In the 2017 AD100 list of the world’s renowned names in the interior design and architecture industry, we find Pierre Yovanovitch, a Paris-based designer with an undeniable expertise in mixing modern and vintage details. The famous interior designer brings to the world of interior design and decoration what the magazine AD France states as a new style “Made in France”: bringing together the best of French artisanal know-how while staying tuned into foreign talents and influences. Yovanovitch is best known for his dazzling residential projects, including his own knockout Paris apartment (which have been featured in Architectural Digest and the New York Times’s T, among other magazines) and in the Haut-Var region of Provence, where he has masterminded a subtle update of a 17th-century château.
In order to bring you interior design inspiration, today we selected a home in Paris decorated by Yovanovitch. In the words of the designer “The apartment works because it’s in accord with Modernist architectural thinking and with today’s lifestyle.” Take a look.
Any designer with less experience in orchestrating and dramatizing the play of interior space would have been daunted by the 4,500-square-foot, rubble-strewn demolition site Pierre Yovanovitch discovered atop one of the imposing and venerable apartment buildings that face the Place de la Concorde on the Left Bank of the Seine. Not Yovanovitch. He saw only the possibility of creating a striking contemporary interior in the tangle of broken masonry, cabinetry, hardware and displaced utilities that the discouraged former owners had fled.
Here, in the very heart of Paris, a city not noted for lavish interior space in its apartments, he saw an intriguing, if challenging, disposition of grandly proportioned rooms oriented to a picture-perfect view that leads the eye across the Seine, the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries Gardens and on, all the way across Paris to Sacre Coeur sitting atop the Butte Montmartre on the horizon.
Walking into the harmonious, airy spaces of the apartment today, it is impossible to suspect its chaotic past, so seamless is Yovanovitch’s handling of volume, line, surface, color and restrained ornament. A massive fireplace inappropriately distanced the living room from the music room, and the majestically proportioned library had an oppressive and thinly disguised supporting steel beam running its length above the fireplace. A useless corridor stole space from the entrance hall. Only one guest room and bath could remain in their original locations.
The kitchen and dining room had been inexplicably placed where the master bedroom and bath rightfully belonged. A warren of cramped rooms and hallways choked the space needed for a graciously proportioned eat-in kitchen. There was a laundry room where the powder room should have been. A curiously wedge-shaped space confounded the lovely bay of windows overlooking the river, where the circular dining room would take form.
Here, minimalist interiors are set with exceptional Scandinavian Art Deco and European and American mid-century furniture and design. Sobriety, balance, comfort and modernity are the keywords that describe this Parisian home. The ultimate perfectionist, Pierre Yovanovitch conceived it as a work of art.
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