Sloft Édition 10

Unpredictable Times

Number 11! “To resist is to exist,” as Jacques Ellul, the philosopher and thinker of technique, put it. In 2027, clinging to an independent, 100% human publication looks like a reckless bet, so certain does the world’s technological transformation seem to sweep away everything in its path. And since “technical progress does not know where it is going,” to quote Ellul once more, total unpredictability lies ahead. As for us, at the dawn of a new cycle for Sloft Édition, and perhaps a little foolishly, we will keep championing the work of creators for as long as a few clever start-up founders haven’t great-replaced them with a tool.

In this eleventh bilingual edition

• 8 Exclusive Home Tours: So we keep championing the handmade, a source of long-term well-being. We celebrate a non-technological technique, reuse, in designer Claire Renard’s weekend house on the banks of the Loing. We look at the enthusiasm for the 1970s through an apartment designed by architect Justin Meuleman. That era carried a vision of progress that had not yet given up on hedonism, with interiors built for conviviality, as the apartment’s incredible secret bar shows. And we check how Fida and Bruno’s quirky hideaway, reimagined by Studio Tigre and Pierre-Maxence Renoult, solves every constraint of a patchwork space, with an aesthetic result that beats the best interior-design prompt.
• An interview with visual artist Nicolas Pierre: In his own way, he too resists, intelligently, the formidable forces of economic change reshaping the Paris region. He rescues demolished buildings from oblivion by bringing them back to life as miniatures.
• A Narrative Home Tour with painter Bryce Delplanque: A Memphis enthusiast and connoisseur of design history, he explores the idea of decor across his entire body of work. His apartment, in an Habitation à Bon Marché, one of Paris’s early social housing buildings, is conceived as a lived-in artwork: the polar opposite of a tech overlord’s vast, cold penthouse.

Eclecticism, poetry, art, escape, beauty and innovation clearly have nothing to do with square meters!