In recent times, the AD100 French Mexican architect Hugo Toro has taken the approach of an auteur, working on a carte blanche basis to realize his commissioned projects down to the last exacting detail. For the Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme’s new crown jewel, restaurant Pur’, home to Michelin-starred chef Jean-François Rouquette, Toro conceived everything, even the napkin rings and the staff uniforms. Currently, he is putting the final touches on La Minerva hotel in Rome, the Orient Express’s five-star accommodation just steps from the Pantheon, which will be a complete embodiment of his architectural vision.
For his latest residential project on Paris’s Left Bank, a 1911 mansion comprising more than 10,000 square feet spread across six floors, the clients—a French family—were happy to hand him the reins with just one stipulation: They wanted a fish tank. “That’s a first,” the 35-year-old admits of the two-and-a-half-ton aquarium he had installed into a wall in the ground-floor family room, adding with a smile, “I left it up to them to choose the fish.”
The project is Toro’s largest (completed) private home to date. “These are very rare buildings,” he says of the history and scale of the site, which features six bedrooms, six bathrooms, a pool, a rooftop terrace, and a garden.
When he first visited in February 2022, the house had sat empty for 15 years and was in disrepair. Water damage and mold marked the ornate, gilded plasterwork, and paint—in a fusty Empire red—was peeling off the walls. “They wanted me to bridge the gap between the past and today: to respect the building but create a new stratification of style and time references,” he says of the brief, which was to unearth some of the building’s original charm—the Art Nouveau curves of the window frames and a more muted palette they found when they scraped at the walls—and create something more distinct.
