Célestine Potin is a French interior architect and designer whose practice examines the relationship between space, intimacy, and visibility. Her work reimagines the interior as a site of negotiation, questioning the conditions under which intimacy becomes visible, consumable, or protected.
Célestine studied interior architecture and design at École Camondo, where her work focused on residential and hospitality spaces, including an exchange semester at the Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires. She then pursued the Master of Arts in Interior Architecture (MAIA) program at HEAD – Genève, where her practice shifted toward socially engaged spatial research, exploring questions of media, domesticity, cohabitation, and the politics of shelter and visibility.
Diploma Project
When You Are Ready, Come With Me
When You Are Ready, Come With Me is a spatial proposition exploring the architecture of refuge through the lens of visibility and choice. Situated in an existing house in Petit-Saconnex, Geneva, the project reimagines the dwelling as a shelter for women in situations of vulnerability, constructing a gradual sequence of thresholds where visibility is never imposed but always negotiated.
Each dwelling unfolds as a carefully calibrated progression of intimacy, from a sheltered garden entrance and shared outdoor spaces suspended above the street to increasingly protected interior environments where the body can exist without exposure or judgment.
The project understands home not as a room but as a choreography of transitions, where light, views, and access are modulated to allow each resident to define, on her own terms, the boundary between the private self and the collective. Architecture here becomes a soft envelope, a framework for recovery, agency, and the gradual possibility of being seen.
