have enabled the faithful restoration of some facades and an approximation of the street’s original atmosphere.
The Villa Martel, on a 61-by-40 foot lot, housed the sculpture studio of Mallet-Stevens’s close friends, Jan and Joël Martel, twin brothers and sculptors who co-signed their works. In addition to the sculpture studio, the house contained identical apartments for each brother and his family, a smaller apartment for their widowed father and two maid’s rooms. There were three independent entrances: to the left of the garage, to the right of the sculpture studio and, in the center, a common entrance serving the apartments and the sculpture studio’s upper level. Entered at ground level from the street through an extremely tall sliding door, the studio is organized on two additional half levels below grade, the largest reserved for modeling and glazing. A mezzanine, outfitted as an office, overlooked a sitting area that could be separated from the studio by a blue plastic curtain. The different floor levels generate a similar fragmentation in the interior and exterior spaces on the upper levels; the two apartments on the second and third floors as well as the father’s apartment and maid’s rooms on the fourth, are all laid out on half levels.

On the exterior, a cylindrical stair tower organizes and dominates the building’s composition. The only strong vertical element, it is reinforced by a stained glass panel, designed by Louis Barillet, that runs its entire height. A large terrace, surfaced with black, red, gray and white mosaic, covers the roof; it provides access to a small circular terrace on the top of the stair tower. This terrace is sheltered by a wide cement crown, whose red mosaic underside is highly visible from the street. Other strong graphic elements, such as the yellow rolling shutters and the bright red or blue painted edges on architectural elements of the neighboring houses, emphasize the plastic organization of the complex. A roughly textured plaster of white granular cement unifies the exterior surfaces of the various structures. At the foot of their facades, hefty horizontal grooves in the grey cement define a three-foot-high band.

The ironwork doors and handles of the Villa Martel were designed and fabricated in the workshop of architect and industrialist Jean Prouvé. The interior walls are painted a simple white to highlight the shapes of the rooms and natural light; the floors are terrazzo or sandstone tile, which are easily washed. As he often did, Mallet-Stevens called on his friends to design the furniture for the apartments: Gabriel Guévrékian designed the father’s bedroom; Francis Jourdain, the suspended sliding storage units for the living room of the third floor; and Charlotte Perriand created a “studio-bar” in one of the bedrooms.

The Villa Martel escaped degradation better than other buildings on the street because it remained, for the most part, within the Martel family until the 1980s. The sculpture studio was sold in 1999 to art aficionados, who also bought the fourth floor a few years later. Partial renovations have
connected the maid’s rooms to the small apartment, but Guévrékian’s built-in furniture is still in place. In the sculpture studio, a few colossal sculptures by Jan and Joël Martel remain; the rest of the space has been furnished by the current owners. In the second floor apartment, sold at the death of the two brothers in 1966, nothing remains of the original furniture. However, the furniture in the third floor apartment, where the widow of Joël Martel lived until her death at age 99, was still intact in 2005. Purchased recently by a Parisian gallery owner specializing in furniture of the 1950s, this apartment will become a gallery. Its furniture, removed for restoration, will be returned to its original location.

It is the enduring presence of so many original elements that conjures for the visitor a breathtaking experience of 1930s space: the terrazzo and mosaic, the sculpted detailing on plinths, the pure white surface of the walls, the great banks of windows, the rolling shutters, the door handles, the heating