A Parisian Designer Builds His Dream House in a Former Brothel

THE POLYMATHIC PARIS-based designer and entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami considers thinking overrated. “For me, it’s mostly a waste of time; instead I just do,” he says midway through a breakneck monologue — in which he describes his recent logo work for Moynat and Christofle, a hotel he’s just acquired in Switzerland, the challenges of reviving the nearly 400-year-old candle maker Cire Trudon and his collection of works by the German industrial designer Dieter Rams — as we drink takeout espresso in the late winter drizzle outside a coffee bar near his 10th Arrondissement studio. Most of the city has ceased masking, but not Touhami, and he stays outside when he can, no matter the weather, terrified of missing even a day of work because of illness. “I have so many things going on that there’s no room for that in my life,” he says.

In theory, at least, the 48-year-old has earned some downtime. In 2021, he and his wife of 23 years, Victoire de Taillac-Touhami, 48, sold their fragrance company, Officine Universelle Buly — which has dozens of vintage-inflected boutiques throughout the world — to LVMH. Despite the windfall, however, the self-taught Touhami — who was raised in the South of France in a family of working-class Moroccan immigrant farmers and, in his early 20s, was briefly homeless in Paris — is indefatigable. As soon as the LVMH sale went through, freeing him from day-to-day responsibilities for Buly (de Taillac-Touhami, whose sister is the jewelry designer Marie-Hélène de Taillac, still works for the brand as the head of strategy and marketing), he vacated the company’s offices in the Marais and moved to his current studio: a cavernous 7,000-square-foot Belle Époque-era event space. In just eight months, he and his regular team of artisans remade it, adding towering marquetry cabinets, spectacular moldings and faux marble surfaces to transform the place into a Baz Luhrmann-esque environment for his 25 or so employees, with a studio for his new podcasting company, a room dedicated entirely to the graphic fonts that are his specialty and a private chef who makes daily lunches for the staff.

But even such a mammoth project seems not to have satisfied the couple’s constant need for creative upheaval. In early 2022, a few months after his offices were completed, Touhami and the equally kinetic de Taillac-Touhami — with whom he has three children between the ages of 15 and 20 — decided to buy a house on Rue Victor Massé, in the newly fashionable Ninth Arrondissement, near Place Pigalle and the Moulin Rouge. With characteristic impulsiveness, they completed the purchase only a week after they first heard of the house’s existence from de Taillac-Touhami’s sister, who passed along the listing from a real estate agent friend. It is their 18th residence in two and a half decades, including stints in Brooklyn and Tokyo (they still own the penthouse that Touhami elaborately transformed about 10 years ago on the genteel Rue du Bac across the Seine). “This is what happens when you do instead of think,” Touhami says.

IT’S LITTLE WONDER that Touhami found such an opportunity irresistible: Even in a city steeped in haute-bohemian lore, the four-story white masonry mansion, in a courtyard entered through an unremarkable Hausmannian locked archway, stands out. Built around 1870, the house had become a brothel by the turn of the 20th century. The artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who often painted and patronized prostitutes and had a studio nearby on Avenue Frochot, is said to have been in residence for a time on the top floor. According to Touhami, after the brothel closed in 1931, the house, with a sweeping entry landing up a wide set of stairs and a capacious front garden, was purchased by a carpet maker who worked with the renowned Art Deco-era designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann. Touhami says Ruhlmann designed the monumental, still-intact curving plaster staircase, topped with a polished walnut handrail.

In 1976, the house became home to Jean-Claude Carrière, arguably France’s most celebrated and prolific screenwriter, known for co-writing the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s trippy French-era films, including “Belle de Jour” (1967) with Catherine Deneuve and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972). Carrière owned the house for more than 40 years, until his death in 2021 at age 89 — barely a year before the Touhamis first encountered it.

Touhami had the interiors planned out within days of signing the contract. In Carrière’s time, the 5,400-square-foot house was an intellectual’s retreat filled with walnut bookshelves and slouchy, off-white slipcovered furniture; now, after being stripped to the studs, it’s a wild pastiche of periods, colors, effects and wall treatments. Accustomed to creating retail environments quickly, Touhami had it finished in a mere seven months, with his artisans sometimes working into the night.

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Today, each room feels as though it might be in a different time or place, with its own logic. The main 860-square-foot salon, to the left of the staircase, has a louche fun house aura, with a high-concept illusion that Buñuel himself might have envied: Two-inch-thick burled-ebony veneered walls are engineered to appear as if they were peeling off at the top corners, revealing the pale, heavily ornamented 18th-century plaster surface below. “The people working on it said it couldn’t be done,” Touhami says. “You have no idea how hard it was to get that curl of the wood just right, to make it seem real.” In a specially contoured niche in the veneer above the fireplace — among the few things in the house left untouched are the tarot card porcelain tiles, a gift from Buñuel, that surround the mantel — hangs what Touhami believes is a portrait by the 16th-century Venetian painter Titian. Attached to the room’s periphery is a custom-created tangle of thick felt tubes in shades of gray, navy, buff and currant, evoking a duct system run gloriously amok: a site-specific sculpture that doubles as seating. The dining room across the entry hall resembles a ship captain’s private salon on an Art Deco-era luxury liner, with a long, rounded mirror-polished table of Touhami’s own design ringed by a series of narrow, flush built-in cabinets; set into each door are circular portholes with etched patterns by Christian Fournié, a specialist in historical reproductions of French muslin glass. On the ceiling above the table, instead of a chandelier, three giant metal spiders with lighted abdomens seem to be crawling across the ornate plasterwork. Along the crown molding, the names of those he says made their mark on the house over the years are spelled out in plaster, in a blocky all-capitals font created by Touhami’s boutique typography studio: Buñuel, Carrière, Ruhlmann, Toulouse-Lautrec and, of course, Touhami himself. (The house has its own custom-branded cutlery and ceramics, and a logo.) In the kitchen next door, every surface, including the ceiling, is covered in clay tiles handmade by a company in Umbria, Italy; the effect is almost medieval.

Upstairs in the primary bedroom, where the ceiling slants precipitously, Touhami was able to cajole his team of artisans, who numbered in the dozens, to create a series of identical Louis-style plaster wall frescoes that descend in size while maintaining precisely the same scale. (“They were not at all happy,” he says of the craftspeople.) Such ornamentation contrasts with the modern Italian furnishings he favors, in styles ranging from Futurist to Memphis. In the basement, he’s installed a five-foot-deep, 15-foot-long pool with a retro tile surround. Across the space, a guest room with a glass door to the side garden has been fitted with a 1930s suite of near-black mahogany furniture from the Clignancourt flea market, intricately carved with a hallucinogenic menagerie of animals. “The guests will sleep here and it will be insane,” Touhami says.

While he designed a primary bathroom for de Taillac-Touhami, with several types of deep-hued, highly figured marble and a sculptural, squared-off tub, he has left two small powder rooms on different floors as he found them, each covered top to bottom in a seemingly random pastiche of small multicolored glazed tiles. Buñuel gave the tiles, which were from one of his film sets, to Carrière. “Only a fool would remove them,” says Touhami. “Even when you’re making something entirely new, you have to recognize if you come upon magic. You have to know just to leave it alone.”