BOISBUCHET RESIDENCY PROGRAMME
CARLA WIECHERS
SEASON 2025
During her residency, Carla Wiechers, educational editor-in-chief & concept designer, often began the day with a walk through the fields with the big trees, along the paths to the lake, boots wet and mind open, returning with small treasures: a thought, a story, a question.
These fragments slowly found their way into her Trendbook for children, a growing collection of life skills seen through the eyes of children: noticing, collecting, wandering, imagining and making. The book gathers the real questions, dreams and observations of children and turns them into small chapters that invite curiosity and exploration. It is not a method, but an invitation to rethink what learning could be when it starts from children’s voices.
Boisbuchet turned out to be the perfect place for this kind of work. Ideas rarely arrive in straight lines there. They appear while walking, during conversations at the long tables, or while looking at materials in the workshops. Carla found herself working much like the children in the book, collecting fragments, a thought, a shape, a story, an object and letting them slowly connect.
One of her favourite places to work was the Paper Pavilion by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Light, open and built from simple materials, it felt like the perfect playground for ideas, a space where experiments could remain experiments and where small observations could quietly grow into stories.
Equally inspiring were the other residents: designers, makers and thinkers moving between disciplines, sharing ideas, tools and perspectives. And of course the spirit of Alexander von Vegesack, whose way of seeing design as a web of connections between objects, people and stories quietly runs through this place.
It is striking how a single week can shift perspective, loosen habits, and send someone home looking at their work and themselves with fresh curiosity, new playfulness, and just a little more rebellious courage.
“In the end Boisbuchet became more than a workspace. It became a playground for thinking.”
Photos : Manon Arrougé