Tour a reimagined Paris apartment inside a Haussmannian mansion with its own epic garden

“It’s like a small forest,” says architect Rebecca Benichou, referring to a charmed private garden in the heart of Paris. Roughly the same square footage as the apartment it belongs to—about 3,000 square feet—the garden is the reason her clients chose the home in the first place. “It’s really in the center of the city,” she adds. “The kind of house you never find.”

For Benichou, founder of Paris’s Batiik Studio, the apartment was a welcome challenge. Working alongside her creative director, Florence Jallet, it was the interior architecture studio’s first large project, having made a name for itself transforming itty-bitty flats (think 450 square feet and even 120 square feet) into imaginative, bespoke spaces with artful palettes and bespoke furniture. But the two-level apartment was also a different type of beast: part of a Haussmannian mansion filled (read: overwhelmed) with ornate details. “They were too much,” recalls Benichou of the fussy moldings, mantels, mirrors, and murals covering every stretch of wall space on the main level.

“Every two months, [the owner] will change the display with new art pieces, or new sculptures,” says Benichou of the dynamic new fireplace, carved with various platforms to showcase art. Breaking up the room’s rectangular shape, a pair of Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert Cloud pendants are installed off-center, and a modular Christophe Delcourt EKO sofa system creates a conversation pit layout around a cluster of aluminum Sabourin Coste coffee tables.

Her clients hoped to showcase their art collection and create a space that harmonized better with their contemporary aesthetic—they needed the apartment to loosen up. Some changes were easy lifts—goodbye, gigantic gilded mirrors—while others required real firepower—like replacing redundant fireplaces with warm cherry wood shelving, or relocating the staircase. But the elaborate moldings choking the main level’s wall space? Those needed a proper intervention.

Friends and family were invited over to tag the walls with spray paint before the renovation. “They actually wanted to keep this tag on the wall,” says Benichou, nodding to a red and yellow tag made by the owner’s son. Custom cherry wood shelving warms up a wall that once held an old fireplace, complementing a stone Amélie Maison d’Art desk. A relocated staircase now commands the entry, complete with a new flat wall to subdue the molding beneath.

A new central staircase leads to a contemporary basement free of Hausmannian flourishes. Batiik Studio signals the shift with a mix of contemporary materials: a white resin banister curls onto a silvery travertine platform sourced from Artefacts, while bespoke cherry wood shelving rises along the wall. A Rosanna Lefeuvre painting completes the picture.

Without erasing the flamboyant bones of the home, Benichou and Jallet skirted around them, crafting wall panels for select sections—like a single stretch in the living room, or a wall behind the primary bedroom’s headboard—that protect and sometimes curve around moldings, scaling back the grandeur. Sculptural by nature and rendered in white, each new plane—some smooth and matte, some textured like the surface of a painting—runs along decorative stretches of molding like a veil, creating clean and contemporary surfaces for hanging art.

With Haussmannian details to spare throughout the apartment, the new walls aren’t permanent (future owners can remove them, revealing the original walls again), but eclipse key sections where moldings are almost oppressive. The edited version, a more artful form of White-Out, adds a new contemporary layer that gives the home, and the owners’ art, room to breathe.

Clad in white materials that match the walls and with no overhead storage, the cooking area virtually disappears. “The client didn’t want the kitchen to look like a kitchen,” adds Benichou, nodding to the sculptural island. A minimal, travertine Garnier & Linker Lipari task light hangs over granite countertops sourced from Paris’s Artefacts. Vintage Scandinavian stools add texture along with a mixed-media artwork, and a Batiik Studio–designed wooden door leads to a new work kitchen (to hide any mess).

Batiik Studio designed a one-of-a-kind dining table that breaks into two pieces, depending on how many guests are over (the fixed smaller piece creates space along the wall for things like sculptures and flowers when not in use). With boulder-like legs and a curving shape, it adds complexity against the room’s rectangular symmetry. Frédéric Pellenq chairs from Kolkhoze and a vintage Louis Poulsen Artichoke light enhance the contrast.

