Named Electric, the music venue features soundproofed music rooms, an outdoor terrace and a dance floor facing out over the city skyline.

Mathieu Lehanneur collaborated with architect Ana Moussinet to design the interior and added split levels to define different zones.

By day, sofas and trunk-shaped stools can be dotted around the space to form lounge seating areas. By night, these are stored away to open up a ballroom with a rippled DJ booth.

Faceted windows and diagonal panels give texture to the walls in one of the spaces. Others can be used as screens for lighting and video projections.

Mathieu Lehanneur launched his industrial design and interiors studio in 2001. Other interiors he's designed include a renovation of a Romanesque church in France and an office filled with pulped paper caves. See more design by Mathieu Lehanneur.

Trees have featured in a few interiors recently. See a few more in our recent feature all about indoor forests.

Daytime photography is by Felipe Ribon and night photography is by Fred Fiol.

Here's some more information from the design team:

Electric by Mathieu Lehanneur

"If Alice in Wonderland had liked rock this is where she would have spent her days and nights…" summarised Mathieu Lehanneur. Electric, the new cultural platform in Paris, is already an event in itself: a 1,000 m2 penthouse in which the designer has devised a canopy of sound suspended between heaven and earth, monumental electrical braids emerging like pitch black trees.

Impressive by day, magical by night, Electric is a venue which never sleeps. A lounge interspersed with soundproofed modules and an 80m2 terrace, Electric is a space equipped with a mixing console whose ballroom floor provides a new perspective over Paris, integrating the ring road as a perpetually moving graphic foreground facing the metal mesh of the Eiffel Tower.

An ephemeral restaurant at lunchtime, a lounge or a club from dusk 'til dawn, Lehanneur and Ana Moussinet have designed a space which can also be freely customised through video projections and an infinite number of layouts available to its customers.

A huge trompe l'œil window onto the city, surrounded by streams of LED lights, is an ultimate nod to a new Versailles, Electric has already been chosen by We Love Art, and Kavinski for the global launch of his next album, and Ducasse… Meanwhile there are already rumours about the installation of an enormous open-air swimming-pool on the site of the car park this summer.

A result of the high creative demands of the management ensured by curator John Michael Ramirez whose range of artists contributes to the cultural distinction of the venue: Greater Paris has found its centre of gravity.

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Mathieu Lehanneur appeared first on Dezeen.

Named Escale Numérique, which translates as Digital Break, the proposal won a competition to design street furniture that links with the underground fibre-optic network so residents and visitors without mobile internet access can connect on the move.

Concrete swivel chairs with attached tables for laptops sit underneath a foliage-covered shelter and a large digital billboard provides city information and news for those who don't have a laptop or smartphone with them.

A cluster of wooden legs like tree trunks support the green roof, which is designed to look like a garden when viewed from balconies above.

The project was realised in collaboration with outdoor advertising company JCDecaux.

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Photography is by Felipe Ribon.

Here's some more information from the designer:

JCDecaux and Mathieu Lehanneur won the call for projects by the Mairie de Paris devoted to intelligent furniture with Escale Numérique, a connected haven of peace available to everyone.

Set up on the Rond Point des Champs-Elysées, Escale Numérique is a revival of the underground fibre optic network which is now supplying the capital, ‘Like the Wallace fountains, which since the end of the 19th century have offered Parisian the free drinking water which was circulating beneath their feet, Escale Numérique allows everyone to benefit, like a real public service, from a high-speed WIFI connection by raising it from beneath the ground.’

For his first urban development project, Mathieu Lehanneur devised a protective shelter with a plant covered roof, like ‘A garden placed on a few tree trunks’ and designed to be as attractive when viewed from the ground as from a balcony.

The hard-wearing concrete swivel seats are equipped with plugs and have mini tables attached to rest an elbow, a book or a computer.

A large touch screen provides updated information about services in the city: guides, news and augmented reality for tourists and visitors who are not online.

