With pattern and whimsy galore, this Parsian pad is like a painting come to life
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Loading... - Ella Murph
- 31 Oct 2022
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France Jaigu was perfectly content with her family’s light-filled apartment near the Champs-Élysées. So the psychoanalyst admits she was more than a little hesitant when her husband, Charles, a journalist with Le Figaro, told her he wanted to buy his childhood home from his mother and move from the Right Bank to the Left into a cramped 16th-century townhouse on one of Paris’s oldest streets. She finally agreed, but on one condition. “If we are going to move there,” she said, “I get carte blanche with the decor.”
The house, in the fifth arrondissement off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, did have some advantages. Her mother-​in-law’s apartment—a triplex at the top of the six-story townhouse—had an annex where the couple’s young-adult children (who are still at home) could live while affording some privacy for the parents. Their oldest son resides in another apartment in the building.
Even so, France was daunted by her new home, with its warren of petite rooms. It wasn’t until she met the interior designer Eric Allart at a party that she began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. In truth, she had known of his work and reputation for quite some time. A former art adviser and antiques dealer, Allart has become one of Paris’s go-to interior designers. Still, she hesitated to call him. A few bad experiences with decorators in the past made her wary, and because the project required significant architectural alterations, his background did not seem the obvious choice. Ultimately it took mutual friends to play matchmaker, sitting the pair next to each other at a dinner. He impressed her with his vast knowledge of architecture and design, and she realized he would be ideal for the job. Read More...
