Inside designer Kenzo’s luxurious Parisian home

Arushi Sakhuja

Late Japanese fashion designer, Kenzo’s fashion creations were artful; bold, loud and eccentric. His former Parisian home called the Kenzo House fuses traditional Japanese design with Haussman architecture. The good news is that Kenzo’s luxurious Parisian home is up for sale with Belles Demeures de France, an affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate. 

The home is a zen refuge from the bustling cities of Paris in the historic Bastille district, a quiet, fashionable enclave of the Rive Droite.  A 13,778-square-foot, four-story home, Kenzo’s luxurious Parisian home is built around its own interior courtyard and is anchored to nature by landscaped terraces on an authentic Japanese garden with a stone-studded pond stocked with Nishiki carp. While the original home was built in 1993 and took three years to complete, it was redesigned in 2018 by celebrated architect Kengo Kum.

Upon setting foot into Kenzo’s luxurious Parisian home, any design enthusiast would call it an aesthete’s dream. While it’s not reminiscent of his exuberant prints, bold hues, and risk-taking silhouettes seen in his eponymous luxury fashion brand, the property boasts fine craftsmanship and meticulous attention to detail. It houses 18 rooms, seven bedrooms, two full baths and seven partial baths. Kenzo conceived his house as an eclectic convergence of East and West, cultures and art, and a reverence for nature.

Staying true to the late designer’s style, the interiors were in sync with the brand ethos when it came to textures and colours, light, and form. However, in 2018 Kuma, completely reconfigured the home and brought transparency to each room and re-oriented all the views toward the garden. Kuma said, “transparency is a characteristic of Japanese architecture; I try to use light and natural materials to get a new kind of transparency.”

He also incorporated more traditional Japanese building materials, such as ceramic, stone, bamboo, and wood, as well as cedar shingles, teak, and clay, to add texture and warmth to the exterior. The moment you set foot into the home you forget you are in Paris. To ensure the rooms are well illuminated, each room has floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing natural light and picturesque views of nature to flood inside. The home also features an engawa, a traditional Japanese exterior corridor crafted from the wooden lattice, replacing an indoor lap pool. A Japanese pavilion with tea ceremonies, tatami mats and shoji sliding doors opens to a koi pond. In the garden, you can find cherry and maple trees, bamboo, junipers, lichens, mosses, rocks, and waterfalls that mimic the calm and serenity of the Japanese landscape.

There are also three studio apartments, two reception rooms, two dining rooms, two kitchens, a music room, a study, a wine cellar and a fitness room. The home also has many gallery-like wall spaces and is the perfect spot to enjoy both indoors and outdoors.

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