RREEL modernises apartment beneath Le Corbusier's former home in Paris

Architecture studio RREEL has given a more contemporary feel to this apartment inside Immeuble Molitor, the residential building where architect Le Corbusier lived for more than three decades.

Immeuble Molitor is located on the edge of Paris' 16th arrondissement and was designed by Le Corbusier and his close collaborator, Swiss architect Pierre Jeanneret, in 1931.

Le Corbusier moved in when construction works completed in 1934, having reserved the top two floors of the eight-storey building for his own living quarters; he stayed up until his death in 1965.

The apartment updated by RREEL sits on the third floor. It originally had several elements that Le Corbusier felt were essential to modern building design, some of which were outlined in his Five Points of Architecture: an open layout, long, ribbon-like windows and columns in place of load-bearing walls.

During the 1970s, however, its owners inserted a number of partitions, laid down a thick brown carpet, and rendered surfaces an unsightly shade of orange.

When new occupants moved in last year, they asked RREEL to "restore the atmosphere and qualities of Le Corbusier's work".

The studio did extensive research into how the apartment looked in the past, but decided to avoid replicating it exactly.

"The plan is entirely contemporary and is not a reproduction of the original state. We had no intention of recreating a pastiche of the 1930s, but rather of taking advantage of the open plan offered by Le Corbusier to create something new," RREEL's co-founder, Rosalie Robert, told Dezeen.

"The new interior is conceived as a dialogue of several distinct objects, whose shapes, colours and materials give a historical and poetic echo to the existing building."

To begin, surfaces throughout the home were completely stripped back; this process revealed a layer of wallpaper that Le Corbusier had designed for Swiss manufacturer Salubra in the early 1930s.

Unfortunately it was too damaged to be preserved, leading the studio to paint the walls a clean shade of white.

The kitchen used to sit towards the back of the plan, but has now been integrated into the front lounge area to form a flexible living-dining space.

It's anchored by a large counter clad in sienna-red tiles, a hue that RREEL sourced from Le Corbusier's 1931 Colour Keyboards – a series of complementary colour palettes that the architect curated to capture different interior moods and atmospheres.

The radiators, structural columns and exposed pipework throughout the apartment have all been painted a shade of blue that was present in the wallpaper.

A curved wall that RREEL believe featured in Le Corbusier's original plan has been reinstated, and now conceals the bedroom and its adjoining bathroom. The shower here is contained by a similar curved wall, covered in the same red tiles that were used on the kitchen counter.

A sink has also been slotted into a concrete ledge that has run beneath the apartment's courtyard-facing windows since the 1930s.

Immeuble Molitor has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016. That same year, Fondation Le Corbusier launched a restoration of the architect's own apartment, which involved the repair of the home's peeling walls, restoration of its furniture, and its original paint scheme refreshed – it re-opened to the public in 2018.

Recently, an exhibition at Le Corbusier's Maison La Roche building explored the architect's ties to Brazil.

The photography is by Mary Gaudin. 

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