IBIZA
Photos by Bennu Gerede
At Kilometre Paris, each piece seeks to tell a story of travel through Couture & Embroidery. With our 'Caravans', we invite you to join us on our worldly travels and experience unique events in which fashion meets storytelling.
Through our stops around the world, we shine lights on each of our 'muses': those exceptional individuals who inspire us with their passions and their individuality. These encounters offer the opportunity to immerse yourself in a universe where each garment, crafted with care & detail, represents a journey, an enriching experience which we hope to share.
Under the direction of Alexandra Senes and with the eyes of talented photographers such as Sarah Forgie, Bennu Gerede & Julie Ansiau, we've documented these exchanges, offering an intimate & authentic way of celebrating at our creations. This edition of Caravan takes place in Ibiza, with 8 inspiring muses, each enriching our adventure. Join us on an unforgettable journey of fashion and creativity.
Camille Barotin
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Camille Barotin. Her grandfather fell in love with the island and had a house built here. He drew it himself. She spent a large part of her childhood inside it, and the word she uses is formatted: the creativity, the encounters, the freedom, and above all the light, which she still calls insane. That is one half of where the eye comes from. The other half is that she trained as a graphic designer, so the colour was taught.
She is from the south of France, Montpellier. She lived in London, then Paris. Since 2009 she has worked for Hermès, and there is a symmetry in that, because her mother and her grandmother opened the Montpellier boutique. What holds her there is that it isn't only a luxury brand to her, it's a universe. Time, exceptional materials, things that have kept their value. And it remains one of the few houses still genuinely interested in artists.
She calls herself a Swiss army knife. Ceramics, photography, video, playlists. She DJs, and even there she is telling a story, not with words. Never records one after another. A selection, built whole.
What she likes most is choosing. Finding the beautiful, the singular, the authentic, anything with a soul in it, and handing it on to other people through whatever medium is nearest. A place, a restaurant, a shop, an object, an artist.
Indigo is the current obsession. Aboubakar Fofana, whose talent she calls insane. And an Indian artist from Bangalore, Kaimurai, whose work she came to recently: small textiles, natural indigo, the landscapes of southern India, a gesture repeated until it works like meditation. That one she says she feels physically.
In a world moving this fast, with AI, with machines able to reproduce absolutely anything, what the hand transmits holds a value that is profoundly human, and it is exactly what is missing now. A machine will never reproduce a trace. A flaw. The thing that makes an object the only one of its kind. She has her own hands in clay, so she isn't speaking from outside it.
Ask her what she will be doing in ten years and she says she doesn't know, and that she needs to work it out soon. Something with a link to art. Something close to curating without being curating. Emotional is the adjective she reaches for, and then she says she isn't sure the term exists.
Twenty-four hours starts with a walk, early, from a small port along the paths on foot, up to a sundial standing beside a stone doorway. Timeless, she says. On the other side of it, Es Vedrà. Then fish for lunch at the place she thinks does the best on the island. A swim at Ses Salines, then another somewhere with small alcoves, lagoons, rocks worn into shapes. Then west, because she likes the west, and Atlantis for the end of the light.
Given an unlimited credit card and three months, she wouldn't buy objects. She isn't a collector of possessions, she says, she is a collector of emotions. So she would buy time, which she considers the greatest luxury there is. Then she would spend the three months going to see the last artisans while they are still there. Japan for ceramics, and to learn washi. Africa for the dyers. India for textile. Morocco. So many countries.
Not to make a documentary out of it. To soak in it, learn properly, watch how it actually happens. And record it, the sounds and the smells, so that it can be rebuilt afterwards into something people can walk into.
A living medium, is how she puts it, before admitting she hasn't found the name for that either.
Lucho Gonzalez de Brieva
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Lucho Gonzalez de Brieva, unelected mayor of three streets.
