La Villa Madie stands on the promontory that dominates the little French town of Cassis. This top-class restaurant, which looks out over the Mediterranean Sea, specialises in innovative cuisine created using local, seasonal ingredients. Run by chef Dimitri Droisneau and Marielle Droisneau, partners both at work and in life, the restaurant has held two Michelin stars since 2014.

The French practice Mise en Scène Éclairage worked together with VinJay-Studio to create a lighting project designed to bring to life the park that surrounds the building. To do this, they chose lighting fixtures with a high colour rendering index (CRI >90), to bring out the green tones of the vegetation. To light the tall maritime pines, they chose Stra P 1.0 projectors, fixed in the ground with stakes and directed upwards to light the trees’ gnarled trunks and foliage, as well as their characteristic interweaving branches. The projectors’ 37W power pushes the light to the top of the trees, creating a magical atmosphere in which the interlaced branches stand out against the blue tones of the sky at dusk.

A simple portico protects the entrance to La Villa Madie: it is marked by Flori 1.0 projectors fixed to the structure’s wooden beams and directed at the paving. The area is surrounded by a luxuriant garden in which low shrubs edged by stone flowerbeds share the space with tall trees. On sunny summer days, the latter cast welcome shade on the small square in front of the entrance to the restaurant. When evening falls, the vegetation is accentuated by lighting solutions in harmony with those used for the maritime pines. Here, too, the designers opted for bottom-up lighting, choosing Kleo 2.0 projectors: the fixtures – smaller, and with a lower wattage, than the Stra P 1.0 – are fixed in the ground with stakes, pointing their light beams at the trees’ trunks and foliage.