A Traditional Parisian Condominium Stuffed With Up to date Construction
IN THE Drop of 2019, the architect and designer Sophie Dries, 35, and her companion, the sculptor Marc Leschelier, 37, moved right into a two-bed room Haussmannian residence in Paris’s eleventh Arrondissement, not removed from town’s historic Location des Vosges. For a lot of months, they lived just about fully with out the necessity of furnishings or household comforts, allow you to save for a mattress on the bed room floor — which doubled as a hangout place and property workplace — and two meal plates. They skilled no need in acquiring stopgap issues and most popular to contemplate time to acquaint on their very own with the home upfront of manufacturing it their possess. “We’d wholly avoid the residing space, although,” Dries states. “It was so empty, it skilled an echo.”
However the couple weren’t particularly commencing with a clean slate. The 1,450-square-foot 2nd-ground residence is an archetypal Nineteenth-century Parisian property, full with all the trimmings of the period’s refined, engaging structure. The ten-foot-substantial ceilings have ornate, botanically themed moldings the partitions are wainscoted and the flooring maintain their first geometric two-tone marquetry. On the western conclude of the 376-sq.-foot dwelling place, there may be an elaborately sculpted marble fire inscribed with the 12 months of its creation, 1853, and on the adjoining wall a row of ground-to-ceiling French home windows open up on to a balcony overlooking the extensive, tree-lined boulevard beneath. The residence, in different phrases, was designed to be a luxurious backdrop for the gilded commodes and carved-leg bergères of its time. However Dries and Leschelier — who happy not intensive quickly after they equally graduated from the structure methodology at Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts — had an solely completely different eyesight for it. “We needed to supply a conflict in between this bourgeois typical Haussmannian dwelling and fashionable residence furnishings and ideas,” claims Dries. “We keep on the outdated continent, and we like its sense of historical past, however we’re younger — it’s important to have that paradox.”
Since FOUNDING HER namesake structure and design and magnificence studio in 2014, Dries has developed a portfolio of residential assignments in Paris — comparable to a minimalist penthouse on the Rue Saint-Honoré for a pair of art work collectors and an elegantly stripped-back two-bedroom across the Canal Saint-Martin for a younger couple who work in development and tech — that each function a deft portrait of their residents though reflecting Dries’s personal passions in combining pure traces with wealthy textures and unconventional assets. Along with his raw massive-scale sculptures — sometimes pavilion-esque concrete sorts — Leschelier equally seeks to introduce a notion of spontaneity and experimentation into the architectural strategy. This shared sensibility, which rejects hierarchies of earlier and new, kind and performance, is obvious by way of the pair’s dwelling. Beginning in December 2019, they little by little furnished the residence, which has a standard round structure — a residing space and a consuming residence information off an entryway, and the extra private rooms, together with the mattress room and a nursery for the couple’s 3-month-old daughter, Daria, motion right into a single a distinct from there — above a two-12 months time interval, mixing gadgets by designers comparable to Philippe Starck and Ettore Sottsass (obtained primarily by Paris-based gallerists, which incorporates Paul Bourdet and Yves and Victor Gastou) with Dries’s possess handcrafted creations.
Preparations have been usually educated by affinities that Dries or Leschelier seen amongst seemingly unrelated gadgets. Within the dwelling space, for illustration, the few paired a consuming desk with a wavy-edged oval oak prime rated, and tubular rusted metallic legs by Dries with a established of Starck’s ’80s-era metal Von Vogelsang chairs for Driade. A ten-by-6 1/2-foot framed print by Ryan McGinley depicting just a few nude figures sprawled all through a sand dune covers virtually the entire south wall. Dries shared illustrations or pictures of the realm with the British designer Max Lamb, who then created a slablike rubber espresso desk for the realm in a complementary shade of peanut butter brown. The piece now sits beside a crescent-moon-formed modular couch, constructed by Dries and upholstered in deep aubergine velvet, that like the bottom is constructed from oak however in a extra fashionable burled veneer.
Leschelier additionally contributed personalized is efficient to the dwelling place: two console tables composed of steel-topped stacked cinder blocks sealed with overflowing mortar that sit on probably side of simply one of many French home windows. Dries, as nicely, steadily elevates raw, humble elements in her apply and counts the postwar Italian Arte Povera movement, which championed day-to-day provides, and the minimalism of the French Modernist inside designer Jean-Michel Frank among the many her references. “Frank was a punk of his time, and I typically speculate what he’d do at present,” she states. For the couple’s bed room, a warmth however restrained refuge outlined by earth tones and all-natural textures, she made use of a slap brush to make use of an natural and pure, craggy white plaster full to the tall constructed-in closets, and she or he had curtains produced from roughly woven hessian, a cloth generally utilized in upholstery. The daylight-flooded eating space, adjoining to the residing room, options simply one in every of her brass Glow chandeliers, developed for the lighting company Kaia, whose egg-shaped glass globes are topped with molded papier-mâché conditions. And for the modest galley kitchen space on the a lot end of the residence, she chosen a blue-gray polished concrete to guard the counter tops and flooring, a refreshing departure from the beige and white palette her customers so often request.
Dries and Leschelier share an appreciation for performs with a sense of humor. They’re lovers, for illustration, of the expressive methodology of the Italian designer Gaetano Pesce, and simply one in every of his anthropomorphic, brightly coloured hand-poured resin No person’s Good chairs sits — in shut proximity to an opulent purple and inexperienced tufted wool rug by Dries for Nilufar Gallery that evokes an otherworldly animal pelt — within the nook of the residence’s vestibule, a hushed, jewel-box-like place the place the couple’s eclectic preferences are most fully on show display screen. To amplify the room’s intimate, denlike really really feel, Dries upholstered the partitions in jade inexperienced Japanese straw. Then, having inspiration from the Barnes Basis in Philadelphia — by which outdated masters and particular person curiosities amassed round a few years by the early Twentieth-century collector Albert C. Barnes are exhibited facet by facet — she hung among the couple’s extra compact-scale artworks salon-fashion all through them. A non secular engraving by the German Renaissance study Albrecht Dürer, inherited from Leschelier’s maternal grandmother, appears not a lot from {a photograph} of an English breakfast by the British photographer Martin Parr an engraved panorama by Dries and Leschelier’s close to good good friend the French conceptual artist Laurent Grasso offsets a floral nonetheless on a regular basis dwelling by the youthful Azerbaijani painter Niyaz Najafov. “The place has no carry out, however it’s our beloved,” Dries states. “We required to find an absurd method of inserting gadgets collectively with out any imagined of profit.”
Now that the lounge no for an extended time has an echo, the few make whole use of it by internet hosting good pals for aperitifs. Regardless that neither guarantees to be a implausible cook dinner, they equally enjoyment of sharing a bottle of Chablis — or, when the event telephone requires it, a gin and tonic or two — with their cherished sorts, and it’s on this house, method too, that they make investments essentially the most time with their daughter. However for Dries, the household’s family can also be a consultant manifesto of sorts, a strategy to illustrate {that a} extra idiosyncratic residing place can preserve implausible attract. “My prospects may be method too frightened to do a lot of the elements listed right here,” she suggests. “But when they see them within the context of a traditional condominium, they might enhance their minds.”
Picture assistant: Lilly Merck
