A Classic Parisian Apartment Filled With Modern Design

IN THE Tumble of 2019, the architect and designer Sophie Dries, 35, and her husband or wife, the sculptor Marc Leschelier, 37, moved into a two-bed room Haussmannian condominium in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, not considerably from the city’s historic Spot des Vosges. For various months, they lived just about fully without the need of home furniture or house comforts, conserve for a mattress on the bedroom ground — which doubled as a hangout location and residence business — and two evening meal plates. They experienced no curiosity in purchasing stopgap things and preferred to take time to acquaint themselves with the room in advance of making it their very own. “We would wholly keep away from the residing space, while,” Dries says. “It was so vacant, it had an echo.”

But the couple weren’t accurately starting off with a blank slate. The 1,450-sq.-foot next-floor condominium is an archetypal 19th-century Parisian household, comprehensive with all the trappings of the era’s refined, decorative architecture. The 10-foot-significant ceilings have ornate, botanically themed moldings the partitions are wainscoted and the floors retain their primary geometric two-tone marquetry. At the western stop of the 376-square-foot dwelling space, there is an elaborately sculpted marble hearth inscribed with the calendar year of its generation, 1853, and on the adjacent wall a row of flooring-to-ceiling French windows open up onto a balcony overlooking the broad, tree-lined boulevard beneath. The household, in other text, was built to be a luxurious backdrop for the gilded commodes and carved-leg bergères of its time. But Dries and Leschelier — who fulfilled not prolonged following they both graduated from the architecture software at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts — had an solely distinct eyesight for it. “We needed to make a clash involving this bourgeois regular Haussmannian home and present-day household furniture and concepts,” suggests Dries. “We dwell on the outdated continent, and we really like its perception of background, but we’re younger — it is critical to have that paradox.”

Because FOUNDING HER namesake architecture and design and style studio in 2014, Dries has constructed a portfolio of residential jobs in Paris — such as a minimalist penthouse on the Rue Saint-Honoré for a pair of artwork collectors and an elegantly stripped-again two-bed room in close proximity to the Canal Saint-Martin for a younger few who function in vogue and tech — that each individual serve as a deft portrait of their residents although reflecting Dries’s possess pursuits in combining pure strains with wealthy textures and uncommon materials. With his raw big-scale sculptures — often pavilion-esque concrete types — Leschelier likewise seeks to introduce a sense of spontaneity and experimentation into the architectural procedure. This shared sensibility, which rejects hierarchies of outdated and new, variety and functionality, is apparent in the course of the pair’s house. Beginning in December 2019, they little by little furnished the condominium, which has a standard circular structure — a living space and a dining place direct off an entryway, and the much more private rooms, which include the bedroom and a nursery for the couple’s 3-thirty day period-outdated daughter, Daria, circulation into a person one more from there — about a two-year period of time, mixing items by designers these kinds of as Philippe Starck and Ettore Sottsass (obtained largely by means of Paris-based mostly gallerists, such as Paul Bourdet and Yves and Victor Gastou) with Dries’s possess handcrafted creations.

Preparations were being often educated by affinities that Dries or Leschelier seen between seemingly unrelated things. In the dwelling room, for example, the pair paired a dining table with a wavy-edged oval oak prime, and tubular rusted metal legs by Dries with a established of Starck’s ’80s-era metal Von Vogelsang chairs for Driade. A 10-by-6 1/2-foot framed print by Ryan McGinley depicting a few nude figures sprawled across a sand dune handles nearly the whole south wall. Dries shared illustrations or photos of the room with the British designer Max Lamb, who then established a slablike rubber coffee table for the area in a complementary shade of peanut butter brown. The piece now sits beside a crescent-moon-shaped modular couch, created by Dries and upholstered in deep aubergine velvet, that like the floor is built from oak but in a much more modern burled veneer.

Leschelier also contributed custom made performs to the living home: two console tables composed of metal-topped stacked cinder blocks sealed with overflowing mortar that sit on either aspect of 1 of the French windows. Dries, far too, usually elevates uncooked, humble components in her exercise and counts the postwar Italian Arte Povera motion, which championed daily materials, and the minimalism of the French Modernist inside designer Jean-Michel Frank among her references. “Frank was a punk of his time, and I typically wonder what he’d do currently,” she states. For the couple’s bedroom, a heat but restrained refuge outlined by earth tones and normal textures, she utilised a slap brush to apply an organic, craggy white plaster complete to the tall constructed-in closets, and she experienced curtains produced from approximately woven hessian, a material commonly utilized in upholstery. The sun-flooded dining area, adjacent to the dwelling place, features a single of her brass Glow chandeliers, built for the lighting enterprise Kaia, whose egg-formed glass globes are topped with molded papier-mâché circumstances. And for the small galley kitchen area at the far stop of the apartment, she chose a blue-grey polished concrete to include the counter tops and flooring, a refreshing departure from the beige and white palette her clients so frequently ask for.

Dries and Leschelier share an appreciation for operates with a feeling of humor. They are admirers, for example, of the expressive approach of the Italian designer Gaetano Pesce, and one particular of his anthropomorphic, brightly coloured hand-poured resin Nobody’s Fantastic chairs sits — in close proximity to a plush purple and inexperienced tufted wool rug by Dries for Nilufar Gallery that evokes an otherworldly animal pelt — in the corner of the apartment’s vestibule, a hushed, jewel-box-like room wherever the couple’s eclectic tastes are most fully on show. To amplify the room’s personal, denlike really feel, Dries upholstered the partitions in jade inexperienced Japanese straw. Then, having inspiration from the Barnes Basis in Philadelphia — in which outdated masters and individual curiosities amassed more than many years by the early 20th-century collector Albert C. Barnes are shown side by aspect — she hung some of the couple’s more compact-scale artworks salon-design and style across them. A religious engraving by the German Renaissance grasp Albrecht Dürer, inherited from Leschelier’s maternal grandmother, appears not far from a photograph of an English breakfast by the British photographer Martin Parr an engraved landscape by Dries and Leschelier’s shut good friend the French conceptual artist Laurent Grasso offsets a floral continue to daily life by the younger Azerbaijani painter Niyaz Najafov. “The place has no function, but it is our preferred,” Dries claims. “We required to find an absurd way of placing matters collectively devoid of any thought of price.”

Now that the living space no lengthier has an echo, the couple make complete use of it by web hosting mates for aperitifs. Although neither promises to be a good prepare dinner, they both of those delight in sharing a bottle of Chablis — or, when the situation phone calls for it, a gin and tonic or two — with their loved ones, and it is in this place, as well, that they expend the most time with their daughter. But for Dries, the family’s home is also a experienced manifesto of kinds, a way to illustrate that a a lot more idiosyncratic residing house can maintain excellent allure. “My clientele could be also scared to do most of the things here,” she says. “But if they see them in the context of a conventional condominium, they may change their minds.”

Picture assistant: Lilly Merck