Paris VII

A nature lover, the interior designer has arranged a protective canopy over her dining-room table with the foliage of a giant ficus. The apartment’s balconies feature lush green compositions of grasses and climbing plants, the fruit of her collaboration with landscape designer Arnaud Casaus.

Marion Stora lives with her husband Didier and their son on Paris’s Left Bank, just a stone’s throw from the Champs-de-Mars with its shady paths lined with plane trees, horse-chestnuts and limes.

This calm, serene interior is entirely dedicated to family life and animated gatherings with friends, where notes from the piano can be heard on the night air. The musicality of the apartment also emanates from the flat tones of color punctuating the walls: a swathe of black groundnut in the dining room, another of October mistletoe in the study, notes of blue-green in the child’s room.

These touches of color also punctuate Marion Stora’s furniture, such as the two footstools upholstered in fuchsia leather framing the sideboard in the entrance hall. Desk, bookcase, seating – many of the pieces here were made-to-measure, down to the wool and mohair rug for her son’s bedroom, woven by Manufacture Robert Four following a drawing by her son.

Alongside her own creations, the interior architect likes to mix vintage furniture, both Scandinavian and Italian, forming compositions of elegant simplicity. The hall is lit by Paavo Tynell wall lights, originally designed to indicate the room numbers in a hotel corridor. Contemporary creation is not to be outdone. Marion Stora commissioned a sculptural coffee table divided into quarters from designer-artist Éric Schmitt. A Balinese daybed – a travel souvenir – breathes exoticism and fantasy into this rigorously designed interior.

Marion Stora develops lived-in interiors that tell the stories of their owners.