Dimorestudio’s Saint-Germain apartment: the early private commission before the hotels

INTERIORS · PARIS

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Dimorestudio’s apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Pres is usually written about as a mood, jewel tones, gallery-worthy art, a “layered narrative.” What rarely gets said is where it sits in the studio’s own history: one of Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci’s early, largely under-the-radar private residential commissions, completed years before the Grand Hotel et de Milan and the hospitality projects that made their names internationally recognised.

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Introduction

Dimorestudio, the Milan studio founded by Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci in 2003, designed the interiors for a private apartment inside a 1940s building in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, Paris, for a pair of art-collector owners. The apartment spans approximately 300 square metres across two floors, a genuinely generous scale for central Paris, and it is consistently described, accurately as far as it goes, in terms of colour: saturated walls, jewel tones set against powdery pastels, and a confidence about pattern and finish that treats the building’s classical, mid-century Parisian proportions as a canvas rather than a constraint.

What that description leaves out is context. This is one of Dimorestudio’s early private residential projects, undertaken alongside similarly low-profile work in London’s Notting Hill, before the studio became known internationally for the Grand Hotel et de Milan, Ceresio 7 in Milan, Caffè Burlot in Paris and the Public Hotel in Chicago. It is, in effect, an origin story that almost nobody writing about the finished rooms bothers to tell.

Dimorestudio: two designers, one studio, one word

Moran and Salci met in 2000 through mutual friends and founded Dimorestudio in Milan in 2003, starting with a single assistant in one room on Via Solferino before growing into the internationally recognised practice it is today. Moran, from Asheboro, North Carolina, had originally planned to become a doctor before moving to Milan to teach English and eventually finding his way into graphic design. Salci grew up in Arezzo, Tuscany, where his father owned a furniture shop, and worked as art director at Cappellini before the two met.

They named the studio “dimore,” Italian for dwellings, a deliberate signal of where their instincts sit: not spectacle for its own sake, but rooms built to be lived in, however theatrical the palette gets. Salci has described the guiding principle plainly: “it’s fundamental that things are slightly off.” That instinct, along with an acknowledged debt to mid-century Italian masters including Carlo Scarpa and Gio Ponti, runs through the Saint-Germain apartment as clearly as it runs through anything the studio has built since.

The practice grew steadily rather than suddenly. From that single room on Via Solferino, Dimorestudio expanded to a twenty-person studio occupying roughly 2,100 square feet, and in 2006 launched its own furniture line of handcrafted Italian pieces, a natural extension of a design language already built around custom, one-off objects rather than off-the-shelf specification. The Saint-Germain apartment falls squarely within that early growth period, close enough to the studio’s Via Solferino beginnings that the confidence on display, jewel-toned walls set directly against inherited Parisian grandeur, reads as a genuine statement of intent rather than a formula already proven safe by prior commissions.

A generous scale, handled with intimacy

At roughly 300 square metres across two connected floors, the apartment offers a scale increasingly rare in central Paris, but the project resists the temptation to let that scale read as grandeur. The building’s original period detailing, cornicing, tall openings and the measured, formal rhythm of a classic Parisian plan, remains largely intact, giving the rooms a sense of permanence that Dimorestudio then works against rather than smooths over.

Contemporary colour and finish are set directly against that inherited architecture rather than softened beneath a neutral scheme. Walls carry saturated, jewel-toned pigment; upholstery and patterned textiles introduce warmth and visual drama in equal measure; and a mix of glossy, matte and softly worn surfaces lets light behave differently in each room across the day. The material vocabulary runs to lacquered and oxidised finishes, bespoke plasterwork and tapestry fabrics, a combination that reads as considered rather than simply maximalist, since each finish is doing a distinct job of catching or absorbing light rather than competing for attention.

The staircase and the art

A connecting staircase between the two floors is treated as more than circulation. Dimorestudio designed it, along with select furniture pieces, as part of the same visual sequence that runs through the rest of the apartment, meaning the walk between floors carries the same rhythm of colour and material change as the walk between rooms rather than functioning as a neutral in-between space.

Because the owners are art collectors, the apartment carries something of a private gallery’s logic throughout. Walls, colours and furnishings appear to have been chosen in conversation with the collection rather than as a backdrop imposed on top of it, and furniture spans decades deliberately, historical design pieces sitting alongside custom, bespoke work commissioned specifically for the space. That combination, buying old and building new within the same room, is consistent with how Dimorestudio has approached its later, better-documented projects, and this apartment is one of the earliest places the studio worked the method out in full.

The same method shows up, at greater scale and with fuller documentation, in the studio’s later work this site has already covered: the hidden Vendome salon built for Dior Doha, the Mayfair-inflected interiors smuggled into a Foster-designed Dubai tower for The Arts Club, and the single borrowed room built for Aesop in Milan. Each of those later projects takes Dimorestudio’s central instinct, set contemporary confidence against an inherited architectural register rather than smoothing it away, and applies it to a commercial brief. The Saint-Germain apartment is the version of that instinct built for a home rather than a client-facing space, which is precisely why it rewards being read alongside the studio’s later work rather than in isolation.

Why this project rarely gets named as the start of anything

Compared with the studio’s hospitality work, which arrives in the press with photographer credits, opening dates and detailed material specifications attached, coverage of this specific apartment is unusually thin. No address more specific than the Saint-Germain-des-Pres neighbourhood is consistently reported, no completion date is firmly established across sources, and even the project’s own name varies between the handful of outlets that have covered it. That is not unusual for an early private commission completed before a studio’s international reputation was fully established, when press coverage of residential work tends to be sparser and less systematically archived than it becomes once a practice is handling five-star hotels.

It is worth stating plainly rather than glossing over, because it changes how the project should be read. This is not simply “another moody Paris apartment” in Dimorestudio’s back catalogue. It is a formative private commission from before the studio’s name carried its current weight, executed with the same conviction, the same willingness to let colour do serious work against historic architecture, that would later define Dimorestudio’s hospitality projects at a much larger scale.

Private residential work generally carries this disadvantage in design history. A hotel or a members’ club opens on a fixed date, invites press for launch photography, and generates a body of coverage almost automatically. A private home, however accomplished, depends entirely on whether an owner agrees to let it be photographed and published at all, and once that window passes, later coverage tends to recycle whatever images and text first circulated rather than returning to interview the studio again. That is almost certainly why so little further detail about this specific apartment has surfaced since, and it is worth naming as a structural gap in the record rather than treating the apartment’s relative obscurity as a comment on the work itself.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Dimorestudio’s Saint-Germain apartment deserves a place in the studio’s own history, not just a place in a mood board. It is an early private commission, made before Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci’s names carried the weight they do now, and it already contains the studio’s full method: saturated colour set directly against inherited architecture, historical furniture placed alongside bespoke new pieces, and a staircase treated as seriously as any room. Read as an origin point rather than a standalone moodboard, the apartment says more about how Dimorestudio actually works than any single description of its palette can.