Renaissance man Ramdane Touhami can be introduced as one, some, or all of the following: fashion designer, DJ, artist, entrepreneur, art director, shop owner, brand consultant. He is the man behind the resurgence of Buly1803, the Résistance clothing label, and has designed for Liberty London, helping to reinvent the storied French candle maker, Cire Trudon, into an enduringly beloved and contemporary brand. Touhami has had stints in Tokyo, Tangier and most recently, New York. “The party is over in Manhattan,” he says. “It’s a capital for rich people. Europe is much more interesting.” It is an opinion that might explain why the globetrotting French-Moroccan finds himself living in an 18th-century hôtel particulier in Paris, with his wife Victoire de Taillac and their three children.
In the second episode of our new interiors series, we go inside Touhami’s eclectically refined abode. Below he talks us through the il-logic of his space.
The house is like me, a mess! You’ll see modern art, old art, ethnic art, a mix of everything… There’s nothing logical here.
My favorite thing of the house is my books—if I had to keep only one thing here it would be the books because you don’t learn from furniture, you learn from books.
We have a lot of things, various collections, but we don’t collect collect. We just have our life and every object has a history because we didn’t buy them at one time; it’s been a 15-year process and it’s funny to mix the old and the new and some of the same things.
Natalia Rachlin is Design Editor-at-Large at NOWNESS.