LOVE RULES

In his Paris home, rock star and designer Lenny Kravitz has fashioned a spiritual tribute to—and haven for—family and friends

- DANA THOMAS

Superstar musician Lenny Kravitz has loved Paris since he first landed there in 1989, at 25, to promote his debut album, Let Love Rule. Finally, in the early 2000s, he felt it was time to find a pied-à-terre: “a little apartment, maybe on the Seine—one bedroom, two bedrooms, maximum—where I could write and hang out,” he recalls. “One day, the real estate agent says, ‘I have something. It’s not what you’re looking for, but you need to see it.’”

“It” was the grand mansion of Countess Anne d’Ornano, the widowed former mayor of Deauville, a 1920s confection set on a leafy cul-de-sac next to a clutch of embassies in the conservative 16th arrondissement. With her children grown, the countess found herself more at her Norman estate, with poetic gardens by Louis Benech, than in the Paris house, and had decided to sell.

LENNY KRAVITZ, WEARING A VINTAGE JACKET, COÛT DE LA LIBERTÉ JEANS, AND A JAEGER-LECOULTRE WATCH, ATOP A 1970S COFFEE TABLE IN THE GRAND SALON. A 19TH-CENTURY HANDCARVED WOOD SENUFO BIRD SCULPTURE STANDS NEXT TO A LITHOGRAPH OF MUHAMMAD ALI BY ANDY WARHOL. OPPOSITE THE HÔTEL DE ROXIE CHANDELIER BY KRAVITZ DESIGN FOR SWAROVSKI'S CRYSTAL PALACE COLLECTION IS A FOCAL POINT OF THE GRAND SALON.

“The agent said: ‘It’s not on the market yet, and this kind of thing only comes around once in a generation,” Kravitz continues. “I pull up, she points at the building, I said, ‘Okay, what floor?’ thinking it’s an apartment building. And she says, ‘It’s the whole thing.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, no, absolutely not.’ ‘Please, just go inside and look at it.’ I walked in and said, ‘This is my house.’ Spiritually, I knew.”