A magazine dedicated to compact interiors

How Ana managed to play every angle 40 m² Paris, France Cosy minimalism Retro-minimalism One-bedroom AAA ARCHITECTURE

This Home Tour is fromSloft Edition 04

While most seek out sunlight, parquet flooring and intricate moldings in a Parisian apartment, others tend to favor a certain atmosphere – or even complicity with the seller. Ana Xenia took the latter tack when she first visited the 40m2 19th-arrondissement apartment that would become her home, back in the post-lockdown days of December 2021. "This apartment gave off a good vibe. And I really hit it off with the owner, a woman who was retiring." Even so, the floor plan wouldn’t be to most people’s taste.

The diagonal apartment had a large kitchen right off the threshold, followed by an L-shaped living room, with a bathroom and bedroom at the back. Right away, Ana could see herself living here: "To me, this apartment offered many possibilities and it was just weird enough for me to want to strip it down and remodel the space to my liking." Lucky for her, she has architect parents to turn her desires into volumes – hence her previous place’s 160 square meters never feeling cramped. But leaving behind Balenciaga and Loewe (where she worked as an accessories designer,) to focus on her own brand, Axep, means she needed a space that allowed her to work from home.

The vast kitchen was turned into a creative space. A bookcase lines the walls with an embedded cantilever desk inspired by the one designed in 1939 by Charlotte Perriand: "I didn’t want a desk leg to get in the way,"explains Ana. The thick oak plank’s protruding angle recalls the apartment’s own off-kilter floor plan. The kitchen finds itself facing the front door, in an acute angle opening up on the living room. The bathroom is nestled in a corner and illuminated by a skylight above the shower. The bedroom hasn’t moved, but was shrunken to give way for the living area. "Now I feel like the apartment is bigger than it really is. And that’s all thanks to my architects – I mean, my parents!"