The Art of Living: Miele × Paper Pen Paris Design Week

Steel-stained casseroles. Striped grill pans. Non-stick pans stacked on marble counters in a custom-built kitchen. And right above them, a city hanging over a kitchen—the pencilled portrait of Place Bellecour in Lyon.

Black lines, white space, the drawing captures the city’s convivial gathering spot: a town square much like a home, made for connecting, hosting, living.

A home is built slowly. Through objects, habits, dinners, books, flowers, photographs, paintings and the people who keep coming back to the table.

There is an art to it like no other.

Cocktails, Canapés & Conversation : A Parisian Aperitif

For Paris Design Week, the Miele Experience Center on rue du Bac offered an interesting setting for thinking about the most intimate of places.

The Paris flagship hosted an intimate cocktail with design and food, bringing together the domestic objects we use every day with framed pencilled art that makes us stop and look at them differently.

Seemingly ordinary objects—appliances, cookware, even office supplies—shared the Miele Flagship Paris space with architectural drawings, punctuated by a red hearth right in the centre emblazoned with Miele signage. 

Fire-engine red casserole pots sat against midnight-black built-in microwaves and ovens, while the work of artist Marion Lagarde, founder of Paper & Pen, appeared throughout the space.

Artisanal hors d'oeuvres, from lobster rolls to chocolate flowers, were prepared using Miele cookware. Right in the middle of it all, the message was clear: here is an invitation to the next expression of luxury—a home built for hosting, with taste.

While champagne flowed, conversations carried through the air at a Parisian aperitif hosting a unique mix between appliances, art and architecture. 

 

It was an unusual combination, but one that made immediate sense.

After all, a home is rarely just about what is functional. It is about what we choose to live with. Lagarde's drawings are a particularly elegant way of looking at that idea. She takes architecture—the buildings, streets and places that we pass every day—and strips them down to their essential lines, framing them into a tableau of striking simplicity.

 Bringing the iconic parts of a city into the home and making us dwell in them, she reminds us that escape isn't just about comfort. It is also about carrying memories with us, surrounding ourselves with fragments of the places that have made us feel most alive.

 

Drawing a Life Into Lines : Architecture As Art

Marion Lagarde's work begins with architecture, but her interest isn't simply in making a building look beautiful.She wants people to look at it properly.

The roofline. The number of floors. The little details above a doorway. 

The things you pass every day without noticing because, as she puts it, “we never stop and look up.” In bustling cities full of ambition and verve with everyone on the go she states emphatically “I try to reveal the beauty of the buildings we cross or live in”. 

Her drawings are deliberately pared back, usually black lines against white, leaving enough space for the architecture itself to breathe. 

When asked about the special work created for the Miele collaboration, she explains the title almost with a laugh. “It’s called lines because I draw, obviously, a lot of lines.”

There is something wonderfully simple about the idea. In a world where everything is photographed, filtered and redesigned, Marion's work asks us to pay attention instead.

“To immortalize,” she tells me, is a motto that defines her work. “For me, what's important is to emphasize the history and the unique visual identity behind architecture,” she tells me. “I try to reveal the beauty of each building.”

It sounds simple, but look at one of her drawings and you begin to understand what she means.

“Did you notice that at the top of the roof, there's a nice thing? Did you notice the number of levels of this building?”

We don't. “We never look up.”

That is really the point of her work: to make us look again. Deeply. Intentionally.

Lagarde describes each drawing as a way of preserving the history held inside a piece of architecture. Every building gets its own visual signature. And sometimes, that signature is deeply personal.

And that idea of immortality becomes surprisingly intimate.

A family home, for instance, can become a portrait before it disappears from the family. Lagarde speaks of families who commission her to draw their homes they have lived in for decades—homes where children were born, where birthdays happened, where entire chapters of a life unfolded with walls holding decades of memories before leaving them. 

“Having a work of this house before leaving it is something very strong,” she says. The house may be gone from their lives, but the drawing remains. The drawing becomes a kind of visual heirloom: not merely a pencilled picture of the house, but a record of everything that happened inside it.

For companies, the idea takes another form. Lagarde draws the facades of their buildings and turns them into what she calls a visual signature—a piece that can then live on websites, business cards, postcards, tote bags and other forms of communication.

Then, architecture isn't just something you visit, it becomes part of identity, something you carry, a portable object of conviction. 

The everyday objects and appliances we use without thinking are given a setting, a little theatre, and a reason to look at them differently. A storied tableau of our making, built through the intentional curation of every object.

Because how else can something as seemingly mundane as a washing machine tell your guests something about your personality?

It sounds odd until you think about it. The things we live with become part of how we live.

Beyond the Appliance: Lifestyle As Desire

Miele is, of course, known for its appliances. But the conversation is no longer simply about the machine itself.

Michel De Siqueira, Country Manager Executive at Miele, doesn't really speak about the home as a collection of objects. He starts somewhere more interesting: with what those objects allow us to do, remember and experience. 

