This article originally appeared in the September 2011 issue of Architectural Digest.
Jean-Paul Beaujard, an urbane Frenchman, answers his doorbell on a gray morning. The hallway of his building, off Lexington Avenue in New York City, seems unremarkable. From the foyer, a visitor notices the heady scent of wood smoke and lilies. A flight of stairs, closely hung with engravings, rises on the left. The entrance to Beaujard’s salon is curtained by a swag of velvet, and all you can see of it is an opaline glow. “Entrez,” he says suavely.
Not all escape routes from Manhattan, it turns out, involve a bridge or a tunnel. Beaujard is a designer whose work combines formal rigor with a gift for scenography, and his residence has something in common—a magical sense of dislocation—with Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris. Allen’s story is a reverie about time travel (his hero is ferried back to the Jazz Age), and when you cross Beaujard’s threshold, you are also transported to a moment of glamour and ferment in Parisian history: the early 19th century. (His guest room is such a perfect Empire bijou, with striped silk on the walls, an exotic nude over the mantel, and a steel campaign bed, that you half expect to meet Napoléon’s ghost.) “I love the romance of lost or forgotten places,” Beaujard says, “the mystery of an interior where time seems to have stopped—yet nothing is dated.”
The layout of his duplex resembles a work of marquetry, an elegant puzzle with hidden seams. He pieced the two floors together from adjoining ateliers in an Art Deco–era building with 14-foot ceilings and oversize windows. The apartments were designed as pieds-à-terre for gentleman artists; Beaujard, who never cooks, left the first-floor bachelor’s kitchen as he found it, and he works in a minuscule office converted from a maid’s room. His sleeping quarters upstairs are downright modest, recalling a garret from La Bohème. But each of the rooms on the lower floor—the salon, the dining room, and the guest room—has, like a Bonaparte sibling, been groomed for a throne.
The First Empire was a virile moment in French decor, when the froufrou and pastels of the ancien régime surrendered to the martial style of an age whose hunger for grandeur coexisted with a penchant for severity. Beaujard’s translation of the period isn’t literal (Art Deco chandeliers commingle with Minton garden stools, a Wiener Werkstätte screen, and sculptures from the Second Empire), but he is faithful to its heroic spirit. The salon is furnished with upright seating by the master ébénistes Jacob Frères. There is plenty to read about palace architecture in a baronial English bookcase. Equestrian bronzes flank the window. The lapidary palette—onyx, emerald, and sapphire—is neoclassical, and so is the effect of a bare floor. “I resisted the temptation to add carpets,” Beaujard says. “My notion of luxury is a room that is just a bit spartan. When you edit out everything superfluous, you liberate the emotion of a room, and it has the power to keep surprising you.”
Two steps down from the salon, its dark luster dissolves into the shimmer of an ethereal dining room modeled on a czarist winter garden. A treillage of ivy on moiré curtains frames a window. (“I love ivy,” Beaujard says. “It’s a bit melancholy yet so tenacious!”) A Regency-style table floats on a floor of faux bleu turquin marble squares. Mirrors balance the room’s height, creating an illusion of symmetry.
Beaujard has lived in New York for almost 40 years, but he was born in Burgundy, in a village, he notes proudly, not far from Colette’s. That makes him, like her, a product of la France profonde. (His charm, like his accent and his café filtre, is still deeply French.) A brief visit to Manhattan in the mid-1970s turned into a lifetime sojourn. He opened an antiques shop near his current residence, and clients soon began asking him to do up their houses.
Among Beaujard’s early commissions was a sumptuous hotel apartment for Diane von Furstenberg—a tour de force of Orientalism. A nostalgia for the gorgeous barbarism of an East that never existed suffused French art and literature of the 19th century, and even a purist like Beaujard, who prefers, he says, “coolness to warmth” and spareness to pomp, wasn’t immune to it. Apparently, he still isn’t. “I have always been a dreamer,” he concludes, “enamored by the faraway. And I’ll tell you a secret—I’m often inspired by old postcards.” Time travel takes many forms.