ELITE DESIGN AWARDS 2025
Clothilde Verdim – MAY Rethinking everyday life
Second prize
“I found the idea of designing a bed – a vital and intimate part of our homes – to be an unusual and stimulating exercise in my craft” explains Clothilde Verdim, winner of the second prize in the 2025 Elite Design Awards for her project, MAY. As well as co-founding a Paris-based firm specialising in retail design and restaurant outfitting, Clothilde takes personal pride in designing her own furniture and ornaments alongside her official business line.
She felt a very special connection with the Arts and Crafts theme, too: “It instantly resonated with a sketch I’d done during a stay in Oxford, where I rediscovered the patterns designed by one of the movement’s founding figures, William Morris.” She sees her award as an encouragement to develop and share her ideas, and is eagerly looking forward to new partnership opportunities in the future. MAY embodies Clothilde’s quest to match Elite’s expectations, in particular by highlighting upholstery
expertise through her use of piping. Clothilde, who trained in design at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design and later at the University of Strasbourg, explains that the result is a perfect fulfilment of the purpose of good design: “being useful and improving everyday life whilst also offering a fresh take on a familiar environment.” She sees design as “a tool for rethinking the world at everyday level; a hybrid experience that combines freedom and discipline with a focus on others.”
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