Elegant Double Salon in a Paris Apartment | Living Room Tour & Inspiration

Name: Elegant Double Salon in a Paris Apartment | Living Room Tour & Inspiration
Uploaded: 2026-09-06T20:29:00.989Z
Duration: 9 min 9 s
Channel: Cat Tuong

Cat Tuong

114 Video Views·Sep 6, 2026 #castle

"GOOD CONTENT"#architecture #castle
On a street of grand limestone facades in the 16th arrondissement, designer Timothy Corrigan has created a Paris apartment that argues, room by room, against the fashion for painting everything white.

The building dates to the Belle Époque, a period Timothy describes as being entirely about elegance and show. There's one apartment per floor, and this one was built by the building's original owner — which is why it has terraces, balconies on most windows, and roughly 3,600 square feet, enormous by Paris standards.

The salon is really two rooms. Doors once separated them, and Timothy removed the doors to make one long space that still reads as two. The daytime salon is white furniture in outdoor fabric — light, bright, genuinely usable. The evening salon is double the size and dressed in silk velvet, which he warns will stain if you so much as look at it wrong. Each has a fireplace, a mirror, and a chandelier, none of them exactly matching the other, and he added mirrors flanking the doors in both rooms to complete the effect. Symmetry matters, he argues, because we register it unconsciously and relax. Our faces are symmetrical. Our bodies are. It's a natural state.

The plasterwork ceiling is painted in five different colors to bring out its detail. When he arrived, everything had been whitewashed, as is currently fashionable in Paris, and he considers that a genuine loss — research suggests architectural detail measurably lifts your mood, and painting it flat means you stop seeing it.

Across the hall is his favorite room in the apartment: the library and study, intended as a dining room until he decided he doesn't entertain that formally. De Gournay made custom wallpaper panels here to imitate an original frescoed ceiling. The centerpiece is an 18th-century screen from the reign of Louis XV, showing what is now the Place de la Concorde before the surrounding buildings existed, with Montmartre visible in the distance. He found it at the Paris flea market.

Elsewhere: a Jacques-Louis David study for a painting hanging in the Louvre, a 1940s bust, a Rodin watercolor propped casually beside a taxidermy parrot. Nothing announces itself. You notice things slowly, over weeks.

