Fabrice Juan, the designer of this elegantly colourful Paris house, has a maxim that an inside “should operate even with out furnishings.” Agree or disagree, it’s an fascinating assertion from Juan, who, earlier than turning into a celebrated architect and designer, apprenticed as a carpenter. Earlier than embarking on his present line of labor, he’d already created a variety of remarkable sofas and armchairs, tables and cupboards, lamps and equipment. Nonetheless, it’s laborious to disagree with the concept that a room ought to have the ability to stand by itself. In recent times, Juan has renovated and furnished an excellent variety of stately flats, largely within the posh Paris neighborhoods across the Bois de Boulogne and in Neuilly-sur-Seine the place he has lived.
“The French artwork de vivre is value preserving and selling,” says the designer. “The best way craftsmanship and a way of favor are mixed right here is one thing fairly particular that may be very near me personally.” And so Juan didn’t hesitate for lengthy when requested if he may tackle this Paris house close to the Champs-Élysées.
With a big entrance corridor and 7 rooms unfold over 3,000 sq. toes, the house exudes a definite Parisian bourgeois aptitude. However after many years of quiet grandeur, it wanted some assist being ushered into the twenty first century. “From the get-go, the shoppers had just one want,” Juan recollects, “and that was to have the kitchen centrally situated. They gave me free rein to make all different choices. I had the impression that they wished to be shocked by the end result—too many discussions would have simply been a trouble to them.”
The very first thing Juan did was to rearrange the ground plan by transferring the kitchen from the again to the middle of the house, per the shoppers’ needs, together with designing new cupboards and an island. What offers it a particular twist, nonetheless, is the prolonged customized banquette from Juan’s personal Saint-Germain assortment. Rounding out a nook, it emphatically proclaims that this kitchen is not only a kitchen—it’s additionally an area for lounging. That desk in entrance of the couch serves not simply as a eating desk but in addition as a counter for groceries and a bar desk of kinds.
Juan opened up the house’s L-shaped entrance with terracotta-red partitions. It’s now virtually a room in its personal proper. The ground is a spectacular and grand mosaic of oak parquet and inlays of limestone and travertine impressed by the craftsmanship present in France’s aristocratic properties. Furnishings within the different rooms reveal the breadth of inspirations behind Juan’s work. They vary from Artwork Deco, with its dynamic traces and rounded corners, to the quirky, outsized, and boldly colourful pop designs of the Seventies and ‘80s.
For the partitions, the designer got here up with one thing particular. To offer order and construction to these ample areas that had been as soon as almost certainly embellished with classical wallpaper, he selected refined colours in gentle shades of brown and ocher, and added grosgrain ribbon traces. Within the giant bed room, they kind rhombuses that recall the calming high quality of outdated wall panels. Within the remaining rooms these ribbon patterns are nonetheless linear, however extra expressive, with acute angles, diagonals, triangles, and diamond shapes.
