If you’ve ever visited one of French womenswear brand Sézane’s shops, you’ll know very well that they’re designed to feel like stepping into someone’s Paris home. Among the lace-trimmed dresses and wool cardigans are plush sofas and vintage armoires—as if the point of the operation isn’t to take home a flouncy floral blouse and, instead, sit down and stay a while. “For me, it made sense that the stores look as if I was inviting you into my home,” explains Morgane Sézalory, the brand’s founder, who grew Sézane into one of France’s most successful fashion e-commerce companies before even breaking ground on her first brick-and-mortar. “But to be honest, I wouldn’t know how to do it otherwise.”
So with that in mind, what does the entrepreneur’s Left Bank pad look like? Exactly as one would expect: cozy, welcoming, and layered with rich textiles, vibrant colors, and vintage furniture that has followed her from apartment to apartment for decades—including her latest, a two-story flat in Paris’s seventh arrondissement.
When Sézalory and her husband found the spacious ground-floor apartment, its ornately decorated rooms had laid vacant for several decades. “No one had touched the place for 70 years,” she recounts. Originally constructed in the 1800s, its neglected state meant that a lengthy restoration process was required, which entailed replacing the crumbling structure, ancient wiring, and century-old plumbing. However, Sézalory made sure to keep its original features intact, like dainty molding on the ceiling rendered in floral motifs and timeworn herringbone parquet wood floors. “We had to do the construction, but at the same time we wanted to preserve its charm,” she adds.
Along with the renovation, Sézalory took the opportunity to reshuffle the rooms. The most dramatic being the kitchen, which she, along with her contractor, had moved from the upper level to the ground floor, overlooking the private walled garden—a true rarity in densely packed central Paris. “I wanted to make a beautiful corner where I could spend time with my family,” explains Sézalory, who installed a curved bench to make the most of the tight space and a mirrored wall to catch the natural light. “Somewhere I could sit with my daughters after school and do homework.” Plus, in the summer she could admire the garden’s fragrant vines of jasmine and bursting rose bushes from the comfort of her kitchen table. “You have this feeling of being in a countryside house,” she says. “On the streets of Paris, you can’t hear the birds, but every morning in this garden you can. It’s just so magical.”
Elsewhere, the design is dictated by some of Sézalory’s most cherished objects, including one-of-a-kind jewels picked up on far-flung travels. “I start with what I love the most,” she explains. “And I create the room around it.” In the living room, the center point was an antique paper wall hanging depicting climbing vines of blue-and-white morning glory flowers found on a trip to Japan, which she balanced with sofas, discovered at flea markets then newly upholstered in complementary shades of blue-and-gold velvet. While in the dining room, a vintage screen discovered in Los Angeles sets the tone. “Most people come back from holiday with just clothing and a suitcase—I return with furniture,” she quips. The wood screen’s cloudy tinted finish was the perfect accompaniment to an abstract fabric collage by the artist François Mascarello and a portrait of a seated woman by the French painter Pierre Boncompain, whose work Sézalory has hung throughout the house.