Nowhere does nostalgia quite like Paris. The gothic buildings, the ornamental fountains, the gilded walkways across the river Seine – all are intricate reminders of a city inextricably linked with its past. But take a closer look at the French capital today. Thanks to falling but still relatively high property prices in upscale neighbourhoods and continued overcrowding in the less wealthy ones, the city is beginning to rethink both its overall size and its aesthetics.
New arrondissements are being revamped, with trendy cafés, shops and building owners converting loft spaces. Even more strikingly, new high-rise structures are about to grace the city’s skylines for the first time since Jacques Chirac, then mayor, banned them in the 1970s. At long last, Parisians are moving out and up and, in the process, trading in their traditional, classic homes for cutting-edge, contemporary ones.
“The capital is literally running out of space, particularly in the inner districts, [and] pressure has been mounting on the government for ages,” says Brendan Macfarlane of Paris-based architects Jakob & Macfarlane. “The one-size-fits-all approach – uniform buildings and tree-lined boulevards of the Haussmann era – has all but paralysed the urban grid, with limited scope for developers to design something visionary.”
Finally, however, attitudes are changing. “The first signs [started] creeping in a decade or so ago at a time when contemporary real estate was still comparatively ‘niche’,” he says. “Momentum has been building since, with the capital’s first-ever collection of mixed-use projects now under construction, bringing together residential units, hotels, offices and retail premises all under one roof. As a concept, it’s spot-on. It offers up its own ingenuity for a city striving for sustainable development.”
The fact that such projects have been getting the green light is largely down to Paris’s socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, a politician who has long touted “new age” architecture on the city’s periphery as a means of easing a growing housing shortage. “We are not talking about creating a Manhattan in Paris; changes to building codes and new construction will clearly be on an appropriate scale,” says Jean-Pierre Caffet, president of the socialist party for the city council and formerly Delanoë’s deputy mayor in charge of town planning. “What’s important is not so much the dogma about the number of storeys but the where, the why and the how, in particular addressing real housing needs and giving a boost to business in the city. Some architects have argued that well-planned high-rises can help reconnect Paris to its suburbs, now cut off by the Péripherique [ring road]. In essence, it’s 100 per cent responsible urban planning.”
Macfarlane’s practice is behind Docks de Paris, a €35m conversion of a turn-of-the-century dockside depot in the 13th arrondissement, while another, even more ambitious, €3bn redevelopment project, Rive Gauche, is planned for the Austerlitz, Tolbiac and Massena neighbourhoods nearby under the supervision of the Paris city council and the French national railway, SNCF. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Work could start as soon as next year on Projet Triangle, a 50-storey, mixed-use glass building by Swiss partnership Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron at Porte de Versailles. Meanwhile architect Jean Nouvel recently secured the bid for Signal Tower, a state-of-the-art, 71-storey building in La Défense that will bring hotels, offices and shops together under several floors of luxury apartments and a statement roof. These are the first of many proposed skyscrapers designed to breathe new life into the French capital.
Sceptics have denounced the new developments – especially the proposed towers – as a denigration of the city’s classic roots and a tasteless throwback to 1972, when the incongruous 700ft-tall Montparnasse Tower was built. A recent survey conducted for the Paris city council revealed that 63 per cent of residents would vote for a moratorium on high-rise construction.
But others see the audacious new projects as linchpins of the capital’s future. “Key-note projects of this stature give Paris creative scope, a means of escape from the quixotic vision the rest of the world has of it,” says architectural consultant Nicolas Libert of estate agency Ateliers, Lofts et Associés. “For the first time utilitarian use of space is creeping in among the formalist beige and stone as a 21st-century solution to the city’s housing shortage. Add to this a new generation of investors demanding arty, designer real estate stock and it’s not too hard to predict where the metropolitan landscape is heading.”
Observers say the direction is not only up but also out into arrondissements that high-end homebuyers had previously ignored. “The buying map is expanding,” confirms Gerald Leblais of estate agency De Carne Immobilier. “The 6th is one of the city’s most expensive districts and a magnet for foreign buyers [but] a lot of Americans who [once would have] bought there now can’t afford to. Head to the north-east, by contrast, and the unexploited nexus of the 10th, 11th, 19th and 20th is springing to life. Places like Belleville in the 20th and the Canal St Martin in the 10th appeal as much to locals as to smart commuters hopping on the train back to London or Brussels on a Friday night. Capital appreciation is also stronger in those areas. Property values in the 10th rose by 12 per cent last year, with price per square metre around the €7,000 mark compared to high-end favourites, such as St Germain des Pres and Luxembourg, at €15,000.”
