Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it often misses the mark. Copying a look or a lifestyle without somehow making that model your own is simply aping, not an expression of admiration. Homage is an empty tribute when issued without true love. But when appreciation and understanding converge, the compliment hits home.
This small Paris apartment, located in the city’s sixth arrondissement, exemplifies an informed, measured and original reading of 70s style. Designed by Ève Ducroq and Arnaud Dollinger, the color-driven rooms, outfitted with vintage pieces, echo another era but stay this side of time capsules. The client, who bounces between New York and the City of Light, was looking for a suite-like cocoon in which to settle comfortably when in town. “She approached us because she really likes the 70s universe, which is part of our signature,” explains Ducroq, who studied art history at the École du Louvre. “She wanted something unique and daring, and we were able to express ourselves fully while respecting her wishes.”
Fans of cinema with an offbeat sense of humor – think Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodóvar – the designers incorporated unusual touches. In the foyer, for example, they installed an unplumbed pedestal sink to serve as a catch-all for bags and keys. “We try and lead our customers towards surprising things that they wouldn’t necessarily have thought of or known about,” shares Dollinger, a trained cabinetmaker. “It’s also our role as interior designers to take customers where they don’t expect to go.”
Saturated paint colors – green in the living room, orange in the home office – fill the eye and invest each room with a very concrete presence. Throughout, a shrewd selection of complementary furnishings create a relaxed yet conspicuously unified look. Grounded by a leopard-print rug from Madeleine Castaing, the living room is outfitted with anonymous Italian pieces, including a low-slung sectional sofa in brown velvet and a table made of metal and plastic, as well as a classic Warren Platner buffet. The office sports a desk topped with orange melamine and paired with an Adalberto Caraceni chair, along with Gae Aulenti’s Pipistrello lamp, first produced in the 1960s.
Although the kitchen is executed in a more neutral, black-and-white scheme, the play of pattern – a grid treatment on the cabinets and a checkerboard floor – makes this room the dynamic equivalent of the other spaces. “Kitchens in France are often living spaces, and we treat them as rooms in their own right, over and above their function of food preparation,” notes Ducroq. “This one is quite ornate and narrow, but rather than seeing this as a negative constraint, we decided to accentuate it as much as possible with this Superstudio-style grid and play with the optical effect.” [Superstudio was a socially progressive architecture firm founded in Florence, Italy, in the 1960s].
From avocado appliances to disco, the 70s are often dismissed as a sort of lost decade when compared to the psychedelic exuberance of the 1960s and the high style of the 1980s. But bright colors and soft curves were key expressions of the times, and in hands as capable as those of Ducroq and Dollinger, never go out of style.
Photography by Cécile Perrinet Lhermitte.
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