I’m always searching for objects,” says Jean-Christophe Aumas of the midcentury designs and curiosities that lend his Pigalle apartment its theatrical, lived-in look. The Parisian artistic director and founder of the visual and set design studio, Singular, is the imaginative eye behind some of luxury fashion’s most spectacular creative displays. Aumas spends his days scouring flea markets and galleries for design finds and furnishings, destined for the windows, instore scenes and events he conjures for everyone from Hermès to Diptych. Starting his career at Christian Lacroix, Aumas joined Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton as head of visual identity in 1997, before striking out on his own to collaborate with a roster of clients including Phoebe Philo and Alber Elbaz.
“I learned something different from each one of them,” he says. “From Philo it was the beauty of simplicity; that even a plain chair can be wonderful and compelling.” From Jacobs, it was unfettered self-expression. “He let us do whatever we wanted to do,” says Aumas, who has distilled every one of these sartorial lessons into the home he shares with his French bulldog, René.
The apartment occupies the entire ground floor of an 18th-century hôtel particulier, which, though divided into three separate homes some 50 years ago, retains its original grandeur – from the richly decorative plaster detailing to the seriously lofty ceilings. Accessed by a small door at the end of a long, antique tiled corridor, the space is a tranquil shelter from the nocturnal hum of the nearby bars, clubs and fabled Moulin Rouge. A quirky, lavender-toned kitchen opens out into a generous, glass-walled sitting room complete with its own compact courtyard garden. “It has a very special feeling,” says Aumas of the veritable jungle teeming with bamboo, banana plants and ferns in oversized pots and trailing from hanging baskets. “You can’t believe that you’re in central Paris – the garden has a real Mediterranean feel.”
The architectural surprises don’t end there. The airy sitting room leads to a large study, complete with mezzanine bunk and bathroom, and on to a dining room and two adjoining bedrooms that are dominated by a procession of stained-glass windows. Thought to be in the original Art Deco style, their bright, bold design lends the space the ecclesiastical atmosphere of a church.
When Aumas was first shown the property in 2015, he wasn’t particularly looking to move from the loft he’d lived in for more than a decade – but he knew immediately it had to be his. Rather than reconfiguring the layout, he set about installing the skylight and floor-to-ceiling glass doors in the sitting room: “I wanted to bring in more light and open things up to enhance the sense of modernity.”
Next, he set to work on the kitchen, adding the circular concrete table and fashioning the okoume plywood cabinetry, which stands in stark contrast to the lilac walls. That unexpected tone, chosen to clash with a geometric acquamarine wall light he picked up at a Belgian flea market, is typical of Aumas’s instinctive approach to design. Instead of meticulously planning with mood boards, it’s spontaneity – and the objects themselves – that determines the decor. Beyond the kitchen, his modus operandi was to keep the palette uncharacteristically restrained. “The style of the interior is so unique, rather than have mono blocks of colour everywhere I decided to let it breathe,” he says.
Aside from the arched blue mirror he conceived for the living room mantelpiece, little is fixed in this ever-evolving home. Huge canvases lean against the walls, grouped with eclectic ensembles of Portuguese and Spanish ceramics and left-field, one-time props. It’s an ad-hoc style that allows him freedom to play around and constantly reconfigure the space. “My apartment is like a laboratory for my ideas,” he explains. “It’s important to me that it feels like a constant work in progress.”
Drawn to designs from the 1950s and 1970s for their cool sense of modernity, Aumas made his first serious investment in the black leather sofa by the Italian architect Vincenzo De Cotiis, which currently sits alongside an armchair by another favourite – Carlos Scarpa.
Far from a design snob, he finds as much aesthetic value in a stone, a shell or a junk-shop find as a quality design piece from a gallery. “It’s not a question of whether something is good or bad taste, it’s whether it tells a story,” says Aumas. He is attracted to objects for their shape, hue or material finish.
The compulsion to decorate started young. The walls of his childhood bedroom would frequently change, shifting from blue to black to yellow. This easy fluidity extends to his current work life, too. Often, he’ll source a piece of furniture or an object for a window display that will end up in his apartment; or he’ll pull the perfect piece from his home to put in a showroom. “There’s no boundary between my work and my home,” he says. “It’s all just my way of styling. I like the idea that my home is never finished.”
During lockdown, the designer has been pondering a move to the French country or seaside, his long-held dream to relocate to Italy on hold for now. “When I start to feel stuck,” he says, “I’ll simply move on to another space.”