Sometimes he does not drive for six or seven days. You could go half an hour, forty minutes, out to a beautiful cala, and he will tell you honestly that he would rather not. Everything he needs is a ten or fifteen minute walk from his door: the cafés, the restaurants, the castle to explore, the Parador. There is a vedic place he loves where he has his own table. An Italian, high end, small plates. A Michelin star down in the marina, opened by someone he rates enormously. So his recommendation for twenty-four hours on this island is to stay exactly where you are, which is either the least useful answer anyone gave, or the only honest one.
The full name is Luis Eduardo González de Brieva y Palacio. He shortens it. Brieva is a small town in Ávila, in Castilla, where the family came from before they went to Colombia several centuries ago. His brothers have been. He has not.
His father would not eat chicken and would not eat fish, on the grounds that fish smells bad. The household went through a cow a week. Empanadas, terneras, sausages, tripe, every part of the animal, an enormous barbecue. He calls it a massacre and he calls the Colombian diet a killer, and he notes that everybody got sick.
He was writing stories at twelve and being published in the local newspapers. He was introverted, and he has always had an interior life that occupied him.
He left at eighteen, for an English girl. She was working at the embassy, considerably older than him, and about to marry a captain in the paratroopers. Before that he had a small house by the sea in a fishing village, and he filled it with exactly the people his parents did not want him near: the intelligent ones, the lesbians, the poets, the writers, the musicians. She came to one of those parties. She stayed. And afterwards she told him he was brilliant and that he had to come to England.
He went, and he stayed thirty years. What he found there was the European culture he had been looking for, which is why Brexit ended it for him. London itself he describes as the opposite of here: hard, grey, pushing you outward, turning you into a tiger because you have no choice, and laying a melancholy tone across a whole life. He built himself a house inside a set of gates, hidden, with a courtyard and a pool, and he says the house should not have been there at all. He never had the need or even the inclination to ask anyone's permission. He simply did it. If it had been on the main street he would never have got away with it.
That house was a temple, and occasionally it was something else. Around two hundred and eighty people at each party, on average, held to honour the shadow. His conditions: no business, no agendas of any kind, just the dance. All his drummers and a good DJ. A great deal of attention paid to the lights, and at a certain point nobody could film anything, so everybody was simply in it. People came back the following day because they did not want to stop, and they would make pizzas. He did four of them across two years and that was enough.
He came to Ibiza for the first time in 2006, to visit the mother of the woman he was with. On the last day, driving to the port from Santa Eulària, the traffic stopped. He lost consciousness. The impact came through the door and into his arm and broke his ribs, and the doctor told him afterwards that the muscle was what stopped it going through his back. The driver put eight people in hospital. Lucho was in for ten days.
Welcome to Ibiza.
He said he would never come back. Then he came back for ayahuasca. And then, on the first of September 2018, at ten in the evening, he was at a party at Sunset Ashram, tired of the blablabla, and he walked away from all of it, climbed onto a rock, took his clothes off and got into the sea, which was still warm. He floated there under the whole sky. And what he thought was: this is what I want, and I do not want it for two weeks a year, I want it every day if I want it.
Three weeks later his son told him he was moving out with friends. Lucho said that was wonderful, and that he was also moving. Where, said his son. A small island in Spain, said Lucho, called Eivissa. His son had never heard of it.
His mother made things. She was a designer with a lot of people working for her, and she was always making something for the children anyway, and he watched her. He thinks he has always had something in his hands. He is an architect, and a designer, and a philosopher, which he worked out when he realised everything he was doing led back to a philosophical exploration. He has always played: piano, guitar, flute. He never trained, does not read music, and played well enough to work for a long time alongside one of the great guitarists in rock.
If you can use your hands, he says, you have solved the existential question of your life. You can sit in an office all day, and hold every degree there is, and if you do not play the guitar or paint or lay a wall then you are missing a part of it.
He never studied philosophy at an institution and he never will. The Greeks explained it perfectly well: philo is love, sophia is wisdom, and anyone interested in wisdom is already in it. He has carried questions in his head his entire life and he says, without hedging, that yes, he has found answers, from extraordinary teachers, and he took as much as he could. He does not hand any of it on unprompted. There is a rule in India about not teaching unless you are asked. Which is a peculiar position to hold on an island where everyone talks about spirituality, and where, he thinks, they mostly play at it, because playing is easier.
