Why a Caribbean Fabric Collection Was Unveiled Inside a Chinese Pagoda in Paris

ART & CULTURE · PARIS

Reading time: 8 min

Lelièvre Paris chose an unlikely stage for its first indoor and outdoor fabric collection: a Chinese pagoda built inside a Parisian mansion in 1926. Îles du Vent takes its palette and its twelve fabric names from the Caribbean archipelago, and the designer behind its staging, Edgar Jayet, has built his entire practice on putting new work in conversation with old buildings. The venue was not a curiosity booked for the week. It was the argument.

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Introduction

Lelièvre Paris unveiled Îles du Vent, the house’s first dedicated indoor and outdoor fabric collection, at Paris Déco Off in January 2026, staging the launch inside La Pagode, a red-painted Chinese pavilion built into a Parisian mansion at 48 Rue de Courcelles in the eighth arrondissement. The collection takes its name and its visual language from the Caribbean, twelve fabrics and two rugs named for islands across the archipelago, engineered to move between a living room and a terrace without changing character. The venue, at first glance, has nothing to do with either. A French silk house’s tropical debut, staged inside a century-old monument to Chinese architecture transplanted into an haussmannian street, is the kind of pairing that could easily read as a scenographer’s flourish rather than a considered decision.

It was not a flourish. The designer responsible for the staging, Edgar Jayet, has spent his career building a practice specifically about putting new work into dialogue with buildings and traditions that came before it. Understanding why Lelièvre chose La Pagode, rather than a conventional showroom or a stripped white space, means understanding both what the house was launching and who it asked to stage it.

A house that has spent 112 years choosing carefully when to change

Lelièvre was founded in 1914, when Henri Lelièvre acquired the Paris fabric houses Piquéé and Logerot at 36 Rue des Petits Champs, in the city’s second arrondissement. Following Henri’s death in 1935, his wife Madeleine Lelièvre took over the business, and their son Paul Lelièvre began running operations from 1942, the same period in which the house developed its own silk velvets. The company moved to 13 Rue du Mail in 1954, where its headquarters remains today. Emmanuel Lelièvre, the fourth generation, joined as general manager in 2009, making Îles du Vent a collection launched under the family’s fourth consecutive generation of leadership, a continuity that few fabric houses of Lelièvre’s scale can claim.

That continuity has been built through careful, occasional acquisition rather than constant reinvention. Lelièvre bought Quenin, a Lyon silk-weaving manufacture with its own precious archive, in 1972 and 1973, and added Tassinari & Chatel, a hand-weaving workshop in Lyon’s Croix-Rousse district, in 1997. In 2024, the house joined Comité Colbert, the association representing France’s luxury and heritage houses, the same year it partnered with the textile group C4 Industries. Against that history, a house’s first outdoor collection is not a routine seasonal launch. It is the kind of decision a family business makes once it is confident the core of what it does, precise weaving, considered colour, fabrics built to be lived with, will hold up outside the room it was designed for.

Twelve fabrics, each one carrying an island’s name

Îles du Vent, designed entirely in-house by the Lelièvre studio, is built from twelve fabrics and two rugs, each engineered for both indoor upholstery and outdoor exposure rather than treated as a separate, lesser outdoor-only range. Aruba is a matte bouclé with a textured relief, offered in eight colourways. Trinidad takes a linen-like drape across twenty-three colours, by far the widest palette in the collection. Tobago carries bold, contrasting stripes across a textured ground, and Antilla does the same idea more quietly, a fine classic stripe set on a light background. Sainte-Lucie is a marled, textured cloth with threads of subtle colour running through it, and Antigua takes its geometry directly from Caribbean craft traditions rather than an abstracted version of them. Sombrero softens into a linen-effect ground carrying stylised motifs, Montserrat is woven in wide bayadère stripes with a raised texture, and Orchila works ikat-style braiding and variegated thread into its surface. Saba is a faux-solid built from tricolour grain, Caraïbes carries a botanical, tapestry-like jungle motif across just two colourways, and Dominica closes the fabric range with tricolour vertical stripes in a linen effect. Two rugs complete the collection: Amure, a flat weave carrying a polka-dot pattern, and Loro, a finer weave in a smaller, more saturated colour range.

The detail worth pausing on is not any single fabric but the naming system across all twelve. Aruba, Trinidad, Tobago, Antigua, Sainte-Lucie, Montserrat, Saba and Dominica are not invented, evocative-sounding words chosen to suggest the tropics. They are the names of real islands, drawn directly from across the Caribbean archipelago the collection takes its inspiration from. A buyer working through a Lelièvre sample book for Îles du Vent is, without necessarily realising it, moving through an actual geography rather than a marketing palette, which is a more disciplined way to build a themed collection than most houses attempt, and a detail unlikely to survive a quick scan of the collection online.

