A London Apartment Where Family Life and Treasured Artworks Coexist

By Design takes a closer look at the world of design, in moments big and small.

PASS THROUGH THE front door of Mathieu Paris’s three-bedroom apartment, on the top floor of a brick four-story Victorian building in London’s Marylebone neighborhood, and you might think that you’ve inadvertently wandered into an art gallery rather than the home of new parents and their toddler daughter. But given that Paris, 41, is the global sales director of White Cube, the international gallery with two outposts in London, perhaps it’s no surprise that even the foyer, though paneled in varnished plywood and sparingly furnished, holds prized pieces.

One wall displays a pen-and-ink drawing by Alberto Giacometti; on another is a pencil-and-black crayon piece by Lucian Freud. An emerald green glass Tiffany lamp, set on a shelf built out of the same type of treated plywood, illuminates a second Giacometti portrait. Beneath it sits a chair by the fashion and furniture designer Rick Owens, which looks like a Brutalist version of the ivory stools used by dignitaries in ancient Rome. It, too, is built of plywood (stained black) in keeping with Paris’s penchant for beautiful objects made from the simplest of materials. (He’s an admirer of the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and ’70s.) The chair is also a subtle reference to his design credentials: After studying contemporary art history at the École du Louvre in Paris in the early aughts, he went on to work for the renowned art and furniture dealer Philippe Jousse, for whom he helped organize Owens’s first furniture show in the French capital in 2007.

Paris and his husband, the financier Razid Kalfane, 49, bought the 1,700-square-foot apartment in 2020. “We love Marylebone and this particular block known as the Montagu Mansions,” says Paris, who grew up in Marseille, France, and moved to London in 2014. “Plus we needed a bigger space for a baby.” The couple spent the following two years doing a gut renovation with the help of the Egyptian architect Tarek Shamma, an old friend whose recent projects include a round three-story tower in Melides, Portugal, for the French shoe designer Christian Louboutin and a yacht for the Egyptian mogul Nassef Sawiris. Paris says that the flat in Marylebone was an “empty shell” that hadn’t been updated since the 1960s. Among the first tasks was to replace the flooring (“old linoleum over old floorboards,” says Shamma) with reclaimed herringbone oak parquet.