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Flammel Apartment details | As Seen In | Maps | RATE CLICK ON THUMBNAILS TO ENLARGE IMAGES or GO TO SLIDESHOW  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paris Luxe has partnered with the leading private concierge service in Paris to coordinate roundtrip airport transfers, romantic getaways, restaurant reservations, personal requests, unique Paris activities. View a sample customized plan for Personal Concierge Service here. Please inquire with Paris Luxe booking agent. Please note that prices may increase for arrivals on Christmas or New Year's Week. If you are arriving Christmas or New Year's Day, please expect to pay a supplemental welcome fee. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST
Having fallen out of favor after the French
Revolution, the Marais become so
spectacularly dilapidated by the fifties that it
was considered a slum. Renewed attention
to the area has revived it, and over the past
twenty years the Marais has once again
become on the most fashionable and sought-after places in Paris. For Yann Hentschke, a publisher who had been living in New York, the Marais seemed the ideal place to look for a town house. “After leaving New York, I lived
Everything needed to be redone, from top to bottom. A major problem was the glass roof over the house’s central well; he thought of replacing it with a Gothic-style conservatory roof and taking the floor out do that some light would filter through. Hentschke asked interior designer Christophe Gollut, who had been a friend for more than twenty-five years, what he though of the idea. “Christophe said, ‘Take the floor out if you like, but replace it with one made of glass.’ It was a brilliant idea,” says Hentschke, “because it increased floor space., It took me about thirty seconds to agree. Once the structural issues had been resolved, Hentschke and Gollut concentrated on making the most of the interior. In the cool, lofty collars, they installed a kitchen and a dining room, as well as an exercise area and a sauna. The first floor was given over to an entrance hall and a study, while the second story became a living room on the street side and, beyond the intervening glass floor, a master bedroom. On the floors above, they fit in five more bedrooms, each with a mahogany-paneled bath and one with a planted terrace overlooking the rooftops of Paris. And although the house is relatively narrow, there was room for a small elevator.
Hentschke had equally firm opinions when it came to decorating, but he allowed himself to be guided by Gollut’s experienced eye. “All the fabrics came from Christophe’s shop in London, except for the damask in the master bedroom, which I got directly from Bevilacqua in Venice,” Hentschke explains. “It was a marvelous excuse to show my son Venice and introduce him to the delights of white chocolate cake at Harry’s Bar!” Otherwise Hentschke depended on Gollut, who has a keen eye for color. “He mixes things you would think at first couldn’t possibly go together. I’ve been collecting objects and furniture ever since my father first took me to the Hôtel Durot auction house in Paris when I was fifteen,” says Hentschke. In recent years he has been concentrating on Directoire furniture. “And that, of course, couldn’t possibly fit in here, so I put it in storage and started buying the most appropriate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pieces I could find,” he says. Hentschke’s guiding principle was that, although the furniture and objects in the house had to be mostly from the same period, there should be as much variety within those limits as possible. He has a fearless motto when it comes to decorating—“Too much is never enough”—and he new that Gollut would agree. “People say that it’s terribly difficult to decorate for a friend,” he designer remarks. “But I believe the contrary is true. I know Yann’s tastes well, so that’s an obvious advantage.”
Now comfortably installed in the ancient Marais town house, Hentschke is delighted with the finished product. “My environment is important because I work at home and I also entertain a great deal here,” he says, settling into a deep eighteenth-century armchair. “After all, when you have a house like this, why go out to a restaurant? We like it so much here, we stay indoors as much as possible. Often we even forget we’re in Paris, because the house feels so much like the little château we had in the Touraine—with the obvious advantage of having a great city at our doorstep.”
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Once in Paris, anyone with an interest in beautiful old houses will make a beeline for the Marais. Stretching westward from the Palace des Vosges, the neighborhood abounds with streets lined with magnificent palaces and noble town houses built in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because the French aristocracy flocked to the area after Henry IV built his palace there in the early 1600s, there are imposing gateways and courtyards, ornate facades and formal gardens galore. 
Unlike the château, which was well
maintained, the Marais town house was
extremely run-down. At some point in the
nineteenth century the building—like so many
others in the area—had been turned into a
small factory. “Inside, I have to say, there was
nothing of architectural value left, apart from
the barrel-vaulted stone cellars and a
beautiful wrought iron banister leading up the
stairs,” he says. 
“Yann had very clear ideas about what he wanted and what he didn’t,” remembers
Gollut. “He found not only all the period terra-cotta and stone-and-slate floors from the
Touraine but no fewer than eight seventeenth-century stone fireplaces.” Hentschke
scoured antiques shops and auction houses outside Paris. “He also came up with all
the antique doors we needed,” says Gollut. “He really brought this old house back to life
with the kind of period features it might ideally have had in its heyday.” 
For Christophe Gollut, what was particularly
attractive about the project was the fact that
Hentschke didn’t want a lot of daylight to flood
the house. “He likes to have the shutters half
closed and to live very much in his own
atmosphere,” says Gollut. “Most of the time,
people are adamant about wanting as much
light as possible. But I love the idea of
working in a slightly somber atmosphere,
because you can get the most fantastic riot of
beautiful, rich colors in a dark room, which
simply wouldn’t work if the sun came blazing
in.”
