with the metalwork by Pouenat. Sculptural rather than joinery-like, it reads as an object placed in the room rather than a fitting built into it.

A bar is the most efficient social device in interior design. It gives people a reason to stand, a place to put a hand, a destination that is not a seat, and a natural break in a conversation that has run its course. Put one in a lounge and the room acquires circulation. Leave it out and everybody stays where they first sat.

Around it, the other pieces were designed for the room and made for it: a monolith sofa, a pair of armchairs, a coffee table in blue, and the marble fireplace. That is a complete set of custom furniture, produced for an installation lasting under three weeks, which tells you what the exercise was really for.

Six French workshops for a nineteen day room

This is the part of the project that deserves the most attention, and it is the part that gets summarised as a credit list.

Pouenat made the metalwork. Founded in 1880 and still working from Moulins in the Allier, it is a ferronnier d’art turned furniture editor, working in steel, stainless steel, brass, aluminium, copper and bronze, with a client list that runs from the Plaza Athénée and Le Meurice to Dior, Balmain and Versailles.

Atelier Tollis made the ceiling. Tollis holds the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label and belongs to a group whose main business is the restoration of French historic monuments, with in-house workshops for staff moulding and decorative painting. A firm whose ordinary week involves repairing cathedral ornament was asked to produce a crisp white modernist ceiling, and that is a more interesting commission than it sounds, because the skills involved are identical and only the drawing changes.

Atelier Martin Berger made the murals. Berger works from Grenoble, has been practising since 1992, and developed a technique he calls paper marquetry, building textured surfaces on flexible supports so that light moves across them. He describes his work as a choreography in which body and matter perform, which is an unusually physical way for a decorative painter to talk about a wall.

Baccarat supplied the crystal. Pierre Frey supplied the fabrics. Codimat supplied the carpet. The artwork came from White Cube.

Six houses, one gallery, one room, nineteen days. That is patronage in the present tense, and it is the strongest thing about the project. A temporary room is the mechanism by which a workshop in Moulins or Grenoble gets its work photographed, published and specified. The installation is the shop window for people who do not have one.

Marie-Laure de Noailles was a commissioner, not a look

Which brings the room back to the woman it is named for, and to the reason invoking her is more than decorative shorthand.

Marie-Laure de Noailles, who lived from 1902 to 1970, is described in almost every account as a muse. She was a client. With her husband Charles she commissioned Villa Noailles at Hyères from Robert Mallet-Stevens, begun in 1923 and one of the founding buildings of French modernism. She funded Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Château de Dé in 1929 and Francis Poulenc’s Aubade the same year, then Buñuel and Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or and Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète, both in 1930.

Her Paris house was the hôtel particulier at 11 place des États-Unis, and its interiors were redecorated in the 1920s by Jean-Michel Frank, the designer who did more than anyone to establish that luxury could be plain.

Here is the detail that closes the circle. That house is now Maison Baccarat. Baccarat acquired it in 2003 and converted it under Philippe Starck. Baccarat is one of the six houses that made this room.

So the crystal in a room dedicated to Marie-Laure de Noailles comes from the company that now occupies the house Marie-Laure de Noailles lived in. And the whole show sat inside a building being prepared for a company of philanthropists, in homage to a philanthropist. Whether any of that was planned hardly matters. It tells you the room was built on the right idea, which is that a great interior is usually the visible end of somebody’s decision to pay for something difficult.

What the room turned into

Installations are worth judging by what follows them, and this one was followed quickly.

In 2019 Humbert & Poyet opened Beefbar Paris in the former Fermette Marbeuf, a restaurant that opened in 1898 with an art nouveau atrium that was concealed behind a wall during the Second World War and stayed hidden for decades. The atrium was listed in 1983 and needed full restoration before anything else could happen. The studio restored it and then worked against it: olive green and navy seating, red velvet chairs, brass-edged tables, dark green marble cladding and glossy emerald tiles at the arched doorways.

That is the smoking room again, at full scale and with a real historic surface instead of a bare wall. Build a highly finished, saturated, material-heavy interior, and let the distance between it and the old fabric behind it be the design.

Since then the studio has joined the AD100, taken Beefbar to Milan and New York, converted a barge for Belmond and moved into hotels, with the Mandarin Oriental in Vienna among the work in progress. The nineteen day room in a fifteenth century building site turned out to be the argument they have been making ever since.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The Nocturnal Smoking Room is easy to file as a beautiful set piece, and it is one. It is more useful read as a proposal.

The proposal is that the fumoir is a room type worth having back, not for its original purpose but for its plan: a fixed anchor at each end, low seating between them, muffled surfaces, a ceiling that lifts, and a bar to give the evening somewhere to go. That is a set of instructions any designer could use in a house, a club or a hotel, and it is the reason this room reads as an argument rather than a display.

The second proposal is quieter. Six workshops, one gallery and a magazine put a room into a building site for under three weeks so that a group of French craft houses could be seen doing what they do. Marie-Laure de Noailles would have recognised the arrangement exactly.