Escale Numérique is a forerunner for a new range of urban architecture where virtual reality dictates the shape of what is real in order to live with even greater fluidity.

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Mathieu Lehanneur appeared first on Dezeen.

French designer Mathieu Lehanneur has added stacked layers of white marble to create a podium in this Romanesque church in France.

The marble strata step up and down, with a still pool of clear water created in one sunken area.

The alter and ambo are made from a coloured mineral material, similar to the existing interior of the church.

Photography is by Felipe Ribon.

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Here are some more details about the project:

St Hilaire church in Melle by Mathieu Lehanneur

Mathieu Lehanneur has converted the choir at St Hilaire church in Melle in the Deux-Sèvres department (France). The designer has enhanced the Romanesque building with a very mineral look, a surge of white marble that he imagines "prior to the construction of the church. A mineral presence justifying that the church was built there. Reflecting the extreme care paid to the telluric energy of stones and territories in the building of Romanesque churches, this place of worship would have been built on this specific area for the discernable energy that emanates from it."

An architectural gesture equally paradoxical and strangely distinguishable which will undoubtedly mark an important milestone in the development of religious works. The white marble creates a homogenous mineral block formed from successive strata which seem to recall the sedimentary formation of the basement. The liturgical furniture (altar and ambo) is made from coloured alabaster, close to the colour of the original stone of the church. The result is a visual impact, one of Lehanneur’s trade secrets, this time using the purity of the geological chaos to highlight the perfection of the Romanesque geometry.

The complicity between the church and this mineral mass is completed by the baptistery hollowed out from the same material. The water that it holds appears to be from the river which runs below the church: the ultimate linking of the building with its environment.

A scenario inspired by the topology of the place, just like a ‘box’ sunk into the sand, the church in fact gives the impression of nestling in the landscape. It’s not just a building placed on the ground but part of the region and reveals itself to visitors as they descend. The main idea of the project was then to accentuate this sensation of progressive discovery and taking root in the land, "I imagine that when this ‘box’ was sunk into the ground as if pushed by an invisible, maybe divine hand, it revealed the geology of it, the visible aspect of a mineral and massive form: a revelation which seems anterior, and not posterior, to the construction of the church."

This play between anterior or posterior construction allows a relief to be produced which creates a natural hierarchy between the celebrant and the congregation. It simply uses then the site’s topology in order for a better comprehension. An organic architecture which is not though a break with with the liturgical codes and conceals symbolic invariants like the eight sided baptistery or the altar built at the junction of the transept.

See also:

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The JWT Agency by Mathieu Lehanneur	Studio 13/16 by Mathieu Lehanneur	L’Atelier des Enfants by Mathieu Lehanneur

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This office in Paris by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur for advertising agency JWT features caves made from pulped paper and plants that play music.

The rough exterior shells contain pristine white meeting rooms, while plants cascading from the ceiling outside activate the sound system when workers brush against them.

Green pathways snake across the floor of the lobby while clusters of white blocks provide informal seating.

Lehanneur collaborated with architect Ana Moussinet for the project.

More about Mathieu Lehanneur on Dezeen »

Photographs are by Véronique Huyghes.

Here are some more details from Mathieu Lehanneur:

The JWT Agency by Mathieu Lehanneur

Perpetually on the lookout for new ways to live, sleep, create and work, Mathieu Lehanneur turns the advertising agency JWT (Neuilly/Seine) into a "digital plant station", a new reflection from the designer about contemporary working styles and the necessary invented depictions of them when applied to the professional world of communications. Hot on the heels of the office conceived for David Edwards, founder of the Le Laboratoire (Paris) and areas for teenagers and children at the Centre Pompidou, he has once again designed an area dedicated to creative production larger than 1000m2.

An interior architecture produced in collaboration with the architect Ana Moussinet where the objects are as much brainstorming aids as three dimensional logos assigned to sum up the spirit of this French JWT subsidiary specialising in digital media. First symbolic move: to reverse the usual dynamic of authority by placing the two chairmen and the director of JWT on the ground floor, as close as possible to the hub of the agency, separated from the reception simply by tall wadded doors!

