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In his search for an apartment for his infant son, himself and all his books, Léonard stumbled almost by chance upon this mini-duplex on the top floor of a rather typical Parisian building, right in the heart of the 18th arrondissement.
A bit off-kilter and with magnificent views and plenty of natural light (being on the seventh floor and all) it featured a mezzanine accessible only via an awkwardly positioned ladder that required a certain appetite for risk, alongside two load-bearing beams and a micro-washroom. No matter: Léonard saw the potential to build a real apartment, with a proper real area, accessible by a real staircase. All he had to do was find the architects capable of turning his dream into reality. The dream? Something bright, fresh, minimalistic, and very functional. With one major constraint, in this small, completely open-plan volume: to create a small, secure bedroom for his child on the mezzanine, that would be isolated from the noise of the rest of the house. A friend recommended Chayeb & Paradis (Sarah and Pauline, respectively). It was like a daydream come true: “we treated the apartment as if it were actually 200 square meters,” the architects joke.
To wit, the centerpiece of Léonard’s mini-domain: a beautiful sculptural staircase in bent metal. Lightweight, with a delicately pleasant railing, it is totally practicable standing up – no helmet or harness required, for everyone ages three to 99. It has the added bonus of structuring the space and its functions: contained beneath the reinforced mezzanine (complete with functioning hatch) it forms a strip that articulates the apartment without encroaching on the living area. “We hardly touched the existing layout,” continue the designer duo. “We reinforced the existing structures where they needed to be, and filled in and unified the missing bits of the floor. But we went looking for functionality everywhere, exploiting the numerous niches, working on every detail of this micro-surface to optimize the layout as much as possible, thus freeing up the double-height main floor and creating two distinct sleeping spaces upstairs.” It helped that Léonard has few possessions and likes minimalism – “except when it comes to books,” say Pauline and Sarah. “They’re absolutely everywhere! For the rest, he trusted us completely. It’s the kind of job that’s hard to say goodbye to.”
The ultimate luxury? A large, custom-built bench with an unobstructed view of the Sacré-Coeur, convertible to accommodate friends passing through, and topped by a large bookcase. Léonard is still pinching himself.
