Astier de Villatte

The ceramics stacked in their hundreds on rough wooden shelves, the incense threading through the air, the slightly dusty accumulation of objects that manages to feel both entirely deliberate and entirely uncontrived: all of this is the achievement of Benoît Astier de Villatte and Ivan Pericoli, childhood friends who founded the house in 1996 with a shared conviction that beautiful things made by hand, for daily use, are the most honest form of design.

Nearly thirty years later, that conviction has produced one of the most distinctive aesthetic identities in contemporary French decorative arts — one that remains, in its original expression on the Rue Saint-Honoré, impossible to replicate elsewhere.

Two Sculptors and an Idea About Daily Life

Benoît Astier de Villatte and Ivan Pericoli met as children and trained together as sculptors at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. Their conviction, developed over years of working with clay and plaster, was both simple and radical: that the most important design objects are not the ones displayed on pedestals but the ones used at table every morning. Cups, plates, bowls, pitchers — the ceramic vocabulary of daily domestic life, made with the seriousness the decorative-arts tradition had reserved for more obviously prestigious objects.

Black Earth, White Glaze, Paris Atelier

The ceramics draw on a technique as old as French pottery: black-fired earthenware — a dark, porous terracotta body fired at low temperatures — coated with a milky white slip glaze that pools in the recesses and catches on the raised edges, producing a surface that is at once ancient and unmistakably contemporary. Every piece is made by hand in the house’s Paris atelier, so no two are identical; the slight variations between pieces from the same mould are a feature, not an inconsistency.

The shop itself is a made thing. The space at 173 Rue Saint-Honoré dates to the early nineteenth century and was, under the First Empire, a silversmith’s workshop supplying the Napoleonic court. The floor-to-ceiling wooden shelving, the worn stone floor, and the dense, layered abundance of the arrangement are the result of decades of accumulation — a total work of art built with the same sculptural intelligence that produces the ceramics.

The most beautiful commercial interior in Paris — where objects made for daily use are treated with the seriousness they deserve.

What to Look For

The range has expanded well beyond ceramics. The incense and room fragrances — under the Svelte and Incense de Nuit lines — are complex, resinous, and emphatically non-commercial, among the most distinctive produced in France. The notebooks and stationery, bound in marbled papers and heavy linen, are objects of beauty in their own right and the most accessible entry to the house. And the long-running collaboration with the American designer John Derian — his découpage trays and objects — sits with surprising naturalness among the ceramics.

Things Worth Knowing Before You Go