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"View Slideshow\n\nAsk fashion designer Stefano Pilati why he chose his apartment in Paris, and the creative director of Italian menswear brand Ermenegildo Zegna explains it was because of his white boxer, Bepi, a canine named for a great-uncle. (\u201CHe was quite bald, and Bepi has eyes that remind me of him, too.\u201D) While friends warned that the puppy, now 12 years old, would rip apart furniture, Pilati was more concerned with the practicalities of having to walk him several times a day. His solution? Find a place with a private garden where Bepi could roam.\n\nWhat the Milan-born Pilati discovered back in 2001\u2014shortly after taking a position as a designer at Yves Saint Laurent, under then\u2013creative director Tom Ford\u2014was a garden duplex in a stately 19th-century building on an upscale commercial street. His one worry was that the neighborhood was not lively enough. The \u00C9lys\u00E9e Palace, the French president\u2019s official residence, is just blocks away, and once the shops close at night, the area is more or less deserted. Over the years, though, Pilati has become enamored with it. \u201CI started to appreciate the grandeur,\u201D he says, adding that his love affair with the French capital began with a childhood viewing of the 1970 Disney movie The Aristocats. \u201CI was fascinated by the roofs of the city and the Seine and the woman who lived in an h\u00F4tel particulier with all those beautiful cats,\u201D he recalls.\n\nFor the first few years, Pilati rented the apartment and did little more than arrange his belongings. But when he purchased it in 2006, two years after replacing Ford, significant changes soon followed. Working with architect Bruno Caron, the fashion designer transformed the garden-level service area into a gym and a laundry (the kitchen was moved upstairs). He also acquired additional ground-floor space to make a master dressing room and a vaulted bath; they are located below the master bedroom and reached by a winding staircase. \u201CEverything is coordinated around my way of living,\u201D asserts Pilati, who has a penchant for combining wildly disparate objects; the television room, for example, contains a chaste Louis XVI desk bearing a lamp made from a zebra leg.\n\n\u201CStefano\u2019s taste is both sophisticated and very eclectic,\u201D notes his friend Nina Yashar of Nilufar, the adventuresome Milan furniture gallery, a favorite Pilati resource. \u201CHe\u2019s not obsessed by any one period.\u201D That said, there is something quintessentially Italian about the decor. Perhaps it is the atmospheric hues, such as the vivid teal of the living room walls. \u201CDepending on the light, it\u2019s sometimes emerald, sometimes turquoise,\u201D Pilati says. \u201CI never get bored with it.\u201D The dining room\u2019s mural of an autumn woodland, painted by Mathias Kiss and Olivier Piel, would not look out of place in a Roman palazzo, though its inspiration was actually a scene from the Reese Witherspoon movie Vanity Fair. But Pilati asked the decorative artists to leave the landscape unfinished, because \u201CI didn\u2019t want it to seem too retro or old-school.\u201D\n\nThat appreciation for slightly rough edges is a leitmotif here, from alcove seats upholstered in peccary hide (\u201Cit isn\u2019t so chichi,\u201D Pilati says) to a wall of rugged African masks. The designer has a passion for drawings\u2014artist Adel Abdessemed gave him three that are displayed on chrome music stands in the dining room\u2014and a knack for giving design classics a personal twist. To create a ceiling fixture for the living room, more than 60 Charlotte Perriand sconces acquired from Nilufar were organized into a large square, while blue Formica doors from Gio Ponti\u2019s 1961 Parco dei Principi hotel in Sorrento, Italy, pop against the mauve velvet walls of the dressing room \u201Clike monochrome paintings,\u201D the designer observes. Pilati also owns an exquisite Jean Dunand vase, an echo of the Dunand collection amassed by Saint Laurent for his treasure-trove duplex on rue de Babylone. \u201CI\u2019ve never seen such an amount of good taste all together,\u201D he enthuses of the legendary apartment. (Pilati left YSL in March 2012 and was hired six months later by Zegna; his first line for the firm is scheduled to debut in June in Milan.)\n\nIconic treasures aside, Pilati thinks his apartment\u2019s most exceptional work is the shelving system commissioned from furniture designer Martino Gamper. A sculptural assemblage of polished and lacquered wood boxes, it frames the opening to a rectangular space that was the original master bath and is now the fumoir, or smoking room. There, Pilati reveals, many a chic garment has been born. \u201CBefore I go to sleep, I sit down, have a cigarette, and draw,\u201D he explains. With the gentle Bepi often at his side.\n\nClick here to view the slide show of Stefano Pilati&amp;#39;s Paris duplex."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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