After a little more than a year of renting this place at 207 rue La Fayette in Paris's 10th arrondissement, I became owner in November 2006 after a fairly long process. I bought it from David Hingamp (that's him there), the former owner and architect who had renovated it from the clothes-making atelier it was in 2000 when he bought it. He's now got his own firm in London, archic. When it was originally built in the first half of the 1800s, the space was used as a garage for horse-drawn carriage taxis, while the rest of the building housed the workers from the nearby workshops and factories lining the Canal St Martin. These photos were all taken before I moved in, for a spread in Maison Magazine published in May 2005.