For a certain type of person—or in the case of Atlier Vime founders Anthony Watson and Benoît Rauzy, persons—the notion of inheritance isn’t limited to familial property but encompasses honoring a property’s past. So, when the pair purchased an 18th-century hôtel particulier in the Provençal village of Vallabrègues and discovered assorted baskets and archival drawings that pointed to the building’s history as a once-thriving wicker workshop, it seemed obvious that they should revive the craft that had at one time defined the area between Arles and Saint-Rémy de Provence. “Everything was there. We had the story of the village, the history of the house and the archival drawings. We just thought, let's do it,” Rauzy says.
The house was well-placed to access the region’s underused and abundant source of wicker, with reeds proliferating along the nearby Rhône River. Harder to find were the craftspeople needed to bring their vision to life, with samples of their work reduced to the occasional sightings of a woven basket used for bread in the region's boulangeries and bistros. Inspired by vintage wicker pieces by French designers like Janine Abraham and Louis Sognot that they’d begun collecting, but with no formal training in design—Watson was an artistic director for luxury brands while Rauzy worked as an environmental consultant across Central Asia and Russia—they teamed up with their friend and former handbag designer Raphaëlle Hanley, whose work for Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs helped bring a sense of cohesion to the brand’s designs.
Quickly, Atelier Vime (from the Latin word for “twig”) began producing a line of wicker furniture that captured a sense of nostalgia while feeling utterly fresh—joyous scalloped daybeds, character-filled lamps that seem to tip their woven shades in a gracious bow, and conical pendants so capacious they seem to create a room within a room for those sitting below. The designs, photographed in their home with its backdrop of gracefully peeling paint, wooden beams and terra cotta floors, caught the eye of designers Pierre Yovanovich and Karl Lagerfeld, then Instagram and the international design media, from Architectural Digest to World of Interiors, did the rest, launching a thousand rattan lampshades in homes from London to L.A. “It's okay to have other people producing things in wicker, but we are trying to introduce new content,” Rauzy says of the proliferation of the style in the years after Atelier Vime’s inception.
We spoke to the duo in their Vallabrègues office, surrounded by summer blooms and their dog Alma, an Andalusian Podenco, snoozing in the background, after their return from one of their many road trips across the country.
Conor Burke: Before we get into it, where were you traveling for the past two weeks?
Anthony Watson: We were working between Paris and Brittany. We have a farm in Brittany where we’re now harvesting our own wicker. We’re back in Provence and are opening a new studio workshop showroom in another house in front of the big one.
Before you had this farm, were you sourcing all your wicker from elsewhere?
Benoît Rauzy: Yes. The craftsmen we worked with had grown their own wicker, but we’re growing a type of wicker that is thinner for special things that we are making.
