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COLLINS House

Each June, we turn a château above Cannes into COLLINS House.

The gathering works because of what we leave out. We remove the apparatus that typically frames creative work: the stages, the name tags, the scheduled presentations. What remains is what we believe is essential: time, proximity, and the kind of attention that emerges when people can actually think out loud. “If creativity were a home," a global agency's Chief Creative Officer and House guest said, “COLLINS would be its living room.”

We’re deliberate about who we invite, and shaping that guest list was at the heart of my work leading Audience & Partnerships. will.i.am and John Hegarty, yes, but also the Broadway producer we admire, a venture capitalist who thinks like an artist. We introduce them and step back. On the terrace, a debate about risk and emergence. In the garden, Taika Waititi tells strangers about his worst creative fears. By evening, Fiat's CEO is sketching plans to recreate Michelangelo's Creation with three thousand drones above the Vatican.

None of this is random, though it might look that way. Taking away structure is different from having no intent. A guest said it felt like "everyone somehow knows each other" even though they'd just met. That's what we're after.

"I was surrounded by some of the most brilliant creative minds alive," someone wrote afterward. But brilliance here takes a particular form: the courage to think out loud, to offer unfinished ideas to near-strangers.

COLLINS House is based on a simple idea: that the most vital creative work happens in the spaces between disciplines. Not a salon exactly, not a conference certainly but more of a structured experiment in unstructured time.

People mistake the house for various things: a private club, a retreat, an art project. But it's simpler than that. It's our experiment in how gathering can be its own creative act.

We do it again each June. Same house, same approach, different results. We keep doing it because what happens there — the relationships, the projects, the shifts in thinking — continues long after everyone goes home.

Photography by Monica Martini