It should come as little surprise that Victoire de Taillac, co-founder of the anachronistic apothecary-style beauty label L’Officine Universelle Buly, has a deep affection for slow travel. Born in Beirut at the start of the Lebanese Civil War and raised in Paris, Victoire, the second youngest in a family of five children, fondly remembers drawn-out car rides as a child. “Travel by car, and to a certain extent by train, has a much more human rhythm,” she says. “You can really embody the movement and feel a tangible distance between you and your starting point as the landscapes transform before your eyes.” Airplanes, by contrast, “extract you as if by magic wand. I will always choose a route that keeps me on the ground, even if it’s longer.”
Since childhood, those long drives primarily took her to the family’s 16th-century manor in Gascony, which also served as a writing escape as she was finishing her 2018 book An Atlas of Natural Beauty. “For my parents, who were born in the 1930s, the only reason to travel was to see family. Naturally, that meant spending time in the Southwest [of France]. It wasn’t even a decision to be made, it was routine.” As she got older, she and her younger brother would spend weeks at a time further afield—with an Uncle near Gothenburg, Sweden; with a close friend of her father’s based in Dakar, Senegal; with her eldest sister Sophie in Tokyo, where she has lived since 1990 — experiences that inspired her deep curiosity for other cultures.
As she and her husband, Ramdane Touhami, Buly’s artistic director and co-founder, expanded abroad with striking shops in Tokyo, Taipei, Seoul, London and San Francisco, so did their homes. For a time, the nomadic couple lived with their three children in Tangier (at Dar Kharroubia, the rainbow-hued villa with a luxuriant garden that once belonged to the late David Herbert), in a brownstone in Brooklyn, and in landmarked homes in Tokyo’s Shinjuku ward.
“What interests me most are the objects and rituals that enchant the everyday,” she says of her philosophy for both Buly and life. “In each of the places I’ve lived or visited, I’ve discovered elements that organically inform the brand.” That might be the plant oils inspired by techniques from ancient Greece, exquisite toothbrushes made of Swiss acetate, the scented matches (sulfur-free) that evoke the Italian countryside or, more broadly, she and her husband’s exacting emphasis on esthetics and service, a product of their Parisian pedigree and reverence for Japan.
In the absence of long-distance travel, de Taillac says she’s allowing herself to be inspired by home—by cultural spaces like the Musée Bourdelle, by artist’s workshops, and by the architectural harmony of Paris. “I’m taking the time.”
THE TRUST
Where will your next vacation be?
Back to the Southwest to our family home during the school holiday (every six weeks in France!). Mid-autumn is gorgeous there —it’s that perfect in-between period of lingering moments of summer with the crispness of fall. The light is golden, and we can pick apples and pears. In a normal year, many of our friends prefer to leave France for the Toussaint holiday, but given the limitations of 2020, they all want to join us! We’re going to have a full house. If we’re lucky, we’ll return to Switzerland at Christmas.
The thing you can’t travel without?