Before the Greeks found the patterns, they called everything chaos. That is the actual word. Then they started noticing the repetitions in nature, the proportions, the golden mean, and they changed it to cosmos, which means order. He would like you to consider what kind of mind performs that switch. He thinks we are in another one now, and being badly served by it, because we are less intelligent about running our lives than we were, and because we are entertaining ourselves to death. For eighty years most of us have not had to think about famine, or hunger, or war. Not really.
Ask him how to build a temple and he will tell you, and it takes about ninety seconds. The square is the material world: cardinal points, the forces, everything of this universe. The dome is divinity, the cosmos, the circle. Every tradition does this, Chinese temples included. The difficult part is the connector between the two, and the connector is a second square, laid over the first and turned forty-five degrees, which produces an octagon, and the octagon is the perfect seat for a dome. Our ancestors knew. And the reason it works, he says, is that it is more or less a science: we now know the brain is looking for the relationship between the proportions.
Love, in his account, comes from the act of protecting, of taking care of the thing. Not romantically, not you are mine and you are my saviour, but simply that if you love someone you want to look after them, and that is what the word has meant for thousands of years. He puts it alongside three others he takes from Hindu tradition, satyam shivam sundaram, the true, the good and the beautiful, and his position is that any creative process undertaken with those in mind cannot go wrong. Which he applies to absolutely everything, including what you keep around you and what you spend your attention on.
He is pleased that scientists have started counting the neurons in the heart, tens of thousands of them, a second brain, the same way we now talk about the gut. Nothing new, he points out. They are only confirming it. And the virtues we already carry in there are a form of wisdom, so the work is simply to use them, rather than to compete, or to be seen. Do the thing. Then practise. It wakes up.
Also, on Alexander the Great: not so great. He was an asshole, and nobody is even certain where he is buried. Lucho once stood in Siwa with two real historians arguing about it in front of him. What interests him more is what happened afterwards, when one of Alexander's generals took Egypt and built Alexandria, and how much of what we became came out of that library.
In his first year here he was asked whether he wanted to organise something during a talks event on the island. He found an eighty-year-old Roma woman, a lesbian, a singer, who had survived a life he does not summarise lightly, having been rescued as a child by a woman from outside the community. She had taken eighty-three Roma people and put them into a school so they could learn to read and write. She adopted eighteen children personally. He calls her a fighter and a local hero and an artist and an intellectual, and he says she has a presence. She still performs, most nights, everywhere. He asked her to sing at the event and she said the audience would not understand what she was carrying. He also brought the guitarist she always plays with. The word people use around her is duende, and Lucho, who knows perfectly well what it means, uses it too.
Nobody pays him for any of this. He pays full rent like everybody else and does the rest in service, and he says the question he is asked most often is whether he is getting paid. Exactly one person has ever told him he was doing something worth doing: a very quiet English musician who lives here part of the year, a guitarist and a writer, one of the local heroes.
Last year he met a scientist, an American, formerly Air Force, and they connected, and there is a large property here, an old military installation, which the man wants to open as a school of science and philosophy with Lucho teaching in it. Could it happen? It could happen, yes. They are still looking.
Given three months and a credit card with no limit, he would spend it with the most loyal friends he has, the ones who hold a place in his heart, and he would take them to a desert oasis. Philosophy. Music. The stars.
Mattias Mähl
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Mattias Mähl.
Mattias spent many years travelling before he chose Ibiza. Six months in India, six months in Australia, and a small island in the Stockholm archipelago called Ornö, which in winter empties out to almost nothing and becomes its own society. Carpentry carried him through all of it. A car, a box of tools, and a project. You can arrive in any country and simply speak with your hands, which is a language of its own.
Then he chose. And on his first morning here he was sitting outside his van carving a spoon when about twenty people came past and gathered round to watch. Artists, theatre people, clowns, on their way back from something. They were all like him. This is where I stay, he thought, and could not quite believe it. Finally: my language, and people who speak the same one, in full. Like coming home.
