An Ancient Marais Town House is Brought Back to its Heyday
Interior design by Christophe Gollut Text by Michael Peppiatt
Photography by Marina Faust

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.

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
for a while with my young son in a small
fifteenth-century château in the Touraine,”
Hentschke explains. “It was idyllic, but Paris
suited his educational needs and my
business interests much better. We knew we
wanted an old house, so the Marais was the
obvious choice. And when we found this sixteenth-century house, we felt we’d found the
counterpart to our country chateau in the center of Paris.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”