Villersexel keeps the mouldings, arches and marble and redraws the detailing, in a dual-aspect plan of three suites where A Garden to Live In installs painting, ceramics and textiles
Claves, the Paris interior architecture studio, has completed Villersexel, a full transformation of an apartment in an early twentieth-century Parisian building. The original layout is gone. In its place are three suites, each with its own bathroom and dressing room, in a dual-aspect plan where circulation has been simplified to open sightlines that run from one room through to the next.
What survived is the building’s Haussmannian vocabulary, rebuilt, not conserved under glass: mouldings and decorative plasterwork, arches, bespoke joinery, finely worked wood, marble. The detailing is new, drawn to sit against the existing architecture instead of imitating it.
The furniture mixes antiques, contemporary pieces and bespoke designs. Claves brought in the studio Désuet to source part of the furniture and the decorative objects, and worked with the French rug editor Toulemonde Bochart on the pieces that mark out the different rooms. The apartment stands a short walk from the Musée Rodin and its gardens.
A Garden to Live In: ten artists on the living world indoors
The finished apartment is also hosting an exhibition. A Garden to Live In gathers around 10 contemporary artists across painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography and textiles, installed as works would be in a collector’s home — placed in relation to windows, fireplaces, furniture and the lines of sight the renovation opened.
The subject is the presence of the living world indoors. Some works sit close to the still-life tradition that runs from Flemish painting through Fantin-Latour to Matisse and Bonnard: the painted bouquets of Jules Bertin, the observed flowers of Kamila Sipika, the botanical compositions of Melissa Sinapian, the photographs of Hubert Marot.
Elsewhere the vegetal moves into the material itself. Manon Daviet’s tapestries bring vegetation, animals and weather onto a single textile surface. The ceramic sculptures of Samantha Kerdine and Victor Levaï hold seeds, leaves, roots and mineral fragments in forms suspended between object and landscape. The figures of Galatée Martin and Eleonora Rinaldi inhabit worlds where bodies merge with trees and foliage, and Nicky Hodge’s paintings treat the plant world as a trace that surfaces and fades.
Claves: Laure Gravier and Soizic Fougeront after Pierre Yovanovitch
Claves was founded in 2022 by Laure Gravier and Soizic Fougeront, who had worked together for several years at the studio of the French designer Pierre Yovanovitch — Gravier as artistic director, Fougeront heading furniture development.
Villersexel follows two earlier projects. In 2024 Claves completed Le Cornichon, a Paris café built on the vocabulary of the classic French bistrot. The second is Villa Junot, in Montmartre, reworked for Iconic House and recast as an artist’s house, with the original volumes kept and the decorative programme redrawn room by room.
The studio works on residential and public projects, starting each one from the history of the place: archival research first, then the design. The reference point is French decorative arts, and the work concentrates where that tradition concentrates — drawing, ornament, pattern, finishes, a ceiling, a passementerie, a fireplace.
