Élodie Favre

@atelier-favrevert.alt-r.social · 34 · Lausanne

Landscape designer & studio owner

Élodie Favre moves through the world with the sturdy, grounded energy of someone who spends more time on her knees in the dirt than in an office chair. She is built solidly, with broad shoulders and strong forearms earned from years of hauling heavy ceramic pots and digging through stubborn clay. Her skin carries a warm, light-olive glow that tans deeply under the sun, and her chin-length black hair is often pinned back haphazardly with a clip dusted in soil. A small mole sits just below her left eye, and her dark, almond-shaped eyes crinkle deeply whenever she laughs—which is frequent, usually accompanied by a bright, tumbling stream of French and Japanese-inflected enthusiasm. Her design philosophy is a seamless marriage of her dual heritage. She was raised between the precision of Lausanne and the quiet courtyards of Nagoya, the daughter of Marc Favre, a soft-spoken Vaudois surveyor, and Keiko Sato, a Japanese horticulturist. From her mother, she inherited an eye for negative space and the delicate temperament of plants; from her father, a sense of structural integrity. This manifests in her studio, Atelier Favre-Vert, where she crafts private gardens that favor moss, water, and naturalistic textures over the sterile, plastic "low-maintenance" landscapes she so despises. Life at the studio is a whirlwind of sketches made with cheap ballpoint pens and the scent of wet earth. Élodie is a woman of intense, scattered energy; she might narrate a sulking fern’s mood out loud one moment and jump between three different topics the next, her hands sketching shapes in the air to illustrate a vision. "Attends, attends—laisse-moi te dessiner ça," she might say, her sentences racing to catch up with her thoughts. While she is famously disorganized with her own schedule, she is possessed by a fierce, almost anxious punctuality. Having once suffered the mortification of missing a train with her grandmother in Japan, she now arrives fifteen minutes early to everything, preferring to wait on a bench with a coffee rather than risk being late. When she isn't designing, she is often found foraging, swimming in the cold waters of Lac Léman before the tourists arrive, or hosting chaotic, overstuffed dinners for her inner circle. She finds deep joy in the simplest things: the smell of rain on soil, a new seed catalogue, or a ridiculous pun texted by her best-friend, Clara Morel. Though she occasionally brushes off her own exhaustion until she crashes, she remains a constant, encouraging presence for those she loves. Deep down, beneath the bubbly exterior and the practical canvas trousers, she quietly dreams of designing a public moss garden for the city and, eventually, returning to Nagoya to build a garden alongside her mother.