Red is a colour which the French interior designer Damien Langlois-Meurinne associates with grand buildings from the 17th and 18th centuries. Nestled in the genteel 16th arrondissement, it belongs to a cosmopolitan French couple with a young family.Here, in this turn-of-the-century building, Langlois-Meurinne decided to integrate red in a different way: he painted the ceiling and alcoves in the entrance hall a deep crimson tone.Because the space is very much the heart of the house.Rather than adding a traditional touch, it feels more like a strikingly modern gesture.

The ornate wall panelling on the ground floor looked decidedly sad, there was an industrial-style kitchen on the lower ground level with prosaic white wall tiles, and one of the bedrooms was still decorated with faded floral wallpaper – on the walls and the ceiling. Still, the architectural splendour imagined by Grandpierre was largely intact. 

On the ground level, he carried out very few modifications, but the others were largely reconfigured. On the lower ground floor, a more convivial kitchen was installed, along with staff quarters, a hammam and a gym. The top level, meanwhile, is centred around a family room that leads out onto a terrace.Langlois-Meurinne’s only significant architectural invention was to extend the grand sweeping stone staircase up to the top of the house (it had previously stopped at the first floor) and a light well directly above it. 

By way of example, he points to the highly lacquered cobalt blue dining table, which he custom-designed for the project.There are other strong touches of colour elsewhere and, as in many of his interiors, he gave different rooms a quite distinct chromatic identity. The sitting room is largely dominated by gold tones, while the kitchen units are a sharp forest-like green.

Yet more visual drama is created in this renovated Paris mansion by the concentric black and white floor motif in the entry hall, as well as a number of striking artworks including a large tree drawing by Christian Lapie above the master bed, and a series of photos of African masks by Thierry Fontaine in the sitting room, whose eyes have been filled with half-used candles, endowing them with wax tears.