A Chic French Apartment With a Vintage Vibe

Name: Clemence, her partner and their cat
Location: Saint Mandé, France
The basics: 3 years, rented | 45 square meters (485 square feet)

Clemence’s apartment mixes clean lines with leafy plants, black and white with pops of yellow. She also makes the most of the space, dividing it into areas designated for work and play.

Tell us a little (or a lot) about your home and the people who live there: My boyfriend, my cat and I have lived in this apartment since 2014. We live in a beautiful apartment full of sunshine on a quiet street. It is a true corner of tranquility, a few steps from Paris.

Taking advantage of a lot of natural light, we dared to paint a wall of the living room in black. This dark wall is a marvel. We love how the rays of the sun cast a beautiful spectacle of shadows in the living room when they play with our mirror ball.

Then, in order to bring warmth to the monochrome interior, we let nature invade our decor. Thus, cactus, Pilea Peperomioides and succulent plants found a place of honor in the concrete flower pots.

Finally, we bought vintage wood furnitures. I really love the school chairs.

Also, I needed a workshop in the living-room as our room is too small. So, the sofa serves as a separation between the two spaces. Without cutting off the two universes, we still distinguished between them.

What is your favorite room and why? It’s my workshop corner, because I really love to create my own concrete flower pots.

If you could magically change something about your home, what would it be? I would like taller ceilings, like more traditional Parisian apartments (Haussmannian buildings). I love interiors which have space for great decoration from floor to ceiling.

What’s the last thing you bought (or found!) for your home? I bought vintage fabric to sew new cushions.

Clemence’s words of wisdom: I think we need time. Time to go store to store, come back home, see how we live in it and what we really need. We have to get away from catalog pages and create our own and personal interior.

Thanks, Clemence! You can see more on Clem Around the Corner.

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