Twenty-five years of travel and creation.
The idea that changed everything
When I decided to renovate the bar in 1998, the cost of materials in France nearly knocked me off my chair. Gérard Marinier (GG to those who know him) had already been running the Estérel Caravaning restaurant for a while. He had an idea. Like me, he had fallen head over heels for Bali and decided to spend his winters there. He had built a network, forged connections with craftsmen, manufacturers, and a freight forwarder – his wife had clothes made there. One day he said: “Why not have your furniture made in Indonesia? The prices are very attractive.”
That’s how I started designing my first pieces of furniture myself. I chose the materials, the shapes, the finishes. One container arrived. Then another. Since 1998, an average of two containers a year have docked at the port of Marseille. Twenty-five years of travel, selection, and creation. Everything you see here – the restaurant, the bar, the terraces, the shared spaces – came through there.
Drawing your dreams
What this adventure taught me is that once you have the right connections, you can make anything happen. I would sketch an idea on a scrap of paper in Bali, and a few weeks later, it existed. It was absolute freedom. I was no longer constrained by catalogues, standards, or European lead times. I could imagine a bench with unusual curves, a wrought-iron backrest with a specific motif, a tabletop in a wood you can’t find anywhere else – and then watch it come to life, exactly as I had dreamed it.
Inspiration came from everywhere. From a Moroccan palace, a tile in Tunisia, a shop glimpsed down a Seminyak alleyway, a fabric found at a market in Java. I’d come home with arms full of photos, notebooks covered in sketches, material samples stuffed into my luggage. And every time, the craftsmen turned it all into reality. They never said it was impossible.
It’s also ecology
Buffalo leather, solid teak, wrought iron. These are noble, dense materials that age well. Balinese buffalo leather is several millimetres thick. It doesn’t move, doesn’t lose its shape. The poufs in the office date from 2004 and are in perfect condition. So are the restaurant chairs. I think they will outlast me.
That, too, is ecology – even if the word seems strange for someone who ships containers across oceans. Buy less, buy better, buy to last. A plastic piece of furniture replaced every three years (almost certainly mass-produced in China), or a teak piece whose making I followed from start to finish and which lasts twenty years: the maths are straightforward.
The wow effect. I could never have transformed Estérel Caravaning the way I did with European prices. It’s thanks to Bali that we became one of the first five-star campsites in France. It’s thanks to those containers that, even today, when a family walks into the restaurant for the first time, they stop, look around and say wow. That reaction has been the same for more than twenty years. We never tire of it.
Between us: The ironworker among the coconut palms
Twenty minutes by moped from Seminyak, amid rice paddies and coconut palms, men work crouched in the earth. No factory, no machines. Just their hands, the metal, and a breathtaking precision. That is where the ironwork railings that run around the restaurant and the pools were born. Those railings were reproduced from photographs I had taken while visiting the Glaoui Palace in Télouet, Morocco.
The ironworker had never made anything like it. He studied the drawings, he thought it over. And then he got to work. The result is magnificent. Every cell, every curve is shaped by hand with a regularity that defies belief. That is the magic of Bali.
– Aurore
