Summer schools

August 19, 2025·29 min·2 clips

Alexander von Wiegersack reveals why dreaming and fantasy are essential to design innovation at his French retreat.

School is out, sort of. Nick Manisse and Grace Charlton begin with a simple summer-camp question, helped along by the fact that Grace was a camp kid. That easy exchange takes them to Domaine Dubois-Boucher, an international research centre for design and architecture in southwest France. The countryside is not background noise. The guest talks about forest, a large lake, a river, quiet air, birds, and natural music. It sounds almost too idyllic, but the point is less escape than attention, away from the pressure of a fixed brief or project. The mix does a lot of the work. Students and professionals split the room roughly in half, and the useful friction comes from that blend. Younger participants push harder. Older ones bring tricks, cautions, and ways to test an idea without draining the life from it. Cultures meet over meals, and the guest treats those differences as part of the work, not as decoration. Dinner and evening talks carry the day into a looser, more emotional register. The lake and river keep tugging people back outside, then back into conversation, then back toward another possible answer. Nick sounds ready to enroll. After that, the studio drifts into a dream design camp, with yoga, newspapers, sport, and sun folded in. The episode keeps summer school warm, social, and nicely unrushed.

As heard by us

A warm, lightly practical design-school reverie about landscape, mixed company and learning outside the institution.

Summer school becomes a design question in this Monocle on Design episode: what changes when learning leaves the institution for forests, lakes, rivers and long meals.

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Why you'd press play

You want a design show that treats summer school as a working method.

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