The world knows Paris as the City of Lights. For me, she is the City of Muses.
And my muses don’t live in the obvious places. They live in the corners. The odd little curio in a glass cabinet. A snuffbox in a forgotten crate. A pair of gilded gates I can’t stop photographing. The painted ceiling of a room I was definitely not supposed to be in.
I had a handful of days there in early autumn, and I spent most of them looking up, down and sideways rather than straight ahead. What follows is where that took me, and what each place became once my artisans and I got back to the studio in Sydney.
Some of these gorgeous places may already be on your list. Some of them will not.
Where I stayed in Paris
Le Meurice, at 228 Rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries Garden and halfway between Place de la Concorde and the Louvre.
It has been there since 1815, which is longer than almost anything else calling itself a Paris hotel. Charles-Augustin Meurice was a postmaster, and he built it so that English travellers arriving on the coach had somewhere civilised to land. Salvador Dalí kept a room here. So did Rudyard Kipling. A hundred and sixty rooms, all of them in the Louis XVI style, and not a single one of them is shy about it.
The Restaurant le Meurice Alain Ducasse, where you can enjoy breakfast as a guest, is perhaps one of the most exquisite spaces in the entire hotel. The stunning dining room inspired by the Salon de la Paix at the Palace of Versailles. There is truly nothing better than languishing over coffee and croissants under chandeliers and playful frescoes.
There is something about staying somewhere that has been beautiful for two hundred years, that changes how you look at everything else. You stop being simply impressed by grandeur and start becoming interested in how it was made.
Where does a print actually begin?
At a flea market, most of the time.
The Saint-Ouen Flea Markets sit at 87 Rue des Rosiers, north of the city in Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine. Not the Rue des Rosiers in Le Marais, which is the one the map will offer you first. Take the trip north. Seven hectares, around five million visitors a year, and one of the largest markets of its kind anywhere in the world.
Antique dealers, artists, artisans. Art Deco and Art Nouveau side by side. Louis XV treasures propped against furniture nobody has valued yet. Bell jars. Mirrored glass. Worn leather. Vintage jewellery in a case that has not been dusted since spring.
This is the rummaging I love most, and hours can disappear in it. You are not shopping. You are looking for the one object that will not leave you alone.
Four prints in the collection came out of that instinct — Case of Curiosities, This Wild World, My Sweet Serpentine and Animalia Heirlooms. They carry a mint-green room, boiserie framing, oversized leopard and butterfly, and a nod to entomology. That room is a tribute to Deyrolle, the taxidermy and natural history house that has been on Rue du Bac since 1831. We did not have time for it this visit. Our head designer Jenna Redfern and I have been going for years, and some places you carry with you whether you get through the door that trip or not.
Go early in the morning. Bring cash. Don’t plan anything else for the afternoon.
Is Versailles worth a whole day?
A whole day, and I would give it more.
Place d'Armes, 78000 Versailles, and it began life as a hunting lodge before Louis XIV turned it into the principal royal residence of France. Sixty-seven thousand square metres of château. Eight hundred hectares of garden, laid out by André Le Nôtre. The Hall of Mirrors, the Royal Opera, the King's and Queen's State Apartments, the Trianons, and Marie Antoinette's Hamlet nestle far our at the edge of it all.
Everybody photographs the Hall of Mirrors. I suggest you visit three of the smaller rooms instead.
The Dauphin's Library, the retiring room and study used by the son of Louis XV. Boiserie framing, floral detailing, and cupids depicting the four seasons. We wanted to capture what it feels like to stand in that library rather than to reproduce it, so the print took the colour and the layout of the room and let the rest go. It became Ballad of the Bibliothèque.
The Queen's Bedchamber, where I stopped looking at the bed and started looking at the wallpaper. The florals in Versailles Or Die and A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi were directly inspired by those storied walls. The detailing draws from the canopy and the textiles found within. There is a certain Marie Antoinette inspired opulence in these colour that I make absolutely no apology for.
The Salon of Mars, with its frescoes and its ballroom scale. That ceiling inspired Queen of Bohemia, and back in our studio we painted it again in our own hand until it became something else. That print became one of the centrepieces of the season, and it all started with one of my most important travel rules: “always look up.”
Where to find art in Paris beyond the Louvre
The Louvre first, briefly, because you will go and you should. The largest and most visited museum in the world, a fortress before it was a palace, and I. M. Pei's glass pyramid still looks modern in the Cour Napoléon after nearly forty years.
Then, the ones I would gently place on your list, next to it.
Musée d'Orsay, on the Seine at Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, in the former Gare d'Orsay railway station built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900. Eighty-six works by Monet. Forty-three by Degas. Twenty-four by Van Gogh. Around three thousand pieces on display at any one time.
And, despite my penchant for disobeying rules, the thing I carried back home with me wasn’t hanging on a wall. It was provincial textiles, carrying impressionist motifs — the same palette the paintings were imagined in, translated into cloth by someone whose name history did not record. Those textiles became the inspiration for Fleur Libertine, Bonjour Blossom, Poems In Petals and Sunflower Symphony. Blue and white from a single vase. A toile de Jouy reimagined with a leopard meandering through it. A garden painted by hand, gates and all.
