Life Style

How Agathe Labaye and Florian Sumi Turned Their Paris Home Into a ‘Big Diorama’


THE FIRST TIME the 40-year-old French designers Agathe Labaye and Florian Sumi met, they have been in highschool in Dijon, compelled to work collectively in artwork class on an amateurish portray of a useless fish that they nonetheless have in storage. They’d crushes on one another, Labaye says on a dreary March morning whereas the couple sit at an oval black glass eating desk of their third-floor residence in Paris’s Haut Marais. However they didn’t reconnect for an additional 18 years, after ending what Labaye calls “first life” — stuffed with 20-something relationships, houses and jobs — after which deciding to co-create a line of commercial wooden, leather-based and metal furnishings (offered at London’s Charles Burnand gallery), a collaboration that established their skilled and romantic partnership. The subsequent 12 months, in 2019, they accomplished their debut full-scale mission, the renovation of Resort de Pourtalès, a pale-toned Eighth Arrondissement refuge that, as Labaye explains, wanted a recent sense of calm. Three years earlier than, it had been the place Kim Kardashian was held up at gunpoint.

Again then, Sumi thought of himself an artist who produced steampunkish metallic furnishings meant much less for sitting on than for . Labaye was an architect who labored with French designers like Pierre Bonnefille. As their firm, Labaye-Sumi, grew to seven individuals and took on commissions, the pair determined they have been neither of these issues — and each, too. In every of their unbiased practices, that they had lengthy been fascinated by exposing handmade strategies and artisanship, whether or not joinery, wiring or literal nuts and bolts, which frequently resulted in objects and rooms that, virtually like theatrical set items, may very well be disassembled and reassembled in numerous methods. So, not lengthy after they began making areas collectively, they invented a shared philosophy of kinds: “Furnishings makes structure.” As she explains this, Labaye factors above to the bespoke oak railing that borders a lot of the mezzanine-like loft of the 1,290-square-foot, three-bedroom residence: “A good friend lately requested whether or not that balustrade was structure or design, and I couldn’t reply,” she says. “With the ceiling lamps and lecterns [attached to it], it creates structure as a result of the form fills the void.”


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THEIRS, INDEED, IS a world of in-betweens: He likes to face and work all day, she prefers to be horizontal in mattress; he likes sofas, she forbids them; he’s most fascinated by type and supplies, she obsesses over gentle and colours (which on this house alternate between moody jewel tones and comfortable beiges, all lit in buttery hues by customized LED bulbs they manufacture themselves). As they’re brainstorming, one will sketch, the opposite will make 3-D renderings from these drawings after which they’ll carry the outcomes to their atelier outdoors the town in Saint-Denis, the place they manufacture most components for this and different tasks. After they host dinner events, typically a number of occasions every week, Sumi does the cooking whereas Labaye refills drinks and smokes cigarettes with buddies, all of them leaning out the window.

A lot of the house, in reality, is oriented round having individuals over for hours, the house adjusted as wanted: The center of the residence is the kitchen and eating room, the place in lieu of inflexible picket seating they’ve positioned 4 classic burgundy velvet armchairs that encourage guests to remain and chill out. For additional friends, they’ll pull squat stools from the remainder of the dwelling, which unfurls down a snaking 55-foot window-lined hall via a cavernous central sitting space, the first suite and as much as the inside balcony, with a semi-exposed research and rooms for his or her two younger kids. All over the place you look, there’s modern portraiture on the partitions, and chaises and divans that encourage crouching and dialog beneath dramatic hanging pendants. “We aren’t towards the everyday Parisian residence,” says Labaye. “However this type of place gave us the flexibility to essentially push laborious —”

“To invent one thing,” Sumi provides, ending her thought.

Maybe it is sensible, then, that simply as they by no means supposed to design flats, this was by no means meant to be an residence within the first place. It was constructed within the 1870s because the chapel of a convent, they usually’ve maintained this vernacular by delineating rooms, some with beamed 15-foot ceilings, throughout three distinct naves, with the residing space occupying the center. Till the couple renovated the place in 2023, a single girl had lived right here for 4 many years, rising outdated amongst her assortment of ashtrays and classic Le Corbusier chairs. Lengthy earlier than she arrived, the upstairs degree had been a church attic the place Jews hid after the Nazis invaded.

The duo wished to pay tribute to the home’s architectural legacy nevertheless they might — for instance, by hanging tough jute curtains they felt have been humble and vaguely magisterial. Additionally they put in curved sliding wood-and-glass doorways alongside the hall that enable every downstairs house to be cloistered or opened up, exposing it to the unique arched home windows reverse the corridor. “Our flat is a giant diorama for the neighbors,” says Sumi, gesturing to the numerous who stay across the constructing’s courtyard. “It’s an actual stage. So we simply play.”



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