Paris Digest
Paris city guide since 1997
Housed in the Louvre Palace in Paris, the rich Arts Décoratifs Museum (MAD) pays tribute to French craftmanship over the centuries. This museum is is must for lovers of fashion, furniture, design, French Art de Vivre and culture. Paris museums.
Paris is famous for fashion, jewelry, tableware and stylish furniture. Many people come to the city for shopping and to discover the best from local artists, designers and artisans.
If you are one of them, rush to Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts). After 10 years of closure and a 35 million euro restoration, the museum reopened in 2006 as one of the top Paris museums. It is now named MAD, which stands for Musée des Arts Décoratifs. A museum mad with objects.
Arts Décoratifs display 6000 exceptional pieces of art designed by the greatest artists and artisans in fields ranging from cabinetmaking, precious metalwork to ceramics, glass, design and fashion.
Arts Décoratifs are the only institution to be able to pay tribute to the many illustrious names who forged the history of French style and taste. The list includes Boulle, Sevres, Aubusson, Christofle, Lalique, Guimard, and Le Corbusier.
The modern display of French jewels, fashion clothing, modern furniture and advertising at Arts Décoratifs is absolutely spectacular.
Add to that the grandiose building, part of the Louvre, some of the greatest views of the city from the museum windows and the pleasant Loulou restaurant which has a very quiet terrace in the spectacular Tuileries Gardens.
The very quiet Decorative Arts Museum is certainly one of the best kept secrets of Paris and an excellent introduction to French style, taste and fashion.
Wonderfully located in one of the aisles of the Louvre Palace, the Museum of Decorative Arts was inaugurated in 1905. The Museum of Decorative Arts tell the art of living from the Middle Ages to the present day, a history of taste, know-how and techniques of craftsmen, genius of artists. All this, through works and objects that can be of daily use but which are nonetheless works of art. The Museum of Decorative Arts presents this search for beautiful in the useful. To achieve this, the institution has a renovated space of 6,000 square meters where 5,000 works are exposed. The route is chronological: it begins with a beautiful series of altarpieces from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and continues on the first of these period rooms which are the attractions of the museum. They reconstruct typical interiors of places of residence at given times by bringing together in the same room the furniture, the painting, the sculpture, the decorative objects that once composed it. There are ten of them throughout the museum. These period rooms are much more interesting than the traditional accumulations of objects that are often found in other museums.
We strongly recommend les Arts Décoratifs, a must for lovers of design, fashion and French culture. The Decorative Arts Museum is located in the Louvre Palace. Locate Arts Décoratifs on Paris map.
Paris metro: Tuileries metro station on line 1
Arts Décoratifs Museum - The terrace of Loulou restaurant