Gilty Pleasure

A rising design talent lends brilliant luster to an apartment in Paris.

- lan Phillips

A couple of years ago, the owner of this apartment was in France's rural Auvergne region during the quiet week between A Christmas and New Year's. She took to browsing real estate ads online, deciding to visit some of her discoveries on her return to Paris. "I had no intention of moving," she insists. "It was simply out of curiosity."

That was until she stepped inside this 1,900-square-foot duplex in a 19th-century building on the city's Right Bank. She'd been drawn by a photo of an almost psychedelic motif of interlocking cubes in metal that lined the walls of the stair hall. "It looked like something from a 1970s nightclub," she says. What appealed to her more, however, was the apartment's atmosphere. "It gave me a really good vibe," she recalls. "It was very cozy, like a cocoon."