The designer whose entire practice is about putting new work into old rooms

Edgar Jayet founded his interior architecture and design studio, based between Paris and Venice, in 2021, shortly after winning the Grand Prix Van Cleef & Arpels at Design Parade Toulon. His practice describes its own approach as both speculative and operative, meaning a project begins as an idea and is worked through in conceptual terms before it is allowed to become a physical space. The through-line across his work, from residential commissions to installations for Design Miami/Paris and an exhibition called Le Bain du Collectionneur, staged in collaboration with the Musée Nissim de Camondo, is a consistent refusal to treat contemporary design as something built in isolation from what came before it. Jayet’s studio positions new work specifically in dialogue with historical and traditional context, and builds that dialogue through close collaboration with master craftspeople rather than around them.

That is precisely the brief a Caribbean-inspired outdoor fabric collection, staged inside a Chinese pavilion in the middle of Paris, actually needed. A conventional showroom would have let Îles du Vent’s colours and textures speak for themselves without asking anything of the room around them. La Pagode does not allow that kind of neutrality. Staging a collection that is explicitly about one culture’s landscape inside a building that is explicitly about another culture’s architecture, transplanted and reinterpreted on a Parisian street, sets up exactly the kind of conversation between tradition and new work that Jayet’s practice is built to hold. The choice of venue was not incidental to the collection. It was an extension of the same argument the fabrics themselves are making, that decorative history travels, and that a considered new object can sit inside an inherited structure without either one flattening the other.

The pagoda that outgrew the rules that would have stopped it

La Pagode, also known as Maison Loo, began as an entirely ordinary Parisian mansion, built in 1880 in the Plaine Monceau district that straddles the eighth and seventeenth arrondissements. It was bought by Ching Tsai Loo, a Chinese art dealer who had arrived in Paris in 1902 and built his career trading Chinese antiquities to European collectors. Loo wanted a building that expressed, in his own words, one man’s love for his native China in the heart of Paris, and in 1926 he commissioned the architect Fernand Bloch to deliver it. Bloch’s renovation was not a modest one. Two additional storeys were added, the roofline was entirely reshaped into a pagoda’s tiered silhouette, and the whole structure was painted a deep, unmissable red, a transformation made possible in part because building permit regulations at the time did not prevent it. Local objections followed, including formal petitions from neighbours who had not expected a Chinese pavilion to appear on their street. The building survived them.

Today, La Pagode operates as a private museum at 48 Rue de Courcelles, hosting exhibitions on Chinese art and tradition, cultural events exploring the relationship between France and China, and privately booked events inside its distinctive rooms. Its own history, one culture’s architecture inserted deliberately and unapologetically into another’s streetscape, gives it a specific relevance to Îles du Vent that a rented event space could never supply. Both the building and the collection it hosted are, at their core, exercises in transplanting one place’s visual language into a completely different setting, and asking whether it can hold its own there. La Pagode has been answering that question, successfully, for a century.

Three houses under one roof

Îles du Vent was not the only collection Lelièvre showed at La Pagode during Paris Déco Off. The house presented it alongside Escales Lointaines, a range of travel-themed jacquards built around exotic motifs and maritime geometries, and Festivités 2026, a collection from Quenin, the Lyon silk-weaving house Lelièvre acquired in the early 1970s, built around theatrical, opulent patterns suited to entertaining. The presentation also included reissued archival designs from Tassinari & Chatel, the hand-weaving workshop Lelièvre added to the group in 1997, among them Les Roses and Dahlia Perlé. Showing all three houses together, under a single staging by Jayet inside a single building, was itself a statement about how Lelièvre positions its wider group: not as a single fabric brand with occasional acquisitions attached, but as a family of French textile houses, each with its own archive and specialism, presented as a coherent whole. Îles du Vent, as the newest and most technically distinct of the group’s collections, carried the weight of showing that the house’s range extends convincingly beyond the interior, without asking any of the others to change register to accommodate it.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe Îles du Vent as a French fabric house trying its hand at outdoor textiles and leave it there. What the staging at La Pagode makes clear is that Lelièvre treated the launch itself as part of the design brief, not as an afterthought bolted onto a finished collection. A house that has spent four generations and 112 years choosing carefully when to change does not hand its first outdoor collection to a scenographer without a reason for the venue. Edgar Jayet’s practice exists specifically to put new work into conversation with the buildings and traditions that came before it, and a pagoda built by a Chinese art dealer determined to bring his native architecture to a Parisian street is about as direct an example of that conversation as Paris has to offer. Twelve fabrics named for real islands, staged inside a building that is itself a transplanted culture holding its ground for a century, make the same argument twice. Decorative language travels well, provided the people handling it take it seriously enough to ask where it is going.