It’s not often that an interior is designed to deliberately include so-called “ugly” pieces. Then again, Orléans, a pied-à-terre owned by fashion designer Mathieu de Ménonville of menswear brand Éditions M.R, is a rather unusual apartment.
Presented with a home at one of the most prestigious addresses anywhere, on Paris’s exclusive Île Saint-Louis, architect Chloé Leymarie and art director and curator François Weiss decided to design the three-bedroom, three-bathroom home as if it had spent its life occupied by a fictitious, intrepid family. In this fantasy, each object is charged with subjective meaning, infused with either the wildest or most mundane of stories. If everything was straight-out-of-the-box-perfect, it wouldn’t feel real — in fact to legitimise the theme, some things, argues Weiss, need to be unattractive.
“There’s a spirit, a…
