Tour a Reimagined Paris Apartment Inside a Haussmannian Mansion With Its Own Epic Garden

“It’s like a small forest,” says architect Rebecca Benichou, referring to a charmed private garden in the heart of Paris. Roughly the same square footage as the apartment it belongs to—about 3,000 square feet—the garden is the reason her clients, an art-collecting couple, chose the home in the first place. “It’s really in the center of the city,” she adds. “The kind of house you never find.”

For Benichou, founder of Paris’s Batiik Studio, the apartment was a welcome challenge. Working alongside her creative director, Florence Jallet, it was the interior architecture studio’s first large project, having made a name for itself transforming itty-bitty flats (think 450 square feet and even 120 square feet) into imaginative, bespoke spaces with artful palettes and bespoke furniture. But the two-level apartment was also a different type of beast: part of a Haussmannian mansion filled (read: overwhelmed) with ornate details. “They were too much,” recalls Benichou of the fussy moldings, mantels, mirrors, and murals covering every stretch of wall space on the main level.

“Every two months, [the owner] will change the display with new art pieces, or new sculptures,” says Benichou of the dynamic new fireplace, carved with various platforms to showcase art. Breaking up the room’s rectangular shape, a pair of Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert Cloud pendants are installed off-center, and a modular Christophe Delcourt EKO sofa system creates a conversation pit layout around a cluster of aluminum Sabourin Coste coffee tables.

Her clients hoped to showcase their contemporary art, which included a large figurative painting by Craig Hanna, multiple pieces of mixed media by Eva Jospin, and sculptures by the likes of Kader Attia and Simone Fattal. In order to achieve that, and create a space that harmonized better with their contemporary aesthetic, they needed the apartment to loosen up.

Some changes were easy lifts—goodbye, gigantic gilded mirrors—while others required real firepower—like replacing redundant fireplaces with warm cherry wood shelving, or relocating the staircase. But the elaborate moldings choking the main level’s wall space? Those needed a proper intervention.

Friends and family were invited over to tag the walls with spray paint before the renovation. “They actually wanted to keep this tag on the wall,” says Benichou, nodding to a red and yellow tag made by the owner’s son, which now rests behind a Kader Attia sculpture. Custom cherry wood shelving warms up a wall that once held an old fireplace, complementing a stone Amélie Maison d’Art desk. A relocated staircase now commands the entry, complete with a new flat wall to subdue the molding beneath while creating space for one of the owners’ most prized paintings, by Craig Hanna.