Signature Bar

by Maugoust Chenais

Pavilion 7.2

WE’RE DARING to create a sensory experience to put fabric front and centre. That’s what artistic director Cécile Chenais and interior architect Laurent Maugoust did for the Signature Bar at EquipHotel Paris 2024.

It’s a space where people can walk around amid long swathes of fabric. Sheer, tweeds, jacquards and more become denser along the way, taking hold as their movements change, come to life and vibrate. “We created a textile forest where you can walk right into the heart of the material,” explains Cécile Chenais.

The materials are meant to be touched and listened to as they crackle, rustle and rub... Several major fabric houses, including Bisson Burneel, Thevenon, and Misia are represented in the space, which features a bar adorned with mirrors, to create an infinity of reflections.


The agency

“Whether we’re interpreting the stars as we renovate hotels, or sketching the outlines of a piece of furniture, our work today is intended to stand the test of time. It is precisely this awareness that sharpens our sense of purpose and gives meaning to our firm’s trajectory. We've been working together for twenty years. Through communication, dialogue, sometimes confrontation, always in contrast, we create the right amount of tension to express our creative language. Our sensibilities are mutually nurtured to meet the needs of current projects, for demanding clients, in synergy with players in the world of publishing and exceptional know-how. One came to the decorative arts through art history and the anthropology of movement and space. The other through fine arts and the academic route of interior architecture and design. We are different and complementary at times, but we share an eclectic yet foundational aesthetic base in our respective paths. With this unusual combination, MAUGOUST CHENAIS, in which some see a form of uniqueness, forces us to question the notion of sustainability in each of our projects. While we share a taste for understated elegance and pure volumes, we also have a keen appreciation of classical forms, the framework from which our actions emerge, our gaze rests and our purpose asserts itself. Our approach is a variable focus. Our interest invariably lies in what is singular, setting the tone for what we always want to include in a form of timelessness. Our studio has around sixty hotel projects to its credit (Midscale Upscale Premium and Resorts).  Our ACCOR clients (Novotel, Mercure, Pullmann Sofitel Mgallery Tribe Ibis Style) Relais&Chateaux, Marriott Hyatt, etc. ”