HOME TOUR:
Ollivier & Gladys Chenel

In Ollivier and Gladys Chenel’s Paris apartment there is a 17th-century marble console, on which a series of objects have been carefully arranged: a second-century marble head, the fragment of a column from an ancient Roman monument, a ceramic dove by Pablo Picasso and a photograph of the Mediterranean coast taken from inside Adalberto Libera’s iconic Villa Malaparte by François Halard. It’s a neat cross-section of the eclectic mix of art, objects and antiquities that fill the couple’s home in the historic city center.

For Ollivier and Gladys, though, the key to understanding their creative and collaborative approach to collecting is, in fact, a small work by the British artist John Stezaker. It hangs in the entryway and consists of two black-and-white photographs combined to ...