Inside the Parisian Apartment Where It’s Always 1969
The
musician Nicolas Godin, one half of the indie-electro band Air, has
recreated the sort of bourgeois, moody interiors he knew as a child.
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THE SCHEME FOR the French musician Nicolas Godin’s
apartment began with a meeting, for which he was running early. It was
2004, and the appointment — its purpose now forgotten — was in the Sixth
Arrondissement of Paris, where a friend of his has an antiques shop.
Godin stopped in to have a look, and emerged smitten: “I had a crush on a
painting,” he said. The object of his affection depicted a young woman
in a simple white dress with voluminous sleeves. She had pale skin, a
lustrous bun and an unflappable expression.
“I
used to have sleepovers at my best friend’s house,” Godin recalled.
“I’d be sleeping on an old couch in the TV room and there was this
portrait of a beautiful woman. I saw all of my childhood coming back in
one snap.” He took the painting. He also took from it an idea for how to
decorate a flat that he had recently bought in Gros Caillou, a quiet
residential area not far from the Eiffel Tower.
The background of the portrait was rendered in a dark but serene hue
that was not exactly green and not exactly gray, a color that now covers
the walls of Godin’s flat, speaking to what he calls his “nostalgic
desire to refresh memories and places around the Paris life I used to
know.”
Godin’s mother was a
housewife; his father, Philippe, an architect, helped design the Stade
Louis II in Monaco and worked on Yamoussoukro, a new capital city
commissioned in the ’80s by the president of the Ivory Coast. The family
lived in the 17th Arrondissement and, when Godin was a year old, moved
to a “cool, ’70s wood-and-stone building” in the genteel suburb of
Versailles. The contrasting aesthetics of his surroundings impressed on
him the fundamental link between style and place. “I grew up in this,
like, ‘Mad Men’ world,” he said. “But on the other side of the road I
was in Marie Antoinette’s village with my bike.”
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Marion Berrin
Godin,
now 49, earned a degree in architecture from the École Nationale
Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles before starting his career in
music, forming the seminal indie-electro band Air in 1995. Two years
later, he teamed up with math teacher and fellow native Versailles
resident Jean-Benoît Dunckel, and the duo released Air’s first album, which included the single “Sexy Boy” and sold more than two million copies around the world. Air’s second album, “The Virgin Suicides,”
doubled as the soundtrack for the Sofia Coppola movie of the same name.
The group’s dreamy, retro-futuristic sound was, in its way, a tribute
to their boyhood stomping grounds. “I used to spend all day hanging out
in the gardens of Versailles,” Godin said. “It was very calm, very wide,
with lots of space and very few elements.” Air was basically Le Nôtre
in your headphones.
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Godin
spent most of his 30s touring the world. When he decided to buy
something in Paris, he hired a flat hunter, giving her one criterion: He
wanted a place where he could leave the windows open. She came back
with some imperfect options. One of them was a seven-room fixer-upper on
the fifth floor of a Haussmannian
building. “The apartment was not so charming,” Godin said, explaining
that the previous owner had stripped out its original parts, down to the
mantles and radiators. “ ‘Not so charming’ is an overstatement,” said
his wife, the Brazilian-born bassist and scarf designer Iracema Trevisan,
35, who met Godin at a music festival in Melbourne a year after he’d
closed on the property. (She bears an eerie likeness to the woman in the
painting.) “Everything was kind of caramel colored,” Trevisan said.
Still,
the place was parkside, meaning that Godin could easily walk Maya, his
whippet, and it was high up, where he could throw open the shutters. “I
was born, like, 500 meters from here,” he said, so the property also had
sentimental pull. “I think in 20 years it will be almost impossible to
find a real Parisian apartment dans son jus, as we say.”
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TAKING
SERGE GAINSBOURG’S moody, tenebrous apartment on the Rue de Verneuil as
a reference, Godin worked with the artist and decorator Mathias Kiss
to turn the place into something he felt was more “vibey.” Their goal
was a self-consciously Proustian revival of the rooms of Godin’s
childhood, except that the interiors he craved were perhaps less akin to
madeleines, which no one ever stopped liking, than to crêpes Suzette:
bourgeois, labor-intensive, too heavy for many modern tastes. They
wanted to push back against the wenge floors, white walls and ceiling
spotlights that were, all over the city, turning Paris apartments into
places that they didn’t remember. “This flat is just memories, memories
of my life,” Godin said. “I’m recreating some stuff that I used to
experience.”
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The
resulting renovation amounts to an in-group elegy, a series of private
jokes. Building off the mysterious background in the portrait, which now
hangs in the dining room, the two men decided that all of the colors in
the apartment should defy identification. “If you can name the color,
it’s not quite right,” Godin said. There is mustardy wall-to-wall carpet
by the venerable Parisian firm Codimat
and a hall lined with built-in closets lacquered in a smoky shade to
match a photograph of a Vietnamese opium den that Godin saw at the Albert Kahn Museum
in Boulogne-Billancourt. Godin says he is not a collector, but he
nonetheless has a nice collection: David Hicks side tables in lacquered
beechwood, a Willy Rizzo lamp and desk in his favorite black-and-yellow
portoro marble. “I didn’t want to do period rooms; I just wanted the
apartment to be how it’s supposed to be,” he said.
Godin
was determined to uphold the traditional codes of decoration that so
many home-improving Parisians of his generation have thrown into the
dumpster, considering them unlivable. This is apparent from the moment
you walk into the large, space-wasting entryway, the walls of which are
hung with Chinese ink drawings that his father made while studying
drafting. Then there’s a little door that leads from a secret corridor
directly to the dining room, enabling the kind of entertaining that few
people still do. (The kitchen, of course, is small and separate.) Godin
canvassed his older neighbors to figure out what the building’s original
door handles looked like and tracked them down at the city’s Paul Bert Serpette
market. In the dining room, Kiss — who mastered traditional craft
techniques during a stint as a traveling apprentice — treated the
ceiling with silver leaf, which is meant to resemble the pavement
outside a Parisian cafe on a rainy night.
But
Godin’s most transgressively old-school move was to swaddle the space
in fabric: Prussian-blue velvet walls in his bedroom; linen-paneled
dressing room doors; yards and yards of light-blocking curtains in the
plushest black velvet. “In the beginning, I was surprised with the
choice,” Trevisan said. “For me, it’s all about colors and plants. But I
really enjoy it, because it creates something really cozy.” She was
sitting in the living room, which had a muffled, womblike feel. There
was a silver cup full of cigarettes on the coffee table. You could hear
birdsong instead of passing buses. You could have been in 1969.
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