Ketabi Bourdet Hosts ‘Philippe Starck, The spirit of the forest’ Exhibition

A Paris showcase tracing his career‑long dialogue with nature.
Zoe Leung, HYPEBEAST, 5 February 2026

The exhibition Philippe Starck: The Spirit of the Forest, presented by the Ketabi Bourdet gallery in Paris offers a profound retrospective of the designer’s career-long engagement with nature. Rather than viewing eco-design as a purely technical challenge, the show traces Starck’s transition from using nature as a mere stylistic metaphor in the 1980s to adopting it as a functional system for living. This evolution is illustrated through twelve key artworks that highlight how Starck has consistently used design as a tool to reframe our relationship with memory, resources and everyday consumption.

 
A major highlight of the exhibition is the exploration of Starck’s 1990s projects, which marked a definitive shift toward “nature as method”. Central to this is the Maison Starck (1994), a pioneering mail-order house developed with 3 Suisses that sought to provide an affordable, high-quality alternative to mass-market housing.
 
Another standout is the Bo Boolo collection (1995), which famously collapsed the distance between furniture and its origin by requiring buyers to have a birch trunk spacer cut on-site by a forest ranger. These pieces, alongside the particleboard-encased Jim Nature television (1994), demonstrate Starck’s early adoption of material cycles and shared responsibility.

 

The exhibition also features an array of uncanny and iconic furniture that blends surreal humor with functional design. Visitors can view radical silhouettes like the W.W. stool, the Vase Popopo and the Chaise Dick Deck, which translate organic flows into physical form.

 
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