A Driven Introvert Creates His Dream Home in Paris

Max Gunawan, a product designer, lost his heart to the Place des Vosges. Now he lives in the fabled square.

By Stephen Wallis

Photographs by Joann Pai

Aug. 29, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/style/paris-home-design.html

Timeless with a bit of magic. That is how the company Lumio describes its small line of lamps and speakers that are designed with smart functionality but also a distinct sense of delight. Max Gunawan started Lumio in 2013 with a portable light shaped like a book that turns on when opened and — voilà! — its accordionlike pages form a sculptural fixture that can be used in various tabletop configurations or hung from a strap.

Relying on Kickstarter campaigns for initial funding, Mr. Gunawan, 43, took an unconventional path in building his venture. Trained as an architect, he founded Lumio with no experience in industrial design or business leadership, driven by a unique and uncompromising idea of the product he wanted. (He persuaded all the panelists in season six of the ABC show “Shark Tank” to make investment offers, though none ultimately panned out.) Lumio’s collection has expanded to include an illuminated Bluetooth speaker that refers to the Japanese art of kintsugi and, most recently, a seesaw-arm desk lamp inspired, in part, by the stabile sculptures of Alexander Calder.

The San Francisco–based company’s products are now sold through some 200 retail outlets in 30 countries.

Mr. Gunawan’s creations are available on Lumio’s site, in select design and gift boutiques, and at a number of museum shops, including MoMA Design Store, the first retailer to offer the Lumio book light.

“You don’t need to be a design expert to appreciate it,” said Emmanuel Plat, MoMA’s director of retail merchandising, who described the book light as having a poetic quality. “It’s just so universal in a way that anybody really can react to it. It’s hard not to have a reaction to it, an emotional reaction.”

He added: “What really sets Max apart is, he has that left-right brain, where he has a design mind and the creativity to create this object but also the know-how, the business mind to finance and produce all of this.”

Mr. Gunawan travels extensively, frequently to Hong Kong, where Lumio has an office, and to Paris, which has become his European base. Increasingly, Paris is also the place he goes to relax and recharge creatively, especially since he completed renovations on a small apartment on the elegant Place des Vosges, the storied 17th-century square in the Marais district that is lined with stately brick-and-limestone townhouses and street-level arcades populated with antiques shops, galleries and cafes. It’s a landmark that has captivated the Indonesian-born Mr. Gunawan since his college days, when he spent a semester in Paris as part of his undergraduate architecture studies at Wesleyan University in the early 2000s.

“I traveled the city and really soaked up the architecture,” he recalled. “I told my friends, ‘Gosh, one day, if I were ever to have a place in Paris, I would want to live in Place des Vosges.’ But it was purely a dream.”

After spending a decade and a half in the Bay Area, working in retail design and then starting Lumio, Mr. Gunawan said, the “slow burn” lure of Paris grew with repeated visits, prompting casual inquiries to a real estate broker. “I told her, ‘You know, if you could find me a semi-fixer upper, because I really want to put a stamp on it,” he said. “It just needs two things: good light and good volume, and that’s it, then I can work out the rest.’”

One day in late 2019, the broker called with a lead on an off-market apartment in the Place des Vosges, a ground-floor one-bedroom overlooking a quiet cobbled courtyard with a parterre garden, but he would have to act quickly. Traveling at the time, Mr. Gunawan informed her he wouldn’t be in Paris for a few months. “She said, Forget about it. That will be gone. You need to go tomorrow,” he recounted. “So I asked a friend to do a videotape walk-through of the place. And guess what? Sometimes I make decisions by impulse, and that’s what happened. I made the offer two days later.”

Totaling a modest 700 square feet, the apartment had generous 13-foot ceilings but was broken up into a series of small rooms. For Mr. Gunawan, certain changes were obvious, such as removing one of the central walls to create an open, continuous space for the living and dining areas and kitchen. But before embarking on renovations he opted to live in the apartment for 18 months, he said, “to get a feel of how I would use it day-to-day, how I want to enjoy my coffee, how the morning light comes in.”

