Mon Pavé Parisien

“For a modest price, the streets of Paris can be yours”
said Benoit Morenne from the New York Times!

A cube of Paris. Its name “Mon Pavé Parisien” which means My Cube from Paris.

Coco Chanel might have walked on this pavement of granite. Or Victor Hugo or even Charles de Gaulle. Witness of the life of Parisians for more than 800 years.

Summer 2016. The warmth of the streets mingles with a popular sports fervor; One team having won against another.

Margaux is in a light dress on her red vespa. Roundabout of the Champs-Elysées. A small, thunderous car cuts off the road. Margaux stops and falls on a unsealed cobblestone. A parisian cobblestone. Her Parisian cobblestone which she would like to bring home. To expose it between a set of antic books and a ceramic unicorn. Or on her art-deco desk. Or in a old Japanese Zen garden of the 90s.

Considering the possibility of facing 5 years in jail and having on her conscience the accidental death of a cyclist falling into the void left by the absence of cobblestone, Margaux continues on her way and will later search on the internet to attempt to acquire her Pavé Parisien. In vain.

Therfore Margaux will seek to repair this regrettable omission of international design by buying, washing, reworking, painting, packing, labeling, those pieces of Parisian patrimony that are the granite cubes known as cobblestone or, in French, “Pavés”

Thus was born “Mon Pavé Parisien”, available today so that every Parisian has the chance to have 100 cubic centimeters of rock history at home.

Philip 2., knowed as Philip Augustus, was the first serial-street-builder. He decided to enclose the city of Paris with walls on the sides (enclosure of Philippe-Auguste) and on the ground with the first paving of the streets of Paris from 1181.

The climax of Le Pavé (cooblestone) in Paris is reached in 1968 with 800 hectares of paved streets. From 1968 on, with the riots of Mai 68, strangely, the public authorities decided to privilege massively the coating of bitumen which launches less easily on the forces of order in case of barricades.

“Mon Pavé Parisien” is a real cooblestone of Paris, bought directly from the city of Paris Council, which recycles 8,000 tons of granite every year. “Mon Pavé Parisien” is part of a sustainable development approach and it arrives on your shelf at the end of its cycle in the circular economy.