Lighting projectors and cables hang from the spindly branches of chunky black trees inside this penthouse bar and nightclub in Paris by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur (+ slideshow).
Named Electric, the music venue features soundproofed music rooms, an outdoor terrace and a dance floor facing out over the city skyline.
Mathieu Lehanneur collaborated with architect Ana Moussinet to design the interior and added split levels to define different zones.
By day, sofas and trunk-shaped stools can be dotted around the space to form lounge seating areas. By night, these are stored away to open up a ballroom with a rippled DJ booth.
Faceted windows and diagonal panels give texture to the walls in one of the spaces. Others can be used as screens for lighting and video projections.
Mathieu Lehanneur launched his industrial design and interiors studio in 2001. Other interiors he's designed include a renovation of a Romanesque church in France and an office filled with pulped paper caves. See more design by Mathieu Lehanneur.
Trees have featured in a few interiors recently. See a few more in our recent feature all about indoor forests.
Daytime photography is by Felipe Ribon and night photography is by Fred Fiol.
Here's some more information from the design team:
Electric by Mathieu Lehanneur
"If Alice in Wonderland had liked rock this is where she would have spent her days and nights…" summarised Mathieu Lehanneur. Electric, the new cultural platform in Paris, is already an event in itself: a 1,000 m2 penthouse in which the designer has devised a canopy of sound suspended between heaven and earth, monumental electrical braids emerging like pitch black trees.
Impressive by day, magical by night, Electric is a venue which never sleeps. A lounge interspersed with soundproofed modules and an 80m2 terrace, Electric is a space equipped with a mixing console whose ballroom floor provides a new perspective over Paris, integrating the ring road as a perpetually moving graphic foreground facing the metal mesh of the Eiffel Tower.
An ephemeral restaurant at lunchtime, a lounge or a club from dusk 'til dawn, Lehanneur and Ana Moussinet have designed a space which can also be freely customised through video projections and an infinite number of layouts available to its customers.
A huge trompe l'œil window onto the city, surrounded by streams of LED lights, is an ultimate nod to a new Versailles, Electric has already been chosen by We Love Art, and Kavinski for the global launch of his next album, and Ducasse… Meanwhile there are already rumours about the installation of an enormous open-air swimming-pool on the site of the car park this summer.
A result of the high creative demands of the management ensured by curator John Michael Ramirez whose range of artists contributes to the cultural distinction of the venue: Greater Paris has found its centre of gravity.