Petit Palais, on Avenue Winston Churchill, built for the same 1900 exhibition and designed by Charles Girault. Four wings gathered around a semi-circular garden, behind a columned porch that is simply far too extravagant to be outside. Among the treasures, decorative murals, sculpture, furniture and objets d'art dating from antiquity to 1914.
Musée Jacquemart-André, at 158 Boulevard Haussmann. Édouard André and Nélie Jacquemart spent their lives collecting art and left their house full of it. It is a private home rather than an institution, which means you see the collection the way they lived with it.
Hôtel de la Marine, at 2 Place de la Concorde. Neoclassical, built in the late eighteenth century by Ange-Jacques Gabriel as the royal furniture depot, then headquarters of the French Naval Ministry from 1789 until 2015, which is where the name comes from. It was recently restored, along with the Loggia ballroom. The oval gold frames in those rooms gave Zig Zag Zoo and A Wink To The Wild their structure. Each one, an oversized zebra skin and a peacock feather, each alive inside a frame that was never designed to hold an animal.
What is worth doing in Montmartre?
Montmartre began as an artists' colony in 1814 and has never quite stopped being one. Most visitors go up for Sacré-Cœur and the painters in Place du Tertre. Two streets away there are far better reasons.
Musée de Montmartre and the Renoir gardens, at 12 Rue Cortot. One of the oldest buildings on the Butte, seventeenth century, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir made his studio here. The gardens behind the museum are the quietest stretch of green in the 18th arrondissement. Once you have stood in them at the right hour, you can see why he painted the way he did.
Le Marché Saint-Pierre and Reine Fabrics, at 2 Rue Charles Nodier, at the foot of the Butte. This is the fabric district, and it is where designers, stylists and decorators go when they are not pretending to be tourists. Floor after floor of textiles, upholstery and haberdashery. I could lose a day in there, and I have.
If you only do one thing in Montmartre that is not on a postcard, make it this one.
Where the hand still works
At 18 Rue Notre Dame de Lorette there is a costume atelier that makes for the Moulin Rouge, and we were very kindly invited in.
Sequins going on one at a time. Feathers sorted meticulously by length, before anybody even touches a needle. Each pair of hands, doing a thing they have done ten thousand times, at a speed that looks completely unhurried and yet is somehow faster than you can possibly comprehend. Making slow, making intentionally, making with love.
I think about it constantly. We are a print house, and the gathering is only ever the beginning: the ceramics, the wallpapers, the lace, the photographs, the fragments of palaces all have to pass through somebody's hands before they ever become a garment. Watching another house’s version of that, in a workroom on a Paris street, was the most useful hour of the trip.
You cannot visit the atelier, but you can see what they create. The Moulin Rouge has been at 82 Boulevard de Clichy since 1889, it is the birthplace of the modern can-can. It burned down in 1915 and was reborn in 1925. Book the show. Then look at the costumes rather than the choreography, at least for the first ten minutes.
Where to eat in Paris when the room is the feast
Le Train Bleu, above the platforms at Gare de Lyon, and the reason a resort print in this collection is the colour it is.
It opened for the 1900 Paris Exposition, built by the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway company to show travellers what luxury looked like before they had even boarded. Forty-one paintings, each one honouring a different part of France, framed in gilded moulding under ceilings that go up, up and away. The restaurant took the name of the Calais-Méditerranée Express, the Blue Train, in 1946. Coco Chanel ate here. So did Jean Cocteau and Brigitte Bardot.
We recreated the structure of that room in Sweet Sacré Bleu, then took our favourite of the forty-one paintings and blew it up into a landscape scene all of its very own. It unfurls across silk and jersey and swim, in an exquisite blue that I have been chasing for years.
Maxim's, on Rue Royale, for Art Nouveau at full volume. Bistro Paul Bert, in the 11th, for the opposite — steak, chalkboard, no ceremony, and the best room of the week for eavesdropping. Hôtel Costes, at 7 Rue de Castiglione, which moved into an eighteenth-century mansion in 1995 and has been theatrical about it ever since.
And Saint-Germain for an afternoon when you have nothing else booked. It’s the left bank's answer to Montmartre — antique stores, galleries, boutiques, and streets that reward walking without a destination.
Shop Paris By CAMILLA
Paris By CAMILLA is our new ready-to-wear and resort collection, and it unfolds the same way the trip did, in chapters.
The first release brings four prints. Sweet Sacré Bleu and Ballad of the Bibliothèque were born from Le Train Bleu and the Dauphin's Library, into silk kaftans, waisted dresses and sculptural swim. La Belle Botanique and Journal de Voyage drew their watermarks, landscape scenes, custom stamps and airmail stripes from travel journals, onto linen day dresses, shirt dresses and striped sets. Hand-painted scenes, architectural forms and collage, all reimagined across fluid resort and softly tailored ready-to-wear.
Because the truth is, you can’t translate Paris. We don’t try. We let her lead us, we try to keep up, and we compose with her.
