Reaching Across Time and Space With Architect Bernard Dubois
Belgian architect Bernard Dubois' work spans cultures and materialities.
Bernard Dubois is the architect desired by the whole fashion world. One day you may find him at a restaurant in Paris’ Marais, and the next in the pine forest of Cap Ferret. Entrusted by a range of houses and contemporary brands to imagine their flagship boutiques in his minimal and sensual style, the architect keeps one foot rooted firmly in Brussels—his birthplace—and the other on the high-speed French-Belgian Thalys train, to better see the world change scale in real time.
I meet Dubois on Avenue George V, in a four-floor mansion next to the Prince de Galles Hotel, in this golden triangle where luxury is at ease. The building houses the first Western flagship of Icicle, an eco-conscious fashion company originating in Shanghai, whose philosophy “Made in Earth” comes from the Taoist concept of man coexisting with nature. A few months before the pandemic spread across the globe, the Belgian architect delivered his design concept for Icicle’s Paris boutique, for which The Louvre and also the Parthenon-like James Simon Gallery in Berlin served as references. “Everything is played out between a part of radical modernity juxtaposed with a part of history and heritage. Most of my projects have multiple scales of intervention,” says Dubois. “First the space—the architecture of the place—and then the decorative arts: the design of the furniture, the lighting, and each object. I like to invent and combine architectures and things that do not necessarily have to be together.”
The 41-year-old first studied chemistry and then photography before branching out into architecture at La Cambre, a renowned visual arts school in Brussels that counts Anthony Vaccarello and Marine Serre as alumni. Diploma in hand, Dubois knew how to take advantage of what Belgium does best: encouraging young creators to express their talents on the international scene. After a quartet he formed with his peers won the national competition for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2014, the young architect opened his own agency, and, thanks to his friend, the fashion designer Nicolas Andreas Taralis, he flew to China, his first playground.
At the Icicle boutique, Dubois first created a double-height ceiling and a staircase with rounded edges. Different materials, from lime plasters to Paloma, a natural stone, were all rendered in the same ivory shade.The same spatial repetition also occurs on each floor, where each counter-space opens onto a larger room, with the layout of oak or indigo lacquered leather providing variation. On the top floor, the modular space is next to a library, whose intention is to invite visitors to discover contemporary Chinese culture through exhibitions and events. It is this mix of the East and West, this space where proportions coordinate with architectural motifs, that seduced the founders of Icicle, Shawna Tao and Shouzeng Ye, “who showed me their Shanghai—museums, galleries, gardens—to understand that we share common aesthetic intentions crossing minimalism and raw materials,” Dubois says.
In addition to Icicle, Dubois has designed retail spaces around the world for Zadig & Voltaire, Dice Kayek, A Bathing Ape, and Aesop. His firm’s latest project, though, was the redesign of Courrèges’ new flagship, a historic boutique on Rue François. The store is an eye-catching environment of chrome arches coiled in velvet and immaculate wall-to-wall carpeting, perfectly in line with the retro-futurism of the brand. Founded in 1961, the storied French brand was relaunched in 2015, and current artistic director Nicolas Di Felice was appointed to the role in 2020. Di Felice, a young Belgian designer who also graduated from La Cambre, worked at Balenciaga and Louis Vuitton under Nicolas Ghesquière and at Christian Dior with Raf Simons before taking the helm at Courrèges. Dubois’ collaboration with his fellow Belgian is not over yet, as another Courrèges boutique is currently under construction in the Marais, and will apply the same pop style to a more modest space.
A change of scenery but still in Paris, the PNY burger restaurant on Rue du Faubourg St-Antoine perfectly shows Dubois’ obsession with an identical overall design. The space is defined by a series of wooden stalls, a ‘60s diner spirit, and a fairly apparent pop proposition, where the architect refers to the postmodern aesthetic of Swiss architect Mario Botta. “I wanted to pay tribute to the famous cracked facade that Hans Hollein created for the Schullin jewelry store in Vienna,” he says. Farther away, on Rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie, Dubois is working on another location for the Parisian burger chain. Here, André Jacqmain’s brutalist architecture for the old Louvain-la-Neuve science library in Belgium inspires the third project and closes the loop. Arches cut into the wood draw the eye, repeating their motif, including the bar stools and the hammered-glass door handles.
As for Aesop, the minimalist luxury cosmetics brand that chose Dubois to interpret the architectural quintessence of Belgium in its Brussels store, the architect explains he “got hold of some yellow herringbone brick, a typically Belgian pattern used outdoors throughout the 20th century, but twisted it vertically and indoors in a narrower format that allows for smoother, better structured curves, giving it an exotic side that is reminiscent of Japan, Brazil, or even Morocco and its bejmat.”
For Dubois, architecture is an all-encompassing subject. “The architects with whom I want to identify myself drew everything and did not prioritize the objects according to their size, because for them everything was part of a single discipline, without distinction between design, interiors, urban planning, or simply architecture,” he says. Ask him about Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, or Philip Johnson, and the architect is inexhaustible. His enthusiasm doubles when he mentions projects that take him out of his retail comfort zone, such as a hotel in the 10th arrondissement or a villa in Cap Ferret. Dubois’ versatility was showcased in his recent collaboration with leather goods designer Isaac Reina at Maniera gallery in Brussels, for which the architect created several household objects including a lamp, armchair, shelf, and side table. “What interests me in working with forms is coming to that limit,” says Dubois. “A tipping point, where codes can seem familiar or typical of an era, and take them totally elsewhere.”
