Swiss Design, by Way of Japanese Aesthetics

New York Times

30-04-2025

Five years after Covid-19 first upended our lives, Florent Breton's story is something of a cliché. A French-born sales manager for Victorinox, the company best known for producing the Swiss Army knife, he was among the thousands, maybe millions, of people who turned a corner in the pandemic and adopted a new career.
Mr. Breton's sales job required frequent travel. But once he was grounded in his home base in Lausanne, Switzerland, physical stillness produced a restlessness of the mind. He thought often of his previous work as a merchandising manager for Zenith, a luxury watch company, and his pleasure in collaborating with architects and artisans on the design of boutique and exhibition spaces.
In 2021, while continuing to work full time for Victorinox, he enrolled at a Lausanne design school called Idées House. On receiving his diploma in interior design two years later, he established a design practice and second residence 90 minutes away, in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana.
From that point on, there were no more clichés. Beginning with his own home in Crans-Montana, Mr. Breton, 46, was determined to disrupt the area's signature architectural style, the peak-roofed, timber-sided Alpine chalet.
'It's always the same,' he said. 'Old wood, gray tiles on the floor, always the same fireplace.'
For an outsider — a Frenchman raised in the Loire Valley, no less — to challenge a building typology that is effectively a Swiss national brand, was risky. But if he wanted to stand out in his new profession, he would have to be bold. He paid about $600,000 for a 1,025-square-foot 1980s condo with two bedrooms and a home office — the last domicile that would be found in a cuckoo clock or a 'Heidi' reboot — and transformed it with a potent mix of Japanese and European influences. He estimated spending $150,000 in renovations.
The rebellion happened from the ground up. The local dealer who sold Mr. Breton his living room floor tiles told him he was the first and only customer to order the pattern that looked like shards edged with gold. Assembled, the tile evoked the Japanese kintsugi technique used to repair damaged ceramics and honor their wounds. When sun rays strike the gold, Mr. Breton said, light flashes through the interior.
Far from forsaking wood, which is to chalets what gingerbread is to gingerbread houses, he promoted it to an ornamental material visually sharpened by its contrast with the condo's smooth, white walls. Wood appears in knotty pine beams (sandblasted to roughen the texture) and discrete swaths of wall paneling, in baseboards and built-in cabinetry, in doors with horizontal strips bumping up graphically against vertical borders and in a charred console table.
Like the kintsugi floor tile, the console table's burned finish was a nod to Japanese aesthetics, in this case the treatment known as shou sugi ban.
The living room bookshelf he designed as a grid of slender oak pieces rising to the peaked ceiling was inspired by getabako, or the racks at the entrances of Japanese temples where visitors leave their shoes. (The Swiss carpenter working from Mr. Breton's drawings told him he had never built anything like it.) The mountain silhouette drawn on a wall in the primary bedroom — an illustration of the Alpine view looking south from Crans-Montana — was executed by a local painter employing a technique that reminded Mr. Breton of katagami, the Japanese practice of using stencils to make textile patterns.
For the living room fireplace, the designer wanted more of a wow than was solicited by the heater that came with his unit, which was built of traditional stone, with a wood slab for a mantel. Here, he took his cues from the kachelofen, a wood-fired masonry stove more commonly found in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. The new fireplace projects into the room like a peninsula and is clad in red ceramic tile set in corrugated-looking vertical strips. The wall next to it has the same tile in light gray, emphasizing the eye-catching ruddiness of its neighbor.
The tile's curves are part of a vocabulary of billowing shapes, echoed in the living room's scooped-out seating and circular coffee tables (from the Belgian company Ethnicraft), and ring-patterned rug (from the Italian company Opinion Ciatti).
Hanging from the ceiling are globular pendant lamps (from the French brand DCW Editions). The Eames chair parked near the bookcase is famously, cheerfully rotund.
Which is to say that Mr. Breton maintained warmth and friendliness in his swing away from cuckoo-clock traditionalism. This condo is where he and his wife, Anne-Sophie Hottelart-Breton, 40, a publicist, and their 6-year-old daughter, Sixtine, retreat to enjoy the sublimity of mountain life.
It is also his calling card in a midlife career change. 'I'm a new interior designer here in Switzerland,' he said, 'and there are so many different interior designers. But I'm convinced that there is space for newness, and there is space for people like me.'