The Art of Place: Gregory Taylor on Paris, Architecture, and Exceptional Design

 

I first met my friend Gregory through our mutual friend Wolf Worster, founder of the Sirreti Group and its exclusive UHNW network, which brings together professionals from every corner of the luxury world.

It quickly became clear that Gregory and I share a number of common interests. Given my work in real estate and the steady stream of clients relocating to France or purchasing property here, I felt his knowledge would be especially valuable to my readers.

Based in Paris, Gregory offers a unique perspective on the city’s architecture, history, and design—insights that can be invaluable for anyone looking to better understand or invest in the French capital.

I hope you enjoy our video conversation, followed by an in-depth Q&A exploring Gregory’s expertise and his passion for Paris.

When you look back at your early career working in architecture and global luxury brands, what felt like the turning point that made you want to launch your own studio?

Working with global luxury brands was an extraordinary education. It taught me precision, storytelling, operational discipline, and how to create environments that communicate immediately, without needing to shout.

But after many years working within defined brand universes, I began to feel the need for more freedom — more variety, more intimacy, and a more personal relationship to each project. I had learned a great deal about codes: architectural codes, luxury codes, cultural codes, the way different clients and countries understand space and experience. I wanted to be able to move more freely between them.

In a way, I had spent years conducting a very large orchestra. Creating my own studio allowed me to become more like a luthier: working at a more intimate scale, with more direct contact with the material, the process, and the character of each project.

That is really what Gregory Taylor Design allowed me to do: bring together the different strands of my experience — architecture, interiors, luxury, branding, travel, and culture — into one practice, with greater freedom and a more personal sense of authorship.

Gregory, you’ve built a design practice in Paris with a very distinctive voice — how would you personally describe your design philosophy in a few sentences?

I would say my work is about creating spaces that feel quietly confident, as if they had always belonged there.

But what matters to me is not imposing a signature. A project begins as a conversation — with the client, of course, but also with the place itself. I try to understand the client’s personality, lifestyle, and ambition, including the things they may not yet know how to express. At the same time, I listen to the building: what should be kept, what should be revealed, what should be transformed.

I am very attached to the atmosphere. Of course, a project should photograph beautifully, but photography is not the final goal. What matters most is the feeling of living there — a kind of serene contentment, a durable happiness. When the balance between the client and the place is right, the result feels natural, lasting, and almost inevitable.

Is there a material or design element you keep returning to in your projects — and why do you think it keeps pulling you back?

         I think I return repeatedly to the idea of passage — the way one moves from one            space to another.

I have always been fascinated by thresholds, hidden doors, secret passages, mirrors, reflections, and the small moments of surprise they can create. A concealed door in a library, a reflection that extends a room, a corridor that slowly reveals a view — these are not just decorative gestures. They create anticipation and make a space feel alive.

Someone once asked me what I thought was the most important room in a private home. I found it difficult to answer, because sleeping, eating, entertaining, bathing, working, retreating — all these moments matter. For me, what matters most is often the fluidity between them: how naturally you move through the house, how the spaces connect, and how the views are orchestrated from inside to outside.

That is something I return to constantly. A beautiful space is important, of course, but the way you arrive there — and what you discover along the way — can be even more powerful.

What influences your work?

I am certainly influenced by architecture — by my education, by the great twentieth-century masters, and by the belief that everything begins with a plan. A plan tells you almost everything: the volume of the spaces, the way they relate to one another, and how people will move through them.

But inspiration is something different. I don’t think you go out looking for it in a very deliberate way. It often arrives by accident: a film, a piece of music, a garden, a meal you cooked, a conversation with someone, or the light filtering through the trees as you come out of the subway in Paris. All of these things stay somewhere in your head.

When I begin a project, it is a bit like opening all those little drawers with raw bits of inspiration and sorting out what belongs to that particular place. I am also very influenced by atmospheres — historic hotels, old bars, private houses, gardens, places where everything seems to work in the same direction and nothing strikes a false note.

In the end, what interests me is not just how a place looks, but what it makes possible: how people move, how they feel, how they behave, and what kind of emotion remains with them afterward.

What are some of your most unique experiences with a client or property?

Two very different projects come to mind.

One was a townhouse at the top of Montmartre in Paris, with a garden on what had once been the site of a windmill. Beneath the garden were two levels of underground vaulted stone spaces, hidden chambers, but they were in a very poor state — full of water, blackened, and crumbling. 

Several architects and engineers had looked at it before and preferred not to get involved, because it was complicated and not immediately glamorous.

But I found it fascinating. The property had been in the same family for generations, and the client had a real sense of custodianship. Restoring those hidden vaulted spaces eventually led to the restoration of the entire townhouse. What made the project so meaningful to me was that it began with something almost forgotten and became the starting point for bringing the whole property back to life.

Another project was a 1930s vacation home in southwest France. The house was deeply loved by one member of the family, but for others it had become emotionally complicated. The brief was not simply to renovate it, but to transform the way the family could live there — to make it feel like a home again, and like a place that truly belonged to everyone.

That kind of trust is very moving. Clients naturally ask me to solve architectural problems, but behind those problems there are often personal questions: how a family lives together, how a place carries memory, how a home can begin a new chapter. I am not a therapist, of course, but architecture can sometimes help people inhabit their lives differently.

Who do you think is your business demographic? Is it a mix of locals in France with those from other countries such as the US?

Yes, it is a mix. I work with French clients, of course, but also with international clients — Americans, British, Europeans, and people who have homes or business interests in France.

