Step Inside A Parisian Apartment by Pierre Yovanovitch

The City of Lights – Paris – is well known for many things including fashion, innovation and interior design. Pierre Yovanovitch invites us to step inside this beautifully transformed Parisian apartment. This stunning abode was given a new lease on life!

Yovanovitch began by rearranging the floor plan of the 2,500-square-foot duplex. He kept the two main salons as they were, but almost everything else changed. He moved the kitchen from the back corner—as was the case in old grand Paris apartments, “because families had staff,” he explained in an interview with Architectural Digest —to a more central location, and added an island with barstools. “It’s very convivial now,” he observes. “It’s really a room where the family lives.” He turned the former kitchen into a guest bath and a powder room, and the dining room into a guest room.

“I often work on 17th- and 18th-century houses, but I believe they must live in our time,” Yovanovitch avers. “Today, kitchens are more important. Family rooms are more important. Women have more clothes than before, so need bigger closets. We are more material and accumulate more stuff. That forces us to approach decor differently.”

Once the flow was sorted, Pierre Yovanovitch played with the apartment’s unusual design features, such as the small, round tower, where he put the wife’s home office, outfitted with a crescent-shaped desk; the windowless staircase to the second floor, for which he commissioned a delightful fresco evoking windows and mouldings; and the 650-square-foot terrace—a rarity in Paris—which he tied to both the living room and the dining room, allowing, as Pierre Yovanovitch puts it, “an in-and-out that is very fluid.”

In the end, the home is filled with charm and architectural details including tall windows, dark hues, and original wooden bookcases. The unfinished oak panelling and bookcases remained, as did the pale pink marble in the entrance hall. For Pierre Yovanovitch, this was enough to fulfil the clients’ wish to return the home’s atmosphere “to something more Jean-Michel Frank—something more contemporary,” he says.