Inside Lenny Kravitz’s Soulful Paris Home

A spiritual tribute to family and friends, stepping inside rock legend Lenny Kravitz’s Paris home is akin to paging through the musician’s diary – a deeply personal and informative journey filled with creativity. Perfectly encapsulating Lenny, it’s hard to believe the house was not his first choice.

“I was looking for a little apartment, maybe on the Seine – one bedroom, two bedrooms, maximum – where I could write and hang out,” he recalls. “One day, the real estate agent says, ‘I have something. It’s not what you’re looking for, but you need to see it.'”

The “it” was a grand mansion in the 16th arrondissement.

“The agent said: ‘It’s not on the market yet, and this kind of thing only comes around once in a generation,’ ” Kravitz continues. “I pull up, she points at the building, I said, ‘Okay, what floor?’ thinking it’s an apartment building. And she says, ‘It’s the whole thing.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, no, absolutely not.’ ‘Please, just go inside and look at it.’ I walked in and said, ‘This is my house.’ Spiritually, I knew.”

Working closely with his team at Kravitz Design, a studio specialising in commercial and residential interiors, branding, and creative collaborations that he founded in 2003, he transformed the stately mansion into a comfortable home, rich in personal detail.

At the foot of the sweeping staircase in his soaring entry hall, across from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Black Figure) from 1984 stands a Kravitz Grand, a limited-edition handcrafted piano, produced in collaboration with Steinway & Sons. Elsewhere his Grammy awards are on display alongside art books and Muhammad Ali’s Adidas lace-up boxing boots from his final fight in Nassau in 1981. While items Items from or depicting family and friends are always near – a portrait of his godmother Diahann Carroll in the library; framed black-and-white publicity shots of his mother in her namesake Roxie Room in the den; a framed Miles Davis leather jacket, a gift from another godmother; or the Ruven Afanador portrait of Kravitz’s grandfather, Albert Roker.

“I’d call it ‘soulful elegance,” he says of the design. “Soulful elegance’ means it’s designed, curated, balanced, not too minimal, not too maximalist,” he explains. “It’s comfortable, clearly. But also chic. It’s got a lot of ethnic and African elements mixed with European because I love that balance of African, European, and Afrofuturism mixed with midcentury pieces. I love things that are extremely glamorous and also extremely brutal.”