What many of them have in common is that they are looking for more than decoration. They may be buying, renovating, or rethinking a property, and they need someone who can understand both the potential of the place and the practical side of bringing a project to life successfully.

For international clients, I often play an advisory role as well as a design role. Buying or renovating property in France can be complex, especially if you are not here full-time. A large part of my work is helping clients understand what is possible, what needs attention, and how to move through the process with more confidence.

Do you find that more hands-on attention is required if someone isn’t from France?

Very often, yes. Not because international clients are more difficult, but because the French process can be opaque if you did not grow up with it — or spend years learning to decipher it.

There are many layers: administrative procedures, building permissions, co-ownership rules, heritage constraints, technical norms, craftsmen’s habits, and sometimes a very French way of communicating indirectly. For someone coming from the US or the UK, for example, it can feel slower and less explicit than expected.

My role is partly to translate — not only linguistically, but culturally and professionally. I help clients understand what is possible, what is risky, what is worth fighting for, and where patience is necessary. That reassurance is particularly important when clients are not in France full-time.

How does working in Paris influence your design language compared to your international projects?

          Paris teaches a certain elegance of restraint. You learn, simply by living and                 working here, that not everything has to be said loudly. A doorway, a transition             between rooms, the rhythm of windows on a façade, the way daylight falls on a             wall — very simple things can carry a great deal of emotion when they are well             handled.

Working internationally has taught me to be attentive to what changes from one place to another: questions of scale, light, climate, the way people receive guests, the relationship to the outdoors, even the pace of daily life.

So perhaps Paris gives me discipline — a sense of proportion, editing, and quietness — but of course each project must speak in its own language. A house on the Riviera, an apartment in Paris, a hotel project, or a resort in the Indian Ocean should not feel as if it came from the same recipe. It should feel as if it could not have been imagined in quite the same way anywhere else.

Paris is so layered architecturally — do you see your work as responding to that history, or deliberately breaking away from it?

I think more in terms of conversation than opposition. It is not about copying the past, but it is not about breaking away from it just for the sake of being contemporary either.

Paris has many layers — classical, Haussmannian, modernist, industrial, contemporary — and the best projects understand which layer they are speaking to. Sometimes the right response is to restore and clarify. Sometimes it is to introduce something more contemporary. The important thing is that the gesture feels necessary, not decorative or forced.

For me, the question is always quite simple: what does this particular place need in order to become more itself?

Is there a trend you are seeing right now that is shifting in property?

I do see a shift in the way people look at property, especially in prime property.

Clients are becoming more sensitive to the difference between a property that is simply well-presented and one that has real emotional resonance and long-term value. A house can photograph beautifully and still have poor circulation, complicated technical issues, very little atmosphere, or no real sense of place.

I find that people are more discerning now. They want properties with character, of course, but also places that offer ease and flexibility of living — homes that work for family life, guests, work, retreat, and changing needs over time.

For me, the most interesting properties are often not the most obvious ones. They are the ones with hidden potential: a view that has not been properly revealed, a garden that could change the whole rhythm of the house, a floor plan that could be transformed, or an atmosphere that is there but needs to be brought back to life.

For your varying projects, you must have a list of key people you work with regularly who are top notch and reliable. This must make clients feel more at ease, especially if they are not from France and do not know how the process works.

Absolutely. A project is only as strong as the people who execute it.

Over the years, I have built relationships with contractors, artisans, engineers, lighting specialists, cabinetmakers, stone suppliers, upholsterers, metalworkers, and other trusted partners. For a client — especially an international client — that network is enormously reassuring.

Good design is not just an idea. It has to be built, coordinated, priced, adjusted, and delivered. The quality of the team determines whether the process feels chaotic or controlled. One of the advantages of experience is knowing not only what should be done, but who can actually do it well.

Was there ever a space that completely surprised you once it was finished — something that didn’t behave the way you expected during the design process?

Yes and no. I am rarely surprised by the volume of a space once it is built, because that is part of the work: to imagine the proportions, the circulation, the views, and the way the spaces will connect long before they exist physically.

But there is always a form of serendipity when everything finally comes together. Light and shadow move through a space in ways that can be more beautiful than you expected. You hear birds from a terrace where you had not noticed them before. A reflection, a sound, a certain hour of the day can suddenly give a place an atmosphere that feels even stronger than what you imagined.

That is the elusive part of architecture. You design the plan, the volumes, the lighting, the acoustics, the materials — all the visible and practical things — in the hope that something invisible will happen. When it works, the architecture almost disappears behind the atmosphere and the emotion it creates.

What are you currently working on now?

At the moment, I am working on a fairly wide variety of projects. I am working on several resort projects for a well-known French hospitality brand, in locations as different as Canada, the Caribbean, Morocco, and the Italian Alps.

What feels like the next chapter for Gregory Taylor Design?

I think the next chapter is about working on more exceptional projects — not necessarily more projects, and not simply larger or more expensive ones, but projects where the stakes are higher and the level of trust is deeper.

I am interested in clients and properties where architecture is part of a larger question: how a family wants to live, how an exceptional property can be transformed, how a hospitality concept can become more distinctive, or how a place can acquire real long-term value.

For Gregory Taylor Design, growth is not about becoming a large office. It is about working with clients who are looking for judgment, discretion, and a very personal level of attention — whether that is for a private residence, a hotel, a yacht, a club, or a property they are considering acquiring.

The ambition is simple: to create spaces that feel inevitable, personal, and quietly exceptional.