Mirror, brass and simple geometries feature inside this Parisian apartment by local architect Clément Lesnoff-Rocard, which offers an understated take on art deco.
The 65-square-metre flat, nicknamed The Whale, is tucked away in the basement of a residential building in the city's 16th arrondissement.
The Whale apartment is located in the basement of an art deco building in Paris
According to Lesnoff-Rocard, the apartment had undergone a renovation in recent years, leaving it with "perfectly tasteless" interiors that were a pastiche of the building's original art deco style.
Most of the rooms also seemed dark and cramped, the architect explained, with unsightly plasterboard used to conceal the home's technical systems.
Knocking through a false ceiling revealed the apartment's concrete framework Given carte blanche by the client, Lesnoff-Rocard completely stripped back the apartment by rendering a majority of its surfaces white and tearing down its false ceiling, revealing a network of unexpectedly chunky concrete beams.
"The disproportion between the enormous size of these structural elements and the smallness of this apartment sent the space to a much larger dimension," he explained.
"It's like we were hidden inside a much larger, surreal animal."
This contrast in scale is what ultimately gave the project its name, The Whale.
Marble, mirror and brass are used across the apartment's standout features
Lesnoff-Rocard used brass, mirrors, coloure...