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Renovating an old two-bedroom attic apartment to turn it into a one-bedroom apartment with a double exposure and a focus on reuse: in Montmartre, Parisian architect Flore Bellanger has created a striking space that combines common sense with aesthetic sensibility.
Tucked away behind Butte Montmartre, this 41-square-meter apartment feels like a well-kept secret. A few flights of stairs, a narrow walkway, then the silence of the rooftops. Up there, light fills the space and Paris seems to breathe. Once compartmentalized, the space has been opened up into a light-filled one-bedroom apartment, piloted by designer/resident Flore.
As her own client, she wanted to optimize everything by adding more storage space so that clutter would never be visible; as an architect, she made it a rule to make the most of reused materials and secondhand furniture. Traces of the original space were preserved and then reinvented : the original bathroom tiles now form four wall niches, while the cabinets from the old kitchen have been incorporated into the new one. Elsewhere, fragments from other projects have found their place: a patchwork of terracotta tiles highlights the missing partitions, a sideboard has been transformed into a bathroom cabinet, and a piece of seagrass has become a headboard... For the architect, “each material tells a fragment of a story, each piece seems to have found its rightful place.”
The renovation itself follows this logic by revealing the best the space had to offer. The kitchen was installed in the former bedroom, the partitions were removed, and the living room was extended, flooding it with light. The original beams reappeared were stripped of its plasterboard, restoring the room’s hidden charm. As the light glides over the materials, the space takes on gentle warmth. Second-hand pieces and deliberate imperfections combine to create an interior that awakens fond memories, evoking a place that feels both new and familiar.
