The rug in the Haussmannian apartment

A period parquet, cognac leather armchairs, white walls, high mouldings. In a Haussmannian apartment, the rug always arrives after this decor, and it must reckon with it. In Paris, in the seventh arrondissement, a decorator who is a friend of the house redid an apartment of this kind in 2024 and was looking for a piece able to converse with the parquet without supplanting it: a very colourful piece, but one that knows how to step back when needed. He chose a rug from the PAINTINGS collection by Jean-Paul Espinosa, hand-tufted in India. The choice runs against a received idea, according to which a classical interior would call for a discreet rug, plain or antique. It shows on the contrary that a frank colour finds its place in a Haussmannian apartment when the piece knows how to hold its rank, no more, no less. On the floor, an Espinosa that catches the light.

What did the apartment ask for?

It asked for a piece that would speak with what already existed. The period parquet remained the first element of the place, and the rug was not to steal that place from it. Yet colour was needed, a great deal of colour, in a room with white walls and high mouldings, furnished with cognac leather armchairs.

The request thus came down to two demands that seem to oppose each other: to be very colourful, and to know how to withdraw. This is often the case in apartments of this type. Haussmannian buildings were constructed during the transformations of Paris directed by Baron Haussmann, prefect of the Seine from 1853 to 1870, according to regulations that strictly fixed the height and arrangement of the façades; the apartment building and the private mansion served as models. A rug here joins an ensemble that already has its personality.

The decorator, a friend of the house, looked for the answer in its artists' collections. The rue du Bac showroom, where the pieces can be seen and touched, is in the same arrondissement.

Why a piece from PAINTINGS?

Because PAINTINGS is a collection of colour, and its colour comes from a painter. Jean-Paul Espinosa stands on the border between art and design: artistic creation gives the impulse, then he carries that spark through to the end, into the object. He loves colour passionately and works it with great freedom, in the spontaneity and breadth of the gesture. “Colour passes through me and I guide it,” he says.

The rug, for him, is a place in its own right. “I conceive the rug as a territory: a privileged, personal and reassuring place, where one can welcome one's friends and family.” The artist also thinks of art at the scale of places: through a global approach to projects, his work develops the integration of art into architecture and design. For him, art opens windows in our spaces and makes places alive for those who pass through them. A Haussmannian living room, with its parquet and mouldings, lends itself to this idea.

In the collection, the piece The Rose concentrates all this vocabulary: a colour worked in full freedom, between frank brilliance and depth. The other pieces of PAINTINGS extend this handwriting, each with its palette.

The collection is hand-tufted in India, in the workshop with which the house has worked since November 2000, the one that masters its most complex projects and its large mock-ups. The translation of these canvases into wool proceeded by trial and error: the artisans learned to modulate the tufting to render the artist's touch, and each piece raised the same question, what to keep from the canvas and what to reinvent in the textile. The story of this collection can be read in when painting comes down to the floor, and the pieces on the page PAINTINGS.

The parquet, the cognac leather, the mouldings

The piece lives today with the cognac leather armchairs, the white walls and the high mouldings, without ever seeming out of place in this classical setting. It catches the light, and it does so without supplanting the place.

That is all the realisation retains, and it is a great deal. The period parquet keeps its role. The furniture keeps its own. The rug brings the colour the decorator was seeking, and it brings it with the measure he asked for.

This dialogue is in no way a compromise. A very colourful piece that knows how to step back is a piece whose colours have been conceived by an artist and developed by a workshop, until they found their right intensity. That is where the work of publishing plays out: choosing the right piece for the right place.

A very colourful rug in a classical interior: on what conditions?

On condition that the colour has an author and a reason to be there. A colourful rug taken at random would have competed with the parquet; an artist's piece, chosen for this place, settles there because its colour is part of a work.

This project also nuances a habit of the house. It readily pairs the pieces of Christian Signorel, graphic and precise, with Parisian apartments, and those of Jean-Paul Espinosa with houses, where a rug that lives finds more space. The apartment in the seventh shows that the border is in no way a rule: a lover of colour can bring PAINTINGS into a Haussmannian interior, provided the place is left what belongs to it.

To go further in choosing a colour, the article choosing the colour of a rug gives markers, and the publishing work that links an artist, a material and a workshop is described in what is a rug publisher. The project itself features among the house's realisations: Haussmannian apartment, Paris 7. Other projects carried out with architects and decorators are gathered in the rug in an interior architecture project.

Text written by the house of Diacasan Edition from the realisation published on our website, our collection and artist records, and a historical source cited, October 2026.

Sources: Wikipedia, Immeuble haussmannien.