At Home With: Emmanuel De Bayser

One could say that the area around Parc Monceau in Paris’ 8th Arrondissement is swanky, but that would rather miss the point: The neighborhood is quintessentially Parisian. The park itself is a delightful oasis of 19th-century splendor and the surrounding streets and boulevards have a serenely moneyed air. It is here that affable Parisian Emmanuel De Bayser has just completed renovations on a spacious, light-filled apartment. He makes an animated host. “I’ve been working on this apartment for a long time,” he says of his new place—a labor of love that included a total refit, decoration and, crucially for an interiors collector, furnishing. “Perhaps as long as six months,” he figures. It’s hardly an epoch, but De Bayser is clearly someone who doesn’t wait around.

The project played second fiddle to his day job running The Corner Berlin—the successful concept store he cofounded some 1,000 kilometers away in the German capital. There, on Mitte’s Gendarmenmarkt, he has also created another intimate apartment to house both himself and some extraordinary design pieces. The modern, mainly mid-century refinement of his Berlin home is something that De Bayser has always wanted to create in Paris—something he is hoping his new apartment (much larger than his former abode) will help him achieve.

“It was a little bit too small to allow the pieces to breathe,” he says of his previous address (shown throughout). Did he choose the new apartment with his furniture collection in mind, then? “Yes definitely,” De Bayser confirms. “Once you have that in mind, you really want to get on—to fill the place and finish it.” There is nothing slapdash or facile in his approach to creating a home, however. Influences on De Bayser’s taste hark back to 19th-century decorative arts and architecture as much as they celebrate sweeping modernist curves and angles. He corrects himself: “Well, in fact I’m never finished! The apartments always evolve.”

There is a charming dichotomy between many aspects of De Bayser’s life and personality: between the fast-paced and considered, the classically inspired and modernist-minded, between work and home in two of Europe’s great (and radically different) cities. All of this is something that informs De Bayser’s taste and approach to interior design. His collection of furniture may be varied, but it shows a definite francophone flavor.

“I started to collect my first objects from the 1950s when I was maybe 22,” he says of a lifelong passion for an era evident in all of his apartments. A striking arrangement of Pierre Jeanneret armchairs and couch dominates the main living room, for example. The set, with its distinc-tive V-leg formation, was designed by Jeanneret for Le Corbusier’s modernist vision for the urban plans and architecture of Chandigarh, India. Made of matured teak and upholstered with hide, De Bayser’s pieces are angular, soft and kept impossibly white. This cluster of chairs surrounds a reflective Ron Arad coffee table from the 1990s. Next door, a dining room is arranged with a playful menagerie of Jean Prouvé chairs. To punctuate the furniture—or almost as if to offer footprints—De Bayser has used ceramic pieces by the likes of Georges Jouve, mostly in a deep ink-black hue.

Though drawn to modernist postwar pieces, De Bayser is also influenced by the 19th-century, mainly Haussmannian architecture in the surrounding Parc Monceau area. There is something old-fashioned about De Bayser, who, with both parents and grandparents claiming the city as home, is born-and-bred Parisian. He laughs this off immediately and refutes the suggestion that he is counter-contemporary in any way. “There were artists and art dealers in my family, so I was surrounded by aesthetics—paintings, furniture, objects.” But it’s easy to see how this cultural training has influenced him through osmosis: “I distinctly remember being a child and hearing constant conversations about these objects, and also how each one had a story,” he adds.

Despite De Bayser’s penchant for what he calls “classic Parisian chic,” there isn’t the slightest bit of stuffiness about him. On the contrary, he is exuberant and fun-loving—especially when talking about his interiors. He is also very keen to shirk any hint of elitism: “For me, it’s more about being truthful to what you are and also what you got from your family.” But, of course, the ever-mercurial De Bayser does not follow in anyone’s footsteps. “I like to play with heritage,” he says, explaining how his game of interiors can be played on material choices, by referencing the elegant soft yellow limestone cornices and architrave in a pair of sheep sculptures by François-Xavier Lalanne, for example. Elsewhere, the typically 19th-century ironwork and leaded rooftops visible outside are matched and contrasted inside. “I like the combination of totally new and fresh alongside old features and materials,” he explains, gesturing toward a chunky, contemporary table he acquired from young French furniture designer Francesco Balzano: “You have to create tension.”

With the trappings of a Parisian life all around, it is easy to overlook the fact that De Bayser currently spends the majority of his time in Berlin. This dual urban existence is another of the many paradoxes that he makes his own. Does the choice of a scaled-up, larger Parisian abode hint at homesickness—a desire to resettle on his home turf? “When I live 100 percent here, I get a little bit sick of Paris,” he says. The past seven years have allowed De Bayser to regain a fondness, however. “I’ve started to like Paris more and more—almost as a tourist would.” Not to say that he is tired of Berlin just yet: “Paris means all the tradition and culture, and Berlin means being more adventurous, a bit more experimental, daring even.”

When creating beautiful homes in either the French or German capital, De Bayser’s domestic endeavors seem removed from his professional life. The feeling that he has curated a sanctuary for himself using his personal taste pervades the apartment on rue de Monceau. “My day job is most definitely still The Corner Berlin, and it’s a very big day job,” he concedes. “Every day, you receive beautiful new collections and merchandise that you must show off and celebrate. It has to be crated, yes, but it’s not a museum… I have to sell them.”

Here, in the calm environment of a carefully crafted private space, perhaps the most obvious of the many contrasts of this entrepreneurial retailer-cum-furniture collector is clear. “The business side of my life is go-go-go,” he says, gesticulating. “You receive things, you sell things, and so on.” But, at home, as he reclines back on his Pierre Jeanneret couch, the therapeutic value of his passion for collecting—and keeping—interiors is self-evident. Perhaps, concludes De Bayser, work and home don’t have to be countries apart: “I suppose it’s all about proportions for me. It either fits or it doesn’t fit.”