Christiane Lemieux

Christiane Lemieux Founder and Creative Director Lemieux Et Cie, Author of The Finer Things, Undecorate and Frictionles

What is about the summer? Maybe it's because I am Canadian and usually found buried in snow; but this kind of beauty is ...
06/05/2026

What is about the summer? Maybe it's because I am Canadian and usually found buried in snow; but this kind of beauty is so brief. Living outdoors is a true luxury.

I first went to India in 1980 on my parent's lap. We refueled in Tehran on the way. I was a child and had no idea that a...
06/03/2026

I first went to India in 1980 on my parent's lap. We refueled in Tehran on the way. I was a child and had no idea that a country, a culture, and eventually a city called Chandigarh would become part of my personal geography.

Since then, I have returned many times a year. Jaipur became familiar. Chandigarh became familiar. The rhythms, the colors, the optimism, the contradictions. Places that once felt impossibly far away eventually became home.

Over the years, I began collecting the furniture of Pierre Jeanneret. Not because it was fashionable, and certainly not because it would become valuable, but because these pieces carried the spirit of a place I loved. They were never just chairs. They were fragments of a grand experiment—India's declaration of modernity after Independence, built by Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier, and a remarkable generation of Indian architects and artisans.

I visited the workshops. I walked the sectors. I sat in the buildings. I traced the fingerprints of the makers. The collection became intertwined with my own story.
Now, as I begin to part with a few pieces from my personal collection, I find myself thinking less about design and more about time. The objects remain, but what they really hold are memories: decades of flights to India, friendships, discoveries, and a lifelong education in beauty.

Some collections are assembled.

Others simply accumulate around a life.

This one is the latter.

Slide 1: Elysee Table, Wall hanging, Totem and Office Cane Chairs. model PJ-SI-28-A, Jeanneret 1955–56.
Slide 2: Palace of Justice, designed by Le Corbusier 1955–1956.
Slide 3: Pierre Jeanneret—set of Office Cane Armchairs, model PJ-SI-28-A, together with a Library Table, model PJ-TAT-08-B 1955–56.
Slide 4: Committee Chairs 1955–1965.
Slide 5: Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret at Sukhna Lake.
Slide 6: Me and some chairs a long time ago.
Slide 7: Now called Punjab and Haryana High Court—the Palais de Justice.
Slide 8: Le Corbusier's bas-relief genius.
Slide 9: At Jeanneret's house and giddy.
Slide 10: Light Designed by Le Corbusier in 1952, the Borne Béton was conceived as part of Chandigarh's total design vision.

There is no season more tied to the kitchen than summer. The harvest arrives all at once-peaches on the counter, tomatoe...
06/01/2026

There is no season more tied to the kitchen than summer. The harvest arrives all at once-peaches on the counter, tomatoes still warm from the sun, armfuls of garden flowers finding their way into a vase. It is a season that asks us to linger, gathering around the island long after the meal is over, reminded that luxury has always been these moments shared with others.

There is a reason the aperitif feels especially right in June.As the days lengthen, so do our expectations of life. We l...
05/31/2026

There is a reason the aperitif feels especially right in June.

As the days lengthen, so do our expectations of life. We linger a little longer. We leave work a little earlier. We eat outside. We call friends. We remember that not every hour needs to be productive.

For centuries, cultures across Europe have marked this seasonal shift with the aperitif. From the Latin aperire—"to open"—it was designed to open the appetite. But perhaps its greater purpose was to open the evening itself.

A small ritual acknowledging that summer has arrived and the rules may loosen.

The aperitif is not really about the drink. It is about transition. The movement from schedules to spontaneity, from obligation to pleasure, from efficiency to enjoyment.
In a world increasingly devoted to optimization, summer remains one of humanity's oldest rebellions. The long table. The open window. The garden at dusk. The conversation that stretches beyond sunset.

The aperitif simply announces what we have known all along: Life is meant to be lived, not merely managed.

slide 1: my rawbar on the go
slide 2: Weekend scenes
slide 3: France where the apéro became ritual
slide 4: Slim Aarons the documenter of leisure - courtesy of
Slide 5: Beach apéro
Slide 6: Swimming with bubbles
Slide 7: Mountain apéro
Slide 8: Slim Aarons again with the Italian apéro—courtesy of

April showers. May flowers. June is when they take over the house.
05/29/2026

April showers. May flowers. June is when they take over the house.

NOW IN BLOOM: The history of the rose is the history of beauty itself.Long before logos, algorithms, or luxury marketing...
05/27/2026

NOW IN BLOOM: The history of the rose is the history of beauty itself.

Long before logos, algorithms, or luxury marketing, there was Rosa Damascena.

Cultivated first in ancient Persia over 5,000 years ago, Persian poets wrote of it as both divine and dangerous: the flower of paradise, longing, sensuality, and mortality all at once. The rose moved west through trade routes and empires into Roman banquets scattered with petals, cathedral gardens, and the ateliers of French couture and perfumery.

Botticelli painted roses falling around Venus as she emerged from the sea. Redouté immortalized them for Empress Joséphine. Christian Dior rebuilt femininity after the Second World War through his "femme fleur" silhouettes. Jean Patou's Joy, created during the Great Depression, used an almost irrational abundance of roses to remind the world that beauty still mattered. Guerlain's Nahema turned the rose into something molten and operatic.

And now, with the solstice coming, the harvest begins again.

