Trésors Publics

Most of the entries in this little blue book lead you to Paris — a courtyard in the Marais, a counter on the Place de la Madeleine, a workshop behind an unmarked door in the 11e. This one asks you to go south, to the old town of Nice, where the streets narrow into shadow and the light at the end of an alley arrives the colour of apricot. There, at 18 rue de la Préfecture, is a shop that has quietly become one of the most serious arguments in France for the value of the everyday object. It is called Trésors Publics, and it is worth the detour.

The name is a small, deliberate joke — public treasures — and it tells you almost everything about the sensibility at work. These are not treasures in the auction-house sense. They are the Opinel knife and the Duralex tumbler, the Madeleine mould and the wooden spinning top, the spectacle case and the cake of soap — the objects an entire country grew up holding without ever once thinking of them as beautiful. Trésors Publics has taken these things, looked at them with the attention usually reserved for art, and discovered that the attention was deserved all along.

Two Men, Two Hundred Telephone Calls

The shop is the work of Antoine Bourrassin and Nicolas Barbero, who opened the first Trésors Publics in Vieux Nice in 2017. Bourrassin had run a bar in Cannes; Barbero had worked at the Chamber of Commerce. Neither came from retail in the conventional sense, which may be exactly why the shop feels like nothing else. The idea arrived on a journey — the recognition that the small French manufacturers who had made the ordinary objects of national life for a century or more were vanishing, one workshop at a time. So they began telephoning them; by the time they opened the doors, they had contacted something on the order of two hundred companies.

They describe the project, without embarrassment, as a form of economic patriotism — a way of keeping French hands at French workbenches. Every object in the shop is made in France, and many carry a small map showing the town the object comes from, so that you leave knowing not merely what you bought but where in the country it was born.

A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Republic of Daily Life

To walk into Trésors Publics is to enter something closer to a cabinet of curiosities than a boutique. The objects — close to a thousand of them — are arranged with a density that rewards slowness. You do not browse so much as excavate: a shelf yields the Cléopâtre glue pot remembered from a school desk; below it, a Moulinex grinder; beside it, a plastic-cased pen that lived in every French handbag of a certain decade. It is something like a recovered grammar — the visual vocabulary of an entire culture’s daily existence, assembled in one room and offered back to you.

There is a scent to the place too, drifting up from the soaps and rose waters made by the perfumers of Grasse, an hour inland — the smell of a French bathroom of the mid-century. The whole shop is a machine for return, a journey back into a shared childhood that you can carry home in a paper bag.

They had looked at the ordinary objects of French life, the ones a whole country had stopped seeing, and decided that the looking-away was a kind of loss worth reversing.

The Objects They Make Themselves

Alongside the curated French manufactures, Trésors Publics has developed a line of its own — objects designed by the two founders and produced by French ateliers to their specification. Chief among them are the leather goods: spectacle cases, passport covers, and card holders cut from hides supplied by the Degermann tannery in Alsace. Then there are the Charentaises, the felt-soled French house slipper whose ancestry runs to the seventeenth century; the Trésors Publics version substitutes Shetland wool for the traditional sheep’s wool, a small refinement that makes a very old object newly comfortable.

The shop has not gone unremarked. Monocle called it “an example of what every city needs more of,” Elle praised its “timeless, useful, beautifully made objects,” and Marie Claire its “irreproachable selection.” It is, in the end, a shop with a thesis — and the thesis is persuasive.

Things Worth Knowing Before You Go