In her recent book, Mathilde à Paris (Flammarion, 2024), Favier offers us a glimpse into her world and that of her friends. ‘I get nostalgic for the Paris I grew up in, a Paris that was beautiful and refined, filled with charming people and charming places that you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else in the world,’ she says. ‘I wanted to create a book about what makes the Paris I love and the people that I love who live here.’ Featuring text by Frédérique Dedet, archival imagery and new photographs by Pascal Chevallier, it takes readers on a journey through the Parisian cafés, shops, studios and secret addresses beloved of Favier and her circle. The result is part mood board, part insider’s guide to the French art of je ne sais quoi — the elusive yet distinctive quality that Parisians have in abundance.
It also includes a chapter on hosting, which is illustrated with photographs of Favier’s former home, a duplex in a 19th-century building in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. ‘It was a charming house,’ she says. ‘I absolutely loved living there.’ The interiors featured a mix of bright colours, textiles and patterns, notably chintz, as well as fine and decorative arts from around the world. She drew inspiration from Hauteville House on Guernsey, where Victor Hugo lived in exile from 1856 to 1870. ‘Every room in that house has a different atmosphere and tells a different story,’ she says. ‘I tried to recreate something similar in my own home.’ The walls of her dining room, for instance, were covered with Indian fabric panels from Simrane, while her bedroom walls were painted with Japanese magnolia flowers.