Crucially, the architecture in these areas is also more diverse, with a fair number of modern offerings, which is an added draw for foreigners, says Sarah Francis of London-based estate agency Sifex. “Buyers from Russia, Pakistan, the Gulf and China are now in the capital in significant numbers,” she says. “Those with multiple homes around the world have grown accustomed to inner-city square footage equipped with lifts and parking, ‘smart-home’ technology and designer interiors. Given the ‘old school’ fabric of the capital, modern apartments understandably have huge appeal.”
There are critics of this trend too. But change does appear inevitable. Last autumn’s Future Vision Paris summit chaired by French president Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the need to draw urban inspiration from forward-thinking world capitals, such as London, Tokyo and New York and this would include the improvements to transport links and the “creative upgrading” of housing stock in underexploited districts.
The poster development for this plan is probably Rive Gauche, in an area formerly considered Paris’s “frontier-land”. “When finished, 5,000 new residences will grace the waterfront site, many located within remodelled turn-of-the-century buildings associated with Paris’s former flour trade,” says Natalie Grand at the city council. These will be supplemented by new-build mansion blocks with landscaped roof gardens and 20 per cent of the residences will be stand-alone properties with three bedrooms or more. Prices will range from a reasonable €200,000 for an apartment to more than €600,000 for a designer townhouse. And “a further 26 hectares will be given over to leisure amenities, with restaurants, galleries and retail outlets adding a community feel and focus”, she says.
Francois Bernheim of estate agency L’Adresse, who relocated his business from the prestigious 16th arrondissement to the 13th in 2007, has watched the project evolve first-hand. “The urban grid may be classical but with big-name architects like Ricardo Bofill and Frederic Borel involved the architecture will be anything but. Prices are competitive too – €8,000-€10,000 per sq metre for a luxury, two-storey residence.”
In spite of the “work-in-progress” landscape, newcomers talk enthusiastically about the neighbourhood too. Sylvain Bourmeau, former editor of culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles, relocated from the 5th to Tolbiac last summer with his wife and two young children, and describes his gleaming architect-designed apartment as a “break with tradition”.
“The district is like a contemporary museum,” Bourmeau says. “It’s worlds away from the classical lines of Haussmann’s Paris. Look out the window and there’s visual stimulation everywhere – from the different colours and shapes of the buildings to the park areas and green zones with their funky garden designs. The other bonus is the diverse social mix, with people from all walks of life moving in – different classes and nationalities. It’s a mélange of faces and places.”
It is the same story in the 10th. Once a down-at-heel, working-class neighbourhood with a seedy underbelly, it was famous for its nightspots in the 1930s. But it took the launch of the Eurostar high-speed trains to London from Gare du Nord in 1994 and subsequent rail network improvements, which have boosted annual station user numbers to 180m, for the area to finally become an attractive destination for homebuyers and developers.
Around Canal St Martin “forward-thinking developers have mixed and matched contemporary design and historic architecture, converting the inner workings of traditional residences into high-spec, open-plan homes, with an emphasis on light and space”, says Sylvie Tissot of estate agency Buisson Immobilier.
The €1.39m loft conversion on the books of local agents Agence du Canal is a prime example. Inside its intricate metal-work exterior is a modern, five-bedroom home with 5-metre high ceilings on the ground floor, a corner office, a 20 sq metre wine cellar and a Japanese garden. Nearby, in the zany Rue du Faubourg St Denis, estate agency Paris Attitude Vente is offering La Cristallerie, a €1.5m designer apartment in a former glass factory that has three levels, featuring steel support beams, exposed brick walls two oversized bathrooms and a Zen-styled salon.
“It’s great to see cutting-edge design being thrown into the property mix,” says London-based IT consultant Robert Jacobs, who is flat-hunting in the area. “Like any real-estate-driven city, developers are always looking for the next big thing. They may have found it.”
