At 55, Matali Crasset is one of the most famous French designer in the world. She first cut her teeth in Milan, then in Paris, with Philippe Starck, working on technological and industrial objects, “Everyday objects at the service of people”. In 1998, she created her own structure. We owe him bags, lamps, sofas and clothes as well as fittings for hotels, schools or cinemas, or even exhibition scenographies.
His creations, which have entered public and private collections, have themselves been the subject of numerous exhibitions in France and abroad. They are most often characterized by their roundness, their generosity and their colors – so many elements that tutelage the purity and the natural. Matali Crasset is currently working on a farm-hotel project in the Luberon, where nature is integrated into the overall reflection, and where wine will have its role to play.
Did you drink wine with your family?
My parents lived in Normée, a very small village in the Marne, about fifteen kilometers from the wine-growing Champagne, in other words a world. They grew potatoes and beets. I grew up in this mainly agricultural region, never drinking wine. And if that happened, it was champagne brought by my uncle, who cultivated a few vines, but who entrusted his grapes to the cooperative. In our family, we did not have this culture of wine, of the name of the winegrower, of the label.
When were you won over by the culture of wine?
I met my husband, Francis, quite early. We were 21 years old. He is of Burgundian origin. My first glass of wine, I don’t remember, but I know it was in Dijon, in his family, who love the yellow wine from the nearby Jura.
“The philosophy of biodynamics tries to translate the spirit of the soil into the wine, removing everything that does not belong to it”
Which one I do not know. What matters to me was the context: the bottle was on the table to accompany a truffle gratin. I have kept one conviction: the environment is always more important to me than the objects that compose it. I can never just look at a work, whatever it is, without seeing all that goes with it.
What wines did you then discover?
Very quickly, Francis and I met the artist of Italian origin Ivo Bonacorsi, who has written books on cooking for Editions de l’Epure. It turns out that this publishing house published the books of Jules Chauvet [1907-1989], a Beaujolais winegrower and merchant, today considered the father of natural wines.
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