The Whale | Clément Lesnoff-Rocard

I was called a year ago by my clients who had just bought this newly renovated apartment in an Art Deco building on the very chic rue Raynouard in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, known for its mid-20th century architecture and next to the famous building. by Auguste Perret.
Despite the fact that its interior was new, they indeed found it lacking in charm and wanted to add a little information to create an extra ordinary universe. I had carte blanche.

From the first visit I discovered this renovated building in a totally pastiche Art Deco style, but above all I found this apartment hidden in the depths of the basements of this huge building and at the end of an endless corridor, perfectly tasteless, with little if not of quality, low ceiling, dark, small, but above all covered with pastiche plastic ornaments and suffocating technical dubbing in plaster boards everywhere.

So I convinced them to put everything on the ground. We break everything and start over. My first intuition was obviously to work from the DNA of Art Deco, not by literally copying it like the previous renovation had done, but by wishing to question it today. It then remained to be seen what would be the prism allowing me to reinterpret this style in this particular project.

Since I had no specific indication or aesthetic desire from the clients, I therefore had to fabricate a story that would give consistency to all my interventions. And it was when we demolished the false ceiling that this story was written: my intuition was confirmed, a majestic ceiling and a concrete frame was revealed: we were indeed witnesses in this so small apartment of the mega giant concrete building structure. The disproportion between the enormous size of these structural elements and the smallness of this apartment sent the space to a much larger dimension, to a large skeleton far exceeding the scale of the apartment: we were hidden inside. a much larger, surreal animal.

So I started with the obsessions of the Art Deco style, the geometry, the constructive expressions, the textures and the colors of the time (repetition of simple geometric shapes, mirrors, trompe-l'oeil, brass and colored marbles) in them, employing differently and shifted towards a surrealist writing: we would be like fishermen swallowed by this immense building animal, and all the architectural elements would become the metaphorical illustrations of this story. Organs, fish, eyes, scales, geysers. A round window encrusted in a mirrored wall is like this animal's eye seen from within and suspended in abstraction, able to look at you at times or closed with a brass shutter when the animal is asleep. All of this takes you into this inner story: the belly of the whale.

The photo shoot, very special in its long version, represents as many little scenes illustrating this story, the passage of this fisherman for a few months in this interior. Open to everyone's imagination to see what they want. We all have our whale’s belly.

Infos :
- Project : The Whale - 65 sq m apartment renovation
- Architect : Clément Lesnoff-Rocard
- Location : Paris 16th
- Date of completion : 2021
- Client : Private
- Photographer : Simone Bossi

Companies involved in construction :
- Wood joinery : RCPM
- Sliding doors : Rimadesio
- Lights : FLOS – String light by Michael Anastassiades
- Decorative panels : ORAC Decorative
- Sofa : The Socialite Family – Rotondo
- Curtains : Maison Pierre Frey
- Mirrors : Brugnon Frères
- Coffee table : Petite friture – Francis Grande
- Paint : Farrow & Ball – Shaded white

THE WHALE
He was quietly wandering the ocean on his little life boat, after having left the Island a few days before, when suddenly, right there in front of him, a monstrous building rose out from the abyss. Stately floating on the water and towering up into the sky. A gigantic mountain made of dirty ancient stone. A Babylonian tower covered in waterfalls. It looked like a massive Art Deco building, vestige of a long-gone Atlantidian civilization ; sunk in oblivion.

In the blink of an eye, he was inside of it. Swallowed. He fell for ever, into the depths of the underground floors, digested in a concrete stomach. Time seemed like an eternity. It was dark and damp. And then, there he was. Stuck in the final chamber. Slowly coming back to his senses, he started to distinguish shapes. Familiar ones. Were they merely creations of his blurred mind? Above his head, a structure, beams and columns. Like a rib cage. He saw organ shapes, kidneys, curves and viscous black drops falling from the ceiling. Fish bones and shells, random objects and a bottle of whisky. A blue marble pillar was occupying the room, grounded and heavy, yet somehow hovering, light as a mist : a geyser connecting the ocean to the sky, propelling air to the heavens. It pierced right through the ceiling above. The walls were covered with gold and shimmering textures, sparkling like oily fish scales. Those must have been clues, witnesses of what this thing was. Then he saw it. Actually, it saw him. It was looking right at him. This big round eye. It was quite far away. A coat was hanging nearby. A coat or a corpse. He was definitely not the first one stuck in here. Everything started to move, walls were shaking and the room slowly flipped upside down. It was waking up. He needs to get out of here. He started drawing plans on a piece of something found on the floor. But he couldn't. He is a fisherman, guided by the sea. One more look around. There it was, the light, he could see it shining in through its skin. He pushed the wall as hard as he could. It stretched and became thinner and thinner, thin like a soft and light curtain. Succumbing to his last-ditch effort, it cracked and opened up like a window, dousing everything in light. He jumped through it, into the blazing light of the unknown.

He woke up, dry and frying in the sun, flat on his little life boat. Was it all a dream?
Was it an anti-chamber of his creation? It surely was a chamber of reflection.
We all have our own whale’s belly.