Half an hour from Paris, Marc Chaya’s house in Chailly-en-Bière is a world away. Its clean white curves and corners seem to float in a flat wooded park on the edge of the vast Fontainebleau forest. It gleams placidly, a world away, too, from the plowed-over fields down the road, where a few remnant heads of lettuce lie forlornly, like guillotined kings. It also bears no resemblance whatsoever to its neighbors, French McMansions of the faux-Norman style.

The 3,068-square-foot home, with its windows framed in curving concrete, has more in common with Terminal 2 at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Indeed, some say the house is an early work of architect Paul Andreu, who oversaw the airport’s master plan and designed several concourses there, as well as the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing, numerous museums, and other major works around the world.

The previous owners told Marc that Andreu and a friend designed the residence for the friend’s family when they were students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the late 1960s. But after the original owners chopped up the interior into small rooms and long, dark hallways, Andreu refused to acknowledge any role in its creation.

“The details on the exterior are like louver shutters. They create a pattern that contrasts with the rounded shape of the windows.”
—Julien Pilon, renovation architect

The architect died in 2018, and his office says the story is pure fiction—fabricated to sell real estate. But if its paternity is uncertain, one thing is not: “The house was like a labyrinth,” says Marc, who bought it in 2017. He asked Andreu to renovate it, but the architect declined, and Marc instead turned to Julien Pilon, at the time an architect with Forall Studio in Paris.

Marc and Pilon had previously worked together on retail concepts for Maison Francis Kurkdjian, the perfume house Marc created with Kurkdjian and which is now part of LVMH. (The house’s credits include Baccarat Rouge 540, among other well-known scents.)

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Marc praises Pilon for working so collaboratively on the renovation. “Julien listens, and he makes your wish come true,” he says. That’s one way of saying that Marc—who began looking at architectural magazines while growing up in Beirut—both knows what he wants and is willing to wait, sometimes years, to get it.

He points to an original Parentesi, a lamp by Achille Castiglioni, which has pride of place in his living room: “I’ve wanted one since I was a kid,” he says. He notes the same of the dining room’s Wishbone chairs by Hans Wegner. He knew this was his dream house when he first saw an ad for it in January 2016, but he was on vacation in Cambodia and had to let it drop. More than a year later, he saw another ad. This time he bought it.

The sculptural house, which consists of a main floor and a basement level, is a boxy volume that recalls a casual California modernism by way of continental brutalism. Between large windows and glass walls, the house is nearly transparent on all sides—“like a dollhouse,” Marc says—all the more so because Pilon erased the extraneous walls that had allegedly offended Andreu.

“We removed everything that was not structural to free the circulation, to rethink the way you move through the house,” Pilon says. It’s filled with Marc’s art collection, and the distribution of photographs, paintings, lithographs, and sculpture is now the best indicator of any prescribed path through the space.

The main level has a meandering floor plan, with the living room bleeding into Marc’s office—or not. The office, and attached primary suite, can also be closed off by pulling shut a pocket door. Other doors are similarly hidden, even some that are extra wide, allowing the space to be reconfigured easily or left relatively loose.

Although Marc works in perfume, he doesn’t intentionally scent his home. The subtle notes of mandarin, iris, wood, and vanilla that wafted through the house on a recent visit are from the perfumes he wears—from Maison Francis Kurkdjian, of course—a wardrobe of scents that he selects based on his mood.

His choice this day enhances the home’s breezy affect, and appropriately, he says it was the house’s kinship with 1960s West Coast modernism that made it so appealing. “I call the house Chailly en Spring because it reminds me of Palm Springs,” Marc says. “I always wanted a house there, but I ended up with a Palm Springs house in Chailly.”

Project Credits:

Renovation Design: Julien Pilon

General Contracting: Georgesbat

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A Perfume Magnate Renovates a House With a Murky Past Outside Paris