In 1898, Paul, together with Behrens, Pankok, and Riemerschmid, was working as an applied artist. He was a leading figure in the development of the Jugendstil, and quickly established himself as the premier designer for the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk, a maker of artistic housewares in Munich. The Jugendstil Hunter's Room he designed for the Vereinigte Werkstätten in 1900 received a gold medal at the 1900 Paris International Exposition and was the first of a series of prestigious commissions that won widespread professional admiration. He won another gold medal at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, introducing his interior designs to a broad American audience. In 1906, Paul designed a festival decoration for a barracks in Munich, his first commission on an architectural scale. His design (perhaps apocryphally) impressed Kaiser Wilhelm II and facilitated his appointment to the vacant directorship of the Unterrichtsanstalt des königlichen Kunstgewerbe-Museums (educational institution of the royal museum of applied arts) in Berlin, an institution analogous to the South Kensington (later, Victoria and Albert) Museum in London or to the Art Institute in Chicago.