Every September, Paris hands its streets over to design. Maison&Objet opens the season at Paris Nord Villepinte from 10 to 14 September, framed this year around its new Pulse identity and a theme built on movement, craftsmanship and emerging talent across seven sectors. Once the fair closes its halls, Paris Design Week carries the momentum into the city itself, running the full ten days from 10 to 19 September and turning museums, hôtels particuliers, galleries and showrooms into one open-air itinerary. Between the two, this year’s edition reads like a study in material, memory and craft.
At the Grand Palais, design collective Uchronia takes over the Rotonde d’Antin with Le Grand Bouquet, a monumental floral installation borrowing its shape from the building’s own floor mosaics and vegetal mouldings. Illuminated petals appear to rise straight out of the ground, with circular seating built into the base so visitors can sit rather than simply pass through. The installation runs from 11 to 20 September, and a companion capsule of ceramics, lighting and accessories lands in the Grand Palais’s own design boutique for the same window.
A short walk from there, on Rue des Saints-Pères, de Gournay hands its premises over to antiques dealer and scenographer Antoine Billore from 10 to 13 September. The house’s hand-painted wallpapers and porcelain meet Billore’s own eye for eclectic, unsigned objects, so the setting ends up somewhere between an atelier and a cabinet of curiosities, newly installed wallpapers and fabrics sitting alongside pieces with histories of their own.
Histories of a different kind surface at the Hôtel de la Marine, where studio Maison Lacmé presents Astre Mobile from 9 to 27 September. A transparent car is rebuilt entirely as an artwork, in the lineage of the Art Car tradition, with around ten French artisans contributing pieces in gold, onyx, shell, feather marquetry, urushi lacquer and porcelain. Every element most people would overlook in a car (the steering wheel, the dashboard, the gear lever) becomes its own small object here, free to view in the Cour de l’Intendant.
The Institut du Monde Arabe turns its attention closer to home this year, unveiling the finalists of its fourth Design Prize on 9 September, with the exhibition itself running through to the 20th. Winners are named across categories spanning emerging talent, contemporary craftsmanship and social or environmental impact, and this year’s shortlist includes young Moroccan designers working across textile, architecture and heritage preservation.
The long-running 1000 Vases exhibition keeps its own quieter tradition alive at 8 rue Chapon from 11 to 13 September, gathering vases from independent designers across dozens of countries, each given free rein to reinterpret one object across ceramic, glass, wood, metal and recycled materials.
Architecture studio Stene Alexopoulos marks its furniture debut on Rue de Seine from 10 to 15 September with Paris–Athens / Athens–Paris, a collection built on the shared classical language of its two home cities. Greek Cipollino marble, red travertine, American walnut and hand-cast pewter appear here without any applied colour, the studio choosing instead to let each material’s own tone and grain define the finished piece.
Light does the building at the Palais-Royal, where Chinese designer Wu Bin installs The Pavilion of Time for the length of Paris Design Week. Mirror-polished stainless steel and a translucent, paper-like membrane dissolve the structure into its surroundings by day, while a circular path threads straight through its centre and the whole pavilion behaves like a slow-moving sundial as the light shifts.
Material carries its own weight again at the Institut Polonais de Paris, where the Visteria Foundation makes its French debut with The Matter of Earth, running from 10 September to 4 October (closed 26 and 27 September). Eleven Polish artists and designers explore the relationship between material, landscape and memory across sculpture, craft and collectible design, extending a project first shown in Warsaw in 2024.
Paris Design Week’s new “Apartments” trail runs the same ten days, opening a run of private-feeling interiors rather than showrooms: a new furniture collection from Charlotte Biltgen in Courcelles, a reimagined Studio Andrée Putman gallery in a converted former school, and several further addresses on the Left Bank.
On Rue Bonaparte, Galerie Kostia opens its own Paris Design Week presentation on 10 September, continuing into the 20th, with the atelier’s collectible furniture on view in its confidential, appointment-only setting.
The Factory programme keeps doing what it has done for over fifteen years now: giving emerging design somewhere to be seen. This year’s edition, curated by two former Factory alumni, spreads across Espace Commines and several addresses in the Marais from 10 to 19 September.
At Pulp Galerie on Rue de Seine, a retrospective titled Plier la matière traces the late Yves de la Tour d’Auvergne‘s decades-long exploration of folding, from paper sculpture through to furniture and cast resin, running from 10 September through to 31 October, well past Paris Design Week itself.
Place de la Bastille takes on a different kind of gravity for the same ten days. Studio 5.5‘s La Re-prise de la Bastille wraps the July Column in a textile installation made from clothing collected through Refashion’s recycling system, turning a site associated with revolution into one about reuse.
And the season’s real opening act, in a sense, comes from Lafayette Anticipations, where Life of Forms runs from 8 to 13 September as the first event of AlUla’s inaugural Cultural Season in Paris. Works developed through AlUla’s design residencies sit alongside pieces from the Lafayette Anticipations collection, raw earth, stone, palm weaving and Hijazi perfumery all treated as living material rather than finished craft.
Ten days, one city, and a season that keeps circling back to the same question: what happens when a material is allowed to speak for itself.
