The Paris-based architect and designer Rodolphe Parente refuses to subscribe to a signature style. “On each project, we create a different story; we try to have the right tone, to develop the right emotion,” the 39-year-old says of his narrative-driven approach, which is based on interpreting a client’s desires instead of imposing his own mark. For one recent apartment redesign in Monte Carlo, the unique Mediterranean light and the Modernist building itself inspired Parente to work with textured materials that would be enhanced by the changing shadows; by contrast, in 2015 he transformed a Parisian apartment built in 1910 into a spare futuristic pod with concrete walls and glossy red floors, channeling the client’s devotion to Buddhism, modern architecture and David Lynch.
Parente’s latest work is the renovation of a 2,000-plus-square-foot pied-à-terre in Paris’s well-heeled Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. The luminous space showcases his trademark strengths — bold use of color, play between texture and context — along with his own bespoke furniture, but it is this talent for collaborative storytelling that unites each element. Owned by a Swiss art dealer who wishes to remain anonymous, the airy five-room Haussmannian-style apartment, with herringbone floors and a procession of towering double windows, marries typical Parisian elegance with a distinctly personal selection of idiosyncratic contemporary art and objects.
Cleverly worked into the mix are the owner’s art and antique heirlooms, including a collection of Picasso’s ceramics, which serve as what Parente calls “protagonists” in several rooms. On the antique desk in the study, for example, a vividly painted terra-cotta vase by Picasso is offset by an enameled mask, in the somber style of Japanese raku pottery, by the Mexican artist Pia Camil. “We found that the dialogue between these two ceramics, from two different eras, was really interesting,” he recalls.
The idea that materials and objects have their own vocabulary has long been central to Parente’s practice. After studying interior design at both the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Dijon and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg, as well as product design at the École Cantonale d’Art in Lausanne, he worked for five years for the Paris-based designer Andrée Putman, who passed on a skill for rich, layered storytelling. Since establishing his own studio in 2010, Parente has applied this talent to both private projects as well as restaurants and stores in Europe and beyond.
In all of his spaces, Parente seamlessly weaves his custom-made furniture into the narrative, and the Saint-Germain-des-Prés apartment is no exception. In the hushed-toned dining room, his minimalist rectangular dining table, in a muted Breche marble, takes pride of place among nubuck leather chairs by the Italian designer Willy Rizzo and is topped by a bulbous bright blue vase by the local designer Jean-Baptiste Fastrez. For the master bedroom, which has a palette that evokes Dutch master paintings (cerulean, cognac, tangerine), Parente designed a textured brass headboard shaped like a folding screen. In the open living room, his inviting brushed-bronze silk sofa and lacquered dark salmon tiered coffee table face the owner’s circular Boris Tabakoff armchair, composed of a brown-tinted plexiglass shell with creamy leather upholstery — a tension between matte and reflective surfaces found throughout the apartment.
Thanks to the abundance of windows, the light changes in every room of the home throughout the day. Parente had the study painted a deep mustard, which appears “not yellow, not brown, not oak,” depending on the hour. In the living room, the soft off-white walls can develop from a blush at dawn to a powder gray as evening falls. “I love this ambiguity,” says Parente. “You can really feel the shadows.”
Like the frames of a film, each corner and perspective in the home is designed and styled with intention and a love of surprise. In the owner’s son’s bedroom, for example, an electric blue tube chair by the midcentury Italian industrial designer Joe Colombo and a glittery violet canvas by the contemporary American painter Jacin Giordano are vibrant focal points. In the study, atop the owner’s luxurious antique ebony desk, Parente set a metal lamp by the midcentury French lightning designer Jacques Biny to create an unexpected juxtaposition of industrial and antique. And in the compact entranceway is a framed large-scale photograph by the Swiss artist Walter Pfeiffer, which at first seems an indistinct amalgam of vibrant colors — until the image of a nude figure emerges. “You don’t notice it when you are in front, because it’s huge and you are in the color, but then you see the guy,” says Parente with glee.
This kind of intrigue stems from Parente’s perennial desire to play with the perception of high and low culture, evident throughout the apartment. In a corner of the living room, two 17th-century portraits of the owner’s Alsatian ancestors hang where the walls meet, so close they might as well be attached by a hinge, bringing irreverence and modernity to the austere antiques. And on a dresser in the bedroom, another Picasso plate offsets a quirky, multicolored polymorphous work in fiberglass by the French contemporary sculptors known as Les Simonnet. “It’s just a question of taste,” says Parente, for whom divergent styles and sensibilities are an opportunity, not an obstacle. “You can do something in between.”