A magazine dedicated to compact interiors

In my profession, we say: “ Never for family, never for friends! Yet Luc Pfister doesn’t hesitate to break this golden rule of the architectural profession when it comes to helping his brother Joseph and his partner Frédéric renovate their new home.

Joseph’s first purchase. The ^18th arrondissement was the obvious choice: ” Et pas seulement parce que nous y habitions déjà. Nous avions tous les deux vécu à l’étranger, beaucoup vadrouillé. Nous souhaitions que cet appartement soit une “base”, a place where you can relax and entertain family and friends. All Paris train stations are less than thirty minutes away, and Orly and Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle are within easy reach. That makes visiting easy! And then, the ultimate luxury, I can walk to work. ”

Nevertheless, the three-room apartment the couple have chosen needs to be redesigned. A godsend for Joseph, who sees it as a way of perpetuating a family tradition: ” Our father was a workaholic, doing almost everything himself. I couldn’t imagine buying a property in which you just put your suitcases: I was really excited about redesigning the whole thing. Above all, working with my brother on this project was extremely important. ”

The Strasbourg architect set out to make this 70 square metre space a model of fluidity, without altering the structure of the space: ” Breaking down walls,” he explains , “would have been too restrictive, including financially. To facilitate circulation and gain depth of field, he prefers to remove doors, visually erase spaces and do away with the distribution corridor. Custom-designed storage units, which are largely absent from older apartments, are so popular here that they become the anchor around which the rooms revolve. I like to structure spaces with more than just partitions,” confirms Luc. . Here, custom millwork looks like a backdrop. “A baroque mosaic, with the original parquet flooring also moored to it.

The former blind kitchen, with its purple ceiling and orange walls (which the couple were considering keeping for a while), was finally transformed into a guest room – a Swiss Army knife that doubles as a TV room and office. As some of the ceiling moldings had deteriorated too much, Luc was unable to keep them, so he created a curved false ceiling that echoed the original architectural codes. ” We wanted to preserve evidence of the history of this place ,” insists Joseph. The idea was to create flexible, coherent spaces that could be adapted to the needs of two or more people,” concludes Luc. . Because that’s what makes a place so special. “