Before and After, Part II – The Paris Apartment

Our little Huffington world has been spinning!  We’ve just finished two fabulous trips to France (if you missed it, here’s a taste from one trip), we’ve turned our store completely upside down to make room for a boat load of new goodies, and some of us are back to France tomorrow for another two trips:  Painting in Provence and Paris and Provence.  So, given the whirlwind, and the kind comments we’ve gotten from our guests to our pied-a-terre in Paris, we hope you don’t mind part two of our Before and After series on the Paris apartment.

As a reminder, when we first saw the apartment there were three American students living there.  Luckily, the bones of the apartment were good … but everything else needed a change.  The front hall was the easiest, and all we did was add a little ceiling molding and some wall paper which was hand carried in a ubiquitous big bag from Atlanta, that, thank goodness, always eluded the customs agents at CDG!

The living room bones were all good too, and we made very few structural changes here.  Just a little decorating ….

… and some window dressing made a big difference.

Ikea was traded in for some divine antiques from the Paris flea markets.

When we first visited the apartment, one of the front rooms was used as a bedroom for the three American students.

Originally we were going to mirror the doors between the living room and the kitchen/dining room.  It was a huge expense and one that Sam Jones, my partner extraordinaire in this renovation, nixed almost immediately.  It wasn’t the first or last time I thanked her for saving me a boat load of money!

This lone little fireplace became the cornerstone of the new kitchen.

And of course here are the infamous chairs with the pink check silk backs, for which Sam Jones practically mugged a pregnant woman in the remnants aisle of Lewis and Sherron fabric store (see our pretty in pink blog).

We were pretty excited that some shots from the kitchen were featured in one of our favorite blogs, Cote de Texas.

Here’s the view from the kitchen in to the living room, with our little paint samples dappled on the wall.

We’ve already covered one bathroom renovation in the previous before-and-after blog.    We really hesitated about renovating this one because it had just been done by the previous owners.  I actually like the tile … in small doses.  But this was overkill and there was no way of salvaging some of it without looking like it was half done. So we kept the same structure, and just tiled right over it.

Finally, some discerning readers have noticed that we replaced a pillow in some of our pictures:

With a monogrammed pillow:

And they asked us the significance of the B de V monogram in such a prominent place.

I’m happy to say that when we are not using the apartment, we have entrusted it to the care of an outstanding rental company in Paris called Paris Perfect.  We use Paris Perfect apartments for all our trips to Paris, so it’s a natural fit.  If you’d like to continue the little journey, and visit the rest of our apartment online, you will find it listed under Beaumes de Venise in the beautiful Paris Perfect website.

And while we may bid adieu to the Paris apartment series, we are not shutting any doors to antiques, renovations and all the fun stuff we were exposed to during this Parisian journey.  In fact, we have another little project cooking in the south of France, with more before and afters (and lots of crumbly 17th century walls) along the way.  Stay tuned … a la prochaine!

Ta ta,

HH

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