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Press Coverage of Marais House

• W Magazine, September 2007
• Paris Notes, March 2006
• France Today, March 2006
• Daily Candy, December 2005
• Architectural Digest, December 2001
• Town & County Travel, October 2006

Architectural Digest - December 2001

Period Perfection (article taken from the December 2001 issue of Architectural Digest)

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.”

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