Ask Mattias about that language and the first thing he says is that being asked makes him emotional. There was a period when the meditation of handwork went so deep that words with other people became difficult. Everything he knows, he learned by doing.
Living material is what he works with, and the process is a constant humbling. You are learning from the direction of the fibre. You want one thing, the wood offers another, and out of that interaction something more beautiful arrives than what you had in mind.
Then the contradiction he has never resolved. The privilege of being close to a tree, of hearing its history, and then of that tree dying, and of you being the reason. Against that: if you make something beautiful from it, if you celebrate it, is that better? Wisdom, in his account, is a long life of several contradictory thoughts. Some days the object is the answer. Other days Mattias stands in front of a living tree and cannot imagine how anyone could make anything more beautiful than nature already has. The two keep talking to each other, and the making, he thinks, came out of that suffering.
For years the spoons and the small objects went to other people. Never sold, always given: gifts that needed to find someone. Carpentry paid for the bread and butter, so both ran alongside each other for as long as they could, until one day he was a carpenter rather than an artist, and finding his way back has been its own hill to climb.
Saunas brought him to the present workshop. High-end, handcrafted, beautiful units. Which brought long conversations with Christian at Juntos, who had a great deal of work that needed their hands, and eventually the conversations turned into working together. The workshop is now Juntos Carpentry, and for the first time in his life Mattias is part of a large team, having always had his own company, so it took some adjusting.
Right now they work only with what grows on the island. Water here is very limited, so the land needs clearing without clear-cutting: clean it up, make it beautiful and walkable, look after the aquifers and the undergrowth, and use whatever timber comes off it. They have a big mill and they cut their own planks and beams. Everybody else builds in sabina, the juniper that Ibizan houses were traditionally made from, which the island no longer has, so it is now imported: beautiful material, but exotic and not ecological. You can do exactly the same thing, Mattias says, with what is already standing here. It is experimental, and he talks to people doing similar work in Mallorca, where the conditions are far closer than Sweden ever was.
Twenty-four hours would depend entirely on what you had already seen and what you came looking for. The climbing sites, the jumps, the spots nobody can reach, the hikes, the caves nobody knows about yet. Do not expect names: things move very fast here and turn into an Instagram spot, and Mattias has watched it happen. In the shoulder season, lunch somewhere the food comes off the ground and onto the plate. Then a short sleep, a snorkel, a walk, and a small cala where you can be alone, because this island does not have the long crowded beaches other places have. Stay for the sunset and the warmth. Silence, or conversation, or space. The insects are extraordinarily loud at the moment: they start at twenty-eight degrees, and it no longer drops below. Then dinner up at Sant Miquel, at a small new Mexican place run by people whose energy he could feel immediately.
Given a credit card and three months, the first thing would be an old-growth forest, protected. Not owned, because nobody should own such a thing, but secured. There is a vibration in a place where the trees have never been interfered with, where things fall and regrow on their own, where the mosses and the blueberries take over and you understand that this is what everything should look like, and what it did look like not long ago. It is open. It is walkable. You draw a breath and your nervous system goes to the ground. Perhaps two per cent of that kind of forest is left in the world, possibly less, and Mattias finds it genuinely astonishing that protecting it is not what all of us are doing.
Then a house of his own, for his family, having built so many for other people. Land somewhere far from here, mountains and a river, with fresh water in abundance rather than a coastline. Slovenia, perhaps.
And then a small cottage on the edge of the forest.
Serenella Cazac
We at Kilometre Paris would like to present our muse: Serenella Cazac.
It all began with three roses and three lavender plants.
When Serenella found her dream finca in Ibiza in 2012, her Ibicenco landlady welcomed her with a gift of plants and cuttings from her own garden. She planted these among the rubble surrounding the newly built pool, and over time they transformed a bare landscape into the beginning of a flourishing garden. What seemed like a modest gesture sowed the seeds of a lifelong passion.
