Mauritius: the island that makes you want to create

There are landscapes we photograph. Others make us want to pick up a pencil, cook, build or compose.

In Mauritius, creativity is everywhere. It hangs on walls, finds its way onto plates, reveals itself in a piece of fabric, a Creole house, a few notes of sega or the way a garden has been designed. It would be easy to attribute this abundance to the island’s beauty, but that would be to miss the point, because perhaps Mauritius inspires not only through what we see, but through everything that comes together here.

An island shaped by many worlds

Across an island that can be crossed in just a few hours, African, European, Indian and Chinese influences have lived side by side for generations. They do not belong only to history books. They are heard in the languages of everyday conversations, seen in temples, churches and pagodas, felt in markets and celebrations — and perhaps most vividly, tasted in the kitchen:

• A single lunch can tell the story of several continents
• A recipe passes from one family to another, changing its spices, borrowing a gesture, preserving a memory
• Architecture brought from elsewhere adapts to a tropical climate. A melody passes through generations and is reinvented along the way

In Mauritius, creating often means bringing things together without erasing what came before, and perhaps that is where part of the island’s power to inspire lies.

When light enters the studio

Then there is the light… The kind that leaves the lagoon hovering between shades of blue in the early morning. The kind that reveals every contour of the landscape with almost unreal precision at midday. And finally, the softer light that settles over the mountains as the day begins to fade.

For a painter, photographer, architect or designer, it constantly changes the perception of colour and material, yet no two people see it in quite the same way.

For Mauritian artist Daphné Domhun, that gaze is shaped in particular by the colours, vegetation and emotions of her island. Elements that feed her creative world and can be found in the artwork she imagined for Legend Hill.

Discover in this edition: How do you tell the story of an island without using words?
→ Read our conversation with Daphné

Creativity has a taste, too

In Mauritius, inspiration does not remain in the studio for long, it finds its way into the kitchen. Mauritian cuisine tells the story of the island in its own way: tropical produce, spices, techniques and recipes inherited from different cultures that, over time, have come together to form a language all their own.

That is also what makes the island so fascinating for chefs arriving from elsewhere. They bring their memories, their techniques and their own way of cooking. Then they encounter a particular ingredient, a spice, a fisherman, a grower, a different approach to food — and what they had imagined at the outset begins to evolve.

It was in this spirit that Glenn Viel imagined the culinary world of Legend Hill: not to transplant a cuisine conceived elsewhere, but to allow the island itself to find its way onto the plate. Local produce, flavours and inspirations give each of his restaurants its own way of telling the story of Mauritius.

Mauritius does not erase what we bring with us, it transforms it through contact with what is already here. Just enough for something new to emerge.

Creating without competing with the landscape

Architecture faces much the same challenge. How do you design a place when the mountains, lagoon and vegetation have already composed the setting?

At Legend Hill, the landscape is not simply something to admire from afar, it becomes part of the composition itself. The architecture, materials, artworks and perspectives respond to their surroundings, with Le Morne and the lagoon as constant points of reference.

Art, then, is no longer simply something hung on a wall. It might be:

• A material chosen for the way it catches the light
• An artwork glimpsed in passing
• A dish inspired by something grown or caught on the island
• A perspective that naturally draws the eye towards Le Morne

Details we may not always consciously notice… But somehow feel.

One island, a thousand ways to tell its story

Perhaps that is ultimately what creators come here to find. Not a postcard to reproduce, but something to interpret. Mauritius offers its colours, its contrasts, its heritage, its landscapes and its encounters… What each person creates from them is entirely their own.

And so, in a work of art, a dish or a place imagined here, something of Mauritius almost always remains. Sometimes obvious, sometimes barely perceptible. But never entirely absent.