The Parisian Apartment: Beams, Atelier Glass, and Haussmann
People often ask us why Parisian interiors "do something" to them. Our answer, as lovers of design: because each one tells an era of the city's story, and the most successful ones set those eras in conversation. A small lexicon, to be read from your sofa — looking up at just the right moment.
The beams. In the Marais, the ceilings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries conceal entire forests: hand-hewn oak, joined without a single nail, blackened by three centuries. A delicious detail: exposed beams were long a mark of poverty, plastered over the moment one could afford it. It took the restoration of the Marais in the 1960s for them to become the treasure every buyer now hopes to uncover. At the Jewel, we left them bare, simply waxed. They carry the whole apartment.
The atelier glass partition. Born in artists' studios to let in the northern light, the black-steel glass partition has become THE Parisian gesture: it separates without walling off, structuring the space like a stroke of ink. It is what gives a studio the bearing of a one-bedroom. At the Jewel, it encloses the sleeping area while letting the window nourish the entire apartment.
The hôtel particulier. On the Left Bank, the Haven of Peace plays a rarer score than classic Haussmann: the Paris of "between courtyard and garden," where you live on a cobbled courtyard ten meters from a boulevard you never hear. Just proportions, soft light, a stone-deep silence: an acoustic that modern buildings no longer know how to make.
Our method. Renovating such places is an exercise in balance: respecting the grammar (noble materials, mineral tones, brass rather than chrome) while writing a contemporary sentence. A kitchen fitted to the millimeter, a shower room carved like a yacht cabin, light under quiet control. We take our cues from the best of Copenhagen, Milan, and Kyoto, and bring them back here, à la parisienne. Let the new look as though it has always been there; let the old work like new.