The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, in the 19th arrondissement, is one of Eva Jospin’s favourite places in Paris. Its landscape had been barren and riddled with holes from centuries of gypsum mining until the mid-19th century, when park designer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand transformed it into a magnificent garden, with sprawling lawns, an artificial lake, a grotto with a 20m-high waterfall, and a miniature Roman temple perched on its highest point. ‘It’s amazing what we can do to redeem abandoned industrial spaces so they become places to go and walk around and to set your imagination free,’ says Jospin, as we meet for lunch in Paris in December 2022 to discuss her collaboration with champagne house Ruinart.
Buttes-Chaumont itself has little to do with Champagne, but the park came to Jospin’s mind on her first visit to Maison Ruinart, the ancient chalk quarries that the maison’s founding family transformed into wine cellars in the late 18th century when they realised that it offered optimal conditions for ageing champagne. Like Buttes-Chaumont, it’s an excellent example of adaptive reuse, says Jospin: ‘It’s beautiful that a place that wasn’t made for storing champagne somehow makes Ruinart’s product better – an opportunistic vision of life.’
