“We’re always starting from the past,” says founder and interior designer Dorothée Meilichzon, who’s speaking to me from her country home just outside of France (it’s August, the Parisians have decamped for the season, and Meilichzon has flowed with the tide). “We start with the history of a place, where it comes from… and then we try to bridge from it, to the now.”

All of Meilichzon’s work is grounded fundamentally in place: whether that’s the wild, eccentrically English setting of Cowley Manor, the hotel that is anecdotally said to have inspired Lewis Carroll when he wrote Alice in Wonderland, or her sexy, low-lit Parisian hotel bars, or a playful ski chalet in Val d’Isère. Meilichzon founded her design agency, Chzon (a diminutive of her last name) in 2009, and began extending her design nous into hospitality projects in Paris, starting with hotels and low-lit bars before taking on full scale hotel projects.

“Cowley was an extraordinary project,” she says, of the sprawling manor home that was bought by the Experimental Group in May 2022 and opened in 2023 after Meilichzon had her way with it. Meilichzon often works with the hotel group — her husband is one of its founders — and has been part of shaping its singular design language: eclectic, but polished, full of texture and a bon vivant attitude, without being overwhelming. And connected in overt and less assuming ways to its geography, of what a place once was, always.

At Cowley Manor, an Italianate mansion which was originally built in 1695, there’s plenty to draw from. The land on which it stands was previously owned, according to locals, by Edward Confessor, an Anglo Saxon king, who then exchanged it for the land on which he later built Westminster Abbey. Under Meilichzon’s direction, the sumptuous history of the hotel and its period-drama grounds are dialled up with the addition of bold, sculptural interiors in shades of cobalt, rich ochre and plum. Lounges are squat and mid-century, upholstered in jewel tones, prints abound, coffee tables in marble and pearl announce their presence, too. Chzon’s interiors aren’t made to blend in with their restrained English façade, but to play off it. “The British countryside is such rich ground to explore, it has so many references for design,” she says.

Working mostly in Europe, Meilichzon feels “lucky to always be working in places that used to be something else.” That means that inspiration for a new iteration of a building blooms in many places: the curve of a window arch, or an old bannister that was falling down. “We sometimes start with the smallest thing,” she says.

Her latest project, Hotel Mylos, sits in the serene, little-trodden foothills of Cargèse in Corsica, overlooking the Mediterranean sea. In 2024, Orma Architettura used soil taken during the excavation of cliffs to build the earthen walls of the structure, which looks almost like it could disappear into the landscape. Because it was newly constructed, the building itself did not hold the secrets of its past — instead, Meilichzon looked to the Greek origins of the village surrounding it to inform its present. The result? Rugged, textured walls, terracotta tiles like the village roofs, and a scattering of amphora motifs around the space. The interior is like a series of interconnected waves, the shapes nodding to the domes of Greek village homes.

Here, like in most of her projects, Meilichzon explains, there’s a subtle geometry that girds a room. The same swift curve or angle printed on the walls is mimicked on the floorboards; on a mirror’s edge; reflected again in the shape of a chair. It’s not often noticeable to those passing through — and nor is it intended to be — but it lends a sense of holisticness to a space that is felt, and embodied. “Whether people see it or not, that’s not important,” she says. “They will walk through it and leave with a particular sense.”