Completely renovated by interior designer Stéphanie Kalb, this artist’s studio, converted into an apartment, offers clean lines with sober details heralding modernism.

The building’s smooth, unadorned facades were listed as Historic Monuments – in 1986 for those on the street side and since 2007 for the rear façade. Punctuated by three-sided balconies, similar to semi-bow windows, and by workshop canopies, the façade stretches towards the sky. The first part of the façade is punctuated by oculi decorated with mosaics in black glass paste, thus highlighting the design of the facade.

The facade is characterized by the absence of ornamentation, typical of the Modern Movement, and a taste for Art Deco vocabulary. Influenced by Auguste Perret for the use of reinforced concrete covered with a coating, Roux-Spitz asserts his singularity in a style that stands as an archetype of the building of report between the two wars.

Son of an architect from Lyon, Michel Roux-Spitz (1888-1957) entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 1908 in the studio of Tony Garnier, then in 1912 at the ENSBA in Paris.

He won the Prix de Rome in 1920 and was noted for his decoration of the hall of a Ministry of Fine Arts at the 1925 Exhibition of Decorative Arts. The same year, he designed a building on rue Guynemer in the 6th arrondissement of Paris (1925-1928), which was the first of a series that he nicknamed “Série Blanche”. A model of official modernism, the “Roux-Spitz style” also stands out in the public domain. He became chief architect of the National Library from 1932 and also built other public buildings: Regional Directorate of PTT in Lyon (1933-1938), the Regional Hospital Center of Nantes (1945-1964) or the city hall of Saint-Nazaire (1959).

At the same time, Michel Roux-Spitz was editor of the journal L’Architecture between 1925 and 1932 and campaigned for the creation of an Order of Architects, effective in 1941. He took part in the patronage committee of L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui in 1930, and became editor-in-chief of L’Architecture française from 1943 to 1950. It is in this way that Michel Roux-Spitz defends a typical architecture he calls “School of Paris” and which wants to be opposed to the “new formalism” embodied by Le Corbusier and his disciples. He was also professor of theory at ENSBA in 1940.

He died in 1957 in Dinard, in his villa Greystones (1937-1950) – synthesis of his syncretic architectural work.