Had Guillaume Coutheillas, the founder and creative director of AD PRO Directory firm FrenchCalifornia, not been such an eagle-eyed Instagram scroller, he and his husband would be living somewhere entirely different right now. Two years ago, the mere glimpse of a bit of molding and a sliver of a marble mantle on a friend’s Instagram Stories sparked enough curiosity about an unlisted West Village apartment, which he patiently waited for until it could be theirs.
“It looked like a mix of a little French, a little Victorian, Greek Revival, and Federal elements, but it was just this little tiny snapshot. I couldn’t tell if it had a lot of natural light; I couldn’t tell anything,” says Coutheillas of the classic 900-square-foot flat he now shares with husband. “I just saw the potential.” The interior designer’s well-honed eye picked up on the little details that ultimately told him a lot about the 1834 building and what was originally its parlor.
Growing up in Paris, Coutheillas was intimately familiar with living in a historical space, and a small one at that. But “what’s just so shocking is this apartment is older than the one I grew up in,” he says. The small footprint posed an exciting design challenge: “I could have definitely gotten something much larger with less character somewhere else, but I preferred to take this apartment.” Once they did, Coutheillas set about repainting, changing all the hardware, replacing cabinets, installing window treatments, and swapping out light fixtures. The original floors, molding, and mantles—one Greek Revival, the other Federal style—all stayed, naturally.
Furnishing the storied pad took a full year, he says, for one because clients always come first and, two, because “everything had to be thoughtful and beautiful. Because there’s only a select number of pieces that fit in this apartment, I wanted to look around and love every single object.” Coutheillas sourced a high-low blend of furniture from France to the UK and Michigan to Louisiana, through dealers, galleries, Facebook Marketplace, 1stDibs, eBay, and Chelsea Flea. For the couple’s bed, Coutheillas designed a bespoke piece for his carpenters to build. The custom creation sits slightly higher than usual to accommodate four suitcases and countless winter coats beneath it. “It’s almost like designing for a boat where you don’t have much space and you need storage everywhere,” says the designer.
