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Anyone familiar with Chef Julien Sebbag’s cuisine knows how much he loves to play around with flavor combinations. In his dishes, rhubarb pickles are accompanied by oyster mushrooms flambéed in mezcal, ajitsuke eggs are served with fennel, and Norman beef is spiced up with chimichurri sauce. It’s hardly surprising that this self-taught chef’s apartment is also steeped in references and inspirations from all over the world – and beyond. Especially when the furnishings are designed by the flamboyant Parisian firm Uchronia, co-founded by Julien Sebban (not a typo).
“Julien and I have known each other for over fifteen years. We lived together in London for a few years, traveled to Japan and started our businesses almost simultaneously. We run with the same gang of friends,” says the interior designer. So in 2019, when Julien-the-chef was entrusted with Créatures, the pop-up restaurant perched on the roof of flagship Galeries Lafayette, he called on his friend for the decoration. After that, one collaboration followed another: Forest Paris, then its alter ego that opened in Marseille in early 2023 – and, finally, Julien’s apartment.
“When we first visited this property in 2020, we discovered a dark, closed-off and partitioned space. There were four rooms in total, spread over just 41 square meters, and that’s a lot. It was as if nothing had been changed since the 1960s,” recalls the designer. No matter, since the duo intended to gut the space and create a sort of bachelor pad, as Julien Sebban likes to call it. Once liberated from its partitions, the perfectly rectangular floor plan was actually very easy to tame. On the entrance side, two-thirds of the total surface area is reserved for the living room with its open kitchen – a necessity for the chef, who hosts many friends and journalists, for whom he never fails to cook up some of his secret recipes. The remainder would house the more private rooms. Alongside a proliferation of space-optimizing tricks, the two Juliens let loose on the decor, summoning up their shared love of local craftsmanship, past collaborations, and a healthy helping of pop-culture references – notably Star Wars. The result is a project as audacious as it is intelligent, and as seductive as it is unique. And it leaves room for dessert.
