By Design takes a closer look at the world of design, in moments big and small.
PASS THROUGH THE front door of Mathieu Paris’s three-bedroom apartment, on the top floor of a brick four-story Victorian building in London’s Marylebone neighborhood, and you might think that you’ve inadvertently wandered into an art gallery rather than the home of new parents and their toddler daughter. But given that Paris, 41, is the global sales director of White Cube, the international gallery with two outposts in London, perhaps it’s no surprise that even the foyer, though paneled in varnished plywood and sparingly furnished, holds prized pieces.
One wall displays a pen-and-ink drawing by Alberto Giacometti; on another is a pencil-and-black crayon piece by Lucian Freud. An emerald green glass Tiffany lamp, set on a shelf built out of the same type of treated plywood, illuminates a second Giacometti portrait. Beneath it sits a chair by the fashion and furniture designer Rick Owens, which looks like a Brutalist version of the ivory stools used by dignitaries in ancient Rome. It, too, is built of plywood (stained black) in keeping with Paris’s penchant for beautiful objects made from the simplest of materials. (He’s an admirer of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and ’70s.) The chair is also a subtle reference to his design credentials: After studying contemporary art history at the École du Louvre in Paris in the early aughts, he went on to work for the renowned art and furniture dealer Philippe Jousse, for whom he helped organize Owens’s first furniture show in the French capital in 2007.
Paris and his husband, the financier Razid Kalfane, 49, bought the 1,700-square-foot apartment in 2020. “We love Marylebone and this particular block known as the Montagu Mansions,” says Paris, who grew up in Marseille, France, and moved to London in 2014. “Plus we needed a bigger space for a baby.” The couple spent the following two years doing a gut renovation with the help of the Egyptian architect Tarek Shamma, an old friend whose recent projects include a round three-story tower in Melides, Portugal, for the French shoe designer Christian Louboutin and a yacht for the Egyptian mogul Nassef Sawiris. Paris says that the flat in Marylebone was an “empty shell” that hadn’t been updated since the 1960s. Among the first tasks was to replace the flooring (“old linoleum over old floorboards,” says Shamma) with reclaimed herringbone oak parquet.
The first room off of the vestibule belongs to 1-year-old Ava. A 1961 black-and-white abstract painting from the “Alfabeto” series by the Greek Italian Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis hangs over her wooden crib, while a framed photogravure — a detail of a nursing mother in a 16th-century Bartolomeo di Zanobi di Benedetto Ghetti painting by the Danish Vietnamese artist Danh Vo — is propped on a white chest of drawers. On one side of the 50-foot-long hallway are two bathrooms clad entirely in white-and-gray marble and, just beyond, a galley kitchen. On the other side are the primary bedroom, the guest room and the dining room, which is anchored by a walnut wood dining table by the Japanese American architect and furniture designer George Nakashima.
BUT IT’S AT the end of the corridor, in the living room, where the family spends the most time. Spanning the entire 23-foot width of the apartment, it’s bookended by a sofa of Shamma’s design, upholstered in a beige heavy linen by Rose Uniacke, and a window partly obscured by thick velvet curtains in a similarly earthy tone. At the center of the back wall, there’s a fireplace surrounded by gray-speckled Ceppo di Gré stone from northern Italy. In front of it is a pair of teak-and-rattan armchairs — more cherished mementos of Paris’s time with Jousse — designed by the midcentury Swiss architect Pierre Jeanneret.
Much as a gallery rotates works, Paris is always switching out objects. Lately he’s found a new passion: early 20th-century American lamps. He recently acquired one by the Arts and Crafts metal artisan Dirk van Erp that stands a foot tall, with a bulbous copper vase and a shade made of mica and copper. The living room’s built-in shelves, made of wood and stone, display more museum-quality objects, such as an ancient soup bowl-size ceramic vessel from the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan. An oak bookcase clad in parchment by Shamma displays a 19th-century wooden funerary bird sculpture from Madagascar. (Kalfane, who is French, has roots in the African country.) Under one of the windows is a many-headed terra-cotta creature sculpted in the 1990s by the Senegalese artist Seyni Awa Camara that sits atop an ornate circa-1900 pedestal of walnut, vellum and copper from the Italian experimental Art Nouveau designer Carlo Bugatti.
While Paris allows that the art-filled room may not be the most suitable for babies, he adds that Ava is drawn to the bronze cast of a sling-shaped West African Lobi chair, also made by Vo, that stands beneath the window. “It’s currently Ava’s favorite thing to climb,” he says. “We’re always hovering behind her.”
Photo assistant: Sam Dearden
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