Hôtel Amour Nice — a place where everything feels obvious

There are places where I feel good immediately, without needing to find an explanation. The Hôtel Amour Nice is one of those places. I walk in, look around, and everything feels obvious.

The Hôtel Amour Nice, on the French Riviera, is one of those places. It's not minimalist, not stripped back, and certainly not visually quiet. There's colour, books, paintings, objects everywhere, and yet the whole thing works perfectly.

The places that look like us

I think we tend to love places that look like us, or remind us of where we grew up. At home, there was always a lot of stuff. We were a big family, so things lived, moved, accumulated.

There were books, frames, second-hand objects, CDs, vinyl. It's the same logic as the references that built me, I wrote about it in the archetypes that shaped me.

Nothing was perfectly aligned, and sometimes it was a bit of a mess, but an organised mess, a disorder that made sense. It wasn't a setting designed to be perfect. It was a place with a soul. It was my home, my reference point.

Hôtel Amour Nice — a French Riviera address with real character

At the Hôtel Amour, I find that same feeling. It's not a cold staging, the way you often see in catalogues. It's a universe. At some point I had the impression that everyone had the same interior, cold, empty, no identity.

Here, the objects seem to have been chosen because they matter, not to fill an empty space. There's a coherence in that density. You sense an intention, even if it's never explained.

People sometimes think that finding the right sofa or the right décor will finally sort everything out. But a living space isn't something you order. It builds up gradually, with the things you genuinely love.

Naturally, that resonates with the way I see things. I like it when there's material, when elements talk to each other, when nothing is there by accident.

The Dover in Mayfair gave me the same feeling — I wrote about it in my London addresses.

An image, for me, works a bit like a space, it needs an atmosphere, a direction, a clear identity. You can layer references, details, depth, as long as everything holds together.

What it reveals

My universe comes from that. From rooms full of life, inhabited walls, objects that tell you something without having to explain themselves. It's exactly what I wrote about in when art steps outside museums, images that hold without needing a context.

I'm not looking for emptiness to look good, I'm looking for an atmosphere. And when an atmosphere is right, you feel it immediately.

What I love about these places, at the end of the day, is their quiet confidence. They exist, with their choices, their excesses, their balance. That kind of freedom is a real source of inspiration for me.

If you're curious to see how this universe influences my work, take a look at my portfolio.

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