A magazine dedicated to compact interiors

Victor and Félix's multifunction cocoon 57 m² Paris, France 100 000 € Contemporary classic Retro-contemporary Felix Haudrechy

This Home Tour is from Sloft Edition 02.

"All of the problems an architect might be called upon to solve, condensed into a single project!" That’s how Félix humorously describes the challenge he and his partner Victor took on in the French capital’s 19^th arrondissement. Fortunately, nothing is impossible for this couple with firmly held and clearly defined tastes! Like his father before him, Félix is an architect and founded his own agency after working at an architecture firm for a few years; Victor, meanwhile, grew up a stone’s throw from the Villa Cavrois, a modernist masterpiece near Lille that fueled his curiosity for architecture, which manifests itself in his work as a journalist and filmmaker.

"Victor was already living in the 19^th arrondissement, smitten with its proximity to the MK2 cinemas and the Buttes Chaumont park. I spent my weekends at his place, utterly charmed by the neighborhood as well, because it’s one of the only places in Paris where you can still see the sky and feel like you can really breathe." They quickly limited their apartment hunt to the neighborhood, until they found the ultimate gem!

"On paper, this place ticked all the boxes," explains Félix. "It was in the right neighborhood, on the top floor of the building, there were renovations to plan... I’m an architect, I can’t help myself! During our initial visit, Victor, with his amateur yet sharpened eye, immediately started picturing our lives here; I, with my professional eye however, was more hesitant: the necessary renovations would be colossal in scope and rather complicated in nature." The space in question was composed of two studios separated by a thick load-bearing wall, and an unfinished attic above them. The three spaces would therefore need connecting, the openings redesigned, the floors demolished, and so on. In short, they would have to start over with an empty shell of a space, all while dealing with time-consuming administrative steps via the City Planning Department and the co-op board. "But Victor’s enthusiasm eventually won me over, and gave me the necessary energy and confidence to tackle this ambitious project!"

Their professional lives dictated the layout of this 57 m² flat, as they both needed a dedicated space for working from home. But the layout was also deeply informed by Felix’s personal tastes and sensibilities: "I have always lived in rather atypical spaces that felt quite spacious. I noticed that they had the particularity of never feeling hermetic or closed off: you could always guess which rooms were the bedrooms or the bathrooms from the living spaces. The rooms flowed into one another, the borders between them were erased and this allowed the spaces to perform several functions simultaneously. I wanted to bring that same feeling to our living room."