AXA Matignon

In the heart of the Champs-Élysées district, just steps from the Palais de l’Élysée and opening onto Avenue Matignon and Rue Rabelais, AXA’s global headquarters—the world leader in insurance—is undergoing a complete restructuring. The site comprises three buildings surrounding a large garden: the historic 18th-century Hôtel de La Vaupalière, and two office buildings from the 1950s and 1960s, which have been restructured several times, notably in the 1990s by Ricardo Bofill’s Taller de Arquitectura, who also added two contemporary wings and a glazed courtyard. While the Hôtel de La Vaupalière and part of the garden are heritage-listed, the ensemble remains an architectural palimpsest lacking coherence and suffering from functional and performance shortcomings. The challenge today is to enhance this heritage by restoring a unified identity and adapting it to new needs and uses.

Symbolizing AXA’s commitment to a sustainable transition

This restructuring project stems from a strategic reflection by AXA’s executive management in response to the profound transformation facing the insurance sector amid contemporary global shifts. Confronted with interconnected challenges—climate, economy, employee well-being and engagement, and global health—AXA seeks to assert its position as an exemplary leader, committed to transition, inclusivity, and resilience. To embody these commitments and reposition the Group’s identity, a thorough reinvention of its global headquarters was undertaken. The new complex is set to become a flagship space of innovation, collective intelligence, and social and environmental responsibility, while also serving as a meeting place for employees and clients.

Embodying a new paradigm for office buildings

For PCA-STREAM, this project represents the opportunity to implement its convictions about a new paradigm for the workplace: attracting and retaining talent, embodying vision and meaning, and fostering creativity and innovation through exchange. The agency has sought to bring coherence to the three buildings by connecting them through infrastructure, creating a shared services base, and opening them onto the garden through new entrances and terraces. From architecture to interior design, the project redefines vertical and horizontal circulation, creates generous shared and collaborative spaces, and restructures work areas for comfort and flexibility. Multiple terraces and an exceptional rooftop provide outdoor access on every level of the new “landscape façade” of the Rabelais building. Generously planted and visible from the main entrance on Avenue Matignon, it embodies contemporary thinking on the role of nature in the city.

Despite its unique scale in such a prestigious and dense urban setting, the partially listed garden of AXA’s headquarters had been under-used, more a passageway than a destination. Its reinvention stands at the heart of this ambitious rehabilitation. Extended by planted façades that reinforce the site’s ecological continuity, the new garden becomes the emblem of the company’s environmental commitments and evolving identity. Designed as a virtuous and resource-efficient ecosystem, this singular garden provides a space for respite, social connection, and environmental learning. Both ecological manifesto and poetic, artistic gesture, the redesigned garden amplifies ecosystemic services—cooling through increased tree cover, water treatment through visible virtuous cycles, and the creation of fertile soil—while anticipating future climate conditions in its plant palette. It offers users a renewed relationship with the living world within a protected green haven visible from the street. Creating porosity with the surrounding buildings, it also aligns with the innovative approach to uses developed indoors, offering varied typologies of spaces for informal work and encounters.

To ensure quality of use and to explore new avenues, true to the project’s spirit of innovation, PCA-STREAM put in place an unprecedented method: a full-scale, 600 m² prototype staging ten spaces — offices, lobby, landings, circulation areas — in order to give physical form to materials, finishes and furniture and to test them. This 1:1 experiment served as a genuine tool for reflection on responsible materials and for decision-making, allowing the interior-design teams to assess the durability and upkeep of the ecological, innovative materials they were recommending, and so to demonstrate their relevance. Assessed against objective criteria, several were then incorporated into the final project: shell concrete (Ostrea) for the washbasins, locally sourced raw-earth plaster for the lift landings, and terrazzo made from the façade stone of an AXA building, in a logic of reuse.