A ladder in a stormy sea. A rock levitating above still water. A banana grove, tinted red. These are not scenes from a sci-fi film; they’re fragments of visions, scaled up and recreated in this Parisian apartment. Here, Belgian interior architect Maxime De Campenaere stages a sensory experience where light and geometry become matter, and you can feel traves of distant places in every corner.
‘The brief was simple,’ he says. ‘Functionally, the client wanted a two-bedroom apartment. In terms of design, he was looking for a place with a strong personality – somewhere that would feel like a real escape. Apart from that, I was given complete creative freedom. I approached the project as a cabinet of curiosities suspended between past and future, an echo of Parisian nightlife.’
The property, on the first floor of a Haussmann building just behind the Centre Pompidou near the Marais district, lacked the grandeur of upper floors – its ceilings were lower, its windows smaller. Its T-shaped layout presented Maxime with a spatial dilemma: how to fit in two bedrooms while still maintaining a comfortable living area. The solution was to place the bedrooms at either end, as close as possible to the natural light from the windows, with the living room at the core.
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‘The floor plan quickly suggested the need for a strong central structure,’ Maxime says. ‘In my work, I always look for geometrical clarity, so the idea of placing a circle at the heart of the apartment, from which all rooms would radiate, felt instinctive. The composition developed from there.’
Even the furniture echoes the apartment’s circular logic. ‘I’m proud of the bespoke bench and shelving, which combine curves and diagonals,’ he adds. ‘Their geometry reinforces the layout of the space, a language of form that ties everything together.’
The home’s lack of natural light was offset by an artificial skylight – a circular stretched fabric ceiling with integrated backlighting – offering generous illumination tailored to different moments of the day. The influence of films such as Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 and Wing Shya’s Self 05 shaped the way Maxime treated light, almost as a tangible material.
‘I wanted to make it as expressive as possible,’ he explains, adding: ‘I filtered the southern sun through a bronze-tinted glass-block wall, creating a golden glow that shifts. Depending on the angle and hour, it casts subtle reflections across surfaces and objects.’ This is not a nostalgic homage to the Paris of the past, nor a sterile vision of the future. It is, instead, a deliberate collision of memory, cinema, structure and space – a hidden cosmos suspended in the city, glowing gently under its own artificial sky. maximedecampenaere.com
