A Designer Turns His Passion for Mountaineering Into New Pursuits

Many designers aspire to the label polymath, but no one polymaths as hard and relentlessly as Ramdane Touhami, whose latest pursuit meshes merchandising, marketing and selling his favorite thing: hiking.

Mr. Touhami is known for acting on impulse, and with intensity. He has lived in New York and Tokyo and owns 51 bicycles, including one of the three made by the French architect-designer Jean Prouvé that are known to still exist.

The 49-year-old French-Moroccan was once the owner of a donkey polo club in Tangier, Morocco; went on to become men’s wear director at the department store Liberty in London; and spent years reshaping the beauty business, reviving the fortunes of the scented-candle maker Trudon as its creative director and then the heritage apothecary brand Buly 1803, which he sold to LVMH in 2021.

Mr. Touhami bought, restyled and reopened Hotel Drei Berge in the Swiss Alps last year, and opened the mountaineering boutique A Young Hiker in Paris in January.

It has been a long climb to the top. At school, he introduced a successful T-shirt line that corrupted the Timberland logo and made a fortune, but then he was kidnapped and relieved of a lot of money. He then became a homeless skateboard obsessive, navigating the streets of Paris having no fixed abode.

But recently, from the headquarters of his agency Art Recherche Industrie, shaped out of a decadent 19th-century ballroom in the 10th Arrondissement, he masterminded the restyling of the silverwear maker Christofle and the leather goods house Moynat, as well as his own podcasts, publishing projects and housewares.