A 538-Square-Foot Paris Pied-à-Terre Built Like a Cabinet of Curiosities

An American couple found a 538-square-foot apartment on Place Dauphine in Paris after the husband made a promise on their wedding day: "You can pick any apartment as long as it's on Place Dauphine." Against the odds, they found one — and turned it into a pied-à-terre designed to feel like a cabinet of curiosities.

The couple married in the French capital and took their wedding photos on Place Dauphine. When the wife said she wanted to buy a place in Paris, the husband set his single condition. Shortly after, the one-bedroom apartment became theirs.

To realize the fantasy, they hired AD100 interior designer Jessica Helgerson, who holds dual citizenship and works with clients and offices in both Paris and Portland, Oregon. Helgerson is known for balanced interiors across a wide range of styles and eschews one signature look. For her, the fun is in invention, not repetition.

What did the clients ask for?

"When they came to us, they said they wanted the feeling of a cabinet of curiosities," Helgerson says. The brief suited the tiny one-bedroom. "My mind went straight to two things," she says. "The robin's-egg blue glass wall in the Natural History Museum in Manhattan and the famous store Deyrolles which is in that same color. It's a great color for displaying things."

That blue runs throughout the apartment: on the dining tablecloth, the egg-shaped coffee table, the upholstered sofa, and the bedroom walls.

The room's gravitas comes from a 17th-century German Renaissance cabinet placed in the dining and living room. The piece dates from the same era as the apartment and fits the largest wall exactly. All the home's small treasures gather on its green fabric-covered shelves, leaving other surfaces clear and letting the small space breathe.

How do you make 538 square feet work?

The bedroom serves purely sleep and storage — it is too petite for anything else. Helgerson turned a defunct chimney flue into a bed niche that looks as if it started out life that way.

In the pistachio-hued kitchen, a wood cabinet serves as a pantry. "The leaded glass windows in the kitchen filter out the unattractive view to an elevator shaft," Helgerson says. "The design of crosses, interjected with red circles, came from the railing outside of the building." The entry window and the raku ceramic coffee table in the living room drew on the same motif.

Despite the many fine antiques, the home feels unified and nowhere near cramped. "I like a pretty limited material palette. It helps the house feel like itself," Helgerson says.

The result is a personal home for two people who wanted fantasy without sacrificing function. Helgerson executed deftly in a limited space many designers would have found challenging. "I don't have my own design aesthetic," she says. "The aesthetic is to listen to the place, where I am working, the materials of the place, and what feels right." Ask her for a cabinet of curiosities, and that — in exactly the right color — is what you get.