When you were young, did you ever have a favourite daydream? One where you imagined yourself in another place, another time?

Maybe you were marooned on an idyllic desert island – or living the life in a fantasy apartment – or hidden away in a medieval castle?

Well, mine was France, Paris – anywhere in France actually. Especially in the era when Camus & Sartre chewed on Gauloises, when Bardot posed for the press, when De Beauvoir and Sagan wrote from the heart and Hardy sang for her supper.

And then I discovered Eugène Atget. Sometime in the late 1890’s, over 60 years before my Gallic icons paraded down the Left Bank, he captured and preserved the bohemian streets of Paris with wispy photographs and painterly compositions.

It was then that I discovered the dazzling architecture of France, the charismatic shopfronts, the serpentine alleyways, the flea markets and the dignified ‘jardins’. And what further fascinated me was the diversity and variety of culture – and how this ‘mélange’ informed and continues to inform the French decorative arts.

It is this spirit of France, this decorative ‘mélange’ that I finally took to heart and made my own. And I’m proud to call it Époque.