The second meaningful gesture, the agency’s specific digital sensibility is entirely embodied by the meeting room, transformed into a creative cavern with walls totally produced from paper fibres, "It has literally sucked up and recycled the available paper in the agency, an archaic and useless support that JWT France eventually envisages totally eliminating.’ Providing excellent soundproofing, usually used for thermal insulating in organic buildings, the final execution sublimates the irregular exterior surface, a shell whose spray projected neo-archaism contrasts with the milky and luminous purity of the internal shell: pure James Bond genius where the most unobtrusive rock hides Dr No’s ultra technical trace.

Close-by, another mineral projection changes agency coffee breaks, this time from the sky and much higher, a black tar meteorite now serves as a bar. A strange and visually magnetic object, a small piece of interstellar virginity, this anti-design mass welcomes visitors for an onward journey towards creative horizons to be built. A place for fruit, objects or simply for leaning on or putting down coffee cups.

The lobby navigates alternatively between geometrical and unruly lines like these megabit landscapes in the form of seating, immediately counter-balanced by an effusion of plants, cascading from the ceiling that will prompt music when gently brushed against, inaugurating the plant mixing! A plant juke box developed with the artist group Scenocosme and whose play-list is updated by the creative members of the agency.

Linking digital rigour and the plant boom, between technology and the very human enthusiasm which transpires in each intervention of the building with the omnipresence of the Andrea air filter, a small harmless piece of equipment whose decorative plant becomes a resource dedicated to the lungs of the collaborators: probably the agency with the purest air in Paris!

JWT agency by Mathieu Lehanneur in collaboration with the architect Ana Moussinet.

Thanks to Anne Doizy, Managing Director JWT Paris, Frédéric Winckler and Claude Chaffiotte, chairmen at JWT Paris.

See also:

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Grotto by Callum Morton	Trufa by Anton García-Abril	My Caravan Studio by Paul Coudamy

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French designer Mathieu Lehanneur has created a series of objects designed to monitor electricity consumption in the home for energy company Schneider Electric.

Above: Actuator

Called Efficient Home, the range features prototypes for six devices that could be mounted onto appliances and provide information on the amount of energy being consumed.

Above: In-home display

Lehanneur's products are on show at the St Etienne Design Biennal 2010 as part of an exhibition called Demain c'est Aujord'hui ('Tomorrow is Today'), curated by Claire Fayolle.

Above: Smart plug

See all our stories on Mathieu Lehanneur »

More green design »

Above: Nano controller

Here's some more information about the range:

Efficient Home by Mathieu Lehanneur for Schneider Electric

Mathieu Lehanneur presents a preview of prototypes from the Efficient Home collection designed for Schneider Electric at the St Etienne Design Biennial. A range of elements destined to optimize the energy consumption of homes in order to obtain a significant reduction in our carbon footprint, whilst at the same time reducing the electricity bill whilst maintaining maximum comfort. An objective made possible by the accuracy of information communicated in real time by these transmitters/ receivers of electric information positioned on the key objects of our everyday consumption (boiler, fridge, television, etc...).

Above: Room temperature sensor

To put it more clearly, sensors will carry out a permanent vigil over the consumption before transmitting the information to receivers which permit a better regulation of this consumption. An internal network that you can also consult via the web, and which will be fitted by your electrician or heating engineer... unless you want to do it yourself! A collection of completely new products that the designer intended to be like an energy alphabet, conceived in essential pictograms and symbols, to become an identifiable family conveyed to complement each other.

Above: MMS - Multimedia Messaging Service

Efficient Home by Mathieu Lehanneur for Schneider Electric
St Etienne Design Biennial
Exhibition "Demain c'est aujourd'hui" (Tommorrow is Today)
Curator: Claire Fayolle

See also:

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Wattcher by Marcel Wanders Studio	ATREEM by Nitipak Samsen	More green design on Dezeen

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for Schneider Electric appeared first on Dezeen.