Quietly Composed

“A quiet way of living doesn’t mean minimal or strict – it means thoughtful,” says Samantha Hauvette, co-founder of French design studio Hauvette & Madani with Lucas Madani. For this family home close to the Bois de Boulogne – Paris’ vast green lung in the west of the city – it feels as though the practice has taken some of the park’s sense of escape and greenery and imbued it into a calm and secluded home.

Organised over three levels, this house needed to feel warm and lived-in according to the brief from the homeowners, a family of four. “One of the main challenges was transforming a relatively compact house into a generous family home without losing intimacy,” says Madani. “From the beginning the project was imagined around everyday life – being together, sharing meals, spending time with friends, but also having moments of retreat. The house is organised so that family life unfolds naturally, without rigid separations, while still offering intimacy when needed.”

Major layout changes have included opening up and extending the ground floor, which takes care of the need for shared family space, and turning the top floor into a master suite just for the parents, which answers the challenge of providing somewhere luxurious to retreat to as well.

Hauvette & Madani looked to Japanese design as an influence, less in a literal sense (there are no shoji screens, or futons) and more in the way they wanted the house to flow. “We’re drawn to the way [Japanese design] frames nature, creates sequences of spaces, and encourages a quieter relationship to everyday life,” says Hauvette. “It’s subtle, but it shapes the atmosphere.”

The remodelled house and its garden were considered in tandem (with landscape design by Aliénor de Bailliencourt), so that one feels like an easy extension of the other; the planting on the ground floor runs close to the windows, so that nature is always close to the interiors.

Materiality is also an important part of the equation. There are swathes of oak, used for flooring, joinery and bespoke furniture, including a front door pierced with rows of roundels that cast fabulous shadows inside – while the exterior of the newly extended ground floor is clad in a charred shou sugi ban oak. In the custom-made kitchen, the warmth of the wood marries beautifully with a soapy green quartz worktop and splashback that picks up on the leafiness of the garden beyond.

The interiors are full of products that the practice has designed either bespoke for this project or as part of its existing catalogue. A Gioello glass and steel light, part of a recent collaboration with Marine Breynaert, hangs on the wall in the kitchen, while the sofas and chairs in the living room are part of the studio’s own Entrements collection.

The house’s beautiful light and flow, and limited palette of materials, may bring the calm that the homeowners were looking for, but there are some bold, playful gestures, too. Black and white harlequin diamonds dazzle on the stair carpet; Hauvette & Madani’s checkerboard marquetry table in macassar ebony and sycamore strikes a similar note in one corner of the living room. Art from Galerie Gastou, including a pink monster-like ceramic piece from Agnès Debizet, adds further personality.

At the top of the house, the split-level master suite serves multiple functions, with joinery cleverly separating them out. A custom oak headboard splits the sleeping area from the open-plan bathroom three steps up, with the bath tucked in just the other side of the headboard. It’s carpeted and features silk Fortuny wall lights – all very plush and decadent-feeling for a bathing space.

Madani says that this project “brings together everything we care about – architecture, interiors, furniture and landscape conceived as a whole. At the same time, it helped us refine our approach to domestic spaces, especially in terms of comfort and long-term living.” Studied and considered, this is a home that “feels calm, warm and easy to inhabit, day after day.”