No.20
By mixing shades, colour connoisseur and interior designer Albane Collon turned a classic Parisian apartment into a bold, exciting home
FEATURE JO LEEVERS
When Albane Collon’s clients commissioned her to redesign their apartment in Paris, she encouraged them to look beyond their comfort zone. ‘The owners had given me carte blanche, so I took the opportunity to challenge them,’ says Albane, who runs interior design company 131 Malesherbes (131m.fr).
‘Left to their own devices, they would have gone for white walls with a few touches of navy blue, but in my opinion that was rather deja vu. I knew that using colour would make the space far more interesting, so I decided to go for a warmer, more painterly palette.’
Albane’s clients had previously lived in the Parisian quarter known as Pigalle, in an open-plan artist’s studio.
‘They wanted to keep that loft-like sense of flow,’ says Albane, ‘despite the fact that their new apartment had more formal, Haussmannian architecture. In short, they wanted to feel more boho than bourgeois when they stepped through their front door.’
Before Albane could begin, there were structural changes to be made. ‘The layout needed reworking,’ she says. The kitchen, previously a galley-style space off the entrance hall, was moved to the centre of the apartment, so it could merge into the dining area – this, in turn, leads directly into the living room. Reconfiguring the layout created the open-plan feel the owners wanted.’
The starting point for Albane’s rich scheme was the bold Ananbô wallpaper in the main bedroom. ‘We picked out the golden whisky colour and treated it like a ball of string, spooling it out and threading it through the apartment,’ she says. Choosing earthy greens and hazy yellows in a similar tonal range, Alban
