Elegant Double Salon in a Paris Apartment | Living Room Tour & Inspiration

"GOOD CONTENT"#architecture #castle
On a street of grand limestone facades in the 16th arrondissement, designer Timothy Corrigan has created a Paris apartment that argues, room by room, against the fashion for painting everything white.

The building dates to the Belle Époque, a period Timothy describes as being entirely about elegance and show. There's one apartment per floor, and this one was built by the building's original owner — which is why it has terraces, balconies on most windows, and roughly 3,600 square feet, enormous by Paris standards.

The salon is really two rooms. Doors once separated them, and Timothy removed the doors to make one long space that still reads as two. The daytime salon is white furniture in outdoor fabric — light, bright, genuinely usable. The evening salon is double the size and dressed in silk velvet, which he warns will stain if you so much as look at it wrong. Each has a fireplace, a mirror, and a chandelier, none of them exactly matching the other, and he added mirrors flanking the doors in both rooms to complete the effect. Symmetry matters, he argues, because we register it unconsciously and relax. Our faces are symmetrical. Our bodies are. It's a natural state.

The plasterwork ceiling is painted in five different colors to bring out its detail. When he arrived, everything had been whitewashed, as is currently fashionable in Paris, and he considers that a genuine loss — research suggests architectural detail measurably lifts your mood, and painting it flat means you stop seeing it.

Across the hall is his favorite room in the apartment: the library and study, intended as a dining room until he decided he doesn't entertain that formally. De Gournay made custom wallpaper panels here to imitate an original frescoed ceiling. The centerpiece is an 18th-century screen from the reign of Louis XV, showing what is now the Place de la Concorde before the surrounding buildings existed, with Montmartre visible in the distance. He found it at the Paris flea market.

Elsewhere: a Jacques-Louis David study for a painting hanging in the Louvre, a 1940s bust, a Rodin watercolor propped casually beside a taxidermy parrot. Nothing announces itself. You notice things slowly, over weeks.