Inside Charles Zana's Storytelling Spaces
Architect and interior designer Charles Zana inherited a passion for building from his father, who was a real estate developer. But from a very young age, Zana was interested primarily in art. This can also be attributed to his father, who was fond of the painter Georges Mathieu and artists of the 1950s such as Jean-Michel Atlan and collected ceramics by Georges Jouve, Jean Lurçat, and Pablo Picasso. Even before beginning his studies, Zana soaked up as much knowledge
Six years of studies later, he left for New York, only to return to Paris in 1990 to found his agency, Charles Zana Architects. Among the architects and designers Zana admires are Luis Barragán, whose work “has been very strongly embedded in the culture of Mexico, and whose use of forms and materials opened me up to a much more contemporary architecture.” Ettore Sottsass fascinates him for “his melancholy, his irony, and his way of bringing the divine back into the project.” Zana also cites as influences Carlo Scarpa, “the virtuoso of architecture who imagined the foundations of contemporary scenography,” and Louis Kahn, who “drew from the American tradition.”
In addition to designing, Zana stages clients’ art collections within his interiors. “If you consider that the exhibition is the life of my clients, then yes, I work as a curator,” he says.
When installing works of art in a house he has just finished building, Zana says he lays “the works intuitively. When we make exhibitions, we are sometimes obliged to follow a chronological direction. In homes, I prefer dialogue. I think that objects respond to each other and that the works settle in a bit naturally."
Zana’s clients are often collectors just like him. Because of this, they also do not want an overly-designed home. “I am very contextual. I like to make a house in Saint-Tropez that refers to Provence, working with terracotta and plaster. If I’m doing a home in New York, I’m going to want to work with painted wood. My clients feel the same about homes; they do not want decoration. They want an interior design styled for living that also respects the space.”
Each interior that Zana imagines tells a story, “For 20 years, I have been in storytelling. I like the idea of talking about projects without showing images, which is not always easy.” As for his own home, “It’s an 18th-century apartment which has barely been damaged, barely touched, and barely restored. So we feel the trace of time. We are not trying to lie or renovate, and I like living in this atmosphere. The 18th-century proportions are the ones I love. It retains an incredible panache and beauty.”
Recently, the architect began to create his own collection of furniture, which debuted at FIAC last year and will be presented this year at PAD Paris Art + Design. “We have always designed furniture for our projects—this is part of this French tradition of decorative art; the Haute Couture interior decoration. Creating furniture for spaces that I haven’t designed myself is really new.
