A Home In Paris

A realisation that living in hotels while working in Paris was not it was all cracked up to be drove Mario and Anne Grauso to take the plunge and buy a base in the French capital

Photographs by Simon Upton

Masculine leather-covered sofas set the tone in this white painted drawing room with original ornamental plasterwork

The dining room is furnished with a circular Belgian stone table and Louis XVIstyle chairs upholstered in a toile de Jouy with a 17th-century crystal Italian chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The photograph is by Herb Ritts

The New York couple and ten-year-old son were regular commuters to France. Mario is the president of the fashion division of Puig, a Barcelona-based luxury group that owns designer brands. Anne meanwhile is a stylish presence on the New York philanthropy circuit, working with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Understandably, their work took them to the fashion capital of the world all-too-regularly, so they came to the decision to forego hotel life and search for a pied-à-terre, and found a 2,800 sq.ft. apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, dating from 1801.

The first task was updating the wiring and heating and refinishing the oak floors- a process that took ten months. But in more stylistic terms, there was a desire to balance the French heritage with a more relaxed, American flavor.

One feature that establishes that tone is the couple’s photo collection - so extensive that they devised a system of wire cables and metal clips so they can rotate the images periodically. Currently, the Grausos have on display Irving Penn’s Two Asaro Mudmen from 1970, Herb Ritt’s portrait of model Tatjana Patitz, a striking Cecil Beaton portrait of Irving Penn and a blown-up 1980s party contact sheet by Patrick McMullan. In the library, oak bookcases serve as display cases, with images by Karl Lagerfeld, Lillian Bassman, Arthur Elgort and Bruce Weber positioned between dividers.

The wood-panelled library has shelves displaying part of an extensive collection of black and white photography that includes works by Lillian Bassman

The Grausos called upon a friend, Lisa Jackson, a New York-based interior designer known for a clean, tailored style, for decorative touches, and all three enjoyed shopping together for the home. The gold-leafed iron and crystal chandelier in the dining room, for example, was a Mario find at a nearby carpet shop. Other discoveries, like an Empire-style, black-lacquer cocktail table, were found at flea markets. Other designers who helped in the apartment were Puig designers Lars Nilsson at Nina Ricci, Hervé Pierre at Carolina Herrera, and Patrick Robinson at Paco Rabanne. The silk for everything was ordered from Bucol, a luxury French firm owned by Hermès, and all the toile de Jouy was chosen from Braquenié, a division of Pierre Frey.

From the Grausos’ perspective, the teamwork approach fit perfectly for their pied-à-terre. It helped to blend seamlessly the extraordinary with the familiar, from boiserie in the library to Napoleon-inspired fabric their son picked out to line the walls of his room. It’s all ‘exactly right,’ they say.

A collection of watercolours by Mats Gustafson have been placed around the marble fireplace in the bedroom

Anne and Mario Grauso in the living room of their Paris apartment