“Give me some surprises” is not the most common client brief, but the owner of this Parisian home placed an unusual amount of trust in her designers, and got something genuinely unexpected in return. “We really wanted to have fun, and were lucky that she shared that spirit,” says Hugo Vince of the client, a lawyer who had already worked with him and fellow Atelier HA founder Adèle Nourry on two previous homes and was ready to take the leap again.
The space gave them plenty to work with. A former garage in Saint-Cloud, a residential suburb on the western edge of Paris, the home was vast: 300 square metres with ceilings over seven metres high. The first task was to make that cavernous shell feel liveable, bringing the scale down to something human.
Their solution was to add a mezzanine level, which lowers the ceiling over the kitchen and carves out a more intimate zone within the volume. “We wanted it to feel like the room is giving you a hug,” Vince says, a neat summary of the whole approach, which uses architecture to turn an intimidating amount of space into somewhere you actually want to spend time.
That instinct, to make a huge space feel cosy rather than grand, is harder than it sounds. The easy move with soaring ceilings is to show them off; the more thoughtful one is to work against them where daily life happens, reserving the drama for where it counts. The mezzanine does exactly that, trading a little height for a lot of warmth.
The result is a home that rewards the owner’s willingness to be surprised. By trusting her designers to have fun, she ended up with an apartment that is playful and personal rather than predictable, proof that the most memorable interiors often come from clients brave enough to hand over some control.
