Reopen rather than sell: on the Champs-Élysées, the Élysées Lincoln starts again from nothing.
Opened in 1968 by their grandfather, the cinema was taken over by Samuel and Louis Merle, who run the Multiciné group. Around them, the avenue’s historic theatres were closing one by one. Rather than sell the building, they chose to rebuild it entirely. Two years spent visiting the most inventive cinemas in Europe, from London’s Everyman to the Nordic venues, set the measure of the project: a hybrid place able to sustain itself through programming as much as through events.
Louis Denavaut led the artistic direction and interior architecture, in partnership with Alain Balzac, his associate on the project at ABFM. The rehabilitation was heavy. Structure, acoustics, climate control, electrical systems: everything was rebuilt inside a building that had provided for none of it. The original plaster staff ceilings, prized for their acoustic behaviour, were kept. The whole was delivered in a timeframe few projects of this scale allow.
The design owns its mixture. The nineteen-seventies and Verner Panton on one side, the Hôtel de la Païva, a few doors away on the avenue, on the other. Outside, the marquee regains its bare bulbs and gains an LED band, the shopfront columns are clad in brass. Inside, floral carpets, mahogany panelling, brushed brass and fluted glass make an entrance that belongs both to the American picture palace and to the speakeasy.
Each auditorium has its own climate and its own name. Le Studio sets forty-two raspberry velvet tablet-arm seats before a wall of red, plum and powder pink chevrons. L’Audito, ivy green on harlequin diamonds, replays the Belle Époque. Le Club is fully modular: arches, circles, a wall of backlit discs, terracotta velvet benches that move aside for cocktail screenings.
The project is as much a manifesto as a refurbishment. It shows that an independent cinema can hold its ground by committing to a strong identity and a mixed model, eight screenings in ten open to the public and the rest privatised. This is how the studio approaches a cinema renovation: an identity project carried from end to end, from the foyer to the seat, from acoustics to the private-hire auditorium. At a time when small venues are closing, the Élysées Lincoln offers a framework others can follow, and the studio works with the operators who want to try it.