A magazine dedicated to compact interiors

Anthony's garden apartment 56 m² Paris, France 41 000 € Industrial Radically minimal One-bedroom Anthony Benarroche Architecte

This Home Tour is from Sloft Edition 04

Practicing architecture as one does acupuncture: that’s how Anthony Benarroche conceives his intervention in the hip 20th arrondissement, in the east of the capital. While looking for a 70s apartment that "checked all the boxes of a typical place from the time, like floor-to-ceiling windows, a streamlined layout – a simple, stripped down space", the architect (and professor at the École d’architecture de la ville et des territoires) stumbled upon this unconventional space on a real estate classified ads website.

The visit of the apartment, located in a building named “Les toits de Paris” (the rooftops of Paris) – a fitting name for a property located on the highest point of the city – didn’t go exactly as planned: "It felt like I had been teleported into the suburbs of Los Angeles, following a zombie apocalypse. The place hadn’t been updated in years, with previous water damage still showing... but the terrace – which was overgrown with amazing vegetation – was bigger than the whole apartment!” Also not mentioned in the ad, this little piece of heaven was an unexpected breath of fresh air amid a gently chaotic neighborhood that “feels very lived-in – and easy to live in. " The project was finely calibrated to “give the apartment a very humble feel that wouldn’t compete with the deck and instill an easygoing, somewhat rough aesthetic both indoors and out."

Anthony built the project on intuitions: "I try to chart where the light comes in, the flow of the layout, the proportions of the rooms. Then it’s just a matter of transposing these sensations into the real world. This part can be done using fewer resources, to maintain a form of spontaneity, which is also conveyed through an ever-evolving space. " The already very functional original layout is almost kept as-is. Planning translates into optimized costs: maximum effect for minimum intervention, "stripping down instead of adding up. " The resulting pared-down aesthetic showcases the original materials, insisting on the continuity between what’s inside and out, and the importance of natural light.