Pregnant with her second child and desperately searching for a larger apartment in Paris, Mariù De Andreis was shown the makeshift suite of offices that would become her family's next home. It was a disaster. Plaster was crumbling, industrial carpeting covered the parquet floors, and a dropped ceiling made the whole place feel like an insurance agency. But De Andreis, owner of the children's-fashion company Zef, saw potential. The location, a few blocks from the museums and the grassy expanses of the Tuileries, was perfect. The building, constructed in the 1920s using the same riveted-metal support structure found in the Eiffel Tower, had good bones. And there were five marble fireplaces.
She and her husband, Rafaël, bought the wreck, launched into a renovation that involved ripping out walls and gutting the kitchen—and moved in just 15 days before their younger daughter was born. "I didn't want to go into labor until it was all put together," De Andreis recalls with a laugh. "There I was with my big belly, arranging books at the last minute. I was completely mad."
But a nesting instinct on overdrive has its rewards, especially when coupled with a sharp eye. Today, the home De Andreis was hell-bent on fashioning for her family—which includes Ines, now 7, and Chiara, 9—is striking for both its elegance and its warmth. Antiques and modern furnishings are paired in unexpected ways, with a little something quirky (be it a chrome fixture that resembles a disco ball or an architectural replica) loosening up the scene. Photos are everywhere, from dramatic black-and-white portraits by De Andreis's father, fashion photographer Paolo Roversi, to Polaroid snapshots of the family. "I am passionate about images," De Andreis says.
Behind the beautifully unfussy look is someone who admittedly can be, well, fussy. De Andreis can't enter a room without tidying up a stack of books or rearranging a vignette. She also insists on some key family rules: Toys are always put back in the children's rooms, and no one eats in front of the TV. For this on-the-go family, a well-regulated home is essential. De Andreis recently opened her fourth shop in Paris and launched a website, on which Zef's ballet slippers and smocked rompers are sold; her husband runs an ad agency; and the girls have their own extracurricular schedule of dance lessons, playdates, and horseback riding.
"I work a lot," says De Andreis, who hustles the girls to school on her way to the office, then races home at the end of the day to feed them and put them to bed before collapsing over a late dinner with her husband. "If I came home to a mess, for me that would be impossible."
While no part of the apartment is off-limits to the girls, there is a clear distinction, design-wise, between the adults' and kids' quarters. A large kitchen is the heart of the home, where the family gathers for meals and the girls do homework and art projects at a big farm table—"and sometimes dance on top of it," says their mom. On one side of this central space are the "grown-up" sections of the apartment—an entrance foyer, a living room, and a master bedroom, all decorated with a mix of inherited furniture (a 1960s desk in the living room came from her father-in-law), vintage finds (a floor lamp with a wavy stand was discovered on one of the family's frequent weekend outings to les puces, the local flea markets), and loungy upholstered seating.
On the other side of the kitchen, a long hallway leads to the kids' rooms. Tacked to the hall wall is a wire, onto which De Andreis has clipped artwork by the girls and silly pictures that she and the kids tear from magazines, like one of a lion with a curly hairdo. The girls' personalities emerge from their bedrooms: Ines, caught up in a princess phase, loves the romantic tulle bed canopy in her pink room. Chiara, more inclined toward books and horses, is starting to have a few ideas of her own about how she wants her space to look—hence the equestrian figurines and pictures she's started accumulating. Toys decorate both rooms, but the bulk of them are stashed away in old armoires or plastic bins. ("They want to keep all their stuffed animals," De Andreis says.)
Like the rest of the house, the girls' bedrooms are filled with dozens of family photographs. Some of the pictures are framed, while others are stuck right to the wall. "I tend to do things quickly," De Andreis says. "If I waited for every last picture to be framed, it would never get done."
