Marie-France Boyer

Paris

Associate Editor, Paris at The World of Interiors

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Articles

Casa Hortícola: Multi-coloured and joyful, this immaculate little seed shop is flourishing

1 month ago | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

It is hard to visit Porto without coming face to face with the Casa Hortícola. This delightful store selling seeds and bulbs is part of a large early 19th-century Neoclassical complex that includes the Bolhão market. While the stalls are still popular, it’s now a pale reflection of what it was 30 years ago: colourful, exotic and teeming with people. Beneath an openwork gallery you will still find fish – sardines and octopus – cheese, a particularly tasty bread, fruit and flowers for sale.
Château de Montfrin: the tortuous past of a Languedoc castle

1 month ago | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

Somewhere between Nîmes and Avignon, Jean-René de Fleurieu lives in Château de Montfrin, overlooking a village of the same name. Despite its classic Baroque façade, what awaits inside is a byzantine architectural puzzle. Initially consisting of a Medieval house built around a seventh-century square tower, by the 18th century it had gradually evolved into the château we see today, with its outbuildings and gardens attributed to JH Mansart, great-nephew of the eponymous roof man.
Debauve & Gallais: a Parisian chocolatier with a royal history

Jan 23, 2025 | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

Although there are more than 150 shops in Paris listed as historic monuments, these are often really just fronts or signs. Only some bakeries, cafés and chemist’s have kept their interior décor and furniture. Fewer still have retained their original function; the wonderful engraver Stern, for example, has become a restaurant. One of the most elegant survivors of an increasingly bygone era, as formal and sophisticated as a museum, is the chocolate shop Debauve & Gallais at 30 Rue des Saints-Pères.
Jean-François Lesage’s Normandy home is a ‘textile fantasia’

Dec 31, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

After living in southern India for 30 years, embroiderer Jean-François Lesage found himself wanting a proper base in France. He decided on Le Perche in Normandy, only two hours from Paris yet worlds away from its highways, railway stations and mass tourism. It is a discreet region, packed with history, where monasteries, castles and old villages meet rivers, woods and thickets. As a boy of 15, Jean-François had crossed the region while cycling with friends from Paris to Belle Ile.
From The Archive: Anders Annerstedt and Katarina Abrahamsson’s 1960s house is a temple to mid-century Modernism

Nov 19, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

Katarina Abrahamsson and Anders Annerstedt live just outside Stockholm. Anders is an architect and Katarina an interior designer for the firm Svenskt Tenn, to whose premises she takes the water bus every morning. Their neighbourhood is a succession of rocky, wooded hills on small islands separated by branches of the Baltic Sea; they’re easily mistaken for lakes or rivers since the saltwater infiltrates everywhere. It’s a chic area, largely made up of elegant 1930s wooden villas.
James Ensor’s eerie home and mask-filled souvenir shop

Oct 9, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

James Ensor was born in Ostend in 1860, some thirty years before two other famously eccentric Belgian artists, René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. In some ways, this fact of birth would be emblematic of Ensor’s artistic life: he was ahead of the crowd though often overshadowed by his contemporaries. Ensor seldom left the town in which he’d grown up: a fishing port on the North Sea that had become a fashionable seaside resort.
André Groult: wallpapers of poetry

Oct 5, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

André Groult began designing in 1908, when he was just 24 years old and Art Deco fashion was in full swing. In 1910, he opened his first antique and curiosities shop in Paris. A year later, he exhibited as a decorator at the Salon d’Automne, where his designs proved a huge success. Initially, he lived on Rue d’Anjou, but soon after he moved to the elegant Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré; his apartment there soon appeared in the Revue des arts décoratifs.
Dark fantasies: Svita Sobol’s Surrealist flat in Paris

Oct 3, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

The Kyiv-born Svita Sobol left Ukraine at six years old to go to school in Switzerland; from almost that age, she dreamed of being in the world of fashion. In time, after business school in London, she decided to see her ambition through, enrolling at the Parsons School of Design.
The restoration of Marie Antoinette’s home in Versailles

Aug 2, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

Marie Antoinette’s cabinet at Versailles – or rather, one of the queen’s many such petits appartements – has changed colour. The ice-blue scheme of the Méridienne room, as it’s also known, has been traded in for lilac, matching the mercurial whims of its previous owner. When in 1784 she received the lilac meuble to effect the transformation, it was the third set she’d trialled; though capricious, she seemed satisfied enough to keep it.
W is for Wanderlust

May 9, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Marie-France Boyer

I have spent more than 40 years trying to understand the intimate bond that exists between a house and its owner. This quest has taken me all over the world. Although I have never felt truer happiness than in my domestic stamping grounds – Auvergne, Ostend, Paris – I’ve had my fair share of more exotic adventures. One evening, I was wrapping up an article I’d been working on with photographer Ricardo Labougle on an Argentinian hacienda at the foot of the Andes (WoI June 2008).