There is an hour in every airport that belongs to no one. The night crews have gone, the first wave has not landed, and the building is briefly what the architect drew: a volume of concrete and glass with nothing in it but light.
We came to Charles de Gaulle at five to photograph a case, and stayed until eleven photographing the room. Terminal 1 is a spiral — a doughnut of raw beton brut threaded with glass tubes — and at dawn the low sun runs through those tubes like water through a pipe.
What we learned there changed a detail on the Roam 26. A case does not live on a plinth. It lives on a floor that has been polished by four decades of wheels, under a light that flattens every colour. Anodising that looks rich in a studio can look grey at 6 a.m. So we re-tuned the plum three times until it held its depth under fluorescent wash.
Travel is mostly waiting. The object you wait with should be worth looking at while you do.
