HEAVENS D'OR

摘要

LINDA PINTO, THE INTERIOR DESIGNER, HAD LIVED ALONG Paris's elegant Quai d'Orsay for decades, first in her own apartment on a side street, and later in the home of her late brother, the much-heralded decorator Alberto Pinto, which faced the Seine. Then she heard about a place for sale on a chic Left Bank street that is home to several prominent Parisians, including LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault. Built in 1932 in the Louis XVI style, the apartment occupies a generous 3,500 square feet and overlooks a private walled garden said to be one of the largest in the city. When Pinto saw it, she knew she had found her new home. "I hear birds all day long," she says over tea on a cold autumn afternoon, sitting on one of her two raspberry-velvet Jean-Michel Frank sofas. "We are disconnected from the world—like in a cocoon. It's a dream to live here. A joy." Since the death of her brother in 2012, Pinto has managed Alberto Pinto Interior Design, the firm he founded nearly five decades ago. Among the 50-person studio's current projects is one of Paris's most prized properties: the Hotel Lambert, a 17th-century mansion on the lie Saint-Louis, designed by the French neoclassical architect Louis Le Vau and now owned by a member of the Qatari royal family. The company's signature is what Pinto calls "classic contemporary," with a strong Continental European base and a soupcon of Orientalism in the lighting, palette, and decor—influenced, no doubt, by the Pinto siblings' childhood in Morocco.