IN THE CENTER of Paris, in the First Arrondissement, around the corner from the Jardin du Palais-Royal — with its orderly tree-lined promenades — there’s a ragged bistro called Juveniles at which tourists jostle for tables and locals buy bottles of wine to bring home after work. It’s a true neighborhood spot in an office-dominated district where most Parisians could never imagine living, even if they wanted to: Nearby are the Louvre, the Opéra Garnier, Sainte-Chapelle and other landmarks so intrinsic to the grand cinematic vision of the city that the relatively few apartments that become available around here are almost immediately snatched up.
But two floors above the restaurant, on the Rue de Richelieu, is the small, austere home of Charlotte de Tonnac and Hugo Sauzay, both 37, who own an interiors firm called Festen. Together they specialize in creating handsome, historically sensitive — yet gently subversive — hotels (among other projects) like Château Voltaire, a few blocks away, with its spare interiors inside three adjacent buildings that, though they date from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, have been seamlessly conjoined.
After deciding to have a child, the couple bought this 1,075-square-foot apartment during the pandemic in one of the oldest and most classical quarters of Paris not because of their interest in the city’s past but in spite of it: “It was kind of a blank page,” says de Tonnac, noting that the base of the seven-story building dates to the 17th century and the facade above it was rebuilt in the early 20th century. “Nothing was symmetrical — it was very strange. But we liked the idea that it wasn’t another Haussmannian building.” When they first visited the place, which had last been renovated in the 1990s, they knew they’d have to redo everything and ended up removing all the corridors and reconfiguring all the rooms.
“I think it wasn’t a really good architect,” says Sauzay as he pours coffee one chilly December afternoon while sitting on the low, blocky cream wool sofa of their own design next to de Tonnac, the two casually interrupting and continuing each other’s thoughts in that way that work-and-life partners often do. They’d never set out to live in the First, and yet here was a space that would allow them to fully conjure their vision of what Parisian design ought to look like from the nexus of where it all began: Paris “is not Berlin,” Sauzay says, “but since Covid-19 and Brexit — OK, I wouldn’t say it’s more fun, but there’s more energy.” De Tonnac jumps in: “The city was a little bit boring a few years ago,” she says. “Now it’s getting better.”
Both grew up in small cities in rural France, where they were scouted as teenagers to become fashion models. He lasted longer in the industry than she did, although they each wound up studying interior design at Paris’s École Camondo, dating in their final year and deciding soon after, in 2011, to establish their agency. Sauzay had originally hoped to create furniture; de Tonnac was drawn to design, she says, to determine the reason that she “felt good in some places and couldn’t tell why — places with a special atmosphere: It could be a palazzo or a coffee shop.” For their first hospitality project, Le Pigalle, which opened in 2015 inside a former 19th-century townhouse, they learned how they could tweak the acoustics or lighting to encourage people to speak more softly or adjust the lobby seating to make them lounge in their chairs. Years later, it’s still one of the most reliable destinations in the neighborhood for morning meetings: “You don’t want the interior design to change every 10 years — that’s not the point,” de Tonnac says. “We like these kinds of low-key, old-school hotels, so we try to do something timeless, not to be too ‘fashion.’”
FOR THEIR HOTELS — whether it’s Les Roches Rouges, an updated Côte d’Azur resort originally built in the 1950s, or one they’re currently completing inside a 17th-century convent in Nice — they and their 15 employees often begin with extensive architectural research, finding sometimes buried parts of buildings they might unearth, maintain or modernize. In their own home, however, they decided the only things worth salvaging were the long planks of the original 18th-century oak floor, into which they buffed wax — “the old way,” de Tonnac explains — to create a richness that swallows, rather than reflects, the afternoon light.
Neither of them cares for open-plan layouts, so instead they carved the apartment into distinct rooms: A big, square kitchen and dining area installed in the middle branches out on one side to a primary suite and a warren for their 2-year-old son and, on the other, a small living room and corner library. With their hidden appliances and compact bookshelves, these common spaces all seem a bit boatlike, partly owing to a framed nautical painting and some salvaged seashells displayed here and there, but especially because the kitchen is clad in heavy oak, much of it sourced (and waxed) by a traditional craftsman in central France with whom they often collaborate. “We always dreamed of a wooden room somewhere,” Sauzay says; they were particularly inspired by the work of the early 20th-century French architect Auguste Perret, who used materials like wood paneling and reinforced concrete to make rooms that felt rigorous yet poetic. Even the ceilings, which the couple raised back to their original 13-foot height, are covered in oak: When friends come over, “They ask, ‘Why did you put a parquet floor there?’” Sauzay says.
Once they moved in, they had to jettison most of the brown furniture from their last rental, in the Marais — it would have been too monochromatic against the wood — deciding instead to incorporate just a few new pieces of their own design (a ceiling lamp, the couch) with 20th-century antiques like Paolo Buffa chairs and a Jules Leleu dining table. “We like emptiness, so there isn’t a lot of decoration,” Sauzay says. “It’s almost undone.” Still, their strain of minimalism has some inherent warmth, mostly because of the grain of the various woods, the tactility of the few pale fabrics throughout and the way that every surface seems to absorb and capture light in a city that’s famous for being dark. (This, after all, was where the first electric streetlights were installed.) In fact, Sauzay is so unnerved by the unpleasantly bright cast of LED light bulbs, now standard in France and elsewhere, that he dulls each of theirs with special paint — or sometimes layers of vellum and Scotch tape — until they mimic the glow of incandescents. There are also no carpets in the apartment, the better to reveal shadows drifting across the bare floors. “I don’t love rugs,” de Tonnac says. “Let’s just say I prefer the wood.”
Photo assistant: Camille Padilla
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