For years, the Paris fashion designer Emanuel Ungaro was on the hunt for a family home in the city – something magical and one-of-a-kind, like his couture creations. In 2008, he found the first piece of that dream: a ground-floor apartment in a 1910 building at the end of a leafy, gated cobblestone path near the Luxembourg Gardens. At the time, Emanuel and his wife, Laura, lived in a regal hôtel particulier in the seventh arrondissement, so the flat was too small for their needs. But it was the perfect pied-à-terre for their daughter, Cosima, who was studying political science at King’s College, London. He bought it, and told the estate agent: ‘If anything else in the building becomes available, call.’
In 2019, Cosima – by then married to Austin Feilders, an American she met during her first year at McGill University in Montreal – was on the staircase when she passed her upstairs neighbour, who told her they were moving out of their triplex. Excitedly she rang her father, who said the apartment would surely be large enough for him and Laura and that, with it, he could transform the building into a family compound. Emanuel Ungaro bought it and set to mapping out a design overhaul.
For half a century Emanuel had been known for his fluid, sensual couture in rich fabrics and romantic prints. The son of a tailor who had fled Fascist Italy for France in the 1920s, he learned to sew at five years old. In the mid-1950s, at 21, he moved to Paris ‘with not one cent in my pocket’, he later said. He assisted Cristóbal Balenciaga for six years, and André Courrèges for one, during which he helped produce the latter’s space-age collection. He opened his own house in 1965, and soon was dressing the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Deeda Blair, Anouk Aimée and Catherine Deneuve in his sharp suits and lusciously draped gowns. Gena Rowlands wore Ungaro in the title role of John Cassavetes’s Gloria, while Women’s Wear Daily dubbed Emanuel ‘the new cat for couture’.
Given his obsessions with complex construction and exquisite materials – of fabric, he once admitted, ‘I caress it, smell it, listen to it’ – it should come as no surprise that the couturier’s ‘biggest passion outside of fashion was architecture, design and interiors’, his daughter says. He had spent several years decorating a 16th-century palazzo he’d bought in Rome, and so enjoyed the process that he decided to work with Cosima and Austin, who’d recently opened a creative consultancy in Paris called Concept, on the triplex renovation. But he died in December 2019 aged 86 and so the apartment ‘became our project’, Cosima says wistfully, and Laura would live there alone.
The couple planned to incorporate Emanuel’s vast collection of furniture, art and fabrics. ‘It was about bringing all of these pieces together,’ Cosima explains. Nothing would be conveyed to her mother – not the plans, not the stress, none of it. ‘Laura was our client – we know how she lives her life, and how she receives people every day, and has a community of friends,’ Austin says. ‘We would meet her needs.’ Unlike their previous home on Rue Barbet-de-Jouy, Laura’s apartment would have ‘more roundness and softness and femininity’, as Austin puts it. ‘And we wanted the place to be filled with light’ – an easy task to accomplish when all the windows face south, with no vis-à-vis. ‘It needed to be therapeutic,’ he adds.
With architects Alessandro Scotto and Yann Le Coadic (WoI Oct 2023), the couple reorganised the floorplan. The kitchen was placed next to the entrance, since, as Austin observes, ‘food is the centre of everything’ in the Ungaro home. Shelves are laden with cookbooks, Sicilian pottery and Venetian glassware, illuminated by tiny leds. The pantry is stocked like an Italian bottega, with a meat slicer for smoked hams and sausages. ‘It’s where you can come and have a glass of wine and feel comfortable,’ Cosima says.
Upstairs is a sprawling drawing room that flows into the dining room and terrace. At the other end of the floor, hidden away, is ‘the tisane room’, a second more intimate salon where guests retreat for a postprandial herbal tea and chocolate, and ‘to linger and rediscover pieces they saw at Barbet-de-Jouy’, says Cosima. ‘One of Emanuel’s codes was not to reveal everything all at once, creating ambiguity and surprising people,’ she adds.
The third floor, where Laura has her bedroom, wardrobe and bath, is like an osprey’s nest: perched high, bathed in light and extremely private. The duo view the triplex as a spiritual refuge. As Cosima explains: ‘The entrance floor is the earth, the second is open, airy’– like the troposphere, the atmospheric plane we live in – ‘and the third is the sky, elevating her to something serene and pure.
When the home was finished in autumn 2021, Laura finally came to see it. ‘We wanted her to walk in, put her handbag on the chair, sit down and feel she was home,’ says her daughter. Instead, she was so moved, she burst into tears. The couple knew they had fulfilled their mandate for her. ‘When I’m here, I feel like I never want to leave,’ Cosima says. Next up is the restoration of a farmhouse at La Domaine de la Cavalerie, a 160-acre organic farm Emanuel bought in 1985, near his birthplace of Aix-en-Provence. Originally a Knights Templar commandery from the 12th century, the estate now has 5,000 olive trees that produce an award-winning oil. Under the guidance of Cosima and Austin, it will be available for stays beginning in July. ‘Emanuel transmitted this way of life – a passion for food and storytelling,’ Austin says. ‘We are simply enriching it with our point of view’.
For more information about Concept, visit conceptparis.com. For more information about Lecoadic Scotto architects, visit lecoadic-scotto.com
A version of this story appears in the February 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive homes stories like this one, direct to your inbox.
