Modern Travellers, Eternal Poets: Thomas Fournier Concina
Paris is not a city that smiles at you immediately. But rather one waiting for you to introduce yourself.
For Thomas Fournier Concina, it has always felt like a woman of rare elegance. Luminous, but reserved. You have to slow down to see her. And eventually you have to accept a certain distance before she offers anything back.
There is something almost mineral about her. Limestone façades washed in grey light. Zinc rooftops under a muted sky. But still she expects you to pay attention. And attention is where Thomas begins.
He graduated from the National School of Architecture of Paris in 2014. Spent years working alongside Pierre-Louis Faloci and Laura Gonzalez before founding his own agency in 2020. Since then: residential spaces, boutiques, a first hotel. France and abroad. A practice built slowly, on its own terms.
He is Italian on his mother's side, Polish on his father's. Two geographies that produced, somewhere in between, one instinct: to invoke what came before and let it reappear quietly in contemporary space.
"I draw heavily from my origins. I love invoking memories."
In his Marais apartment, the bathroom echoes his grandparents' house. In proportion and in material. And of course in atmosphere. A discreet gesture that anchors the entire space but only he fully reads.
This is how he works. A conversation of materials: accumulated ceramics, bronzes with a patina, fabrics edged with piping and embroidery reflecting the light. In all of this, we understand nothing was added for effect.
"If you pay attention, everything revolves around materials, their combination, their duality."
His interiors outlive the moment and the present.
"Travel is a foundation of my work. An endless source of inspiration."
Instead of collecting souvenirs, Thomas collects evidence.
Hand-painted ceramics from flea markets. Asian boxes found in unexpected corners. Bronze fragments that feel almost archaeological. And he stores all of them in his Paris apartment. A collection of things that arrived from somewhere and stayed.
What Thomas brings in his bag when he travels
What he carries on the road tells a similar story. A simple cord around his neck with two pendants: a Corsican fist carved in coral, an Egyptian hand in silver. Protection, lineage, symbol. Two cultures at the collarbone. A travel guide chosen before departure (Louis Vuitton or Cabana Magazine) because travel, for him, deserves context before it begins. An engraved Officine Universelle Buly comb marked with his initials that crosses every border with him. And always his sunglasses. Sunlight often decides where he goes next. And light is never incidental. Indeed, it shapes how he sees, and therefore how he builds.
"My first arrival in Rome. The sky warming into ochre and pink at dusk. The constant aesthetic shock of history at every turn."
He remembers it without effort. The pale sky turning color as if the city were exhaling warmth. History at every corner: overwhelming and generous in a way Paris never quite allows itself to be.
Rome was immediate. Sensual. Almost theatrical in its willingness to show everything at once.
Paris, in contrast, remains measured. The two cities live inside his work in different registers. Rome as sensation. Paris as structure. From palace motifs glimpsed in India to architectural details of Roman churches, he absorbs without imitating. What he sees passes through memory before it becomes anything. That distance between observation and translation is where his work actually happens.
Paris by Thomas Fournier Concina
His Paris does not begin at a monument.
It begins at Recto Verso, with a coffee. Then Librairie OFR, unhurried. A stop at Officine Universelle Buly on the way somewhere else. An evening at La Perle. A table at Brasserie Lipp, where the years seem to accumulate in the walls. The Marché des Enfants Rouges on a slow morning. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs when he needs to remember why detail matters.
And now L'Opale Noire; his first hotel project, recently opened in the 7th arrondissement. A space where his language becomes something you can sleep inside. He was there from the first line drawn to the last piece of furniture placed. He stayed until the space began to breathe without him.
That is what defines his work. It goes beyond a signature style worn across every project or decoration in the conventional sense. Instead Thomas has an ability to give a space a pulse and to compose an atmosphere that feels inhabited from the very first day.
Like Paris.
Reserved but luminous. Something that has to be earned.
