When it came to Paris renovations, Sara Story had heard all the horror stories and knew she would have to say “Non, merci” to any place requiring construction. “I didn’t want to have to do a lot of work,” she admits. Instead, the Texan designer, who is now based in New York City, bought a two bedroom, third-floor pied-à-terre on the Left Bank that did not need any demo: The kitchen was ready, the place had archetypal parquet floors—a design element she regarded as essential—and it had good light. Story, whose work brings her to the French capital a few times a year, had long wanted a foothold in the city. And finding such a perfect property allowed her to skip the messy stage and get “right to the good part,” the AD100 talent says with a laugh.
“It was fun to create a very Parisian apartment, and I went a little more decorative here than I sometimes do in the States,” Story explains. “I wanted it to be very layered, more textured—but not fancy.”
Story is a passionate collector of art (her mother was a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston), and in her entryway hangs a portrait by Ewa Juszkiewicz, in which the Polish artist has wound the head of her female subject in fabrics. It’s a piece that can serve as a précis for the space to come: Story has enveloped the place in sumptuous textiles. See the brown-and-steel blue jacquard (Prelle) in which she upholstered the living room’s L-shaped sofa and the bespoke cerulean pillows (Dimorestudio) that line it. Nearby, a couple of Roger Landault armchairs—re-covered in a plum-colored velvet by George Spencer Designs—flank a tiny side table shaped like a hippo.
Custom and vintage pieces are Story’s main characters: “A lot of my projects, I would say half of it’s custom and half is vintage,” she says. “New pieces tend to be more functional and most suited to the space, so you can get maximum use of the footprint. But I feel the vintage pieces give it history,” she says. For example, at the Aurélien Serre gallery she’d picked up a midcentury brass floor lamp by Angelo Lelli. It has a shade as sky-blue as a summer day, and Story loved its form. But that lampshade, like those sofa pillows—not to mention a small bright painting by Etel Adnan—also added pops of color to a room composed mostly of subdued hues.
About that palette: One big intervention was to have the living room walls painted by Atelier Blundell & Therrien to evoke marble in soft blues, purples, and grays with cinnamon striations. Those same colors populate the room—on the sofa, in the inlays of the Paul Kingma coffee table. To expose more of the wall, Story removed the back of an existing shelving unit, and both it and the mantel display pieces like a monumental vase and compote by the Marseille ceramist Bella Hunt, whose pastel glazes recall raku, watercolors, and Paris’s typically rain-cloudy weather—those moody hues again.