zyva studio’s paris showroom is a manifesto for neo-ornament

Zyva Studio builds Paris apartment around ornamentation

Paris-based Zyva Studio has turned the apartment of its founder, Anthony Authié, into the showroom of the studio. Across 60 sqm, ornament is not a finishing layer but a starting point that challenges Adolf Loos’s claim that ’ornament is a crime’ and instead opens space for imagination. The 20th century had settled the matter: form follows function, and decoration would be a lapse of taste. With no nostalgia and no pastiche, the studio would rather ask the question differently. What if ornament did not come last, to dress an architecture already finished, but first, as a starting point? It then adds nothing superfluous; it opens a fiction.

living and dining area, terrazzo floor, granite round table and monumental chains | all images ©Robin Le Febvre

flowers and colorful interior motifs shape the apartment

Within Zyva Studio’s Paris apartment, spiky flowers rise from floor to ceiling, green stems ringed with yellow and red corollas. Above them, monumental chains in red, blue, and yellow hang like a child’s toy shifted in scale. None of these pieces decorates something that was already there; each one is both the object and its ornament. In the bedroom, the clay bed leans against a metal headboard where the ventilation ducts remain exposed, like an engine room. What is usually hidden becomes the motif. The coffee table, designed with Mosaic Factory, sets a terrazzo top on a tubular structure borrowed from the pipes of Mario Bros. A noble material, a pop reference, and no hierarchy between the two.

kitchen and mezzanine, terrazzo running from floor to wall

patterned surfaces create a continuous material thread

One motif runs through the apartment: the aggregate. It spreads across the terrazzo floor, tightens in the granite of the round table, returns in the kitchen worktop, and reappears in the terrazzo of the coffee table. Four densities, four grain sizes, one ornament declined. Answering this mineral thread are the printed hides, the cowhide rug on the floor, the Dalmatian curtains at the windows, the star-shaped handles, and the doors perforated with crosses and dots. This apparent chaos is held together by a thread; each motif calls the next and ends up building one single world.

dining area, granite round table and red chairs