With wood as its guiding thread and hospitality at its heart, Saint-Georges sculpts a 240-square-metre Paris apartment into a home built for everyday life and easy entertaining with a nod to Art Deco theatricality throughout.
In Paris’s 9th arrondissement, architects Samantha Hauvette and Lucas Madani have completed a 240-square-metre apartment, named Saint-Georges after its surrounding neighbourhood, that dispels a familiar modern compromise: that a home built for daily life can’t also be one built for gathering.
The apartment unfolds across four levels, structured like a sequence of events. The ground floor opens into a generous reception space, a salon designed for conversation and warmth, while upper levels retreat into quieter, more private rooms where domestic rhythms take over. “The existing architecture already suggested a vertical hierarchy, but it lacked clarity and coherence,” Hauvette explains. Their main intervention was to sharpen that progression, making the ground floor the social heart of the home, and letting each level above settle into its own character.
Running throughout each floor, oak weaves a continuous story. Large panels punctuate the architecture, framing views and lending rhythm to rooms that might otherwise feel disconnected. “We were interested in creating a strong sense of continuity throughout the house,” Madani says. Oak became the unifying thread carrying a visitor from one zone to the next, its warmth balancing the architecture’s structure. Rather than multiplying materials room to room, Hauvette and Madani worked in subtle variations of texture and proportion, keeping the architecture legible and calm.
An arched threshold in walnut and rubied marble frames the kitchen space, its curved form softening the room’s transition from the rest of the home. Vintage Murano lighting and an art deco sculpture sit against the kitchen’s marble console, sourced from Talka, alongside a painting referencing a “ruby grape” hue from Argile.
A DK03 dining table is surrounded by vintage Danish chairs beneath an oak-panelled wall, with the steel balustrade above designed in-house by the team at Hauvette & Madani. Oak joinery wraps the staircase, with Hauvette & Madani’s own Gioiello wall lamps, designed in collaboration with Marine Breynaert, and the Hauvette & Madani Le FontaineBleau floor lamp lighting the space.
That clarity underfoot, including a pale oak parquet laid in traditional herringbone, gives way to richer materials elsewhere. The salon space deepens into golden timber tones, while the kitchen shifts into dense walnut, a subtly rubied wall, and marble, lending the room a grounded, almost theatrical richness. “We wanted it to have a slightly more intimate and enveloping atmosphere,” the designers note of the kitchen, which remains fully connected to the home’s living spaces—a room for both daily routine and entertaining, where practicality and conviviality coexist.
In the private quarters, the same restraint holds true and an oak and lacquer headboard, sculptural wall lights of the studio’s own design, natural textiles by Simrane are all layered with ease. The bathrooms continue this sentiment, with marble surfaces meeting elegant, simple fittings.
Saint-Georges carries a dialogue between what’s bespoke and what’s been collected. A 1969 Maxime Old coffee table, sourced through Galerie Gastou, anchors the living room alongside vintage Murano lighting, while textiles by French heritage brand Lelièvre in earthy tones add warmth without ornament. For Hauvette and Madani, the decision between designing and sourcing begins with the architecture and custom pieces respond precisely to a space, while vintage and collectible objects bring in character and history. “We enjoy creating a conversation between bespoke elements and carefully sourced objects,” Hauvette says, “as this combination gives interiors a richer and more layered quality.”
A 1969 Maxime Old coffee table, sourced through Galerie Gastou, anchors the living space, paired with an oak bench custom-made by Atelier Place Assise and a Gino Sarfatti lamp.
There’s a nod throughout to the decorative arts—an era, as Hauvette and Madani describe it, when interiors were theatrical rather than merely functional, shaped by sociability and the pleasure of being together. But theatre, for the pair, “does not come from decoration alone but from the way space is experienced” through proportion, perspective, materiality and light. Art Deco served as an important reference—by focusing on its underlying principles rather than ornamental attributes, they’ve found a way to evoke drama while holding onto contemporary restraint.
Saint-Georges weaves hosting into the DNA of its design, culminating in a Parisian apartment where true luxury is found in warmth, and not excess.
The fireplace, by La Parisienne de Ramonage, sits within oak panelling, with a Terrae Sienne carpet from Lelièvre underfoot and a personal African bust standing nearby adding character and intrigue.
A custom oak and Alicante marble washbasin cabinet sits beside an artwork by Yvette Hauvette.
An oak and lacquer headboard, custom-made for the project, sits beneath Hauvette & Madani La Corbeille wall lamps from the studio’s Entremets collection, with bed linen in Greige and a Simrane bedspread layered on top.
