Joseph Dirand’s Dreamy Avenue Montaigne Apartment
Extravagant, grand, opulent and yet minimal, Joseph Dirand’s Paris apartment project is an exercise in pure luxury.
The designer who has worked on projects for fashion houses such as Balmain, Balenciaga, Givenchy, Chloe and Pucci, as well as the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs restaurant, Loulou, was given complete creative freedom and an almost limitless budget to realise this design.
Commissioned by the heiress of an Eastern European fortune, Dirand transformed his client’s two large apartments on Paris’ Avenue Montaigne, 600 square metres of absolute luxury into a residential gallery space, where each object and piece of furniture is revered as a work of art.
Dirand, who had been working on fewer residential projects at the time, sat for hours with the prospective client, watching her – the mother of one of his contemporaries – fall in love with his elaborate plans.
Joseph Dirand
“She told me, ‘I want you to achieve your dream; that would be my dream'”. For Dirand, the opportunity to create an uncompromised narrative was too beautiful to pass up. Objects and materials, all in conversation with one another, are a reflection of the designer’s own dream home.
Impressive in scale, and as dramatic as it is pared back, the residence is informed by a monochromatic palette of pale whites and creams and dark greys and blacks. Furniture and artworks from the likes of Vladimir Kagan and François‑Xavier Lalanne, each a sculptural masterpiece (some two-dimensional, some three), which would appear untouchable.
