Photo by Carmen Troesser
"It’s a little skating rink,” says a laughing Isabelle Montupet as she nods toward one of the finishing touches in the Clayton apartment she shares with husband Jean-Paul: a Citterio Diesis coffee table, topped with a sheet of ground glass that does indeed bear the flawless finish of just–Zamboni-ed ice.
The Montupets bought this unit in 2015 after deciding to downsize from a grand Art Deco house in Brentmoor Park. They found themselves having to winnow down their possessions and transform the former corporate apartment with its dark wood floors, putty-colored walls, and eclectic moldings. Enter Susan Bower of Mitchell Wall Architecture and Design, who came on board late that year to help with the gutting and the renovation.
How long did the process take? “It was a very short time,” Isabelle says. “We signed, and we were here in 10 months.”
Bower first gave the Montupets concepts for organizing the space. High-rise apartments can be tricky; the plumbing stacks are where they are, and seismic bracing can render major floor plan changes impossible. The only natural light comes in through the exterior wall windows. After Bower and Isabelle decided on the palette, the plan emerged.
“We did gray lacquer panels wrapping around the interior wall,” Bower says. “When you come in the front door, those panels are on your left and continue. They wrap into the library, become the bookshelves, then end at the opening of the master suite so there’s a continuous ribbon of gray facing the perimeter wall with the windows.” Two more non-negotiables: symmetry and storage. Isabelle told Bower, “I’m French; I like symmetry.” And then, Bower says, “every condition in that apartment, because of the layout, is asymmetrical! So we tried to strike balances where we could.”
The heart of the house is the library. It exemplifies the layering of furniture throughout: French heirlooms, modern furniture from the old house, new contemporary pieces. Here, that’s two cream-colored French bergères, a new Piero Lissoni sofa, and “Grand-père’s Louis Vuitton travel chest,” repurposed as another coffee table.
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Photos by Alise O'Brien
And custom bookshelves. “We carried away from our life a lot of books,” Isabelle says. “We kept half of them.” Some went to their vacation home in Sun Valley, Idaho. “And maybe some…went away,” she says dryly. On Jean-Paul’s side of the library, it’s everything to do with cars, organized by brand; Isabelle’s is organized by color. “It’s not really librarian-approved,” she says, laughing. The stacks are lit with Oskar penlights on adjustable black wires; Bower tucked small collectibles throughout the shelves (such as the pair of little wooden horses on Jean-Paul’s side that look like the Ferrari cavallino). On Isabelle’s side she hung a dramatic red geometric work by the late Gottfried Honegger, a friend from her days at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The library’s tiled wall matches the floors throughout the apartment, which look like limestone but are actually porcelain.
Husband and wife each have a favorite room. For Jean-Paul, it’s his office, built out with custom glass-paned cabinets to house his collection of model cars, which he’s been collecting since 1964. “Here you have Ferraris, Jaguars, Mercedeses… so these are very accurate scale models,” he explains. “Some of them are just one-offs. And you can see that in some cases, the model behind is the same car without the body on it”—down to the tiny V-8 engine, or an (even tinier) leather steering wheel cover. The contractor, Markway, built the cabinetry—starting with existing glass panels, a process that Bower says is proof of their skill and “magical powers.”
Isabelle’s favorite is her stunning dressing room, which features floor-to-ceiling mirrors and light gray–lacquered cabinetry—these provided the highest finish in the space—made in Italy by Lema. Her makeup table faces a shelf backed by a glowing white panel that illuminates her collection of large-scale display perfume bottles, their contents glowing pale green, straw yellow, or amber like the contents of an alchemist’s lab. She says she wants to write a sort of poem with the names on the decanters: Poème, Obsession, Sublime...
Though it was a speedy process, there were challenges. One, for Isabelle, was deciding on the tub—she even stubbed a toe in the process of getting in and out of so many in her search for the perfect one: a simple soaking tub without all the wild modern accoutrements like chromotherapy. As they worked their way toward the front of the space, things got a bit more puzzle-like. The Montupets had to decide between a tiny kitchen and big dining room and vice versa. They opted for a spacious Poggenpohl kitchen with pale-greige Caesarstone counters, with lights engineered inside, outside, and under the cabinetry. And Bower created a pass-through to the dining room in homage to the Brentmoor Park house: “One of our signature moments where we could get the alignments to work!” she says.
In other words, they struck that coveted quality of symmetry—which was also important in the dining room. The outside light is filtered with a scrim that also serves as a place to hang art—symmetrically. Carried over from the old house are the Le Corbusier table and Mario Bellini Cab chairs, two of them stowed on a platform that also offers extra storage. Though each area is discrete, the space flows gracefully from room to room: after excusing themselves from the table, guests can comfortably move to the living room, the site of that impossibly, perfectly glassy Diesis table, a leather sofa that the Montupets brought with them from Paris when they moved to St. Louis in the ’90s, and two Pirellina glass lamps from FontanaArte, designed by the late Gio Ponti, the architect who designed Pirelli’s headquarters in Milan (in honor of Jean-Claude’s love of automobiles).
From the living room, there’s access to two balconies, both tiled with ipe wood. One is outfitted for dining; the other for stargazing (or reading, or talking and sipping wine, as the case may be). Each provides a sweeping, panoramic view of the Montupets’ adopted city, which they’ve loved for more than 20 years—first from the tall-ceilinged rooms of an Art Deco house and now from this most perfect apartment, its mix of the old and the new, and its lovely rainbow of grays.
