Born in 1948 in Soissons and a graduate of the Camondo school, Jean-Michel Wilmotte is an architect, urban planner and designer, and has been a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts since 2015.
He founded the Wilmotte & Associés architecture firm in 1975. From Dallas to Seoul, via Moscow, Dakar and São Paulo, Jean-Michel Wilmotte and his teams have been criss-crossing the world for more than 45 years, placing people, their cultures and their stories at the heart of their designs.
Jean-Michel Wilmotte is equally curious about all subjects: from the most unlikely to the most obvious, from the most upmarket to the most accessible, from the smallest to the most imposing. Over the years, the agency has diversified and now works mainly in five fundamental areas: architecture, interior architecture, museography, urban planning and design. Jean-Michel Wilmotte likes to be where he is not expected. Changes of scale and programme allow him to remain on the lookout, to question and reinvent himself each time, always with the same demand for quality and the same attention to detail. He has put together his team in this spirit: diversity of profiles, origins, nationalities and backgrounds.
Art is omnipresent in his life. A tireless collector, he rushes to museums and contemporary art fairs. He feeds off these encounters, these discoveries, these emotions that he likes to share.
Jean-Michel Wilmotte is both committed to the enhancement of our heritage and resolutely turned towards the future. He builds, transforms and stages with sensitivity, elegance and generosity. A vision, know-how and values that he shares with future architects, notably through the Foundation he created in 2005 or the W Prize, an international competition on the conversion of old buildings according to the concept of contemporary grafting, which the author of the Dictionnaire amoureux de l’architecture has been developing for over thirty years.
Jean-Michel Wilmotte has never stopped developing and diversifying his know-how, in France and abroad. Today, his agency is structured around two companies – the architecture agency Wilmotte & Associés and the design studio Wilmotte & Industries SAS – and simultaneously manages more than a hundred projects. Renowned for the eclecticism of its production, the elegance and quality of finish of its projects, the Wilmotte agency is present in the public and private sectors, in the luxury, hotel, residential and tertiary sectors. It has 270 employees of 31 different nationalities and works in 23 countries. Based in Paris and Nice, its international development has been accompanied by the creation of two subsidiaries: Wilmotte UK Ltd in London and Wilmotte Italia Srl in Venice. It also has offices in Dakar and Seoul.
Jean-Michel Wilmotte is an Officer of the National Order of the Légion d’Honneur, a Knight of the National Order of Merit, a Knight of the Order of Academic Palms and a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.