Working with contractors, he designed everything himself, down to the smallest details. Much like the products he has created for Lumio, the results are a marriage of thoughtful simplicity and artful whimsy. The overall feeling is a refined minimalism, exemplified by the subtly shifting palette of grays. In the living areas, Mr. Gunawan used a deep battleship hue for the chevron floors and a lighter dove tone for the fluted paneling that clads the kitchen cabinets and dining table base, while a pale fog-like shade colors the walls.

“I like quiet space that is simple and clean,” Mr. Gunawan said. “It goes back to my school days, how I fell in love with architecture through the work of Tadao Ando. There are still always elements of that simplicity and the gray tones that speak to me.”

The apartment has plenty of moments of playfulness and surprise, starting in the entrance vestibule, where a couple of Japanese lucky cat figurines perch atop the door frame, while a gentle tug along the edge of an arched mirror by Bower Studios reveals a hidden hallway containing a powder room, laundry and coat closet.

Aside from the entry doors, the apartment features almost no handles or pulls (the inconspicuous few that Mr. Gunawan did include resemble small stones made in collaboration with Léa Van Impe, a ceramic artist). Instead, doors and cabinets slide or open with a touch — or, in the case of the dishwasher, with a double knock.

The kitchen was especially important to Mr. Gunawan, an enthusiastic cook who loves the daily ritual of buying food from neighborhood vendors and coming home to make dinner for himself or, occasionally, for a small group of friends. “I never do big parties, but I like to feed people,” he said, describing himself as an introvert at heart. “Four to six guests is my happy place.”

Every inch of the kitchen was meticulously designed. Appliances and storage are concealed behind floor-to-ceiling fluted paneling, while the range and sink are integrated into a niche of charcoal-hued Ceppo di Gré marble speckled with terrazzo-esque flecks of stone. Contrasting Arabescato marble with painterly gray veining was used for an open storage shelf and for the dining table’s top, which doubles as an island work space.

Mr. Gunawan suspended a minimalist Michael Anastassiades mobile-style chandelier above and encircled the table with seven of his favorite chairs, all in black, by designers including Jean Prouvé, Hans Wegner, Faye Toogood and Oki Sato of Nendo. “Chairs are one of the things that I love,” said Mr. Gunawan, who has been designing his own chair for Lumio, to be unveiled this fall. “I was, like, why not make it a variety of them. You think it’s easy to find all those black versions? In some cases, I actually had to beg.”

The living area is anchored by a classic Arflex sofa paired with a two-tone textured-wood cocktail table Mr. Gunawan commissioned from Ferréol Babin, a French designer, plus an Eames plywood chair in fire engine red and a few felted-wool poufs for extra seating. Nearby, Ceppo di Gré shelves, illuminated by recessed lighting, display books, small artworks, design objects and other curios, including a whale sculpture by the illustrator Jean Jullien, a glass candelabra by the artist José Lévy and a donkey’s head made from raffia palm fibers that he picked up at a roadside market in Morocco.

Access to Mr. Gunawan’s bedroom and office is through a door disguised within the kitchen paneling, leading to a low-ceilinged corridor that provides a sensory as well as spatial transition from the public living areas to the private. Here, he tucked the toilet, polished concrete shower and sink — a sculptural monolith of Ceppo di Gré — beneath a loft sleeping area reached by narrow stairs. The rest of the space opens to full height, with views of the garden just outside.

Every inch of storage is utilized, which means floor-to-ceiling closets with tilting clothes racks. Sparely furnished, the room is outfitted with a Bruno Moinard Editions desk and a Frama Triangolo chair (usually softened by a felt Pendleton blanket), where Mr. Gunawan often retreats to think, draw or have his morning coffee. Sometimes he starts his days at the foot of his bed, feet dangling over the side of the loft, where he designed a narrow lap table, deep enough for a notebook or sketch pad.

“It’s where I detach myself,” he said. “This is my niche, my cocoon.”