The Studio
I don't make rooms to be admired from the doorway.
Cinquième Gauche is named after my first apartment in Paris, a fifth-floor walk-up in a Haussmannian building, where I discovered how I liked to host, how I wanted to decorate, and what "home" actually meant. The name is a nod to that beginning.
I still work the way I worked on that space. I don't come in to reinvent the wheel. I feel for what needs to change, I pay attention to how people actually live, and I spend a while daydreaming about what the walls could hold.
What I'm after is a place with a bit of a past… Somewhere that feels warm and a little romantic, never precious. Unlacquered brass, weathered tiles, lots of texture combined to create rooms you're not afraid to put your feet up in.
Never a museum. Never a showroom.
The kind of place people don't want to leave.
Laetitia Wajnapel
I didn't set out to become an interior designer.
For almost twenty years I worked in the press, first in Paris, then in London, as an editor and journalist. I wrote about fashion, culture, design. I interviewed people about how they lived, what they wore, what they built around themselves. I spent most of my career watching how other people made a life. Looking back, this all makes a certain sense.
Paris shaped my sense of proportion. London taught me how to channel eccentricities. Los Angeles, where I live now, made me pay attention to what's worth keeping: the architecture changes street to street here, Spanish to mid-century to Craftsman to a glass box perched on a hill, and I steal from all of it.
Design lets me back into other people's lives, just from another angle.
Every project starts with questions. How do you wake up? Where do you drop your keys? Do you cook? Do you host? Do you hide?
I look at circulation and light, the practical bones of it. But I’m mostly looking at you: your family, your pets, your pet peeves, the odd particular ways you actually use a room. Your history is one of the things I build with, alongside the building’s and the materials’. That’s the part that keeps a space from looking like anyone else’s, and the part that means I’m working from you, not over you.
It's the same instinct whether it's a home or an independent business: a café, a wine bar, a shop, a small office. A home you don't want to leave and a shop you keep coming back to are made the same way, the difference is that a business also has to earn its rent, and I keep an eye on that too.
Alongside the studio, I (sometimes) write The Walkthrough, which feels like a continuation of my years in journalism, and is the fastest way to tell whether you and I would get on.
Degrees, Qualifications & Awards
Bachelor of Arts,
History & Art History
Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
Master of Arts, Film Studies
Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
ASID accredited for Interior Design
Interior Design and Innovation Award Winner (2025)
Whether it’s a home or an independent business in Los Angeles, there’s a way in that fits, from a single-room Creative Direction consult to full-service interior design.
Have a look at how we can work together.
“Furniture and sculpture obey a lot of the same rules, but you don’t have to be able to sit comfortably on a sculpture. Furniture has to be somewhat practical, but I like furniture that borders on sculpture, and you need a pure room for furniture to be in, too. Most rooms, if you put something in them, it gets lost because they’re so cluttered, so the more pure the room, the more the people and the furniture can come forth.”
— David Lynch, Room to Dream