A traveller’s tale
As keen travellers, designers Stéphane Garotin and Pierre Emmanuel Martin of Maison Hand in Lyon, France, return from buying trips abroad with heads full of visual inspiration as well as suitcases full of purchases.
Travelling around the world and staying in all sorts of hotel rooms along the way, Stephane Garotin and Pierre Emmanuel Martin have discovered some inspiring ideas for balancing harmonious living with practicality in small spaces.
The calm, serene and sophisticated ethnic décor of this light, bright apartment is very much a style anthology of the best features of some of those hotel rooms. It is also a fusion of the couple’s original design intentions, which hark back to their first business in home decoration – an interiors boutique called Hand, also based in Lyon – that specialised in combining handmade one-off items with a charming global mix sourced from all over.
When the pair set themselves a design brief for this apartment, they drew on their elegant yet ethnic aesthetic and a sense of being abroad. They also wanted to achieve a feeling of relaxation and wellbeing, despite the apartment’s restrictions in size. So, two armchairs were brought back from China, the baskets on the wall from a trip to Myanmar, the oversized lamps are from Indonesia and the carpet from Morocco.
There are many influences present in this small space, yet they work wonderfully well together, thanks to the similar textures provided by the natural wood and the rustic bamboo and rattan, offset by the calming soft white shade chosen for the walls. It’s a tried-and-tested palette of colours and materials that Stéphane and Pierre have applied to several of Maison Hand’s interior decorating projects, which works particularly well in such a small space. The subtle greyish-green off-white paint used on the walls offers an ethereal sense of space, but also a feeling of warmth as it is nicely ‘lifted’ and thrown into contrast by the pure white-painted floor. The sense of spaciousness also owes much to the large mirror placed in the corner at floor level, which provides a highly effective and much-needed visual expansion of the living space, and the accompanying mirrored cubes with low-level table lamps. More elaborate details include the decorative gilt mirrors above the bed and the woven wicker baskets on the wall of the living area. Both are perfect examples of how to create a display in a small interior by grouping a few similar objects together to provide
visual interest, but without fuss or clutter.
Yet this small space has more to offer than what is on the walls. A compact shower room and small fitted kitchen allow for more space to be allocated to the key design component of this studio space: the raised bedroom area with a built-in closet. This is screened off by large partition windows that provide privacy at night and connectivity to the rest of the space during the day. Just three steps separate the two levels, but they divide the apartment into a clearly defined living area and a sleeping space to retreat to in the evening. The raised bedroom also cleverly accommodates a built-in closet that occupies the area above the kitchen cupboards, thereby utilising what would otherwise be redundant space. Likewise, the washing machine is tucked under the sleeping area and accessed by a door.
The pair have used some classic small-space solutions to great effect and, by combining these with their own inimitable style, have created an intimate yet attractive and sophisticated space. A vintage cupboard has been given a rough coat of paint and offers a wonderful visual contrast to the clean uniformity of the fitted kitchen cabinets, and provides additional space for crockery, cutlery/ flatware and other kitchen essentials. In the dining area, the panelling on the wall, painted the same shade, quietly but convincingly defines the dining area from the rest of the open-plan living space, with the individual panels acting like empty picture frames and providing additional visual interest without the need for a great deal of artwork. The oversized ceiling lamps and imposing wooden Chinese armchairs are a play on scale and proportion when teamed with other pieces in the apartment of a more regular size.
Similar tiling has been used to marry together two tiny spaces – the shower room and the kitchen – that sit closely together. And repetition abounds, but subliminally so: the graphic framing of the black grout on the white tiles has been picked up and echoed in other details such as the pattern on the rug, the pictures on the walls and the black trim on the shades of the floor lamps and even on the curtains and hooks and poles in the closet. Subtle and simple ideas these may be, but they are also surprisingly effective.