My wife Jennifer had to go to Paris for work and she was kind enough to buy me a plane ticket so I could come with her. I’ve done this before — tagged along to Vietnam once, Kauai another time — and I’ve learned that seeing a place through the lens of someone else’s work trip is genuinely different than seeing it as a tourist. In Vietnam I got to walk through factories and watch traffic that operates on what I can only describe as a collective dare. In Kauai I saw high-end residential construction projects that most people will never get close to. Paris was another one of these. Different city, same dynamic: Jennifer had somewhere to be and I had the latitude to figure out the rest.
She was there for Maison & Object, the Paris design week held at the Parc des Expositions de Villepinte. Her company had a showroom there and she was responsible for aspects of it, so the first few days were about setup and the show floor. This meant I was staying near CDG airport in a small town called Roissy-en-France at the PentHotel — clean, comfortable, a little spare, good food nearby. I walked that town more than it probably warranted. It’s not exactly a destination but it was quiet and I had time, and I had gone from watching our kids full time (I’m the one home, Jennifer travels for work, that’s the arrangement we’ve landed on) to suddenly having entire unscheduled days in France, which is a strange and pleasant gear shift.
The expo itself is enormous. Genuinely gigantic. Worth going to just to understand the scale of the design industry at a professional level. I went with Jennifer a couple of times while she was setting up and it was interesting to see the professional side of a field I’m adjacent to but not in. I’ve spent enough time in broadcast creative to understand trade show culture but this was a different world — interior design, product design, materials, surfaces. Jennifer and her coworker were in their element. I was the kid at take-your-kid-to-work day, which is fine. I’ve been the kid before.
Once Jennifer wrapped at the expo we moved hotels into the city itself, to the Ducs de Bourgogne near Notre-Dame. Typical small Parisian hotel — comfortable, not flashy, and it put us right in the middle of things. Notre-Dame was still under reconstruction, roughly a month or two from its reopening, and watching the work up close was quietly remarkable. They’re rebuilding it the same way it was originally built, using the same methods and materials. Given that the original construction started in the 12th century, watching that process happen in 2024 is one of those things that’s easy to walk past but worth slowing down for.
One of those first days in the city, Jennifer and her coworker had to go back to the expo for a few hours, so I had the city to myself. I hadn’t been to Paris in a while and wanted to get reacquainted. The Paralympics were wrapping up — the Olympics had just ended — and the city still had all the infrastructure in place: blockades, ceremony setups, viewing areas that were in the process of being dismantled. It made navigating complicated, but it also meant I was seeing Paris in a state that most people don’t see it in.
I did not have a data plan for Europe. I had a paper tourist map. I want to be clear that this was fine and also occasionally not fine. I decided to walk the banks of the Seine — they have great walkways that let you stay out of street traffic — starting near Notre-Dame and trying to make my way toward the Eiffel Tower. I never made it. I took a few wrong turns on streets that all look vaguely similar when you don’t have GPS, and I eventually realized I needed to turn around and get back to meet Jennifer for dinner. I logged 14 miles that day. My legs reminded me of this for the next 48 hours. I never saw the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe on this trip, which I’m mentioning not as a complaint but because I think it says something true about how this kind of travel goes. You don’t always see the postcard things. Sometimes you see other things instead.
The Jennifer-and-coworker portion of the trip included studio and designer visits — the kind of design inspiration sourcing that is genuinely part of how interior architects do their work. I went with them to the Fondation Le Corbusier, specifically Maison La Roche, which is one of Corbusier’s early houses and is now open to the public. It’s the kind of place you’d never prioritize on a regular vacation but which is exactly right when someone who knows what they’re looking at is leading the way. We also went to the Fondation Giacometti, which includes his actual studio — the place where he worked, more or less as he left it. Seeing the physical space where someone made things that ended up in museums is a different experience than seeing the things themselves.
We went to the Musée d’Orsay, which I’d put on my short list of great museums specifically because it doesn’t have the scale problem the Louvre has. You can actually spend time in front of things. The Van Gogh rooms had, unsurprisingly, the biggest crowds. Went by the Paris Opéra as well, though I’ll confess I somehow have almost no photos of it. I think the lack of a data plan had the unintended side effect of making me forget my phone existed, which was both disorienting and kind of nice.
We hit two markets during the trip. The first was Les Puces de Saint-Ouen up at Clignancourt — which, if you haven’t been, is not really a flea market in any sense you might be imagining. It’s the largest antique market in the world: 17 acres, 14 individual markets, 2,000-plus vendors, a genuine labyrinth of covered halls and narrow streets that goes on well past the point where you think it must have ended by now. The high-end stuff is very high-end, and the 70s pieces that nobody wanted 20 years ago are now the most expensive things in the building. Jennifer and her coworker were in their element again. I found the whole thing fascinating as a thing that exists. The second market was a smaller neighborhood street market — a different energy entirely, more local, less curated, vendors who seemed like they were genuinely happy to be there. Both worth going to, for completely different reasons.
The highlight of the trip for me, personally, was dinner with our friend Nathalie. She and I have known each other for somewhere north of 30 years — we worked together at R/GA and Trollback, she and a partner ran OneFineDay which meant she was my vendor before we ended up as coworkers at NBCUniversal, and she was my vendor contact at Logo and VH1 as well. She’s one of the better designers I’ve ever worked with, which is not a thing I say casually. She moved back to Paris to be closer to her mother and is now running the Motion Design International program at GOBELINS, which is essentially the most prestigious design school in France. We had dinner — her, Jennifer, Jennifer’s coworker, and me — and it was one of those evenings that reminds you of one of the genuine gifts of working in the visual industry: the people it attracts. Smart, curious, interesting people who keep doing interesting things. You lose track of each other for stretches, life moves, geography changes, and then you end up at a table in Paris catching up like no time passed at all. I don’t take those moments for granted.
One thing I’ll note, because it came up on a previous Paris trip: the people. Parisians have a reputation, and it’s not always wrong. But on this visit everyone was pleasant — the shopkeepers, the waiters, even the cab drivers, who historically have been a specific category of difficult. My theory is that hosting the Olympics required a sustained period of being on their best behavior and the habit hadn’t worn off yet. Whatever the reason, I’ll take it.
We ate all our meals in the neighborhood, which is our standard approach to city travel. The idea is to act like you live there — find the bakery, learn which café has the fastest counter service in the morning, eat dinner somewhere you could walk to. Jennifer’s order every morning was pain au chocolat. I tried something different every day and I don’t remember any of them specifically, which is probably fine.
I want to go back with the kids someday. France, not just Paris. Henry and Elias are at an age where they’d actually get something out of it. But I’m glad I got to see Paris this way first — through Jennifer’s work, not a vacation itinerary. You notice different things. You move at a different pace. You walk 14 miles because you have nowhere else to be and end up seeing something you wouldn’t have planned to see. That’s a gift, even when your legs hate you for it the next morning.
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