Paris apartments with open views are hard to come by, so when Pierre Vérité and Allira Swick found one with three rooms of south-facing windows overlooking the verdant landscape of Père Lachaise cemetery, what also serves as the city’s largest green space, they knew they’d found something special. And there was more to love: antique chandeliers, plaster medallions, and wood paneling. Yet the apartment had not been updated since 1963 by its most recent inhabitant, a woman in her ’90s.

Pierre and Allira wanted to preserve some of its antique charms while making it their own. “We wanted the apartment to reflect Pierre and I, our tastes, and also how different we are as people and see how that could marry together, with me being Australian and him being French,” said Allira. As a native of Western Australia, Allira gravitated toward earthy, matte, porous finishes that hearkened to a warm outdoor climate. Pierre envisioned a clean modern vibe animated by historic details.

Interior architect Asma Florençon of Atelier Varenne took cues from their different sensibilities, iterating the flat’s finishes and adding new ones to create something that felt whole. “It was a matter of putting different things together in a way that brought out the best features of the space, but with an added layer of what the couple were bringing to it with the next chapter of their lives,” Florençon says.

Before: Dining Room

After: Dining Room

Project architect Asma Florençon of Atelier Varenne preserved the wainscoting, lifted the rugs, and revived the wood floors that were underneath." layout="" credit="Photo by Isabela Mayer" photoUserId=""/>

She moved the primary bedroom to the opposite end of the plan, turning the space into a living room and widening the doorway between it and the dining room with a segmental arch, which became a motif for the renovation. It’s a common element in Paris, Florençon points out. “I think of it as a return to origins,” she says.

Florençon extended the original wall paneling of the dining room into the living room, where built-in bookshelves frame a pink marble mantle Pierre and Allira found on Leboncoin, an online marketplace in France. The couple drove east all the way to the edge of Luxembourg and hauled it back to Paris with a truck.

Pierre and Allira negotiated with the previous owner to retain the antique chandelier, which they cleaned by hand and moved into the living room. Ceramic lamps in the dining room and a pier mirror on top of the mantle echo the soft curve of the segmental arches. The plaster medallions above the chandeliers could not be preserved because of water damage, but Florençon replaced them with polyurethane ones.

Before: Living Room

After: Primary Bedroom

Before: Primary Bedroom

After: Living Room

Before: Hallway

After: Hallway

In the hallways and wet rooms, arches signal thresholds, creating transitions between the dining room and hallway, and the entry vestibule and corridor, for example. Built-in shelves in the primary bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen are also formed into arches. “They’re made with a rough, thick plaster, which gave us the ability to sculpt them,” Florençon says. “We wanted it to feel like the shelves had been carved out rather than built in.”

Before: Kitchen

After: Kitchen

The kitchen features molded built-ins, like the living area." layout="" credit="Photo by Isabela Mayer" photoUserId=""/>

Before: Bathroom

After: Bathroom

Chevron-patterned red brick in the service-oriented areas has an equally handmade feel. It also delineates those spaces from the warm sanctum of the living and dining rooms, where old layers of rugs were lifted to reveal wood floors that were refinished. The brick, a callback to beachside homes in Western Australia, resonated with Alliraas—she pushed for them despite fears they were too porous to sustain exposure from water in the bathrooms. The kitchen and bathroom were expanded by borrowing space from the second bedroom, allowing Pierre enough room for cooking and for the couple to entertain guests. So far, the tiles have worked out, they say.

“She was very, very attached to her experience—she’s from Australia—in the sense of materiality, the experience of space, and the experience of light,” says Florençon. “All of those things were very important to her, and hence to us, to add into the apartment.”

Both Pierre and Allira work from home a few days a week—he for Apple, she for Meta—and they say the renovation ultimately gives them the room they need. Part of that is that the apartment is a venue for the changing colors of the trees just outside the windows in the Père Lachaise cemetery. “It changes every three weeks, the apartment. Because all of the windows look over this gorgeous park, the colors in autumn, summer, and winter are always changing the vibe,” Allira says. “We’re really just having fun.”

More Before & After:

A Breakthrough Renovation Reveals a Parisian Apartment’s Good Bones

A 19th-Century Schoolhouse in Brooklyn Becomes a Classy Apartment

Project Credits:

Interior Designer: Atelier Varenne @ateliervarenne

General Contractor: Riaz Kamboh / Renovation In Paris

Photos: Isabela Mayer @isabelamayerphoto

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