“I’ve been looking for a place like this for a long time, and then I came across this rare little gem that’s anything but conventional. It is very Parisian—a top floor attic apartment with generous ceilings and many skylights. That was essential for me because I knew I would have my studio there,” collector, decorator, and set designer Marie-Anne Derville says. “This place helps enormously when it comes to my work. It inspires me because I have the feeling of being outside, surrounded by light and sky.”
Once Marie-Anne had found this 592-square-foot apartment, she had to completely redesign it with the help of interiors architect Régis Larroque, restructuring it to create simple volumes despite the quirks of this imperfect space. Today, it remains “convoluted, and the walls are askew,” she says with amusement, but the lines are cleaner and the layout has been optimized with the creation of a combined living room, open kitchen, and studio, and a half-antechamber, half-dressing room—a passageway “that serves little purpose” other than to create a slightly luxurious breathing space between the apartment’s workspace and the bedroom.
The apartment is finished in a warm milky white though the bedroom and dressing room have a more mauve tone, with the carpet in the same reassuring, comfortable hues, creating a neutral backdrop for the furniture designs that are at the heart of Marie-Anne’s work as a set designer and collector. The slightly pink shade of the walls, thanks to paint studio Mériguet-Carrère, changes with the light, and its velvety texture creates a calm aesthetic that also contrasts with the patinated metal fireplace by Ateliers Bataillard and the very narrow dressing room doors that provide a sensation of height to the anteroom. As for the kitchen, it is finished with stone from Italy. “There’s a little ivory-tower feeling to this top-floor apartment, on a small scale,” she says. “It’s very cozy, like a little palace or a princess’s home atop a tower, reminiscent of the castles in childhood games that also permeate my work. It’s a place where I have the feeling that I can play.”