Alongside these colour-saturated restaurant and retail concepts, Uchronia also blew up at the Coachella music festival this year with a monumental, inflatable installation of pink and red flowers. While at the trend-setting Maison&Objet show in January, it created a conceptual, psychedelic hotel – complete with a velvet cushion-covered circular bed and giant stick figures running in the gym – to mark 100 years of Surrealism.
It is a bold vision that has already earned the studio the accolade of ‘emerging designer of the year’ at the 2023 Dezeen Awards, as well as a place on the French Architectural Digest magazine’s prestigious AD100 list. “Joy is the main motivator for our work,” Sebban explains. “Creating spaces that allow for or elicit joy, objects that are playful and colours that psychologically alter your perceptions.”
Sebban is a walking embodiment of this technicolour outlook, often dressed in zingy tangerine trousers, bright fuchsia sweaters or emerald shirts. His apartment in Paris’ hip 18th arrondissement is a “manifesto of our universe”, a retro-kitsch fantasy where walls are tiled like disco balls, sheer pink curtains are gathered over windows and interlocking coffee tables are made from walnut burr and orange resin.
