Quai de Béthune Apartment
Located in the 4th arrondisement, the Ile Saint-Louis is one of the Seine’s two natural islands in Paris, connected to the rest of the city by four bridges. Amongst the grand frontages between the Pont de la Tournelle and the Pont de Sully is an apartment building commissioned by Helena Rubenstein in the 1930s, on the site of a seventeenth century private residence originally constructed for Louis Hesselin, the so-called ‘Superintendent to the Pleasures of King Louis IV’.
The project here links two apartments on the building’s second floor, previously occupied by Georges Pompidou, ordering the layout around the simple but powerful spatial gesture of a 30-metre living room with nine sets of French doors overlooking the river and a closely controlled palette of oak parquet laid out in a traditional Point de Hongrie pattern, white plaster and Carrara marble.
Project Team
Douglas Tuck, Fabien Pinault
Photography
Douglas Tuck