“I USED TO be very good with stress,” says Gildas Loaëc, the chief executive officer and co-founder of the brand Maison Kitsuné, which has, over 21 years, grown to include more than 75 fashion boutiques and 35 cafes worldwide, after beginning as a record label that worked with indie bands like Phoenix and Cut Copy. Raised in Brittany, Loaëc met his business partner, the French Japanese Masaya Kuroki, 49, while running a Parisian record store, D.J.ing at night and collaborating with the helmeted electronic duo Daft Punk. Now 51, he has long prided himself on knowing what sorts of music, clothes and coffee certain cool-chasing young people from Tokyo to New York want to consume next.
One way he did that was by regularly going out. But during the pandemic, Loaëc says, he was “really feeling stressed,” and it had little to do with the virus. His hearing and eyesight started to go: “You get to a limit, and you decide to be outside the scene.” He watched his friend Virgil Abloh die of cancer at 41 after giving all his waking hours to his career as a fashion designer. Meanwhile, other businesspeople — Loaëc mentions Kanye West and Elon Musk — were boasting about sleeping in their offices, treating their employees badly or, worse, attempting to get involved in politics and change society. “I think it’s all ego: ‘I want more stores, I want bigger stores, I want to fly private’ — or other things that’re terrible for humans,” he says. “But what’s the pleasure in that journey?”
Loaëc realized he was on a different path. Unlike many medium-size homegrown fashion labels, Kitsuné has stayed private, which has allowed its co-founders to take it where they wanted. Increasingly, that’s been to Asia, where the brand’s apparel sells better than anywhere else. The uniform-like pieces, including soft striped button-ups and boxy wool crew necks, are most recognizable for their small, embroidered fox logo. In Japan, the word for the animal is kitsune, a name that Loaëc and Kuroki chose because, according to folklore, foxes have the singular ability to mischievously shape-shift. Loaëc wants the same to be true of his brand — and, perhaps, of his life: Five years ago, he moved to live full time near Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park with his wife, Romy Ishii Loaëc, now 47, a French Japanese former fashion stylist whom he had met in 1998 at a Parisian nightclub, and their two boys, who are now teenagers. “From the outside, Tokyo seems a bit hectic but, compared to Paris, it’s totally stress-free,” he says. “It’s really quiet, and there’s so much green and you don’t have to be ready when you leave your house to get into small talk with anybody.”
JAPAN IS ALSO, crucially, only a seven-hour daytime flight to Bali, the Indonesian island that Loaëc started visiting 15 years ago. Shortly after his first trip, he knew that he would one day spend most of his time here. Loaëc returned often, making friends and connections, one of whom was the Venezuelan-born architect and designer Maximilian Jencquel. He’d also arrived on the island 15 years ago, after leaving his job in Paris working for Christian Liaigre’s interiors firm, to build a project for the local jeweler John Hardy that never came to fruition; Jencquel, now 46, decided to relocate with his family anyway. He eventually developed relationships with artisans who could infuse Balinese craftsmanship (carved wood, intricate brickwork, heavy ceramics) into homes and hotels that in many ways share the squared-off, open-air tenets of Tropical Modernism, a porous architectural style suited to hot, humid climates that rose simultaneously out of Ghana and India in the 1940s.
Earlier this decade, as Loaëc’s anxiety appeared, he found a former rice paddy on a busy road outside the pulsing, nightlife-oriented beach town of Canggu and asked Jencquel to build him his version of that home. Unsurprisingly, the fashion executive wanted a Japanese-inflected take — a meditative single-story rectangular, 6,450-square-foot villa, made entirely in native teak wood with a peaked thatched roof. It has three bedrooms, each with an en suite bathroom; a dedicated eat-in kitchen for the family’s private chef; and a central open courtyard with a swimming pool surrounded by large decorative rocks, a frangipani tree rising from the water. Nearly every exterior wall is lined with pivoting carved-wood Balinese doors, which offer a version of brise soleil that cools the dwelling and makes it feel as if it were a temple pavilion: The house’s entrance, flanked by a pair of terra-cotta foxes (for good luck), is modeled after a traditional Balinese spiritual gate.
“If you’re going to live in Bali, it’s to be outside,” Jencquel told me last May over a lunch of blistered long beans, grilled snapper and spicy sambal at a 15-foot wooden dining table that, like nearly all of the home’s furniture, was made by the architect’s 15-person firm, based in the village of Ubud, an hour’s drive north into the green interior. Although Loaëc’s plot is an acre or so, they decided to build on only 15 percent of it, turning the rest over to a wild, moss-covered garden that Jencquel also masterminded, along with a kitchen vegetable patch of leafy greens and aromatics and a collection of knotty banyan, flamboyant and other trees. Loaëc picked this area because he wanted to be close enough to the Indian Ocean “without getting a tsunami in the face,” he says, but told his designer that he also craved a jungle view. “So we went crazy with all the plants,” Jencquel says. “It’s a luxury to [preserve] that much land. If you look at the neighbors, most people just develop it.”
DESPITE BALI’S REPUTATION as the island where people come to escape themselves — to wander rice fields, practice yoga and consider the smallness of big-city life — it’s an increasingly frenetic and industrious place, often to the disappointment of tourists who expect pristine black-sand beaches and winding hills uncrowded with motorbikes. Indonesia is Asia’s fifth-largest economy, and the country has been particularly welcoming to post-pandemic international remote workers and Ukrainians and Russians fleeing the war, many of whom have found common ground as real estate developers and hospitality workers in and around Canggu.
Jencquel, in fact, has kept working here partly because it’s easy to get things done. “Everything is pretty much made on the islands,” he says. For the main living area, from which the bedrooms branch out, the architect was able to quickly source high-quality Sumatran fiber rugs, squat hand-hewn stools in dark fruitwood, linen slipcovered sofas and a low, round coffee table made from old, weathered bluestone, which was pulled from the sea after being used centuries ago to ballast spice-trading ships.
But though the house is made for relaxing, Loaëc couldn’t help himself from doing a little business, too: Last spring, he opened Desa Kitsuné, the brand’s first beach club, part of a complex (desa means “village” in Indonesian) that also includes a cafe, a boutique and one day, he hopes, his first hotel. Still, he insists: “I’m backing off. We’d like to sell the company at some point, and a potential buyer might not want the founder involved.” If they do, at least they’ll know where to find him.
Photo assistant: Cahya Prawira
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