This Midcentury Modern Beirut Apartment Is a Lesson in Living With Antiques

When Guillaume Excoffier began visiting Beirut in the early 2010s, the French dealer turned interior designer became transfixed by the city’s often overlooked cache of modernist buildings, erected between the 1950s and the mid-’70s, a period of rapid economic growth. He started hunting them down—a Brutalist office building, a swooping concrete basilica, a colorful tribute to Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, built to house an emergent middle class. Across the region, international experiments with prefabrication and new materials were being retooled for the Middle Eastern, Mediterranean locale—here, they featured shade structures, breezeways, and screens fit for the balmy climate, structural innovations to handle sloping terrains, and reinterpreted vernacular elements, like the city’s archetypal triple arches that defined Ottoman-era dwellings. Then, as now, with Beirut at the center of global conflict, construction often involved stops and starts. And some projects, like Oscar Niemeyer’s ambitious plans for the Tripoli International Fair in 1963, remain unfinished. “People believed in a brighter future,” explains Excoffier, who worked with photographer Matthieu Salvaing to compile these forward-looking projects into Modernist Beirut, published by Éditions Norma. As he dug deeper, his interest turned personal: He wanted a chance to occupy a piece of this history. In 2023 he found his answer in Ashrafieh, a stylish neighborhood east of the city center. Here, in a 1952 apartment building, he discovered a place with soaring, 13-foot-tall ceilings and a loft-like atmosphere. “That height makes it feel a bit inside-outside,” he says of the flat, where large windows open onto verdant terraces offering views of the surrounding architecture—traditional Levantine structures mixed in with contemporary high-rises and midcentury apartment blocks like this one. Removing the remnants of a charmless reno, Excoffier poured concrete floors and installed period-appropriate windows. “It became a blank canvas.” Born in Bordeaux to a judge and an English teacher, design-obsessed Excoffier originally found his way to other lands through magazines that he devoured from an early age. After a brief stint working in the art world, he segued to design in the early 2010s, opening a Paris gallery called Guillaume, before teaming up with Nancy Gabriel, a former advertising and film producer living in Beirut, to run Gabriel et Guillaume. After mounting his first show with Gabriel in Beirut in 2013, he decided to move there part-time, enraptured by its mix of people, ideas, and aesthetics. “My main interest in life is looking for things,” says the avid treasure hunter, who left the gallery in 2023 to launch his interior design firm. Now, living between Paris, Beirut, and Dubai, he scours markets the world over for his clients—and, of course, himself—relishing the search, “whether it’s a Jean Royère piece or a soap tray.” Inside Excoffier’s apartment exists another kind of cultural crossroads. “I wanted to mix ’80s furniture with pre-20th-century pieces,” he says of the heady brew, in part inspired by a recent Mica Ertegun auction, which gave him a new appreciation for the lines of Biedermeier furniture, the 19th-century style that streamlined more opulent Empire furniture. Many consider it the first step toward the simplified forms of modernism. In Excoffier’s drawing room, conversations about ornament (and its removal) unfold among a cast of chairs: Philippe Starck’s tubular Dr. Sonderbar seats face off with Josef Hoffmann’s Purkersdorf chairs; André Dubreuil’s freaky, swooping Spine rubs elbows with a totally prissy embroidered slipper. The situation feels quite like the freewheeling cocktail parties that might unfold here on any evening. “Beirut is not about minimalism,” Excoffier notes. “Here, you might host 40 people, and that’s considered small.” Living with antiques doesn’t have to be, as he says with a slight grimace, “froufrou and château-like.” Instead, he posits, groupings can be sharp and intellectually stimulating. He likes to point out the relationships between pieces of different eras, like a circa 1810 Biedermeier cabinet in the dining room which, he explains, “has the same pyramid top and general shape as the postmodern one by Aldo Rossi, in the drawing room next door.” Mixed in with this rigorous group of collectibles are utilitarian pieces produced by local craftspeople. The clean-lined sectional in the lounge was fabricated a short drive away, as was the concrete dining table, bookshelves made of plastered construction bricks, and Arts and Crafts–inspired kitchen stools. Even the jumbo ice cream cones, like ready-made Claes Oldenburg sculptures, were sourced close to home. After passing them day after day on his morning walks, he became so enchanted with the faux desserts that he offered to buy them. “They’re so faded and charming—they feel like Lebanon in the summer.” Like the international modernist architects before him, his handsomely appointed space is but a response to the dynamism and creativity of the city. This story appears in the October issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.