The elegant street-facing facade is made of dressed stone, embellished with stringcourses and stone panels in relief outlined with fine mouldings. The edifice was built in 1864. It has five floors. The top one is set back and underlined with a continuous balcony. Its seven bays of windows are arranged symmetrically around the central axis of a carriage entrance: a double door ornamented with decorative panels and glazing behind wrought-iron grates. This entrance is fitted with an entry code system for security. It is flanked with the street-facing frontages of two shops. A second-floor balcony protrudes right above this carriage door. Inside, a covered entrance area, recently renovated and fully tiled, leads to a second door. Finally, in a paved inner courtyard, you reach a third entrance – a glazed double door in a steel frame of mullions, panes and solid panels.

The interior

The edifice’s street-side entrance door leads into a first space of around 40m² beneath the apartment building’s first floor. The architectural and decorative design of the property’s remarkable interior is resolutely industrial in style: it features solid wood strip flooring, walls of exposed stonework and painted cast-iron pillars. The stonework of the walls shared with the neighbouring properties has been restored, repointed and left exposed.

The ground floor
Once you have gone through the first space framed with brick pillars, you reach a vast triangular space 20 metres further on. This space forms the property’s open-plan ground floor, which covers an area of over 280m². All the posts and beams here are painted white. Exposed metalwork and frames around glazing are painted sea green. In the middle, a straight metal staircase with solid-timber open-tread steps leads up to the first floor. Directly above it, a glazed roof section – about 6 metres long with two slopes around 2.5 metres wide – bathes the interior in natural light that floods even the ground floor through glass panels in its ceiling. Opposite the staircase, a glazed double door leads out into the edifice’s inner court. The roof frame evokes origami. The web of its metal structure casts stick-like shadows in different directions. At the back, on the left, a space for lavatories and washbasins is hidden behind a partition of timber panelling with false openwork. And two adjoining rooms behind industrial-style partitions with glazed upper sections lie to the right of the staircase. One of these rooms is a kitchen.

The first floor
On the first floor, the stairwell is edged with a metal guardrail of horizontal bars. Large panes of glass are fitted in the flooring around the stairwell. Wood strip flooring extends across the rest of this vast space. This level offers a floor area of over 200m². A space for lavatories and washbasins is hidden behind a partition of timber panelling. The floor includes two other office spaces, which lie behind partitions with glazed upper sections. They each have a window that looks down at the inner court. The ceilings on this floor follow the form of the roof slopes and are punctuated with seven skylights and a large glazed section in the middle.

The second floor
A straight metal staircase like the one that leads from the ground floor up to the first floor connects to a mezzanine with a floor area of around 25m², edged with a balustrade: metal rails upon a solid lower section.