the top and bottom, and the fragments of the view to the exterior through little openings in the stained glass that seem to contradict the window’s vertical continuity when seen from the exterior.

Curiously, the owners of the sculpture studio, the only current occupants of the house, have chosen, for the love of art, to live in a space not conceived as a residence. Unlike the apartments, the studio offers only rare views to the exterior; the great windows which illuminate the studio with a constant light, as they are supposed to, are too high to see through and are, for the most part, fitted with translucent glass. Buried a half level below grade, the great volume of the lower studio provides a pleasant sensation of retreat from the world, unexpected and somewhat strange, and very different from that provoked by the light-flooded spaces that Mallet-Stevens, as a true modernist, designed for the residential apartments. It is, finally, in veering from the studio’s original purpose, that its new residents have discovered the pleasure of inhabiting the work of Mallet-Stevens — and demonstrated the adaptability of timeless architecture. It is the visual and physical enjoyment created by the successful linking of its various spaces and the careful details that accompany their daily use that, in the end, guarantees the possibility of revitalizing this space, independent of all theoretical models.

Valérie de Calignon is a Paris-based designer and professor at the École Boulle. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in the history of late 20th-century European interior design.