Profile

From a young age, Hermine Torikian has been fascinated by theater and initially set her sights on a career as a set designer. Her sensitivity to space, staging, and materiality ultimately led her to study architecture. During her training, she focused particularly on the study of materials, exploring wood and earth as subjects for research and creation. After graduating with a degree in architecture, she chose to continue this approach through manual training and enrolled in a CAP program in cabinetmaking.

She then worked for several years in an artistic cabinetmaking workshop in Paris, where she learned the techniques, constraints, and demands of the trade. At the same time, she taught herself marquetry: in the evenings, she created small objects from veneer scraps, gradually developing a personal style based on graphic patterns and color.

In 2023, she founded her own workshop in Ivry-sur-Seine, dedicated to creating furniture and decorative pieces using contemporary marquetry techniques. Her career has been marked by a gradual shift in scale: from buildings to furniture, then to the minuscule and the extremely detailed. This transition from the monumental to the intimate, from architectural space to objects, now forms the basis of her approach.  

Hermine Torikian has developed a unique approach to cabinetmaking, where wood becomes both a medium for artistic experimentation and a sensitive language. Her work is distinguished by a deliberate use of contrasts: bold colors, curved lines, and graphic patterns combine to form a precise visual vocabulary.  

In her creations, marquetry is never confined to a purely decorative role. She makes it the very heart of the project, the structuring principle of the piece of furniture. Total, visual, and omnipresent, it extends across the entire object, sometimes even into areas that are usually secondary or invisible.  
Through this practice, she explores the boundaries between structure and ornament, rigor and sensitivity, constructing a work where meticulous craftsmanship dialogues with a spatial sensibility inherited from architecture.