Beyond the walls, new horizontal surfaces make space for sculptural pieces. In the living room, a faceted fireplace in gray-toned travertine adds sharp geometry to the ornate space. Jutting out on either side and along the mantle are plinth-like surfaces for objects tall and small. In the kitchen’s dining area, Benichou and Jallet flexed their talent for bespoke furniture, creating a dramatic ceramic-topped wooden table that swoops into the center of the room—a stage for rotating sculptures and dinner parties alike.

The apartment’s modern basement was, literally, a whole different story. There were no ornate moldings with which to compete, no historic charms to challenge. And so it was a blank slate for Benichou and Jallet to do what they do best: create.

With only a small window in the crafts room, using white across all surfaces—even bespoke storage and a resin floor—made the space as bright as possible. A vintage wooden table paired with vintage Pierre Chapo stools atop a beige Toulemonde Bochart Lion rug give warmth to the pristine palette.

The owner requested space for crafts like painting, ceramics, and other artistic pursuits, which inspired an atelier just off the new staircase. Batiik Studio created recessed and raised geometric patterns across plaster walls, adding playful dimension to formerly dull surfaces. Similar Tetris-like shapes give high definition to plaster walls in the TV room, which indulges a dark blue palette—one of the project’s few doses of color, and a perfect backdrop for streaming movies. And in one of the guest bedrooms, Benichou and Jallet treated the furniture like building blocks, using squared hunks of cast concrete in various sizes to construct a bed frame, shower screen, and library; the hulking shapes create pedestals and surfaces for even more beloved art pieces.

In the end, it was easy to fill in the reimagined home with the clients’ furniture, which included collectible and vintage pieces that added warmth and texture. When Benichou and Jallet saw the finished and furnished project—the real life version beyond their 3D models, complete with art on the walls and light streaming through windows with views of the epic garden—they felt that the clients’ belongings and the interior architecture actually enhanced each other, creating something like a perfect match. “There was a dialogue between the two of them that just became one,” Jallet says. “It was meant to be.”

The massive garden was the main reason Batiik Studio’s clients purchased the two-level apartment. Benichou and Jallet were in awe of the “huge forest” area behind the mansion, a rare gem in central Paris.

In the primary bedroom, a new wall curves around the corner like a curtain, concealing moldings while incorporating a niche that holds a Camille Romagnani vessel. This architectural gesture flows down across the wood floor, which uses a special resin by Propose Paris, to create a zone for a custom bed cleverly upholstered with a Schumacher rug that is covered with bedding from Oeuvres Sensibles.

The large primary bathroom—once a separate studio apartment that Benichou and Jallet worked back into the blueprint—features a custom tub beneath a Clément Mancini painting. Wooden niches in the tub’s base pocket art books and a small sculpture.

Oval-shaped Apparatus Studio sconces and a set of vintage mirrors with rounded corners bring soft dimension to the room’s rectangular layout, contrasting with the custom sharp-edged vanity.

Textural blocks made of layered concrete create ample space behind one of their sons’ beds for displaying sculptures and art, like a Manoela Medeiros painting from Double V Gallery and a figurative sculpture. The room also features a Marseille wall sconce by Nemo and bedding from Oeuvres Sensibles.

Playing with geometry in the media room, cutouts in the plaster wall create playful shapes alongside a bookshelf with storage. The Togo sofa by Ligne Roset creates a loungey vibe, while a Jean-Pierre Viot coffee table from Aurélien Gendras adds texture to the space.

A new bathroom off the entry adds an intimate feel. “The ceiling is lower than other places, so we wanted to make it like a box,” says Benichou of the warm wooden walls. Textured Studio Neue Tres Chic deep green tiles line the actual bathroom, one of the project’s few doses of color (“But it’s almost black,” jokes Benichou).

Batiik Studio removed a large plaster fountain from the outdoor terrace’s wall. “It was really weird,” jokes Benichou, noting how the plaster looked like fake stones. “When we took it off, we happened to find this shape on the wall that we couldn’t destroy, because it’s part of the wall.” Refinishing the surface created a surprising backdrop for the outdoor living room. Atop a garden dining table rest sculptures by Jean-Pierre Viot and Michel Lanos, both from Galerie Aurélien Gendras, and a vintage Willy Guhl Loop chair rests in the corner.