Americans In Paris

When visiting the city of light, who hasn’t fallen in love with the culture, the architecture, the legendary cuisine? But some romantic Francophiles take the next step. Among this passionate crowd are four american designers enjoying the expat life in Parisian homes of their own, from a left bank triplex to a right bank flat to an ancient house in the Marais. Living like a local doesn’t have to be just a dream.

- Paul O’Donnell

Vive la Différence

The material advantage of Paris is simple, says Frank de Biasi: “What you get is twice the size of a New York apartment for half the cost, plus 14-foot ceilings and 18th-century windows.” But it’s the intangibles that make the city “like oxygen for me,” says the Manhattan decorator. “The French are creatively so inspired. They love the art of beauty, and they love creating beauty.” That devotion to craft, de Biasi says, makes Paris a design professional’s paradise, with furniture workshops, fabric makers, and artisans of every kind of hardware.

That creativity extends, he warns, to Paris’s charmingly idiosyncratic housing stock. “You have to be open to different layouts,” de Biasi says, citing the in between floor with oddly low ceilings, called an entresol, in his own Boulevard Saint-Germain triplex. In addition, many of the city’s buildings were constructed before the advent of indoor plumbing and air-conditioning. Be prepared, he says, to find retrofitted bathrooms in odd spots, like the sink and toilet wedged into a closet off his dining room: “It’s all a pain, but I love it.”

Taste of Freedom