Hector Guimard's Hôtel Mezzara to Become Paris's First Art Nouveau Museum

Paris is getting its first museum dedicated to Art Nouveau in 2028, and it will live inside a masterpiece of the style itself: Hector Guimard's Hôtel Mezzara, a 1910 townhouse in the fashionable 16th arrondissement commissioned by the textiles tycoon Paul Mezzara and his family.

The conversion carries a budget of about $7.2 million. Fabien Choné, the entrepreneur helping to finance it alongside Le Cercle Guimard — the nonprofit that documents and preserves the architect's legacy — said the future Musée Guimard would immerse the public "in an era when art found expression down to the finest details of architecture and décor." Embedded in the building's design, Choné added, are "the seeds of modernity."

Who was Hector Guimard?

Guimard designed scores of Art Nouveau buildings in the early 1900s, promoting their whiplash curves — the sinuous, flowing lines that define the style — under the banner of "Le Style Guimard." He didn't limit himself to houses. His output ranged across apartment buildings, chateaus, tombs, theaters, houses of worship, offices, warehouses and exhibition pavilions. He also designed objects as small as tablecloths and as industrial as factories.

He was confident in his own brand. Guimard unabashedly carved his name alongside the entryways of his buildings, at a time when he was catering to adventurous, upwardly mobile clients. The Guimard expert Georges Vigne has described that phase of his career as an "almost frenetic outpouring of creativity."

Why did the museum take so long?

Fashion turned against him. By midcentury, Guimard's sinuosity had fallen so precipitously out of favour that more than half of his works were razed or altered beyond recognition. The best-known survivors are the tendriled entrance canopies for Paris's Metro stations — the green, plant-like structures that still dot the city's sidewalks.

Beyond those Metro entrances, only Art Nouveau die-hards know how much else Guimard actually designed. That gap between his fame and his surviving body of work is part of what the new museum addresses.

What does this change for visitors?

The Musée Guimard will bring the full panoply of Le Style Guimard back into public view — architecture, décor and objects together, in a building designed by the man himself. For a city whose museums have never given Art Nouveau a dedicated home, that's a first.

The project also signals a broader rehabilitation. An architect whose buildings were demolished by the dozens within decades of his death is now the subject of a major civic institution, financed partly by private money through Le Cercle Guimard. If the 2028 opening holds, Paris will finally have a permanent place to see Guimard's work at the scale he intended: total design, down to the finest detail.