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"View Slideshow\n\nA tour of the spare but beautifully appointed apartment Patrick Seguin shares with his wife/business partner, Laurence, in the Marais district of Paris is a physical affair\u2014especially for him. It involves one of the world's leading dealers of top-flight 20th-century design leaping onto a wood cube by Le Corbusier to show how it comes in handy when changing lightbulbs, then sinking to his knees in front of a 1954 table by Jean Prouve\u0301. \"What's important is to always look at the underside,\" Patrick says in a whisper. Banging loudly on one of the table's slender legs, he adds excitedly, \"That's only one millimeter of folded sheet metal. It's absolutely incredible!\"\n\nThat combination of enthusiasm and expertise has drawn collectors such as Azzedine Alai\u0308a, Peter Brant, and Ronald Lauder to Galerie Patrick Seguin. Pritzker Prize\u2013winning architect Jean Nouvel, who renovated the gallery, a former warehouse in the nearby Bastille district, calls Seguin \"the ultimate perfectionist and a man of passion.\" Notes New York gallerist Stellan Holm, \"He has done more for French design and architecture than any other dealer of the past 50 years.\"\n\nEvery passion starts somewhere, and for Patrick the spark can be traced to the late '80s, when he was in the hospitality industry. At Paris's Saint-Ouen flea market, he spotted one of Prouve\u0301's Standard school chairs in Philippe Jousse's booth; bitten by the modernist bug and weary of working late nights in clubs and restaurants, he decided to change careers and go into business with Jousse. Postwar furniture wasn't exactly trendy at the time. \"Back then,\" Patrick says, \"we had difficulty selling a Standard for $600.\" Today originals can bring 20 times as much. After the colleagues split about a decade later, Patrick and his wife began focusing on five modern masters: Prouve\u0301, Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Jean Roye\u0300re.\n\nThat scope may be limited, but the Seguins' commitment is not. With fellow Paris gallerist Jacques Lacoste, the couple co-owns the Roye\u0300re archives\u2014thousands of drawings, blueprints, and photos, many of which were published in a catalogue raisonne\u0301 earlier this year. The Seguins also possess the world's largest collection of Prouve\u0301 structures, 17 in total, all stored in two huge warehouses in the northeastern French city of Nancy. Twice a month Patrick takes a morning train there to oversee the ongoing restorations. \"Each time it's very moving,\" he says, adding, \"Prouve\u0301 was a visionary genius, using technologies that were previously used exclusively to build airplanes.\" To experience that pioneering brilliance first-hand, head to the Giovanni e Marella Agnelli museum in Turin, Italy, where selections from the Seguins' Prouve\u0301 furniture and architecture collection are on view through September 8. The couple also plans to exhibit the only known prototype of the 1956 Maison des Jours Meilleurs (House of Better Days) at Design Miami/Basel in June. And design aficionados in the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence should stop by Cha\u0302teau la Coste winery, where two '40s Prouve\u0301 pavilions sold by the Seguins now stand in the company of new structures by Tadao Ando and Frank Gehry.\n\nGiven their focus on the 20th century, one might expect the Seguins to occupy a gem of modernism. Instead they live on the ground floor of a 1620s redbrick mansion, in a 2,700-square-foot apartment with 15-foot ceilings and 18th-century parquet floors\u2014major attractions when the couple moved in four years ago with their daughter, Pauline. Patrick was especially taken with how the living room opens to a courtyard garden, where an immense magnolia tree reaches for the sky. \"It gives this place the feel of a country house,\" he says.\n\nIn adapting the apartment to their clean-lined tastes, the Seguins removed most of the moldings. \"It's really quite sober now,\" Laurence notes. \"We prefer less-fancy walls.\" Painted white, those walls host contemporary art that's as formidable as the furniture, from works by Mark Grotjahn and Judy Linn in Patrick's study to a construction by Liam Gillick in the master bedroom. An Alexander Calder mobile, which the artist gave Prouve\u0301, is displayed in the living room, not far from an Andy Warhol silkscreen of photographer Tina Freeman. \"I do not want to live with certain portraits,\" Patrick says, \"but this one is absolutely beautiful, with its blue profile and green eyebrow.\" Curiosities fill Perriand/Prouve\u0301 bookshelves, including an antique shadow box of neatly arranged insects. Quips Patrick, \"That is my 18th-century Damien Hirst!\"\n\nThough the quality of the Seguins' collection is heady, nothing is sacred. \"I work at a Perriand/Jeanneret desk, we sit on a Roye\u0300re sofa, and we eat at a Jeanneret table,\" Patrick asserts. That's been the case since Pauline\u2014now 23 and on her own\u2014was a youngster. \"She had a habit of climbing through the gaps in our Mexique bookcase by Perriand and Prouve\u0301,\" he recalls, adding that he and his wife came up with an easygoing solution for ensuring the safety of both their child and her impromptu jungle gym: \"We simply secured it to the floor.\"\n\nClick here to tour Laurence and Patrick Seguin's artful home in Paris.\n\nView Slideshow"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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