How They Pulled It Off: A Glittering Snake Mosaic Fireplace in a Whimsical Parisian Apartment

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

Before they would go on to work together, designer Laure Gravier of Claves Architecture met Hugo Marchand at a mutual friend’s party. The codirector and artistic director of Christian Louboutin by day and an avid collector of artwork and Art Deco furniture by night, Hugo knows what he likes and knows how to communicate it, too. He and Gravier immediately connected over their shared taste in architecture and design. When Claves—which Gravier cofounded with Soizic Fougeront—came on board to redesign his home, they flowed easily from their casual rapport about design into more targeted conversations.

His existing collection of furniture and art gave Gravier and Fougeront an easy on ramp to envisioning the design of the home, leading them to a space inspired by design of the ’30s and ’40s. From the beginning of the project, Gravier knew that she wanted to add a fireplace to the primary bedroom. Gravier envisioned the property as a tiny hôtel particulier, as in, the stately private city homes of French tradition. Fireplaces are a fixture of hôtel particulier primary bedrooms, so it was a necessary amendment to bring that vision to life. In particular, she imagined a sculptural curved plaster fireplace that "surrounded something more precious." Quickly, that precious thing became a mosaic. Hugo loved the idea, so it was settled. The quiet bedroom would have a sparkling jewel at its center in the form of a glittering mosaic.

To execute their mosaic, Gravier turned to Delphine Messmer, a mosaicist she’d worked with during her time at Pierre Yovanovitch. In their projects there, the mosaics were always geometric but with this fireplace, Gravier was itching to try something figurative instead. "Before we started work on it, I wanted to bring Hugo to the atelier of the mosaicist so he could see the colors and picture the way she works," says Gravier, noting that the process for this project and his process designing shoes at Louboutin is quite similar. At the atelier, Messmer explained her process for crafting the mosaic to Marchand and they looked through samples of her work. Then, they came to the idea of a snake for the mosaic’s design.

"I thought it was interesting because it would give some curve and some softness to the really strong shape of the fireplace," Gravier explains. Still, it was difficult to convert the curvaceous form of the snake to the geometric medium of mosaic, and within the constraints of the fireplace surround’s shape, too. The group of three tried out different drawings of the snake, hoping to avoid giving it a face that looked mean, and cutting the shape out to imagine the curve of the snake. "We really workshopped it all together," says Gravier. "Hugo is not like a classic client, just waiting for you to do a drawing and say yes or no. He’s really involved in the process and he loves it."

How they pulled it off: A curving snake mosaic

• Trust your instincts: The snake motif was the very first idea Gravier had for the fireplace and it’s what they ended up going with. "I really wanted to explore this animal and the pattern and the curve," Gravier explains. "I wanted an animal, but I wanted something with a strong pattern that can fit in a line." Marchand was slightly apprehensive about whether a snake was the right fit for a bedroom, at first, but Gravier insisted. "I was really pushy but in the end it resulted in something really nice," she says.
• Coordinate your colors: For the room’s color palette, Marchand was inspired by the view of the garden that the bedroom windows offer. He wanted blues and greens that could speak to that space, so Gravier chose green and teal tones for the mosaic accordingly. To balance those colors, they worked in gold and orange tones too that add a warm to that space. These threads were picked up in the furnishings, including the custom-made bed frame which has a gold leaf frame that pulls out the gold of the mosaic and the burnt-orange and deep-green bed covers.

• Use what you already have: For some of the additional decorative details in the room, the Claves team used their client’s existing art collection to complement the custom pieces. The vases by Natalia Triantafylli on the left of the mantel were a perfect fit for the room’s color palette, then an antique painting and bronze sculpture added the aged flair that they wanted in the hôtel particulier–inspired space.

Trust was essential to the process throughout, from the mosaicist who Gravier had worked with for years to Hugo’s trust in Gravier to follow her down the snake design rabbit hole. "I loved working with Hugo. When you’re an interior designer, you’re not an artist. I’m not painting alone in my room. You’re doing art, but with a purpose," Gravier says. "I’m always working in existing houses that have a history and working with millions of artisans that participate to make the project great. That’s what I really love in my work—the collaboration—and with Hugo it was super strong."

Top photo by Alice Mesguich

Project Credits:

Interior Design: Laure Gravier, Claves Architecture

Cabinetry Design & Installation: Maison Chabot

Mosaicist: Delphine Messmer

Plaster: Staff Espaces Volumes

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