Inside Lenny Kravitz’s Regal Paris Refuge
All products featured on Architectural Digest are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Superstar musician Lenny Kravitz has loved Paris since he first landed there in 1989, at 25, to promote his debut album, Let Love Rule. Finally, in the early 2000s, he felt it was time to find a pied-à-terre: “a little apartment, maybe on the Seine—one bedroom, two bedrooms, maximum—where I could write and hang out,” he recalls. “One day, the real estate agent says, ‘I have something. It’s not what you’re looking for, but you need to see it.’ ”
“It” was the grand mansion of Countess Anne d’Ornano, the widowed former mayor of Deauville, a 1920s confection set on a leafy cul-de-sac next to a clutch of embassies in the conservative 16th arrondissement. With her children grown, the countess found herself more at her Norman estate, with poetic gardens by Louis Benech, than in the Paris house, and had decided to sell.
“The agent said: ‘It’s not on the market yet, and this kind of thing only comes around once in a generation,’ ” Kravitz continues. “I pull up, she points at the building, I said, ‘Okay, what floor?’ thinking it’s an apartment building. And she says, ‘It’s the whole thing.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, no, absolutely not.’ ‘Please, just go inside and look at it.’ I walked in and said, ‘This is my house.’ Spiritually, I knew.”
There was much to be done to convert the stately manor from a French aristocrat’s city residence to an American rocker’s crash pad, where he could spend half the year recording new music in a home studio, recovering from European tours, and spending time with Zoë, his now-36-year-old actor-model-filmmaker daughter with his former wife, actor Lisa Bonet. He spends the other half of the year at his compound in Eleuthera, Bahamas, and on occasion visits a ranch he owns in Brazil (AD, May 2019).
But Kravitz had the skills and the tools to make that transformation happen: In 2003, he founded Kravitz Design, a studio that specializes in commercial and residential interiors, branding, and creative collaborations. Over the years, the AD100 firm has worked with such corporate clients as Leica, Dom Pérignon, CB2, and Sushi Shop on various projects.
Love Lenny's style? Adopt the rockstar's Parisian-influenced vibe with our editor-curated selection of furniture and decor.
Five years ago, he partnered with Steinway & Sons to produce the Kravitz Grand, a limited-edition of handcrafted pianos in hard maple, Madagascar ebony, and bronze, with African-style wood carvings on the case and legs. One sits at the foot of the sweeping staircase in his soaring entry hall, across from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Black Figure) from 1984. Dressed in a black leather jacket, faded Nina Hagen T-shirt, well-worn jeans, and standing in his stockinged feet—no shoes in the house, thank you very much—Kravitz pads over to the Steinway and plays a few chords. The notes gently reverberate off the vanilla stuc pierre (stone stucco) walls. “The sound in here is beautiful,” he says. “Gorgeous.”
Kravitz’s rich cultural mélange is rooted in his upbringing in New York City: the son of NBC News producer Sy Kravitz and actress Roxie Roker, he spent his youth shuttling between his parents’ apartment near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his maternal grandparents’ home in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Two completely different worlds,” he says. And it was these two worlds—the Beaux Arts formality of the Upper East Side and the cozy homeyness of the American Southern-Bahamian household in Brooklyn—that formed Kravitz’s design point of view.
“I’d call it ‘soulful elegance,’ ” he says, settling into one of a pair of plush bouclé-upholstered Studio Glustin “Scarface” armchairs in the library, a jewel-box of a room, with creamy espresso-brown-painted boiseries and bookshelves laden with art books, Kravitz’s Grammy awards, Muhammad Ali’s Adidas lace-up boxing boots from his final fight in Nassau—the Drama in Bahama—in 1981, and several pairs of the Godfather of Soul James Brown’s boots and shoes. “The whole thing of walking in someone’s shoes and their journey,” Kravitz muses.
He settles deeper into the chair, a turmeric-ginger shot in a thimble-sized crystal coupe sitting before him on one of two Paul Kingma–designed Brutalist cast-concrete-and-resin coffee tables. A mod poster that had been in his parents’ East 82nd Street flat when he was a kid hangs on the wall. “ ‘Soulful elegance’ means it’s designed, curated, balanced, not too minimal, not too maximalist,” he explains. “It’s comfortable, clearly. But also chic. It’s got a lot of ethnic and African elements mixed with European, because I love that balance of African, European, and Afrofuturism mixed with midcentury pieces. I love things that are extremely glamorous and also extremely brutal.”
Things like Richard Avedon’s iconic portrait of Marilyn Monroe in a plunging black sequin gown, set upon a Lella and Massimo Vignelli slab-like Ambiguità console adjacent to the upstairs landing. Or Ubald Klug’s 1970s buttery leather Terrazza landscape sofa for de Sede in the Lounge—Kravitz’s louche subterranean screening room—across from a swaggering brass-and-polished-steel coffee table with a rotating center.
Items from or depicting family and friends are always near, like memento mori, be it the portrait of his godmother Diahann Carroll in the library, or the framed black-and-white publicity shots of his mother in her namesake Roxie Room, an elegant den next to the grand salon, or the framed Miles Davis leather jacket, a gift from another godmother, Davis’s former wife Cicely Tyson, days after the great trumpeter died, in the basement’s memorabilia gallery outside Kravitz’s studio. Or the most important piece in the house: the handsome Ruven Afanador portrait of Kravitz’s grandfather, Albert Roker, above New Hope School designer Paul Evans’s Sculpted Front sideboard in the dining room.
“Ruven was doing the cover for my fourth album, Circus, and we shot it all in Nassau,” Kravitz recalls. “I put my grandfather in one of my suits, and Ruven took a bunch of portraits of him. He is why I am here, and why I’m in this house, why my mom went to Howard University in DC and studied at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and became who she became, then I became who I became, and Zoë became who she became. It’s all him. So he presides over the table at all times.”
The most Kravitz room of all, however, is “the Chaufferie”: a two-story boiler room in the darkest depths of the house, where he has created a sort of speakeasy, with old French bistro tables from the Saint-Ouen flea market, a 1940s German-made disco ball he picked up in Los Angeles, an ornate chrome car grill embedded in the brick wall, and “a great sound system,” he notes. “My daughter’s been having a lot of soirées here.” Now dubbed the Hôtel de Roxie, after his mother, this once unlikely house clearly embodies Kravitz’s life and design philosophies. Spinning around on his be-socked feet, jamming his hands in his slouchy jeans’ pockets, he flashes a big smile—“Now you’ve got the vibe.”
Lenny Kravitz’s Parisian manse covers AD’s May issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
