PARISIANS ARE OFTEN caricatured as blasé yet, when it comes to their city’s cultural treasures, they can be disarmingly sentimental. New Yorkers may dismiss the Empire State Building as kitsch, but Parisians have an unironic love for the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. There is likewise widespread devotion to the capital’s artisanal past: Many wouldn’t dream, for example, of getting their brass door hardware anywhere but the 19th-century A La Providence on Rue du Faubourg St.-Antoine, or their pencils anywhere but the 136-year-old art supply store Sennelier.
Such loyalty to the city’s institutions has a relatively young champion these days: the 38-year-old illustrator Marin Montagut. Raised in Toulouse by antiques dealer parents, he was enamored as a child with images of Paris’s Belle Époque and dreamed of moving to the capital to make art; at 19, he arrived with a single suitcase, a set of watercolors and a few sable brushes.
While sourcing furniture for film sets to make a living, he created an illustrated map of Paris highlighting some of its obscure craft ateliers and stores and sold it from the back of his Vespa to concept boutiques such as Merci and Colette. In 2013, he began producing tiny paintings of fin de siècle motifs — the Jardin du Luxembourg’s sage green chairs, wooden oil-paint palettes, tarot cards — that have become his signature, printing them on silk scarves or porcelain. Later, after establishing a workshop that now employs 10 people, he started to experiment with blown-glass vessels adorned with hand-painted petals, the cut-paper dioramas (depicting everything from flaming hearts to hot-air balloons) that he calls wonder windows, candles, notebooks and papier-mâché boxes.
All of these are now sold at, among other places, Montagut’s namesake boutique, which he opened three years ago on Rue Madame in the Sixth Arrondissement. Once occupied by an upholsterer, the space, with its windowed viridian facade and creaky floors, resembles a turn-of-the-20th-century curio shop; antique toys and objects, including mechanical puppets and handmade globes, sit beside the designer’s wares in vintage walnut cabinets.
The effect might be camp if it weren’t for the exquisite execution and the sheer sweetness of Montagut’s brushstrokes. In 2021, Flammarion published his illustrated sourcebook of inspirations, “Timeless Paris,” a tour of 19 renowned ateliers, lesser-known small museums and esoteric emporiums. With large-scale photographs, reproduced ephemera and hundreds of watercolors, it features chapters on the late 19th-century trimming factory Passementerie Verrier and the 143-year-old apothecary Herboristerie de la Place Clichy. A section focuses on Montagut’s own shop, of course, pasting him, Zelig-like, into the city’s legendary past, where he has always imagined himself.
THE BOOK ALSO, unexpectedly, helped the illustrator find the sort of home that had long been part of his fantasy. Among the businesses profiled is Soubrier, a 150-year-old family-owned firm based in the 12th Arrondissement, on the city’s eastern edge, that originally produced period furniture and dealt in antiques but now rents out its inventory for film and photography sets. The company’s 32,000-square-foot brick warehouse is where a props master might go to find a Napoleon III desk resembling ones from the Élysée Palace or a copper deep-sea diving helmet.
One day during Montagut’s research, the company’s current president, Louis Soubrier, showed him the private cobblestone alleyway next door. Lined with single-story windowed workshops, some of which had been converted into residences, it was everything the young designer had yearned for back in Toulouse. For more than a century, beginning in the Middle Ages, the street was under the control of the St.-Antoine-des-Champs Abbey, a coterie of nuns from highborn families whose connections helped turn it into a furniture-making mecca; during the French Revolution, the craftspeople were instrumental in storming the Bastille. And yes, there was a vacancy — a cozy duplex apartment carved from a two-story house at the end.
The neighborhood’s relative tranquillity is a relief for Montagut, who moved into the building two years ago with his partner, Alexis Gilot, an actor, director and stand-up comedian. Montagut has transformed the 1,292-square-foot, two-bedroom space into a fusion of Gilded Age Paris and his other geographic touchstone: Normandy, about an hour and a half west by car. “You have to pick your city and the place you belong in the country,” he says. “And Normandy is my place.” His mother runs an antiques shop there; he has a weekend house not far away.
Indeed, the couple’s home, reached through a cerulean-painted wooden doorway overhung with grapevines, appears like a cottage nestled in the woods. The small entry, painted a ruddy brown and dominated by a seven-foot-tall forest green 19th-century embellished armoire, gives way to a kitchen wallpapered in cream and ocher stripes. Clustered on a raw wood-plank table are glass and silver candlesticks fitted with pink tapers half-melted during the couple’s dinner parties, at which they serve pot-au-feu or boeuf bourguignon.
The loftlike span of the long, rectangular living area, which adjoins the kitchen, gives Montagut’s innumerable objects space to breathe. Scores of vintage white plaster casts — torsos, busts, feet — many arranged on tall carved marble pedestals, punctuate the expanse; a Victorian crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling’s narrow, rough-hewn wood beams. Next to the fireplace, framed by a carved mahogany mantel, sits a three-foot-tall wooden model of the Eiffel Tower, one of the dozens of miniatures that Montagut owns.
Along the moss-colored wall behind the staircase hang a tableau of religious artifacts from Portugal and Italy; the framed relics with their tiny jewels and cutouts of saints inspired Montagut’s wonder windows. At the top of the steps, down the hall from the couple’s bedroom, where a Swedish quilt with intricate chevrons enlivens the foot of the bed, is the small, crowded room around which Montagut’s enterprise revolves: his studio. Unsurprisingly, he is not a designer who needs a whitewashed box to create in; he prefers to be ensconced in a cabinet of curiosities. One wall is a tapestry of tacked-up tarot cards, and on the surfaces are globes from every era, painted wooden figures, tiny boxes salvaged from the back of a dusty shop. As Montagut works — at a vintage Ikea pine desk, topped with a sheet of cork and positioned in front of a large window overlooking the grape arbor below — his brush flies among several watercolors in progress: of a chest of drawers, a heart topped with a diadem, a bergère upholstered in blue stripes. The afternoon sun slants through the glass, throwing shadows on a small twisted-wire Tour Eiffel at his elbow, and in the greenery below, as if on cue, a thrush begins its song.
Photo assistant: Simon Junot
