When Hugo Toro first saw his new Paris Apartment – in the Eastern part of the French Capital, close to the Parc des Buttes Chaumont – he immediately realised its potential as his very own retreat hidden in the city. He had been looking at buildings dating from the 1960s and 70s, and was drawn to the pattern on the floor in the entrance. As soon as he saw this, Toro decided to turn it into a motif for his own decorating project. “I used a geometric version of the chequerboard in the hall, choosing red and white travertine to retain the building’s period feel, and then repeated the pattern throughout the apartment,” he explains.
As with other apartments Toro has designed, this one was conceived as a warm, welcoming hotel suite. “For me, there’s nothing better than a hotel room where you feel good,” he says. He began his redesign by gutting the apartment’s interior and starting anew, reorganising the space to create a more open, light-filled loft. “I didn’t want a Haussmann-style flat with mouldings that wasn’t rooted in the Parisian vernacular,” he explains. “I wanted a more cinematic feel. This is a space which touches me and allows me to disconnect from my other projects when I get home in the evenings.”
At the heart of the design is a palette of rich, powerful hues and deliberately dramatic contrasts. Since his early childhood, Toro has been fascinated by the interplay of different colours and textures, influenced by his Mexican mother who admired the painter Diego Rivera. “There’s a pictorial side to this apartment,” he notes. “I love Luis Barragán and his Casa Pedregal in Mexico City – the green colour of the pool, the pink walls. It’s one of the houses that has made the strongest impression on me. Even though I’ve never lived in Mexico, its textures and colours fill the pages of my sketchbooks.” Indeed, influences from around the world can be seen throughout Toro’s architecture and design work, with other touchstones including the buildings of Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos in Vienna and John Lautner in Los Angeles – two cities where he did his graduate work.
After university, Toro launched his own studio in 2020. Since then, the 34-year-old designer has been taking on a rapidly growing number of major projects. His latest ventures include Booking Office 1869, a restaurant in London’s St. Pancras International station, which took a Victorian winter garden as its inspiration; and Orient Express La Minerva Hotel, in the former Palazzo Fonseca in Rome, which is due to open at the end of 2024. Toro’s approach is to imagine an entire world with its own strong narrative. His architectural work has a scenographic quality, with every project conceived as a theatre set, complete with carefully staged spaces and an extreme attention to detail.
In this apartment, in addition to the geometric floor, another feature helped to shape the space: the yellow lacquer on the ceilings. Toro chose the colour because the walls were initially covered with a yellow moiré fabric, which complemented the watery green tone of the bijoux bathroom’s original wallpaper. Those walls have since been refinished in a custom limewash, Toro notes. “I like to engage with traces of the past as a way of preserving the soul of a place,” he muses. “Both lacquer finishes and bold colours are uncommon in apartments these days, but I tend to use them regularly in my hotel and restaurant projects. Clients don’t come to me looking for beige and grey.”
While admitting that it’s important to find the right balance, “I don’t think you get tired of colours,” he asserts. “But I’d rather get tired of a colour than not take any risks.” With the apartment’s nine-foot-high ceilings, the lacquer also helped to instil a sense of verticality in the space, while its play of reflections provides indirect light. Wood is also used to striking effect, with three different species – walnut, sweetgum and ziricote – employed to provide contrast.
Toro designed much of the furniture for his Paris apartment himself, punctuating the space with travertine pieces from his new Amanecer collection, created with Paris gallery Kolkhoze and M Éditions. In the bedroom, the angled niche above the bed adds a surprising element.
“I wanted to achieve a hotel feel, but at the same time follow a Brutalist approach,” he notes abouu this retro Paris apartment. “Here, it’s almost like a temple, or Batman’s lair in his villa… only more exotic.” He also worked extensively with curves to counterbalance the rectilinear character of the apartment, smoothing the transitions between spaces and volumes. “I like accidents,” he confesses. “I’m neither a maximalist nor a minimalist; I like living architecture.”
hugotoro.com; translated from French by John Newton
