15.04.2026

Journal Talks with Laszlo Badet

There are people who inhabit spaces, and those who transform them.

Laszlo Badet is one of the latter.

French culinary artist, model, and petite mains for couture, she moves between disciplines with a rare sensitivity to gesture and material. Her world is shaped by hands, cooking, assembling, restoring, collecting, and by a deep reverence for objects as carriers of memory.

Raised in a winemaker’s home near Lake Geneva, the daughter of a painter and antique dealer, she learned early that beauty is not defined by price or brand, but by poetry, by what an object awakens within you.

For Journal Talks, Laszlo reflects on home, memory, collecting, and the quiet spirituality of the spaces we inhabit.

How do you define home? Is it a place, a feeling, or a form of self-expression?

Home is a blend of all of this. It is a place where my feelings unfold, through my manual activities as much as through what I have lived there or what I have offered of myself. My home is where I lay down my present life and my past: my relationship, my family, my friends. It is a place I love to elevate and share.

The words living space resonate with generosity, with amplitude, with a search for an intimate sublime.

My home is not material but spiritual. When I can leave expressions of myself within a space, whatever its form, home is born more from my inner world than from the materiality of the place itself.

I have moved often, travelled often, and I live far from my family. My original home was fragmented early by various separations. Very young, I learned to create homes wherever I could. I have always loved welcoming others, as if to let go of a place that no longer exists and rebuild a place of welcome that becomes the future.

Sometimes it is enough to place a single object there, a flower dear to my eye. Whether in an apartment in Paris, a hotel room abroad, or a holiday house, that is enough for me to open myself to the space.

Is there an object you would never part with, not for its beauty but for its story?

There are several objects I would never part with. Almost everything that surrounds us plays a role in our lives. Some play a greater role than others, but this is not defined by cost, age, beauty, or intention.

Our home began with the objects we both carried from our past, everyday pieces, classics, furniture, and precious family objects. Having travelled so much, they had already been sorted many times. From Switzerland to my dozens of Parisian apartments, on every train journey carrying large Migros bags, I brought a little more each time.

Then came the first objects we bought together, our first kitchen knives, our first sofa. There are those we received as gifts, those we offered each other, and those we created together. All my objects are ours.

My father is a painter and antique dealer. He has given me, given us, many beautiful pieces sourced over months and years of work. He taught me to recognise beauty not through brand, price, or size, but through the poetry an object evokes within me.

Do objects carry memory, or do we project memory onto them?

Believing that some objects carry a soul, I feel deeply that objects can gather a form of memory.

There are objects whose power to receive memory I can sense. Often, they come from raw natural materials, wood, stone, and shell, with a source of life to which I am sensitive.

A shell will always retain the beating of a heart. Our wedding invitation was a closed shell that, when integrated with a small speaker, played the heartbeat of my husband, Léonard, and me.

In artists’ works, every form of art contains memory, what we project into it, what we remember, what we imagine. Handmade objects carry memory through the gestures that formed them.

In this sense, I believe mirrors retain what they have seen. It is a beautiful excuse to show them a kind gaze, to show them our lives, our friends, our families, our spaces.

Where is the line between collecting and hoarding?

I am a collector who hates hoarding. I have a few collections, but each was born of a deep desire, not from piling up. What burdens me has no place.

My collection of small chairs is almost religious, displayed in our home like the most beautiful hotel. They are alive. Each one has its chosen place, cherished and kept.

BMF candle holders by STOFF Nagel have been part of the home for over a decade, the first purchased ten years ago, followed by one each month, bought carefully with saved money.

Pencil leads form another quiet fascination: their colours unfolding into infinite shades, only to vanish with a single stroke of an eraser.

I collect locks of hair from each member of the family, and they are preserved as well. As a child, I witnessed natural disasters and learned that a lock of hair was often one of the most reliable ways to identify someone. Since then, jewellery, artworks, and pieces incorporating hair have been gathered, hair remaining a sublime vessel of memory.

Not all collections need to be named. They are preferred light, instinctive, unfolding naturally without the weight of being declared a “collection.”

The most absurd collections are often my favourites. A collection cannot be predicted; it arrives through the expression of a certain beauty within us.

How do you want your space to make others feel, and is that different from how you want to feel in it yourself?

I want others to feel even more comfortable in our home than I do, and I love our Parisian apartment overlooking the city, with its terrace and magical trees. I adore all the drawers it contains, but I love it even more when I share it. Lending our apartment and our small world of objects to friends, disappearing for a few weeks, and imagining them happy there.

Léonard and I are fortunate to live as we do. We have put great care into shaping our space.

I grew up in a large family in a winemaker’s house in a small village by Lake Geneva. The gaze I was taught to place on things, the creativity offered to me, allowed me to build who I am. I am deeply grateful for that.

Do you decorate for the eye or for the body, for the visual or for comfort?

For all of these elements.

A beautiful piece of furniture with no purpose that blocks the passage has no place in a space. A bouquet whose flowers tell me no story will move me less than wild-cut flowers.

How do you approach imperfection? Do you try to erase it or highlight it?

Imperfection can mean different things to different viewers.

Some imperfections I correct with my own hands, so they are no longer imperfections. Others I accept through the simplicity of living with what we have.

But imperfections born from carelessness, work done too quickly, poorly thought through, make my skin crawl. It can be the way an apartment has been renovated, a house redone like a failed cosmetic surgery with three layers of foundation.

I have a taste for the old, for what is well made, for what is carefully done. What is not, I let go of.

Has your idea of interior beauty evolved throughout the different stages of your life?

Yes and no. It has evolved, grown richer, and expanded into more spaces. Yet it has remained the same, because the objects that surrounded me in my childhood bedroom, the colors, the materials, are still present in some way.

Do you believe in permanent installations, or do you rearrange spaces as a way of thinking?

I rearrange. There is not a day, not even a week, when flowers do not perform their great dance throughout our home, sometimes in this vase, sometimes beside the bed, then cut again into another vessel. The flowers that surround us and move through our space daily, I adore them.

If you could step into someone’s kitchen, past or present, in which space would you most like to cook?

I would love to cook in my future family home.

What is the scent of your inner world?

The scent of poetry and peace, mixed with roses and the potpourri.

xx
Laszlo