Vintage Paris Apartment With Eclectic Features

Located in a 17th century building in Le Haut Marais, the lovely Paris home and showroom of Australian-born fashion designer Martin Grant is an intriguing mix of flea market finds, travel souvenirs and textiles.I’d say that this apartment is real French chic at its best, with eclectic features and refined items that seem to be so different but work well together.

The previous owners had already renovated the home but Grant repainted everything white, including the walls, woodwork, mantelpiece and exposed beams. The beams had been left natural and varnished; it felt like an English pub; he also sanded and oiled the doors.

The mood inside the apartment is at once harmonious and eclectic, there’s a “weird mix of things”. He inherited his passion for mid-century pieces from his forward-thinking parents, who made their family home a 1960s, clean-lined Robin Boyd-designed house in Blackburn, outside Melbourne. So, against a backdrop of pieces with clean, modernist lines, Grant has filled his current apartment with a warmth of antique, cultural and textural influences.

The furniture includes a number of vintage flea market finds, such as mid-century Scandinavian sofas, one-legged tables and Gio Ponti- style chairs. To line his walls, Grant has swapped frocks for photography and artworks by friends, including Australian artist Rosslynd Piggott and photographer Polly Borland. To accessorize, there are Willy Rizzo table lamps, vases from Luxor and cabinets featuring intriguing mementos from his travels, such as delicate ceramics, anemone shells, pretty paperweights and apothecary bottles.

Grant also feels the need for change at home, so he moves the whole apartment around. He changes things and their places and shifts them as he likes, which makes him feel he moved into a new space – such a inspiring and refreshing idea, try!