MARS Architectes and ciguë Layer Offices, Housing and Event Spaces into a Historic Marais Block on Rue Pavée

Rue Pavée is a narrow street in the Marais that links Rue des Francs-Bourgeois to Rue des Rosiers. Behind its stone frontage sits a block that has been rebuilt again and again. No. 13 was reconstructed in 1737 by Jean Hardouin-Mansart de Jouy and reworked a few decades later by Jacques Gondouin. No. 11 still holds much of the former Hôtel Desmarets. Over time, workshops, glass roofs, metal structures and brick-and-iron buildings were pressed up against both mansions. MARS Architectes, with interiors by ciguë and additional architecture by Lagneau architecte, has now turned this 6,778 m² accumulation into a mixed-use complex of offices, housing, retail and event spaces. It was completed in 2025.

The interesting part is what the team chose not to do. Heritage work in Paris often slides toward one official period, with later additions stripped away to recover a clean aristocratic image. Here the architects treat the block as a record of adaptation: palace, then industrial workshop, then administrative office. Their contribution is one more layer on top. That decision has consequences everywhere, from the glazed courtyard elevation to the housing on the roofs. It is a harder brief to carry out than restoration, and in our view a more honest one.

A Quiet Street Face

From the street the project barely announces itself, which is correct. Cream stone, wrought-iron balconies and a tall red timber door set in an arched carriage entrance carry the public identity of the block. The intervention happens behind that threshold.

The carriage door does real work. It compresses the passage from a busy Marais pavement into the block's interior, so the courtyard registers as a discovery rather than an extension of the street.

The Courtyard as Organizing Room

The cobbled courtyard is kept as a reference to the typical inner court of a Parisian block, and it anchors the whole scheme. A small zinc-roofed pavilion, once an outbuilding, stands at its centre and now serves as the entrance to the basement spaces. Reusing a minor structure as the front door to the lower levels is a smart move: it gives the cellars an address without cutting a new opening into the old fabric.

Planting is restrained: potted shrubs, grasses and a single slender tree. A bistro table and folding chairs suggest that the court is a place to pause, not only a lightwell. Plaster wings and a glass wall face each other across the paving, so you read the old and new sides of the block in one glance.

A Glass Wall in the Industrial Lineage

The most visible new element is a four-storey glazed facade on a slim white steel grid. Seen frontally, it could pass for a contemporary office front. Seen in context, it belongs to the site's industrial past, when glass roofs and iron frames were added to serve workshops. The architects extend a material language the block already speaks, rather than borrowing the stone vocabulary of the mansions.

The fine mullion spacing keeps the elevation from feeling corporate. At ground level, planters of grasses and clipped shrubs soften the junction with the cobbles, though we would have liked to see the base engage the courtyard more actively than a row of pots allows.

Construction Exposed

The construction photographs make the layering literal. Scaffolding wraps a courtyard facade above an arched opening. The new glazed steel frame stands beside a mansard-roofed masonry building. A worker kneels on an open concrete floor under the gridded glass bay. These images show that the new structure was slotted between existing buildings, not built on a cleared site.

Stone, Terrazzo and the Stair

One construction-stage image shows rough rubble stone, rebar and a new concrete stair side by side, traced by a thin line of light. It is a precise summary of the project's approach. The finished stair hall replaces that raw contrast with pale terrazzo steps, a curved white wall and a timber handrail, plus a hanging mobile beside an oak cabinet.

This is where ciguë's hand is clearest. The stair is calm and tactile, built around the hand and the foot more than visual effect. Seen through a full-height glass wall, it also becomes a vertical display of movement through the building.

Workplaces Under Exposed Concrete

The office floors leave concrete beams, columns and round ducts exposed, then add oak desks, white storage and oak-framed glass meeting rooms. Sheer curtains filter light from tall windows, and potted palms in terracotta add a domestic softness. Nothing here is unusual on its own. The quality comes from consistency: a short list of materials repeated with discipline.

The timber-framed partitions matter most. They divide the plan without breaking the sightlines along the deep floors, so daylight from both the street and the courtyard can reach the middle of the plate.

Shared Rooms: Commons, Refectory and Auditorium

The shared spaces carry most of the character. A double-height lounge with low modular sofas looks onto a mezzanine through timber-framed glazing. Long refectory tables sit under tall French windows. A commons with indoor palms runs along the curtain wall. Each room takes its proportions from the building it occupies, so some feel grand and others intimate, which keeps the complex from reading as one uniform interior.

In the basement, an auditorium lined with dark timber panels and rows of oak chairs puts the medieval cellar level to public use. A meeting room with a wavy ceiling edge and linear pendants shows ciguë working with a light touch of play.

Housing on the Roofs

The least expected layer sits on top. Timber-clad housing wings with balconies line rooftop walkways, planted beds and wooden benches, and vertical timber fins and mesh balustrades frame views into a planted court. The drawings label this as social housing. Placing it in the heart of the Marais, inside a block once given over to offices, is a meaningful choice about who gets to live in central Paris.

The timber cladding sets the homes apart from both the masonry mansions and the steel-and-glass office front. That is the logic of the layered approach again: the newest use gets its own clearly legible material.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings explain the project better than any single photograph. One axonometric color-codes the historic townhouses and two later industrial buildings by construction date, which states the brief directly. Another maps social housing, offices, retail, spa and basement uses. The section shows conservation in black and modification in blue: vaulted cellars below, stacked office floors in the middle and a planted roof terrace above.

The floor plans show the vertical program clearly. Event and retail spaces, including a tiered hall, occupy the basement. Offices and family apartments wrap the courtyard on the lower floors, and small housing units flank a planted void on the upper levels. The long section through the garden terrace shows trees growing above working floors, a confident reading of how much a historic block can carry.

Why This Project Matters

Rue Pavée offers a working alternative to the restoration reflex that dominates historic Paris. By refusing to pick one golden age, MARS Architectes keeps the mansions, the industrial sheds and the office conversions all legible, then adds a new layer that you can identify just as easily. The color-coded drawings are more than presentation: they show a method in which each intervention is declared, not disguised.

The program matters as much as the architecture. Mixing social housing, offices, retail and public event space inside one Marais block resists the slide of the district toward monoculture, whether boutiques or luxury residences. If heritage sites are going to stay part of a living city, projects like this one, which let old buildings keep changing, are the model to study.

Rue Pavée, renovation of a complex of historic buildings by MARS Architectes (lead architects Sylvain Rety, Julien Broussart and Raphaël Renard) with interior design by ciguë and Lagneau architecte. Paris, France. 6,778 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Maris Mazulis, Raphaël Renard.

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