The Dreamer’s House

Ramdane Touhami transforms a historic Pigalle house once owned by Jean-Claude Carrière into a dreamlike Parisian home, room by surprising room.

Such a gesture demands confidence: asking craftsmen to render ebony burl panelling as if it were peeling back at the corners, hinting at another world concealed behind its surface. Ramdane Touhami, the French-Moroccan designer and entrepreneur behind the revival of Cire Trudon and Officine Universelle Buly, has that confidence in abundance. By his own account, it elicited more than a few emphatic Gallic shrugs from the artisans charged with realizing his vision for a family home in Paris’s 9th arrondissement.

The house, one of a pair facing each other across a courtyard in Pigalle, carries a history nearly as theatrical as its current interior. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is believed to have rented its top floor when the lower storeys operated as a brothel; the writers Stefan Zweig and Alphonse Allais both spent time here; during the Art Deco period it belonged to a rug maker who collaborated with Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann. Since the late 1970s, the building belonged to the screenwriter and novelist Jean-Claude Carrière, who died the year before Touhami and his wife, Victoire de Taillac-Touhami, bought it.

This was a chance for us to experience living in Ramdane's imagination — we live in an aesthetic dictatorship, surrounded by extraordinary things.

Touhami's renovation left the layout almost entirely intact, removing only a mezzanine, and proceeded instead through pure invention, room by room. The kitchen, tiled head-to-toe in custom Etruscan-style terracotta from Umbria, channels a Mediterranean warmth against steel appliances chosen specifically to reflect the colour rather than compete with it. The dining room, where lacquer artisans produced glossy cupboard doors resembling an Art Deco ocean liner, is ringed near the ceiling with the names of those who shaped the house's history, set in typography from Touhami's own studio. Giant illuminated spiders crawl across the dining room ceiling, unbothered by category.

The sitting room incorporates vintage Asafo flags into ebony burl panelling soaked for two months to achieve a precise curl, alongside a fireplace tiled with tarot cards gifted to Carrière by Luis Buñuel. Downstairs, a resistance swimming pool occupies what Victoire calls a space she never imagined having in her own basement.

"This was a chance for us to experience living in Ramdane's imagination," Victoire reflects — an aesthetic dictatorship, she calls it, only half-joking, that has left them surrounded, room after room, by things that continue to mesmerise.

Key takeaways

• Ramdane Touhami designed his Paris home so that each room reveals an entirely different world, commissioning custom details like ebony burl panelling soaked for two months and illuminated spider sculptures crawling across the dining room ceiling.
• The house carries a layered history — rented by Toulouse-Lautrec, visited by Stefan Zweig and Alphonse Allais, and owned for decades by screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, whose art collection once filled its rooms.
• Touhami worked almost exclusively with custom craftsmanship and flea-market finds, enlisting lacquer artisans, specialist seating makers, and Umbria-based tile producers to realise designs many initially deemed too complex to execute.