It’s easy to see how it happens – you go out fully intending to buy a sofa, and come home with an interior designer instead. That’s what happened to this apartment’s owner, an entrepreneur and collector who originally came to Christophe Delcourt to design her some furniture. ‘Then, one day, she commissioned us to work on her apartment,’ he recalls. ‘This is the second project she has entrusted to us.’
The home is located in a typical Haussmann building in Saint-Germain, a neighbourhood Christophe says has an unfair reputation for being stuffy and staid. ‘It is literary, artistic, historic,’ he declares, describing ‘a lively place with its personalities, brasseries, bookstores, galleries, antique shops and cinemas. It’s a face of the city that I really like.’
The property had retained its traditional configuration, with small rooms, long corridors and a kitchen and bathroom tucked away at the back. The first order of business was to tear down partitions to open things up and turn it into a fluid, serene space.
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‘We worked on circulation and perspectives so each room led naturally to the next, physically but also visually, like a crescendo,’ Christophe explains. While making such radical interventions, he was careful to respect the building’s heritage.
His sensitive work on passages, doors and through-flow brought him a huge amount of pleasure. One example is the archway into the kitchen; it inspired the basket-handle motif seen on openings, the living-room ceiling, glass doors, fixtures and mirrors.
‘This common thread, which is above all an architectural element, has become by capillary action a decorative element,’ Christophe says, adding, ‘But we would never have imposed it if it had not already been written into the history of the place.’
Once the layout was established, Christophe and his team introduced layers of texture and subtle colour. Walls are painted in one of his studio’s signature shades, ‘Terre Blanche’ by Argile. ‘It is a warm, complex tone, a false neutral that gives a nice light temperature,’ he says. Flooring is a Hungarian point-oak parquet that they strove to give the most natural patina possible – not too dark – to evoke the original spirit of the apartment ‘but without the weight of time’, as he puts it.
This elegant backdrop sets off a nuanced material palette (think moody, stained-ash joinery, Ceppo di Sicilia marble and onyx, bronze lighting), enhanced by touches of blue or terracotta. Most of the furniture came from the designer’s Delcourt Collection and Collection Particulière catalogues, with each piece chosen to emphasise the chromatic range of the colour scheme and the gentle geometry of the space.
After spending two and a half years working on this home in close collaboration with its owner, there were no surprises on its completion, just quiet satisfaction in a job well done. ‘We knew all of the owner’s tastes, desires and expectations,’ says Christophe. ‘The installation happened quite naturally and with great serenity.’ christophedelcourt.com