“We are moving to a new phase where we want to go beyond the product itself,” De Siqueira explains. “We want to talk about the universe of the home.”

It is a subtle distinction, but an important one.

The kitchen, for instance, isn't particularly interesting because it contains an oven or an induction cooktop. It becomes interesting because someone is standing there cooking for other people.

Because dinner has turned into a shared experience.  Because someone lounges over recounting a storied memory with a lingering glass of wine in hand or pops in to help slice away at vegetables.

Because the kitchen, as De Siqueira puts it, is “the heart of home where you share a moment of living.”

That idea also explains the slightly unexpected connection between Miele and fashion.

We tend to think about fashion at the height of its allure: the stacked silhouettes on the racks, the fit on the mannequin’s body, the sloping handbag on the arm, the curated window dressing outside the boutique.

But eventually the dress comes home. It gets hung in the wardrobe. It gets worn again. And eventually, it has to be laundered. The connection is immediate for anyone who has ever invested in a beautiful piece of clothing and then stood in front of a washing machine wondering whether it can survive.

That shift explains why Miele's world increasingly crosses into art, design and fashion invoking equal parts interest and desire. 

The brand has also collaborated around Copenhagen Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week, particularly through its laundry appliances.

“We are also very strong in laundry, washing machines, dryers,” De Siqueira explains. “That's why we also try to have association and collaboration with people around fashion.”

Last year, Miele used Paris Fashion Week to demonstrate how its appliances could care for high-end fashion without compromising the quality of the garments. Certainly, the intersection of consumer home goods, often thought of as boring or not at all, and fashion brings back sexy again.

 Is this merely brand strategy, a flailing stretch or a deeper sense of self? 

PRODUCTIVITY MAXXING : A BETTER WAY TO MULTITASK 

Miele's philosophy is summed up in its familiar claim: Always Better. This calls to mind productivity, which is notoriously linked to work but in this case it’s about wellness in the subtlest ways. Improving our well-being by maximising use of our time with technology.

For De Siqueira, that means continuing to improve the result and the experience while keeping longevity at the centre.

Miele says its products are tested for 20 years of usage, reflecting the company's emphasis on longevity rather than constantly replacing what is already in the home. 

At Paris Design Week, Miele presented the M Sense cookware system too, with the pan and induction cooktop communicating with each other.

The idea is wonderfully practical.

The conversation suddenly shifts to something oddly mundane: boiling water.

 “You don't need anymore to worry about the water overboiling,” De Siqueira explains. "You simply tell the system what you want to happen and the cooktop adjusts the power itself". This means you can walk away from the stove without wondering whether your kitchen is about to become a small-scale disaster. 

The same principle applies to cooking eggs.

He explains you don't need to fret over overdone burnt eggs over breakfast, simply place them on a pan and you can do something else while the machine takes care of the rest. 

The very definition of productivity maxxing: Cooking while listen to a new episode of your favorite podcast and the same time squeezing in a mini-pilates session. 

Technology, in this case, is not about making cooking feel more complicated.

It is about giving you back your attention. In a world, where everything is competing for your attention this feels particularly relevant today. 

The aesthetics of the home—art, architecture, appliances—are all distilled into the carefully curated thing we call the art of living. And, there is something deeper beneath the composition that goes beyond optimal functionality, productivity or interior decor.

 Paris Design Week is about striking at the heart of the joie de vivre for every one who ventures into the contemporary Paris design scene. 

Paris Design Week and the Future of the Luxury Home

A home can tell you things about a person long before they tell you themselves.

Books left open on a dark mahogany coffee table. A painting centred opposite a teeming bookcase. A custom velvet sofa chair no one is allowed to eat on. The drawing of a street where something important once happened. The absurdly beautiful porcelain casserole dish filled with lemons in the kitchen that could have been hidden away but wasn't.

Even technology has a place in the composition, quietly changing how we move through the room, how we cook, how we host, and how much time we have to actually be there.

The art of living has so little to do with perfection. It is about arrangement. Memory layered over taste, function fused with fantasy, the old sitting beside the new. A home becomes more interesting as it becomes more specific, with the modern and the antique side by side.

And somewhere between the painting on the wall, the pan on the stove and the machine humming quietly in the background, there’s the vivid protagonist.

You.

Not the version of you that walks out the door, but the one revealed by what you chose to keep, what you chose to display, who you are as soon as you arrive at your doorstep. Most importantly, it's about the home where you made room for the people you care for the most.

It’s your life and it’s art. Welcome home.

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By Jennifer AJ Youngmann for Riot by PM Avenue Magazine | Images by Giulia Grillo | Miele Immersive Space Paris Design Week 2026| Rue Du Bac 75007 Paris.

About Riot by PM

Led by Jennifer Youngmann, Riot by PM documents luxury's most coveted experiences—from golden-hour presentations and private dinners to cocktail receptions, maison celebrations, yacht soirées, cultural activations, and invitation-only gatherings. Through immersive reporting and first-hand observation, the series explores where fashion, hospitality, art, and culture meet after sunset.