Difficult exercise to define your style. Soizic Fouger will and Laure Gravier, founders of the Interior Architecture Agency Claves, are getting out of it with an elegant pirouette: “Let’s say that we have a taste for ornament, decorative painting and the 1930s and 1940s, but also that of fantasy and cinema decor. »»
The two associates thirties met in the offices of the French decorator and designer Pierre Yovanovitch. A graduate of the Camondo school, drawing objects since childhood, Laure Gravier took care of the line of furniture for seven years. Passed by Sciences Po Bordeaux and after a first life as a consultant, Soizic will Fouger was responsible for development. In 2022, they left their post to found their own agency, which they baptize “Claves”, a Latin key version: “The key to us at the start of a project, but also the key which has always been an exercise in style among art craftsmen, the key to secret …”
After a first private house in the 20the Arrondissement, the tandem has just completed its latest project in a slope street backed in Montmartre: Villa Junot, 710 square meters updated, from Rooftop SPA, for the Iconic House brand, specialist in the rental of exceptional houses. “We are always trying to give a narration to our sets: in this villa built in the interwar period for a composer of operettas, there was everything to do again but also a very beautiful art deco weft, like the rambardes with the key patterns fawhich served us to pull a thread around music and surrealism. »»
Theatrical diversions
Staff ceilings, gold leaf details, Viennese style stained glass windows, exotic wooden beds … their vocabulary, served by art craftsmen, is dotted with references. “But never literal”, Insists Laure Gravier, who likes theatrical diversions, lay a plaster drape on a master chimney for example, or a trompe-l’oeil fresco on the stairs.
At the Cornichon, a Parisian restaurant dressed by the duo with the codes of a “PMU bistro where we eat well”, Mosaic soil and velvet benches seem to be there since the 1950s, turned upside down by friezes and chrome bands.
“We like when we are asked if a colonnade, or a cornice, is period or not. In fact, it is almost the best compliment that we can make to us: that means that we have understood the place! “, said soizic will fouger. At the start of the school year, the pair will present its latest decor, there too for Iconic House: the interiors of a chalet by architect Henry Jacques the same in Megève, historic builder of the Alpine station, “Perfect mixture of rationality and decorative refinement”.
claves.fr
