Ciguë Brings Its Material Mastery to Caudalie’s Ambitious New Paris Headquarters.

Ciguë portrait. Photo: Vassilis Karidis.

If you know Ciguë’s work, you know the signature: that rare, considered balance between the raw and the refined, the structural and the sensory. It’s an approach the Paris-based studio has been quietly perfecting for years — and one that has found a well-matched client in Caudalie, the pioneering French vinotherapy brand. Their collaboration, which began in 2022, has now reached its most ambitious expression: a new 5,000-square-metre headquarters at 13 Rue Pavée in the heart of Paris’s Marais district.

The site itself is remarkable. Ciguë has worked across an architectural ensemble comprising two protected hôtels particuliers — one dating from the 15th/16th century, another from the 18th — alongside a 19th-century Eiffel-style industrial building at the rear. That kind of layered heritage context demands precision over spectacle, and Ciguë delivers exactly that.

Working within a VEFA (off-plan development) framework in collaboration with Mars Architecture, the studio navigated the constraints of listed buildings with characteristic intelligence, even integrating a geothermal system for heating and cooling throughout.

OBO Office in Paris, France by Ciguë.

Inspired by the meditative simplicity of a monastery, Ciguë chose humble, long-lasting materials including solid oak, baked earth and crude steel for the OBO office in Paris.

What makes Rue Pavée interesting — beyond the extraordinary bones of the building — is its programmatic ambition. This is not a conventional office fit-out. The headquarters brings together Caudalie’s creative, marketing, commercial and finance teams under one roof, alongside a publicly accessible spa with seven treatment rooms, the brand’s first yoga studio, and a 630-square-metre event space dedicated to the French cosmetics industry. On the ground floor, a generous open space conceived in the spirit of a hotel lobby absorbs a fluid mix of uses: informal meetings, breaks, mobile working. The architecture, as Ciguë puts it, becomes “hospitable, almost public.”

The material language will be immediately familiar to anyone who has followed the Ciguë’s work: Frontenac limestone quarried near Bordeaux, cooperage oak staves deployed as wall cladding, stainless steel used sparingly in details that evoke the laboratory. These same materials have been refined across the pair’s earlier projects — boutiques in Bordeaux, Brussels and New York, and a Paris outpost at Saint-Sulpice — before being transposed here to the scale of the collective. Oak frames, joinery and custom-designed workstations structure the open-plan floors, where natural light floods in through a full-height glass and steel façade, and exposed concrete ceilings are left deliberately raw. The result sits comfortably in that Ciguë sweet spot: rigorous, warm, and never trying too hard.

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As co-founder Guillem Renard describes it: “We have transposed, at the scale of the headquarters, the material vocabulary refined through the boutiques, but above all, we have worked to make the everyday workplace a space of care.”

That phrase — a space of care — cuts to the heart of what this project is really about. Rue Pavée is a physical argument that the values a brand puts into its products can and should extend to the spaces where its people work. For Ciguë, whose practice has always been about the relationship between bodies, materials and territory, it’s a powerfully coherent position. For Caudalie, celebrating its 30th anniversary, it’s a fitting way to mark the moment.

Ciguë and Caudalie’s collaboration continues with the forthcoming renovation of the historic Les Sources de Caudalie spa at Château Smith Haut-Lafitte in Martillac — a return, quite literally, to where it all began.

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[Images courtesy of Ciguë. Photography by Maris Mezulis.]