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A Paris Bachelor Pad

August 27th, 2014 · No Comments · Paris, tourism, Travel

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Sometimes we forget how much our living space says about us.

Our furniture. Our appliances. The art on the walls and the knick-knacks on the tables. The size of our television.

What is present, in our digs, and what is absent.

And I can say, without hesitation, that our home in France this week is a fairly extreme example of a Paris bachelor pad.

Within a half hour of taking over the room, last weekend, I uttered something along the lines of: “No woman has ever lived in this space.”

The walls?

Bare. Not one piece of art, not even a poster. One wall, at the end of the living room, is olive green. Everything else? White.

The furniture? Leather, leather and more leather, including the brown leather “comfy” recliner chair in the corner and the black leather L-shaped couch, the brown leather stool, the four armless black-leather chairs around the rickety dining table.

The TV?

Enormous, complicated and the focal point (so not Parisian) of the apartment, let alone a four-room, two-bedroom place.

The lighting?

A strange collection of probably modern stuff, but grotesque and ineffective. Three versions of the same wrought-iron floor lamps that look like cages for light bulbs and shed little light. Mystery lights at the bottom of tubes in one bedroom.

The “light” for the dining table is a half-inch rod that rises about four feet from a tripod base, and has a 12-inch strip for aiming light onto the table. It is perhaps The Latest Thing. But the effect is to blind anyone at the table who actually looks at the light strip.

The kitchen?

Nothing is quite clean. Neither surfaces nor glasses nor crockery. The microwave does not work.

Storage space? Nearly nonexistent. Half a closet here, a few shelves there.

(The one curious element? The big binoculars on a tripod aimed out a window.)

The place is leather, wrought iron and glass. Austere to the extreme. Unwelcoming, unless you and a couple of your mates plan to sprawl on the leather furniture and drink a lot of beer while counting on the massive TV to generate a human touch — even if it’s the Premier League.

What we know about the landlord is this. He is British. He is a banker. And this is an expensive place that seems to have undergone some significant upgrades.

What we assume is: He does not cohabitate with a woman, because no woman would acquiesce to this utterly impractical, cold space.

Does our banker know that? Is he self-aware enough to realize the message he has created here on the seventh floor?

Or is he convinced what he has here is cutting edge and modern, the antithesis of frilly?

But a couple of framed posters, a little less leather, a dinner table that is functional … maybe we wouldn’t be trying to shrink this guy’s head from the other side of The Channel.

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