Art Home Gives a Real-Life Branded Experience Digital Legs

You may have heard about it through a blog, a friend, or the American Express Departures magazine.

It's Art Home, an eating and cooking experience "brought to life" by Electrolux and sponsored by other partners like Corian, Vitamin Water and Moet & Chandon.

Art Home is an art installation, dramatically sited atop the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. It's a place where food meets architecture meets design meets brand. You can take a cooking workshop or hope and pray to get in to one of the very limited seatings for lunches and dinners through July 2010.

We lucked out and got off the wait list right on Thanksgiving. It's a modern dinner party, and we were joined by our two friends in Paris plus met four other couples from Paris, Tampa, Boston and Pittsburgh. We watched the pedigree chef flambé our foie gras and cook our bisque de Homard (lobster bisque with orange zest) and for main course, veal. It was very, very fine dining -- at home.

A baked-in marketing event
It's also one of the most networked and heavily documented brand-sponsored events I've ever experienced -- and for good reason. The glass box on the top of the Palais du Tokyo is stunning, outfitted with Electrolux appliances. (My friend Anne walked right in and said, "I want that kitchen." We were, of course, more distracted by 360 degrees of Paris and the nighttime view of the Eiffel Tower, just across the Seine.)

There are hundreds of personal photos and videos captured on Flickr and Facebook and you can join the official group and see great clips including the making of on its YouTube channel. We even took a quick Flip video we took when we weren't counting our lucky stars.

The follow-up email comes from Electrolux, asking for your thoughts, encouraging you to post and giving you the tags and links to help you do it. To me, this hints at a database grab, which feels appropriate and a good example of fair exchange. It makes you want to share and stay a part of it long after the event.

Bookings open up one month in advance on their web site and go impossibly quickly. Rumors have it, Art Home may go to another city after it leaves Paris in July. All the more reason to stay tuned to the Twitter feed.

Desperate to go? Bid on eBay for a dinner for 12 on Christmas Eve or lunch on Christmas Day.