Inside designer Marion Stora’s Parisian home beside the Eiffel Tower
Ultimately, it was a desire to be nearer their son’s school that brought designer Marion Stora and her husband Didier to Paris’ well-heeled Golden Triangle, ‘just a few steps away from the Eiffel tower’.
It is a fitting context for their V-shaped apartment, slotted into the south-east corner of a handsome 19th-century building, where soft light spills through sheer fabric drapes. ‘When it’s really windy you have to close the windows – it’s like you’re at the seaside,’ says Marion, laughing.
This was a happy inheritance. Beneath high ceilings, historic mouldings remained intact and arched doorways had art nouveau flourishes. Even the herringbone floors needed little more than a polish: ‘All we had to do was give it life and soul.’
The family home would double as a stage for Marion’s 15-piece furniture collection, which debuted at January’s Maison & Objet fair. It is not a showroom as such, but still a place where clients can see hand-crafted tables, cabinets and armchairs in a domestic context – and, hopefully, imagine them in their own homes.
Among the collection is a remarkable dining table made with artist-designers Mauro Mori and Pierre Bonnefille, featuring sculpted Albizia-wood legs that punctuate a softly-coloured top with a chalky finish achieved using a bespoke coating of mineral powders and pigments.
‘The inner beauty of the things I create is the ancestral craftsmanship – those details you see only by living with a piece and really appreciating it little by little,’ says Marion. The ‘fragile’ undulating line that snakes across an inky-blue, handwoven rug in her son’s bedroom was taken from a drawing he made aged three.
A lifelong sailor, Marion wanted to ‘transmit the beauty of the depth of the ocean’. ‘Something was missing until I found that sketch,’ she adds.
The apartment seems so rooted to its location that it comes as a surprise when Marion credits her background in designing yacht interiors– unanchored spaces that must act as their own design ecosystem – as being key to its evolution.
‘It was a strict approach that taught me how to use every corner,’ she explains. ‘But I also wanted comfort and colour.’ This was an exercise in left-brain/right-brain alignment, ‘a combination of the creative and the rigorous sides of myself’.
Marion’s instinct for muted, natural materials (‘I tend to move away from marble, glass and metal’) is evident as you move through the flowing rooms of her home. It is a series of soft transitions, all arched thresholds and curved walls; in places, long sight lines create an enfilade effect.
‘It’s what we really loved about the apartment when we first saw it: the perspective you get from one place into another. There is always a nice path between rooms,’ she says.
Though deep shades of aubergine and fuchsia swathe the bedrooms and piano room, there is a lightness of touch at every turn. ‘I want to feel cocooned by the spaces,’ muses Marion. ‘But things must have room to breathe’. marionstora.com
