RUE DE LA VILLETTE ❘ PARISIAN WALKWAYS


ANTICA BOX 18 rue de la Villette


Tel. +33 (0)7 81 73 53 60


An antique shop created and curated by a true aesthete with dual passions for the golden eras of aviation and maritime transport and for distinctive decorative lighting from the late 19th and 20th centuries. The window display sets the chic-nostalgic ambience, where a pristine glass Art Deco lamp and an antique cinema lighting rig shine over a vintage train set and model aircraft and ocean liners.


LOUISETTE 12 bis rue de la Villette


Tel. +33 (0)9 88 08 18 52


Belleville already boasts plenty of traditional Parisian cafés and brasseries, so the founders of Louisette have decided to offer a different kind of night out, creating the neighbourhood’s fi rst bar à grignoter. A ‘snack bar’, you say? Here, as with the fi rst Louisette, in the 14th, that means a chic lounge/wine bar with comfortable sofas and chill lighting, and a plethora of tasty small dishes and choice meat and cheese boards to nibble at all night.


Rue de la Villette is narrow, just 15 metres wide, with so little automobile traffi c that you’ll often see people strolling down the middle of it. And yet it is, and always has been, a true of artery of the city. Its name harkens back as far as 1730, when maps indicated it as the pathway connecting the village of Belleville to that of La Villette. Reminders of its deep history remain all along the street, where one can peek into verdant, cobblestoned courtyards and passageways like the Villa de l’Adour, a veritable window into Belleville’s forgotten rural past. Today still, rue de la Villette constitutes a link between the 20th arrondissement and the 19th, the bustling rue de Belleville and the bucolic Buttes-Chaumont park, and between two separate yet complementary halves of the same street. Starting from rue de Belleville, at fi rst the street seems to be all about shopping and soirées, with multiple designer boutiques, galleries, bookstores and chic restaurants and wine bars. But by the time one passes the poetically named rue des Solitaires, the tone changes, and we fi nd a quieter half of the street; one dedicated to more, well, solitary enterprises. “It would be very hard for me to be situated at the other end of


DAVAÏ 3 rue de la Villette


Tel. +33 (0)6 23 23 65 29


Davaï (literally ‘give’ in Russian, but also meaning ‘come on!’) is the brand of Nadine Lagalaye, a generous-spirited, eco-minded fashion designer who wanted to create a line of clothing that could follow the evolution of a woman’s body throughout her life, be she slim, pregnant, or carrying a newborn. Her elegant, versatile dresses, skirts and jackets are Made in Paris with recycled left-over haute-couture fabrics.


rue de la Villette; they have passers-by all the time!” laughs François Ettori, who runs a luthier workshop at 80 rue de la Villette. “Here we need time to work; we need silence. This isn’t a boutique: it’s an atelier.” And to see Ettori cutting tiny, iridescent pieces of abalone shells with jewellery-maker-like precision to create mother-of-pearl insets for a violin bow, it’s clear he’s a man impassioned by his profession. Where the Italians were historically the masters of violins, the Parisian school of bow-making was once the greatest in the world, with vintage French bows fetching up to €150,000 today.


Luthier Jérôme Lair specialises in building copies of forgotten instruments, such as this replica of a 19th-century guitar


“In the 18th century, Stradivari started to build violins that could create powerful sounds to traverse the concert hall only because Vivaldi had started to write music for solo violin,” Ettori explains. “In the same way, in the 19th century, when Berlioz composed the Symphonie fantastique, the most innovative symphony of the century, he demanded new things of musicians and their instruments, and thus bows needed to be created that were stronger, faster, more dynamic. French bow-makers, you could say, were in the right place at the right time.” ❯❯


Apr/May 2020 FRANCE TODAY ❘ 53


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