Secrétan 2 | La Sagna & Racine

A few days after we began working on the apartment, the client told me she had also bought a tiny adjacent room—the perfect pied-à-terre, with a beautiful window overlooking the Halle Sécrétan, a stunning cast-iron covered market designed by the renowned architect Victor Baltard. Even better: it had the same generous ceiling height as the main space.

The only brief she gave was: “Don’t make it a space-saving project—I want a small apartment.”

With the main apartment in mind, we designed a grand oak cabinet to house everything, and a green steel structure—no thicker than a sheet of metal—to support a mezzanine bed. Beneath it, the bathroom opens onto the main room, only visible through the sink and the shower head.

No kitchenette either. Instead, inspired by the peculiar rotating kitchen table in the Maison de Verre and Pierre Chareau’s iconic fan tables, we designed three pivoting stainless steel quarter-circles that slide out from the back. They function as surfaces for meal preparation, cooking, and dining. Resting on rubber wheels, they introduce a playful, mechanistic feel to the whole studio—an effect echoed in the cantilevered stainless steel staircase and all the quirky devices hidden inside the grand oak cabinet: retractable wardrobes, a convertible sofa allowing four people to sleep in just 14.5 sqm, a mirror that doubles the perceived space, and hidden appliances that pop out unexpectedly.

It’s a prototype—somewhere between a space capsule and a mechanistic fantasy. Not an optimized, space-saving studio, but something stranger and more theatrical.

Photography: Schnepp Renou