Real Homes: An art dealer's Paris apartment
The PAD art fair co-founder and fourth-generation Parisian art dealer Patrick Perrin has filled his apartment with inherited treasures and modern finds, creating a serene and soigné home in a Saint-Germain building that has been in his family for nearly 100 years.
The building in which Patrick Perrin lives on the boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris has belonged to his family for the best part of a century. He still recalls having tricycle races with his brother as a child in his grandfather's antique gallery on the ground floor. 'From time to time, we'd send the other flying into some piece of furniture,' he recounts. 'It would make my grandmother scream with laughter… and my grandfather scream, full stop.'
Patrick comes from a long line of dealers, starting with his great-grandfather in the 1890s. 'My destiny was always to work in the art market,' he says. Today, he's best known as the co-founder of the world's leading fair for twentieth-century art, __design and decorative arts - the Pavilion of Arts & design (PAD), which has been held in Paris every spring since 1998 and, since 2007, in London as well. This year's London version takes place on October 15 - 19 in Berkeley Square and has attracted some 60 exhibitors from as far afield as New York and Beirut. Those from the UK include contemporary design specialists such as David Gill Galleries and Gallery Fumi, the Arts and Crafts experts H Blairman & Sons, and photography dealers such as Hamiltons and Michael Hoppen. For Patrick, it's more international than the Paris show. It's also, he thinks, of higher quality - for both good and bad reasons. 'The good reason,' he says, 'is that a lot of the top modern-art galleries are based in London. The bad one is that there are very few young, smaller dealers.'
His 228-square-metre duplex apartment is filled with design pieces he has bought in previous years at PAD. In the sitting room on the upper level are a small Elizabeth Garouste table from En Attendant les Barbares, a Vincent Dubourg shelf from Carpenters Workshop Gallery and numerous objects in glass from Clara Scremini. Between the windows are two wall lights designed by the New York artist Jean-Paul Philippe, which he acquired from Cristina Grajales at the one-off PAD New York in 2011. Patrick currently has plans to take the fair stateside once more - this time to Los Angeles next April.
Not everything, however, is modern. For Patrick, 'true style is all about eclecticism'. He loves the Arts and Crafts Movement and also has a number of family heirlooms, including a Louis XIV silver chandelier in the entry hall. The downstairs study in particular has a more traditional atmosphere. The oak desk there once belonged to the nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Caillebotte. There are jaguar and bobcat skins on the floor, and a striking assortment of artworks on the walls - sanguine drawings by Fragonard and Le Brun, a small painting by Boilly, a Millet ink drawing of a house, a Cocteau sketch of a faun… There are also numerous tortoise shells. Perrin has a collection of roughly 100, the largest of which comes from Namibia.
The heart of the apartment, however, is the upstairs dining room, with its custom-made Valentin Loellmann table and benches, separated from the kitchen by a glass partition. 'It's much more convivial like that,' he says. A keen gastronome, Perrin invites a dozen friends to dinner most Saturdays. 'The rule is that everyone takes their turn in the kitchen,' he says. Recently, the dealer Marc-Antoine Patissier from the Parisian gallery HP Le Studio presented guests with Italian zampone sausages made from pigs' trotters. Once a year, he also hosts a truffle dinner for almost 100. 'There are so many of them you can't see the food underneath,' he says. 'Everything looks black!'
Patrick is not just a bon vivant. It would seem he's also a man content with his lot. 'I love living in Saint-Germain,' he says. 'When you have a nice flat here, you don't need anything else. I don't have any desire to own 12 town mansions stacked up one against the other. This is where I'll end my days.'
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