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"View Slideshow\n\nWhat's that racket upstairs?\" Pilar Molyneux asked her husband, Juan Pablo, about the din emanating from the garret above their apartment in Paris. The Molyneux live in a venerable, three-story mansion in the Marais\u2014the H\u00F4tel Claude Passart, which was begun in 1618 and configured like the Louvre, with three wings bracketing a cour d'honneur. On the first floor, Juan Pablo Molyneux has his offices and design studio\u2014the European headquarters for a practice that has made him the guru of grandeur on several continents. The couple's French pied-\u00E0-terre (their main residence is a New York town house) occupies the \u00E9tage noble, and over the years they have been able to buy most, but not yet all, of the property\u2014some 10,000 square feet\u2014from six separate owners. \"Since the Revolution,\" he explains, \"when the building was confiscated and sold off in pieces, it has been mistreated: patched up with cheap materials or partitioned without any regard for the integrity of the architecture. My contribution has been to restore that missing respect.\" The garret, however, belonged to a small, unglamorous business that had lowered the ceilings and divided the space into a warren of cubbyholes with plastic baseboards, glaring spotlights and commercial carpeting, which did little to muffle the clatter of footsteps above the couple's bedroom. \"Don't worry about the noise, darling,\" the designer reassured his wife. \"I'm sure they're just moving furniture.\"\n\n\"They\" were a crew of skilled artisans secretly hired by Molyneux, who had finally succeeded in acquiring the garret as a surprise gift for Pilar. The men had been working in stealth to transform the dismal offices into a magical aerie\u2014a self-contained guest apartment under the eaves, acoustically buffered from the master suite below. The d\u00E9cor fulfills one of Molyneux's oldest dreams, he says: to create his own version of an early-18th-century interior in St. Petersburg\u2014at the Menshikov Palace\u2014that he fell in love with as a student. \"When I brought Pilar to visit the Menshikov for the first time, the experience was moving for both of us,\" he says. \"I wanted her to understand the happiness\u2014the revelation of beauty\u2014that I had there as a boy of 19. My travels have always been a source of inspiration, and I filed away my first impression of those marvelous rooms with an intuition that one day I would have the opportunity to design something in the same style: with walls and ceilings entirely clad in blue-and-white delft tiles.\n\n\"Alexander Menshikov, the first governor general of St. Petersburg, was a former stable boy befriended and ennobled by Peter the Great. The czar had spent a good deal of time in the Netherlands, studying the shipyards as part of his plan to transform feudal Russia into a modern power, and when he built his capital, the Dutch influence was mixed with the Italian. Both are at their peak in the showplace of his favorite courtier.\"\n\nMost of the construction was carried out while Pilar Molyneux was safely out of earshot. Her husband stripped the garret to its bones, raised the mansard roof, exposed the beams and reconfigured the space as two lofty salons\u2014symmetrical pyramids\u2014with parquet de Versailles and recessed window surrounds clad in limestone. Light streams in from the street and courtyard, and to preserve the sense of openness while providing definition for a reception area at one end and a library at the other, he notched the central chimney breast with two ladder-shaped passages. \"As the scientists at NASA will tell you, tile is an almost perfect insulator,\" he says, \"and it's also the ideal solution for insulating the top floor of an old Parisian house, which bakes or chills according to the season.\" A galley kitchen and laundry are discreetly concealed behind an upholstered wall of brass-studded blue linen off the dining area, which is furnished with a Russian table\u2014an antique demilune of mahogany and brass\u2014and 18th-century Venetian chairs. A Knole sofa bed anchors the seating zone near the stone fireplace, and a playful gouache by Horacio Sosa Cordero\u2014The Architect\u2014hangs above it. \"But on the whole,\" Molyneux confesses, \"I wanted to see just how French I could go.\" Among his ultra-Gallic treasures are a fine pair of R\u00E9gence armchairs with their original tapestries; an Aubusson carpet; a Louis XVI marquise covered in cognac leather; a Louis XV daybed flanked by two important revolutionary-era pedestals; and two Louis XV fauteuils, signed \"Cresson,\" drawn up companionably to a Louis XVI gueridon. The blue-and-white silk jacquard on the library/bedroom walls\u2014a royalist motif of fleurs-de-lis\u2014is from the house of Prelle, in Lyon, France's oldest silk manufacturer (in business since the 18th century). The exalted provenance of the furnishings, however, is ultimately less dazzling than Molyneux's finesse in orchestrating such a complex symphony of pattern and color. \"It's a cosmopolitan ensemble,\" he allows with just pride, \"and in that sense, it pays homage to its model. Yet it's totally Parisian.\"\n\nThe Molyneux have been married for 31 years, which is to say, neither can fool the other for long. Pilar began to get suspicious when she noticed the mysterious disappearance of a chair here, a sconce there, from their pied-\u00E0-terre. Her husband told her that he had \"sent a few things to Sotheby's.\" \"For which sale?\" she asked. The crew was duly instructed to suspend their hammering whenever she was in residence, and these interruptions delayed the project. After seven months, however, the work was done, the floors waxed, the shades hung, the tables set, flowers in water, champagne chilled and\u2014says the doting schemer\u2014\"I just handed her the keys. Her first reaction was that I had gone mad. Her second reaction was that the apartment had been waiting for her, exactly as it was\"\u2014a revelation of beauty and happiness\u2014\"forever.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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