Hugues de Blignières Gives a Haussmannian Apartment Slick New Attitude
With a handsome mix of 1990s design icons, beguiling architectural interventions, and striking pieces of contemporary art, the designer transforms a grand Paris residence into a sophisticated backdrop for late-night gatherings
Certain design details are quintessentially, incontrovertibly Haussmannian: 13-foot-high ceilings, parquet de Versailles flooring, sweeping enfilades. Rectilinear stainless steel doorways rarely enter that conversation, but Hugues de Blignières has shown little interest in hewing too closely to convention. The interior designer, who divides his time between Paris, Biarritz, and New York, gravitates toward dauntless gestures, and he deployed several while ushering a storybook residence near Place des États-Unis in Paris’s 16th arrondissement into the present day.
The client, a young entrepreneur and consummate entertainer, envisioned a polished residence tailored to spending long evenings with friends amid his carefully curated collection of minimalist art and sleek, high-gloss furnishings. “It’s a place to, let me say, party,” de Blignières says with a laugh. “And be surrounded by nice art.” No exaggeration there—the client’s collection, split between his homes, office, and storage, encompasses covetable pieces across eras by the likes of Monique Rozanès, Charles Pollock, Robert Couturier, and Victor Guedy.
The reality proved more complicated. The client arrived with a trove of 1990s references that might prompt some design connoisseurs to utter the phrase mauvais goût, but De Blignières saw opportunity instead. “He really challenged me to propose something different from what he’s used to seeing,” the designer recalls. Whenever de Blignières gravitated toward the wood and stone palettes that have defined much of his work, the client urged him toward something more contemporary. Together, they embraced the prospect of introducing futuristic, decade-defining pieces by Ron Arad and Philippe Starck into the Haussmannian envelope, tempering their innate flamboyance with custom furnishings that evoke the grandeur of Parisian interiors. One principle informed every decision de Blignières undertook: “I wanted to make sure everything we selected was coherent and had balance.”
Throughout the 2,200-square-foot apartment, de Blignières maintained a remarkably steady hand. Rather than relying on bursts of color, he achieved depth through unlikely material pairings. Stainless steel recurs, for example, offering a crisp foil to historic plasterwork and pairing handsomely with lacquered surfaces and shadowy marble. In the living room, two glossy Arad loungers face a monolithic white cocktail table, their sheen and silhouettes echoing a stout ceramic by Aurélien Gendras and a moody Charles Pollock canvas nearby. Flanking the fireplace, custom cabinetry conceals a lacquered bar on one side and a DJ station on the other, allowing the salon to transition effortlessly from post-dinner drinks to late-night gatherings. In the dining room, four wiggly Vico Magistretti chairs gather around a bespoke table, their dark profiles practically dissolving into walls sheathed in jet-black Maison Lelièvre fabric.
Monochromatic palettes can quickly flatten into uniformity, but de Blignières approached this one with unusual discipline. He calibrated the apartment room by room, ascertaining how each artwork and furnishing interacted once installed. The process triggered several key adjustments. The Pollock canvas, earmarked for the primary bedroom, ultimately migrated to the living room, its smoky palette forging stronger connections with the room’s glossy black punches. In its place, de Blignières selected a marble slab–like painting by Enrich.R that mirrors the primary bath’s immersive expanses of Dark Emperador stone. “I wanted something more peaceful in the bedroom,” he says. The quieter artwork also allows a twisting wall-mounted Ron Arad bookshelf to command attention nearby.
One of the apartment’s most unexpected interventions awaits in the kitchen. A brushed stainless steel portal slices through the ornate plasterwork, announcing the room beyond as a distinctly contemporary insertion within the Haussmannian shell. Recognizing his client’s penchant for entertaining, de Blignières conceived the kitchen with the ambience of an elegant bar suited to foster cocktails and conversation deep into the evening. “I didn’t want the kitchen to look like a kitchen,” he says. Appliances, meanwhile, disappear behind meticulously detailed millwork crowned with architectural detailing that carries a surprising backstory.
The sweeping crown moldings that frame the kitchen feel perfectly at home within the apartment’s historic envelope, yet are a recent addition. De Blignières borrowed the profile from the bedroom and recreated it in the kitchen, extending a detail he admired into an entirely new setting. “It was such an interesting detail, so we duplicated it,” he says. The maneuver reflects a recurring thread in his work: identifying compelling architectural elements and reinterpreting them in unexpected ways elsewhere.
Yet de Blignières points to a far simpler moment as his favorite, in one of the two entrance halls. The first serves a practical purpose, welcoming guests with a voluptuous, bagel-shaped mirror suspended above a pair of antique curule stools. Beyond it lies a second gallery that once amounted to little more than leftover square footage. De Blignières recast the passage into a moment of grand arrival, punctuating it with towering bronze candleholders flanking a central table topped with an Aristide Maillol sculpture. “This waste of space enhances the other spaces,” he says. “Here, you get a hint of everything that lies ahead.”