At dawn in Bulgaria's Rose Valley, fields of Rosa Damascena are being gathered by hand just as they have been for centuries. The flowers are picked before the heat arrives, when the fragrance is strongest and the oil richest. Thousands upon thousands of petals for a single vial of perfume.

Luxury in its oldest form: agriculture, patience, ritual, weather, and human hands.
Civilizations rise and fall, yet the rose remains.

Perhaps because it contains all the contradictions we do. It is soft and armored. Sacred and sensual. Fleeting and eternal.

Slide 1: In Paris
Slide 2: Walled Persian Gardens courtesy Zoroastrian Heritage Author: K. E. Eduljee
Slide 3: Roses by
Slide 4: Botticelli's Birth of Venus courtesy of
Slide 5: Redouté Roses for Empress Joséphine courtesy of
Slide 6: 1951 Gown by Photograph by W***y Maywald Courtesy of
Slide 7: Jackie Kennedy's favorite Joy courtesy of
Slide 8: Guerlain's Nahema courtesy of
Slide 9: The Rosa Damascena harvest at dawn in Bulgaria
Slide 10: The Rose they put in my champagne at —maybe the most romantic drink gesture ever.

Memorial Day has always been about more than the long weekend. At its heart, it is about memory and gathering. The table...
05/25/2026

Memorial Day has always been about more than the long weekend. At its heart, it is about memory and gathering. The table. The stories. The ritual of breaking bread with the people who carry us through this life.

In a world increasingly lived through screens, there is now something almost radical about pulling up a chair, pouring another glass, passing a plate, and staying a little longer in the light. The greatest luxury has never really changed: a beautiful room, an open table, and the people we love seated around it.

Happy Memorial Day.

The movable feast.Before dining rooms, there were fires carried into the landscape. Tables dragged into vineyards. Lante...
05/24/2026

The movable feast.

Before dining rooms, there were fires carried into the landscape. Tables dragged into vineyards. Lanterns hung from olive trees. The best gatherings were never indoors; they moved with weather, candlelight, and appetite.

The French called it déjeuner sur l'herbe. The Algerians built it into the floor itself: cushions on kilim rugs, no head of the table, everyone at eye level.

Slim Aarons photographed its modern heir. Jackie Kennedy lived it at her wedding and always at Hyannis Port.

The tradition has always been the same: not perfection, but atmosphere.
Life briefly aligning itself around beauty, food, and fading light.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the oldest version of this in America. The table leaves the house again. Candles compete with twilight. Someone stays far later than intended.

The movable feast is really about one thing: creating a place so beautiful, people forget to leave.

Slide 1:
Slide 2: Courtesy of
Slide 3: Horst P. Horst courtesy of and
Slide 4:
Slide 5: Tablescape courtesy of
Slide 6: courtesy of
Slide 7: Slim Aarons, Capri, courtesy of
Slide 8:
Slide 9: courtesy of
Slide 10:

The stripe may have begun as utility, but the French turned it into seduction.Long before it became chic, the stripe was...
05/22/2026

The stripe may have begun as utility, but the French turned it into seduction.

Long before it became chic, the stripe was scandalous. In medieval Europe, stripes were associated with society's outsiders: prisoners, sailors, jesters, and the condemned. The pattern itself was considered disruptive, too visually loud, and too difficult to categorize. Historians called it the fabric of transgression. Which feels fitting; the stripe has always flirted with rebellion.

Then France got hold of it.

In 1858, the French Navy adopted the Breton stripe, or mariniere, as its official uniform. Chanel saw it in Deauville and transformed it entirely. She borrowed it from fishermen and sailors and gave it to women: loose jersey, sun on skin, ci******es, trousers, and freedom. The stripe became less about uniform and more about attitude.

Picasso took it further. Living in the South of France in his striped sailor shirts, surrounded by muses, pottery, and paint, he turned the stripe into the uniform of the artist. Intellectual. Bohemian. A little dangerous. Bardot wore it barefoot in Saint-Tropez. By the time Jean Paul Gaultier built an empire around it decades later, the stripe had become shorthand for a very particular kind of French seduction: effortless, ironic, impossibly cool.

Then came Slim Aarons.

His lens captured the stripe at leisure, stretched across Riviera cabanas, wrapped around beach umbrellas, and flickered across yacht decks in Capri and Palm Beach. Red-and-white awnings against Mediterranean water. Women in striped swimsuits descending into impossible blue seas. The stripe became the visual language of summer itself. Optimism. Escape. The fantasy of a long weekend by the water.

Which may be why it feels so right as we move into Memorial Day weekend .

There's something eternal about it. It reminds us that summer is arriving, that leisure is an art form, that style is often at its best when it borrows from utility and turns it into romance.

a stripe has survived centuries because it holds contradictions so beautifully: discipline and cadence, order and rebellion, sailor and artist, prison and paradise. Few patterns carry that much history so lightly.

Sometimes the most beautiful part of an event is not the event itself, but the conception and the people who build the w...
05/20/2026

Sometimes the most beautiful part of an event is not the event itself, but the conception and the people who build the world around it.

For Design Week and our store opening in Little Paris, I found myself less interested in documenting the (amazing and gorgeous) crowd than in watching our very French collaborators (aka people we actually hired—not an ad) in motion. Caroline at composing florals with the looseness of a Dutch still life.

The team from Daniel Boulud transforming small bites into acts of precision and hospitality.

French Bloom proving that celebration has far more to do with ritual, taste, and atmosphere than alcohol ever could.

In the end, a room is only architecture until people give it rhythm.

This night reminded me that the best spaces, places and events are not merely designed. They are beautifully orchestrated.

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