Pierre Yovanovitch Invites You Inside His Parisian Apartment

In the hands of Pierre Yovanovitch, the Paris apartment that iconic designer Jean-Michel Frank once called home gets a spectacular new lease on life.

Not all was lost, of this historic apartment, as Paris-based designer Pierre Yovanovitch discovered when he took on its most recent redesign for a French family. The unfinished oak panelling and bookcases remained, as did the pale pink marble in the entrance hall. For Pierre Yovanovitch, this was enough to fulfil the clients’ wish to return the home’s atmosphere “to something more Jean-Michel Frank—something more contemporary,” he says.

Pierre Yovanovitch began by rearranging the floor plan of the 2,500-square-foot duplex. He kept the two main salons as they were, but almost everything else changed. He moved the kitchen from the back corner—as was the case in old grand Paris apartments, “because families had staff,” Pierre Yovanovitch explains—to a more central location, and added an island with barstools. He turned the former kitchen into a guest bath and a powder room, and the dining room into a guest room.

Once the flow was sorted, Pierre Yovanovitch played with the apartment’s unusual design features, such as the small, round tower, where he put the wife’s home office, outfitted with a crescent-shaped desk; the windowless staircase to the second floor, for which he commissioned a delightful fresco evoking windows and mouldings; and the 650-square-foot terrace—a rarity in Paris—which he tied to both the living room and the dining room, allowing, as Pierre Yovanovitch puts it, “an in-and-out that is very fluid.”