DECO ESPRIT
Interior architect Gaspard Ronjat has embraced the classic details of this Art Deco residence in Paris with an invigorating blend of styles to suit a growing family.
Interior architect Gaspard Ronjat has embraced the classic details of this Art Deco residence in Paris with an invigorating blend of styles
The suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the western edge of Paris, is the French address of success. All fortress-walled privacy and privilege, it exudes the impenetrability of the beau monde, but its ordered classicism belies the many wild minds that have lived there.
There’s the grand-daddy of Dada, Marcel Duchamp; the founder of French New Wave cinema, François Truffaut; the ‘Little Sparrow’, Édith Piaf; and former president Nicolas Sarkozy on the rollcall of residents who have distinguished this quartier as the quiet axis of liberal culture and political campaign.
That esprit captures in the rich detail and rebellious decorative overlay of this Art Deco duplex — one of four residences resulting from the 1970s carve-up of a four-storey hôtel particulier built in the ’30s by a wealthy industrialist.
The property stands as testament to a design period deeply influenced by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the Paris-staged World Fair of 1925 that blew Art Nouveau’s naturalism out of the water. It flaunts the exhibit’s flow-on effect of newly fragmented perspectives, bold colours, smooth surfaces and hard-edged geometries.
Yes, it is a “true Années 30”, affirms Gaspard Ronjat, the interior architect commissioned to make the refined structure fit a family of five (now six). But it had degenerated into disrepair and required structural intervention and a rethink before it could accommodate the clients’ busy lives and their contemporary design loves, a collection of furnishings and art that would inform the brew of the new. Describing a young couple in their early 40s — she is a lifestyle and fashion journalist, he is a business lawyer — Ronjat recalls “full freedom” in renovating and rationalising the building’s autonomous basement and ground floor into a single family home but qualifies that it came with two important guidelines.
“Nothing ‘too fancy’,” he says of the loose brief that ultimately clarified into a bohemian mix of styles, colours and patterns. “And as much respect as possible for the ‘special’ soul of the place.”
The only other rider was for comfort, he adds, of the planning and materiality that had to take the hand-smearing, crayon-wielding and noisemaking verve of youth.
Ronjat, principal of a self-named practice celebrated for its play of avant-garde art, modernist archetype, retro graphics and splashy tonal tang on a typically monochrome base, recalls the two biggest challenges of the project. The first was the insertion of a casual modernity into a major ’30s relic, and the second was the management of circulation.
His siting of the children’s four bedrooms and three bathrooms in the basement, and a parental suite and salon living rooms above, necessitated new passage between the levels. This passage needed to both acknowledge the historic lines of existing detail and facilitate the efficient flow of family traffic. ››
‹‹ “We had to create a staircase in the dining room in order to bring the floors together,” Ronjat says. “That was a challenge because the dining room had a strong Art Deco identity… so we worked on a very ‘raw’ staircase made of concrete and glass to create a real visual contrast.”
Ronjat offset this 21st-century modelling with a mindful lift of all period detail. He restored existing ironwork, stained-glass windows, a marble fireplace and parquetry across the breadth of entry-level reception areas, isolating its salon de musique for redress into a master suite.
“I love that space,” he says of the timber-panelled music room that received respectful overlay with white panels and a walk-in wardrobe detailed as a simple box insert. “That box includes the bathroom on one side and the closets on the other. I like that this architectural element could be removed if the next owners decide to have the space as it was.”
Within this strategically whitened room, Ronjat made spare statement with a streamlined club chair, a bedside lamp by Joris Poggioli and bedding that brings to mind the colour spacing of Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche, a building predating this one by five years. The Art Deco sobriety was shaken by the female gaze, captured in a large black-and-white photograph by artist Valérie Belin. ››
‹‹ Its subtext on the mainstream constructs of beauty seeps into the living room, where all prescripts on designing ‘to period’ have been ignored. Here, blocks of bold
’30s colour apply to a grab bag of eras and objects but synergise with
Streamline Moderne, Art Deco’s latter-stage softening of hard lines.
In the kitchen, Ronjat responded to the clients’ request for a minimal spend on the space, giving it maximal impact with IKEA’s off-the-shelf steel cabinets — a concession to Art Deco’s material obsession with the Machine Age — and a counterpointing floor of geometrically patterned cement tiles from Carrelages du Marais.
Relating this project to his wider oeuvre, Ronjat says that it reflects the global tilt towards multiculturalism and design’s current efforts to harmonise differences in a single space, be it public or personal. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a very exciting time to be a designer,” he says. “It really feels like everything is possible.”
His voice adds to the layering of resonant narratives that nest within Neuilly’s walls and their want to rescue culture from the concept that there is only one way. gaspardronjat.com
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