Back in London, gardening had been little more than a hobby. She had potted a rose, an olive tree and grown a few tomato plants. As a child in rural Tuscany, she had grown up surrounded by beautiful gardens and people who loved them, but it wasn't until she found herself living in an old finca in Ibiza that she truly fell in love with gardening; and, eventually, with growing cut flowers as well as her sprawling garden.
She went to Ibiza in search of love, friendship and a gentler pace of life, leaving behind the relentless rhythm of the city. As well as finding love and creating a family, she found herself embraced by a warm, creative and nurturing community, where both roots and dreams had room to grow.
Her own roots stretch across countries and cultures. She spent her childhood in the Tuscan countryside with a French father and an English mother, whose own life had taken her from Mexico City in the 1950s to Rome before settling in Tuscany. Serenella attended an alternative boarding school in Switzerland, studied French and Spanish at university, and later completed a master's degree in Creative Writing, driven by her lifelong love of words and poetry.
Curiosity has always been the compass guiding Serenella's life. From Mongolia to Togo, Canada to South Africa, and Laos to Brazil, travel and adventure have shaped her journey, each destination offering unforgettable encounters and experiences she describes as extraordinary. There were chapters in New York, Madrid and Paris, followed by fifteen years in Bristol and London, before life eventually led her to Ibiza.
Looking back, it seems fitting that her passion should begin with three roses and three lavender plants. Sometimes the smallest gifts grow into the most beautiful stories.
Among the island's native plants, Serenella is particularly drawn to the local euphorbias, as well as the wild rosemary, the lavender and the golden helichrysum that carpet the landscape from May through June. Her favourite, however, is the asphodel, which she first discovered on Formentera. Its tall, elegant white flower spikes bloom in late summer, bringing a quiet grace to the landscape as the September evenings lengthen and the light turns ever more golden.
For more than ten years, she has created flower mandalas and immersive workshops that invite a slower, more attentive way of seeing and making. Her work is grounded in respect for seasonality, organic growth, and the quiet intelligence of plants, often dissolving the boundaries between gardening and art.
To Serenella, handmade is the true essence of luxury. The older she gets, the more drawn she is to things created by hand, because they carry a different energy from anything produced by a machine. She believes you can sense the time, care, intention and human touch woven into every detail. Whether it is flowers, ceramics, textiles, embroidery, wood or a painting, handmade objects possess a living quality that brings warmth and a fine frequency into a space.
She feels the same about plants and animals. They too possess a living energy that cannot be manufactured or replicated. Their purity reminds her of our connection to nature, to one another, and to the beauty of things created with patience, presence and love. To her, that is the truest form of luxury; not excess, but presence; not perfection, but authenticity.
If Serenella had just twenty-four hours to share Ibiza, the day would depend entirely on the season. In winter, she would head north for a long coastal walk; perhaps to Cala Sant Vicent or Es Portitxol; following the dramatic cliffs until reaching a quiet spot with a view. Summer belongs to the sea. Whether on a rented boat or one shared with friends, she would take you exploring hidden caves, swimming through their cool, turquoise waters before climbing on a secluded rocky islet to bask in the sun.
If given a blank canvas and three months to dream, Serenella would create a home surrounded by a flourishing garden, overflowing with flowers, wildlife and animals, with a greenhouse and a sauna nestled among the trees. In her ideal world, she would follow the seasons, dividing her time between Ibiza and another place close to her heart; perhaps Scandinavia, England or Scotland; living wherever the gardens are at their most beautiful.
The rest would be given to the causes closest to her heart: organisations protecting Indigenous peoples and their rights, supporting communities facing famine, restoring ocean ecosystems, reforesting and rewilding landscapes, and safeguarding wildlife. She would spend those three months ensuring the funds reached the people and projects that could make the greatest difference.
Beyond that, she would invest in something less tangible but equally important: bringing people together. At a time when so much of modern life seems to deepen division, she would support initiatives that foster connection, understanding and community; creating spaces where people can meet, share experiences and rediscover what unites them rather than what sets them apart.
