Seeing Red at the Opera Garnier restaurant, Paris

Francoise Hardy Le Temps De L'amour

Last year lots of design blogs wrote about the new restaurant at the Opera House In Paris, and so I'd be a bit late to the party if i wrote a design report/building history/conversion post, instead you can find them on sites like this...design boom blog. After visiting last week for breakfast (dinner was too expensive, and breakfast is the best meal of the day anyways, breakfast there was pricey too, but affordable, the honey was the best I've ever eaten, and besides,you can milk it and sit there for ages) I realised something was missing from the blog write ups that I had read...no one had mentioned the toilets, and how could they not have?! I think its essential when you get to visit a well designed hotel/restaurant/public building to take a trip to the bathrooms to see if the good design continues, and here it was AMAZING. The space is divided into three sections-cublicles in a private room on one side for women, the same on the other side for men, and a shared hand washing/mirror area. The toilets themselves were painted out black with a red light and were a bit nightclub style spooky for me, but the vanity unit/sink was the best designed piece of bathroom furniture ever; some sink units look really well designed and sleek but designers don't always think out how they work and the handsoap goops out over the counter top, or the taps splash water out at you and you can't put your handbag down anywhere without it getting soaked, but here they had thought of everything, it looked ACE and it was ACE (or form was equal to function if you want to be more eloquent about it); as you hovered your hands over the sink unit the water came out from underneath and the whole unit changed from glowing white to red, this kept me entertained way more than it should have, then, the drier worked in the same way, blowing up heat from below (very handy and more elegant for discreet emergency hair drying incidences than bending over under a standard drier), the only thing they didn't manage to integrate into it was the handsoap, which came out of traditional style units, which was a bit boring, and it was a shame that they were probably made to put up small signs saying "hot water" just incase some idiot tourist sued them for a burnt hand; but i cant really hold those against them because overall they were cool as hell.

On a "what i wore" note--i wore my new red peplum skirt, peplum top (i didnt think i could pull off a peplum but i'm giving it a go anyways), and red brogues with my blue satchel, so pretty much, I camouflaged into the interior, which is always a good thing in my book.