Culturespaces Brand Guidelines: A 1990 Paris Operator and Its Lumières Centres

Running monuments for public owners.

Culturespaces began in 1990 as a private company that manages museums and monuments on behalf of their public owners. French Wikipedia says it was created by Bruno Monnier and sold public institutions and local authorities a service running their historic monuments and museums. The trade magazine TourMaG described it in February 2022 as founded and still chaired by Monnier, and as having built a reputation over some 30 years in the private management of cultural institutions.

The company says its first contract was the Palais des Papes in Avignon, followed by the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, the château at Les Baux-de-Provence and the Château de Valençay. In 1996 it took on the delegated management of the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, which it says gave it a chance to organise temporary exhibitions. It went on to run the Cité de l’Automobile in Mulhouse, the Villa Kérylos at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, the Roman theatre at Orange from 2002 and the Roman monuments of Nîmes from 2006, according to its own history. In 2015 it opened the Hôtel de Caumont in Aix-en-Provence as an art centre, after buying and restoring the building; French Wikipedia dates the purchase to 2012.

Several of those contracts have since ended. TourMaG reported in 2022 that Culturespaces had lost the management of the Roman theatre at Orange and the arenas of Nîmes to the operator Edeis, and French Wikipedia lists contracts that ended between 2000 and 2023, including the Palais des Papes, Valençay, Waterloo, the Villa Ephrussi and the château at Les Baux. Today its website lists two museums, the Jacquemart-André and the Caumont centre.

The Lumières centres.

The second business grew out of a quarry. Culturespaces says that in 2012 it brought digital images and music into the Carrières de Lumières at Les Baux-de-Provence as a new kind of immersive exhibition. In 2018 it opened the Atelier des Lumières in Paris; French Wikipedia says the building in the 11th arrondissement is a former iron foundry opened in 1835 by the Plichon brothers. The same year, the company says, it opened the Bunker des Lumières on Jeju in South Korea with a local partner.

The model then spread to other large industrial spaces. French Wikipedia says the city of Bordeaux chose Culturespaces in 2018 to run part of its former submarine base, where the Bassins des Lumières opened on 10 June 2020. It also dates the Fabrique des Lumières in the former gasworks of Amsterdam’s Westergasfabriek to 22 April 2022, the Hall des Lumières in a former bank building in Manhattan to 14 September 2022, and the Phoenix des Lumières in a former blast-furnace site in Dortmund to 28 January 2023. TourMaG reported in 2022 that the New York centre was being developed with IMG and that the Théâtre des Lumières in Seoul occupied a former cabaret in the Walkerhill Hotel. The company’s website now also lists the Port des Lumières in Hamburg and the Rêve des Lumières in Tokyo.

The shows are projected films about artists and subjects. The company’s current programme includes shows on Monet, Matisse, Picasso and Frida Kahlo, alongside contemporary commissions and shows such as The Little Prince. Its production studio, called Culturespaces Digital, was renamed Culturespaces Studio in 2024, the company says. In May 2025 it agreed to present shows by the London company Lightroom across its European centres, Music Week reported; its Paris programme now lists Lightroom’s Coldplay film and Prehistoric Planet show.

Immersive art and experience venues.

Immersive art and experience venues sell a visit rather than an object. When Superblue announced its Miami opening programme in October 2020, The Art Newspaper reported that the company would earn its revenue through ticket sales rather than through sales of artworks. In December 2024 the same paper recalled that it had counted more than 100 large spaces for immersive digital art around the world, a group it called “immersive institutions.”

The companies present themselves through their rooms. Projection-filled halls, where images run across walls, floors and ceilings, sit beside mirrored rooms and colour-saturated light works. Frameless in London opened in October 2022 with four themed galleries of digitised paintings, one of them edged with mirrors, ianVisits reported; Superblue in Miami opened in May 2021 with a mirrored maze by Es Devlin and a light work by James Turrell, according to The Art Newspaper.

Naming is usually plain. Venues tend to carry the company name and the city, as in Superblue Miami, and shows and rooms take descriptive titles: the four permanent galleries at Frameless are called Beyond Reality, Colour in Motion, The World Around Us and The Art of Abstraction, The Art Newspaper reported in 2024. Both companies also list a café and private-event hire on their own websites, alongside their tickets.

Corporate pages are where founders, studios and owners appear. Artists and studios are credited by name, such as teamLab, DRIFT or Random International at Superblue, and partnerships with museums and production studios are announced in public: Frameless Creative’s touring work with London’s National Portrait Gallery, made with the studio Cinesite, was reported by The Art Newspaper in 2024 and 2025. This guide sets out what dated sources say about each company, and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

From Engie to investors, and a ruling at Les Baux.

Ownership changed in 2022. TourMaG reported in February 2022 that Culturespaces had passed under the control of two investment firms, IDI and Groupe Chevrillon, after its former shareholder, the energy group Engie, refocused on its core business. French Wikipedia says the company has belonged since 2022 to a consortium of Chevrillon, IDI and CAPZA, after having been a subsidiary of Engie. In 2025 the company announced that Aurélien Bosc would succeed Monnier as chief executive, after 34 years; its website now lists Bosc as president.

The Carrières des Lumières led to a long legal case. La Provence reported on 5 June 2026 that the site, previously run by the company Cathédrale d’Images under a commercial lease, had been awarded to Culturespaces as a ten-year public service delegation by an agreement of 12 April 2010, extended by five years in 2012. The newspaper reported that on 3 June 2026 the criminal chamber of France’s Cour de cassation rejected the appeals brought against a Paris Court of Appeal ruling of 6 March 2025, so that the criminal conviction of Culturespaces for receiving the benefit of favouritism in the award of that contract became final.

The brand works as a naming system. Every immersive centre on the company’s website carries the suffix “des Lumières,” of light, and the first word often names the kind of place: Carrières, quarries, at Les Baux; Atelier, workshop, for the former Paris foundry; Bassins, basins, for the Bordeaux submarine base; and Fabrique, factory, for the Amsterdam gasworks. The same French names are used in Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan and the United States.

For a design guide, Culturespaces shows how one naming formula can tie very different buildings into a single network. Compare Lightroom, the London company whose shows it now presents, and teamLab, the Tokyo collective behind its own digital art museums. For this guide we use a claret, a limestone and a gilt with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Culturespaces’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.