This is sort of the daytime salon, and some of the architectural details that I really love in this room are the incredible plasterwork ceiling, which I painted in five different colors to accentuate all the beautiful architectural detailing. The next room, which is adjacent, is sort of what I would call the evening salon. And again, it's very similar to the daytime salon. It's literally, it's double the size, and it's all about this pair of sofas. And again, you can sort of see the same mirror in the center and fireplace, the same sets of mirrors on the sides. Similar chandelier, but not exactly the same. And again, it's that aspect of symmetry that makes the room feel so special. One of my favorite things in the entire room is this painting by Jacques-Louis David, and it's a study he did for a much, much larger painting that's in the Louvre here in Paris. I think one of my favorite sort of moments in the whole apartment is this mixture of items here, which is really certainly incredible things that I found from all over. This wonderful 1940s bust from the Paris flea market. This sort of fun taxidermy bird in front of this wonderful sort of simple watercolor by Rodin. And it's the mixture of all those different elements together that I find so much fun. The way they've sort of casually placed there so that you don't actually say, gee, look at me, but you start to notice them over time as we start to sit in the room. Well, there actually, there were doors between these two rooms. And so they were really meant to be sort of separated. And I decided to take the doors out and actually sort of make it one big salon, but making it feel like it was, they were almost two rooms in respect that one I feel feels more of the daytime room. It's all done in white furniture. That's all outdoor fabric. So you can really come in and be in the daytime and it feels light and bright. This room is the more formal room. This is silk velvet. If you've ever had silk velvet, you'll know that if you look at it funny, it will stain or it will mark. So this is the more formal, that's the more casual. And I really sort of liked this, that aspect of having two rooms that are all together. What's also interesting is that the French really understand and appreciate the importance of symmetry. And so this is a room that's all about, these two rooms are really all about symmetry. So there's a fireplace. They're not exactly the same fireplace in each room. There's a mirror that doesn't exactly match in each room. And then I decided to continue it. So I added mirrors on both sides of the doors on both rooms. So there's a sense of symmetry. Symmetry is very important because you actually feel more comfortable. Unconsciously, you feel more comfortable in a room that is symmetrical. So I really, that's one of those other aspects of elegant comfort. You don't have to try to figure it out. In a room that's asymmetrical, you're always trying to balance it and try to figure out, well, why is that there and that's not there? By nature, we crave symmetry. I mean, think about our faces. Our faces are all about symmetry. Our bodies are symmetrical. So it's really, it's a natural state of being. From here, I'd like to take you across the hall to my library and study, which is really my favorite room in the entire house. This was intended to be the dining room, but because I don't entertain that much, I turned it into my office. You can see the wonderful beam ceiling. And I actually had Excel, the English company, create special wallpaper panels to make it look like it's the original frescoed ceiling above. And my very favorite item in the entire house is this wonderful 18th century screen that you can see is from the time of Louis XV, when what is now the Place de Concorde was then called Place Louis Cannes. And you can see it's before any of the buildings that have been built up around it were there. And you can see what is Montmartre off in the distance. I actually found this at the Paris Flea Market, which is really such an amazing, there's so many amazing things that if you come to Paris, you absolutely must go visit the Paris Flea Market. I think one of the things that I love about this room is, again, it's all the architectural detailing. And because I spend so much time doing architecture, I have all the artwork is actually architecturally detailed and inspired. And this wonderful maquette here of the pavilion in Montpellier, which is just a spectacular building as well. The first thing I saw when I actually walked in for the really for the first time was I just noticed all the incredible plaster work, the ceiling work, the beautiful paneling, the boiserie in the walls. It's something that I really love. It's become sort of fashionable in recent years in Paris, just to paint all of it white, white, white. And that's exactly what they had done here. And so I actually went back and highlighted all the different beautiful detailing, architectural detailing with different colors. So this room alone has probably around five different colors of creams and whites in it, which actually accentuate the architectural detailing and actually make you appreciate them that much more. And it's interesting because research actually shows that spaces that have architectural detailing actually make you feel better. You actually feel enhanced. They elevate the overall spirit. So it's a real shame when they just all get whitewashed out and you don't notice them anymore. And this is the dining room of the apartment. It actually was originally a bedroom, but I decided to make this into a dining room because it's got this wonderful proportions. It's intimate and it's square, which is actually wonderful for a round dining room table like this. One of my favorite aspects in this entire room are these wonderful sculptures. These were actually created by Christian Dior and they were considered his muses. They were his design muses. You can see the fabric here, the scissors at the bottom of the fabric, and they were in his atelier for all the time that he was alive. One of the other things that I really love is this wonderful cartoon. A cartoon is the artwork. It was used for a tapestry in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was the basis upon which the tapestry was created. Very few of them actually still exist because they were not considered very valuable at the time. The value was, of course, in the finished product, the tapestry. But this is a wonderful cartoon for a tapestry. I just love the richness of the colors. I chose the blue for the dining room because I actually pulled the colors out of the tapestry, the cartoon of tapestry. I also wanted to mix then these Danish rondelles, which are bright and crisp and white. Again, it was the combination of the white, which goes so well against a pale blue background that was found in the cartoon tapestry. Well, it's interesting because I love coral. I think coral is such a wonderful, warm color. Yellow reds are actually, I find, much more inviting than a blue red, which is a colder red. The warm coral color red is just a wonderful complement to so many different colors, but it works particularly well with this sort of pale blue. I think that what's interesting is that when you take pieces from different cultures and put them together, you actually see how similar they often are, and yet you also see the contrast and the differences. Again, it's that tension that is created by those pairings that make you actually see them all almost for the first time because you see them in context with something which is totally different. You want to have a room that doesn't reveal all of its secrets in the first three minutes. You want to have a room that sort of, as you spend more time in it, you start to see, oh my goodness, I hadn't noticed that, or I see this, and isn't that pretty? You want to be in a space that has those layerings, and those layerings are what create the interest in the room. You know what's so interesting about contemporary clean spaces is they really look great when you look at it in a magazine or in a book, but once we bring all of our things into that space, our iPad, our computer, the dog leash, whatever it is, you add those extra pieces in, and that beautiful, pristine room doesn't look so good anymore because it's meant to be lived in minimally, but it's not really the way we live today. So I think that by living in a space that is more accepting of different layers, you actually can live in it more comfortably. I think this home is a reflection of my life and my journey in that it really reflects things that I found all over the world and really love. We're currently working, for example, in seven different countries around the world, so I go around the world once a month, and I'm always sort of seeing things and picking things up, and it's that aspect of acquiring things and then letting them go as well. I think it's so important not to have too much attachment to our possessions, so I'm routinely sort of rotating things in and out of my homes, and so that it never feels stagnant to me as well. It always feels very alive. Thanks for watching. Be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content, shopping guides, and so much more.