This 506-Square-Foot Apartment Is a “Nature Lab” in the Heart of Paris

In Paris’s Marais district, subsequent to the Place Sainte-Catherine, two buildings sit on one lot. The one on the road aspect dates from the 18th century, whereas the one within the again, dealing with a backyard, dates from the Seventies or ’80s. There, a 506-square-foot fourth-floor condominium has views of the sky and advantages from an abundance of pure gentle coming from two instructions, by home windows on each its east and west partitions. Regardless of its constructive elements, architect and designer Olivier Debin says, “I discovered it extraordinarily compartmentalized, with a small kitchen and cabinets all over the place that made it laborious to understand the excessive ceilings. Strolling by the condominium was a journey with many obstacles.”

Olivier’s intervention would have two targets: first, to optimize the usage of house and, second, to create a singular narrative about this condominium. Centered on effectivity, the designer concentrated a variety of the house’s totally different features alongside what he calls its “residing wall”—that’s the place the dressing room, laundry room, kitchen, and workplace are all discovered. Reverse it, Olivier performed with a rounded wall by extending its curve outwards with a sample within the parquet ground, like rays from the solar. There may be additionally now an obstacle-free path from the doorway, by the primary a part of the residing space and a small lounge, which arrives, lastly, within the bed room. The ground plan makes the many of the gentle that passes by the unit and it helps to prepare and outline the house.

“I prefer to create tales in regards to the areas I design,” Olivier shares. “The proprietor of this condominium is enthusiastic about science and, particularly, chemistry. On the identical time, I used to be seduced by the idea of a complicated ‘laboratory,’ one thing that the artist Fabrice Hyber developed in his present on the Fondation Cartier. By combining these two themes, the concept was to invent one other sort of nature, utilizing gentle and numerous different components.” The result’s a palette of pure supplies together with oak, birch, and olive ash plywood, terracotta, and tadelakt plaster. There may be an set up on the entrance displaying chemistry devices—check tubes, a wide range of flasks with a few of them illuminated and others serving as vases for crops—and a big fresco, within the type of Hyber, on the rounded wall, which mixes shades of brown, inexperienced, and blue to inform the story of the passage from the earth to the sky and the way nature connects the 2.