Five years after Covid-19 first turns our lives, the story of Florent Breton is a kind of cliché. A sales manager born in France for Victorinox, the best known company to produce the Swiss razor, was one of the thousands, perhaps millions, of people who gave themselves a corner in the pandemic and adopted a new career.
Mr. Breton’s sales work required frequent trips. But once it was based on its base of operations in Lausana, Switzerland, physical stillness produced a concern of the mind. He thinks of his previous work as a marketing manager for Zenith, a luxury watches company, and his pleasure in collaborating with architects and artisans in the design of boutique spaces and exhibition.
In 2021, while continued working full for Victorinox, Hey enrolled in a Lausanian design school called Idées House. Upon receiving its interior design diploma two years later, it established a design practice and a second 90-minute residence, at the Swiss Crans-Montana ski station.
From that moment on, there was no more clichés. Starting with his own home in Cran-Montana, Mr. Breton, 46, was determined to interrupt the exclusive architectural style of the area, the alpine villa with a maximum wooden roof.
“It’s always the same,” he said. “Old wood, gray tiles on the floor, always the same fireplace.”
For a stranger, a Frenchman raised in the Loira Valley, nothing less, to challenge a construction typology that is effective a Swiss national brand, was risky. But if he wanted to stand out in his new professional, he would have to be bold. He paid $ 600,000 for a condominium of 1,025 square feet of the 1980s with two rooms and an office at home, the last address that would be in a cuco clock or a “Heidi” restart and transformed it with a powerful mixture of Japanese and European and European. He estimated to spend $ 150,000 on renovations.
The rebellion occurred from scratch. The local trafficker who sold to Mr. Breton the tiles of his living room told him that he was the first and only client to order the pattern that seemed fragments with gold. Assembly, the mosaic evoked Kintsugi’s Japanese technique used to repair damaged ceramics and honor their wounds. When the solar rays hit the gold, Breton said, the light intervenes the interior.
Far from the wood that approaches, which is for chalets what is the gingerbread for the houses of gingerbread, it promoted it to an ornamental material Visel Visaple -varying to the contrast with the soft and smooth white walls of the condominium. The wood appears in knots pine beams (sandy sandyglants) and discreet stripes of wall panels, in built -in sockets and cabinets, on doors with horizontal strips that upload the graphic board edges and in a monopo vertical.
Like the Kintsugi mosaic, the burned finish of the console table was a nod to Japanese aesthetics, in this case the treatment known as Shou Sugi Ban.
The shelf of the living room that designed as a thin grid or pieces of oak that rose to the peak roof was inspired by Tabako, or the racks in the inks of the Japanese temples where visitors leave their shoes. (The Swiss carpenter who worked from Mr. Breton’s drawings told him that he had never built anything like that). The mountain silhouette drawn on a wall in the main room, an illustration of the alpine view, looking at the south of Montan Atatunda- Mr. Breton of Katagami, the Japanese practice of using Esticles to make textile patterns.
For the chimney of the living room, the designer wanted more than a wow than the heater that came with his unit, which was built of traditional stone, with a wooden slab for a shelf. Here, he took his Kachelofen signs, a wood masonry stove that is most commonly found in the German -speaking part of Switzerland. The new chimney is projected in the room as a peninsula and is covered with red ceramic tiles set in vertical strips of corrugated appearance. The wall next to it has the same mosaic in light gray, emphasizing its neighbor’s reddish.
The mosaics curves are part of a vocabulary of undulating shapes, resonated in the seats collected from the living room and the circular coffee tables (of the Belgian Ethnicity company) and the carpet with the ring (of the Italian company Opinion Ciatti).
They hang from the ceiling there are globular hanging lamps (of the DCW editions of the French brand). The Eames chair parked near the shelf is famous, cheerful resounding.
That is to say that Mr. Breton maintained the warmth and friendship in his swing away from the traditionalism of Cuco. This condominium is where he and his wife, Anne-Sophie Hottelart-Breton, 40, a publicist, and his 6-year-old daughter, Sistine, retires to enjoy the sublimity of life in the mountain.
It is also your presentation card in a medium -sized career change. “I am a new interior designer here in Switzerland,” he said, “and there are many different interior designers. But I am convinced that it is a space for novelty, and there is room for people like me.”
