Description
This refined, elegant town house is housed in a building that is typical of the “liner” style of the 1930s. Architect Pierre Patout set up his flat and office here on three floors, carefully decorated by cabinetmaker Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and ironworker Raymond Subes.
With a floor surface area of 154 m² (165 m² living space), it is accessed via a beautiful main entrance that leads to the upper level, which is dedicated to reception areas, and the lower level, which houses the sleeping quarters and service areas.
The top floor features a majestic two-storey 71 m² reception room with 5 metre high ceilings, three windows and a small 10 m² terrace, and a separate kitchen.
The lower level, with its own entrance, includes a master bedroom suite with en suite bathroom and dressing room, a second bedroom with en suite shower room and utility rooms.
There is also a superb private vaulted cellar.
Located in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, it is close to all amenities, shops, schools and transport links. It is a 5-minute walk from the Balard metro line 8 and tramway lines T3a and T2.
A unique style
In 1929, after acquiring a narrow plot of land, deemed unbuildable, located against the railway embankment, Patout set up a property company to build a flat block with residential and commercial units. The architect used the formal and constructive vocabulary of the International Style: white rendering on the façades, horizontal divisions, overhangs, flat roofs, metal joinery and reinforced concrete. The façade clearly shows the layout of the interior space: shops on the ground floor, a mezzanine floor of studios, duplexes on the first floor, similar studios on the next three floors, duplexes at the top and large flats at the bow. The entrance is carefully marked by a balcony surmounted by a bas-relief by Alfred Janniot entitled “Architecture, the keystone of the arts”.
But it is above all the image of an ocean liner, a key concept of the Mouvement Moderne, that stands out in this long building, with its successively recessed prow, its horizontal projections at the top, its long interior passageways and its roof pavilions reminiscent of a ship’s chimney. The reference to the ocean liner is reflected in the interior layout of the flat blocks, which are distributed by long, narrow corridors linked by an elegant double-flight staircase.
For modern architects, the great transatlantic liners were a veritable source of formal inspiration, from which they drew forms free of all academicism. For Le Corbusier, they were one of the main references for the Cité radieuse, where housing and facilities were grouped together in a single complex.
Patout’s collaboration on the interior design of several Compagnie Générale Transatlantique ships explains the references to the “liner style” so popular in the 1930s: portholes, gangways, fireplaces and passageways. Patout established himself as one of the best representatives of this style with this building, which was included in the Supplementary Inventory of Historic Monuments in 1986.
Pierre Patout
Between the wars, Pierre Patout (1879-1965) represented a trend that, while close to the “international style”, made room for the decorative arts in architecture.
He trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he was Henri Sauvage’s companion. In 1925, he made a name for himself as a decorator, designing the Sèvres Pavilion and the Collector’s Pavilion for the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts. At the same time, the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, in collaboration with Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, commissioned him to design the interiors of the liners Ile-de-France, Atlantique and the famous Normandie. The decoration of these giant marine hotels was extremely refined.
Patout’s career quickly became synonymous with luxury architecture. A wealthy clientele commissioned villas and private mansions from him: Gabriel Voisin (1923), Lombard (1928) in Boulogne-Billancourt, Asselin (1923), Bou (1925) in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Ducharne (1923-1924) and Quillivic (1923) in Paris.
In the buildings category, although his most striking achievement was the “liner” in the 15th arrondissement, he also designed other buildings: flats and artists’ studios on rue du Docteur-Blanche (16th arrondissement, 1929), a luxury residence on av. de Wagram (17th arrondissement, 1929), a building on Porte Champerret (17th arrondissement, 1929), and the extension and elevation of Ets Ruhlmann on rue de Lisbonne (8th arrondissement, 1927-1928).
Patout also distinguished himself as the architect of the Galeries Lafayette and the Nicolas chain of shops. After the war, he took part in the reconstruction of the city of Tours, where he built the municipal library, the ultimate testimony to the monumental modernity that characterised him.
Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann (1879-1933) was one of the most popular interior designers of his time, creating luxury furniture using precious woods and pure, slightly curved shapes. He founded the company “Ruhlmann et Laurent” to distribute his designs and worked in collaboration with many architects, including Sauvage, Plumet and Patout.
