philippe starck exhibition in paris traces eco-design

Philippe Starck exhibition turns eco-design into lived experience

At Ketabi Bourdet in Paris, ‘The spirit of the forest’ traces how Philippe Starck’s relationship with nature moves from form and metaphor toward action and systems thinking. On view until February 28th, 2026, the exhibition reads as a slow reveal of an idea that keeps returning across decades, around design as a tool to reframe how we live with resources, memory, and the everyday.

Often labeled ‘eco-minded,’ Starck integrated nature early on through visual and formal cues. Works like the W.W. stool and the Étrangeté vase translate vegetal strength and organic flows into objects, stepping away from the stark black metal furniture of the 1980s. At this stage, nature functions mainly as style, echoing the decorative logic of Art Nouveau a century earlier. Yet these pieces already signal a shift toward the common good and the messages Starck would embed more explicitly from the 1990s onward.

all images © Studio Shapiro, unless stated otherwise

from nature as image to nature as method

That shift becomes tangible with Maison Starck in 1994, developed through the French industrial designer and architect’s long collaboration with the mail-order catalogue 3 Suisses. For 4,900 francs and a 24-hour delivery, buyers received a box containing plans, a construction binder, a VHS presentation, a hammer, and a ceremonial flag. The offer granted the right to build a 140-square-meter wooden house, the maximum allowed in France without an architect, with construction costs rising to around one million francs, depending on options. Although only about twenty houses were ever built, the ambition of the project was to propose an affordable, adaptable alternative to the anonymous low-end housing spreading across France. Today, the box itself is an iconic artifact, held in institutional collections such as the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

‘The spirit of the forest’ traces how Philippe Starck’s relationship with nature moves from form toward action

bringing the forest indoors

Across furniture, architecture, and everyday products, Starck repeatedly taps into collective memory and archetypes, sometimes with surreal humor. Rustic chairs become uncanny hybrids, a wheelbarrow morphs into an armchair, and garden gnomes migrate into high-end interiors. These gestures, although not ecological solutions in themselves, sharpen attention. ‘The spirit of the forest’ frames a career-long effort to alert, provoke, and invite reflection on how objects mediate our relationship with nature, consumption, and responsibility.

In 1995, Starck pushed the idea further with the Bo Boolo collection, again for 3 Suisses. Buyers received tabletops and legs, but the defining element was missing by design: a birch trunk spacer cut on site by a ranger from the French National Forestry Office, stamped with a numbered brass plaque and certificate. The gesture collapses distance between furniture and forest, reminding users that materials have origins and stewards. It is a modest move, but a pointed one, and Starck chose the Bo Boolo table as his own desk. Roughly 300 pieces were produced, later adapted by XO in special editions.

Starck’s ecological stance often operates through symbolism rather than engineering. The Jim Nature television, designed in 1994 for Thomson/SABA, replaced glossy plastic shells with particleboard casings made from recovered sawdust, anticipating contemporary conversations around recycling and material cycles. Watching television inside a wooden box subtly reframes consumption. Similar logic underpins later projects, from the Good Goods catalogue launched with La Redoute to the reusable La Feuille d’eau bottle distributed to Parisian schoolchildren in 2008, each extending the reach of design beyond the object.

the exhibition reads as a slow reveal of an idea that keeps returning across decades