Living in Paris is to love the tension in the city

Living in Paris means locking onto the capital visually, with its iconic monuments like the Eiffel Tower, but also the Montparnasse Tower.

A flat for a person living alternately in the city and in the countryside.

The instructing party is Michèle Monory, founder of Le Buisson, an artists’ jewellery publisher. She gave me free rein to renovate her space, an apartment on the ninth floor of a Parisian building with a curtain wall façade. 

The flat of eighty square metres followed a conventional pattern with an entryway, two bedrooms and a living room with kitchenette.  The project proves that clear choices can be made to fit new logic into a flat of conventional design.

A clear white space as the main background 

The open space has to be the largest and most light-filled possible, with access to light and sun.  The feeling of a vast space is amplified by low-lying furnishings running around the flat.  The same typology weaves from the kitchen to the terrace.  Its green colouring conjures a woodland that both separates and makes it possible to see far off.

A confirmed area of hospitality 

A quadruple lounger welcomes us to the centre of the main space, an area for comfortable exchanges in levitation, surrounded by colour above all, so we are in the heart of an invigorating rainbow that invites us to take advantage of the present moment each day.  Colour is life. 

A dynamic space 

The present configuration allows double exposure and makes the terrace accessible continuously with the living area. 

The multi-coloured vertical rhythm rotates, to organise the area in different ways:

- along the wall, to accompany the moment of personal meetings; 

- half-closed, it becomes an openwork panel to create several zones;

- completely turned, it closes the area off to create a space where one can sleep surrounded by this benevolent rhythm of colour.

A singular space to go beyond the aesthetic and decorative codes

This space has the capacity to meet wishes rather than needs.

Two movements – the rainbow and the woods – that set the furnishing conditions of the entire flat and opens perspectives. This invigorating framework helps one to remain active with a lively mind, to go beyond the bourgeois stereotypes that petrify one, to go beyond the cocoon status that over-protects and renders us insensitive.

A modular space

The flat is also used as a showroom for presenting the jewellery collection with Le Buisson, an artistic jewellery publishing firm created by the instructing party (with works by Julien Carreyn, matali crasset, Mrzyk & Moriceau, M/M Paris, Geneviève Gauckler, Théo Mercier, Jean-Luc Verna and others) and sometimes hosts yoga courses. 

"I moved just ‘by changing interiors’," says a smiling Michèle Monory, who doesn’t like to conserve, but rather move forward.  The project also evokes a long complicity between two people… complicity that brings balm to the heart.

matali crasset

Le rainbow et le bosquet (the Rainbow and the woods)

Private flat

Paris 15th arrondissement

Construction by Claval Concept, Artproject

Floor space:  80 m²

Delivery in 2020