The Parisian Palette

Colours of the City of Light

I recently got to thinking about the colour palette of Paris, after a trip to London, a city that is a patchwork of architectural hues. Paris, in contrast, seems a city of beige, of stone — fashioned largely from, or inspired by, its traditional natural reserves of limestone, which is a fittingly luminous building block for the City of Light.

But Paris wasn’t always the Ville Lumière. In the Middle Ages, the city was rather dark — a rabbit warren of narrow, shadowy streets edged with wood-beamed buildings, such as the ones that can be seen to this day on Rue François Miron in the Lower Marais:

It was Henri IV who envisaged a brighter future for his beloved capital, with his 1607 regulations that, in part, banned the timber frame. New buildings went up in stone, and old ones were hastily stuccoed over to fake the look. By the century’s end — late in Louis XIV’s reign, during which time the Sun King illuminated his capital with almost 3,000 lanterns, the world’s first public street lighting — Paris had shaken off its medieval past, having discovered a passion for neoclassical architecture that looked its most grand in gleaming limestone.

Fast-forward to the mid-1800s: Baron Haussmann’s urban makeover of Paris saw elegant limestone apartment buildings lined along graceful boulevards, which were wide enough to filter in sunlight, making the city shimmer all the more. Haussmann is often credited with Paris’s bright and harmonious colour palette, but he was arguably seeing through the grand vision of earlier kings.

Still, while Paris is pleasing to the eye with its soft tones of stone, if you zone in on the details, you’ll see there are nuances. The street furniture – such as the news kiosques and Morris advertising columns — are all painted a dark green, a colour choice that dates back to Hausmann’s time, when there was a push to oxygenate the city, with leafy parks, tree-lined streets, and green trimming to highlight that point.

The architectural canvas of Paris is also splashed here and there with red, and not just in the striped awnings of brasseries and rattan chairs of café terraces; every now and then, you come across buildings fashioned from brick as well as stone. This red-and-white look is on loveliest display in Place des Vosges (above) and Place Dauphine, two of Henri IV’s other projects. It was a rustic architectural effect at the time, inspired by late-Renaissance rural châteaux, and chosen to give the city a breath of fresh, bucolic air.

But back to beige … keep focussing in, and you’ll see that the soft blur of Paris sharpens to a spectrum of pales, especially on the older streets, where pre-Haussmann buildings are a mix of stone and faux-stone.

Some buildings are even white, likely thanks to ‘plaster of Paris’. This gypsum plaster was originally mined in Montmartre, crushed by the windmills there before being carted downhill to the city centre … leaving one street so white with residue that it earned the name Rue Blanche … or so the story goes. (There’s also Sacré-Cœur, of course, which was was built in tavertine limestone, which secretes calcite when it rains, keeping the stone looking ever whiter over time.)

At various points in history, some building owners have painted their façades, which also explains the array of tones on display. And this seems to have allowed some to sneak in un peu de pink. (Of course, you could argue that soft pink is a neutral … despite it being technically pale red!) There’s Montmartre’s famous La Maison Rose, of course:

And also this fabulous example on Rue Lagrange, in the fifth arrondissement:

Paris City Hall decrees that ‘the texture of plasters and paints, as well as their colours, must be adapted to the materials used in the building and must match the appearance of the surrounding area.’

If a building has long been a particular colour, council might approve a request for a redo. Witness the pink building at 41 Quai des Grands Augustins, which was recently repainted from this:

To this:

Hélas, lovers of la vie en rose have lost one of the prettiest Parisian pink buildings of recent times, over on Saint-Germain-des-Prés’ Passage de la Petite Boucherie:

Despite the property’s rosy history, with various photos and paintings from the 1950s depicting it in pink …

… it was recently repainted a creamy-vanilla shade:

While Paris is predominantly a palette of pale hues, there are some vibrantly colourful pockets.

In the case of the Insta-famous pastel-rainbow of a street that is Rue Crémieux (above) in the twelfth arrondissement, the council allowed residents, in 1993, to paint their façades a colour of their choice, in exchange for the pedestrianisation of the street.

Parisians doorways, of course, can also add pops of bold colour to the cityscape. The old carriage doors are generally painted in deep reds, blues, and greens, but you can also find perkier shades, such as pink, turquoise, and mint.

Raise your eyes from ground level, however, and the Parisian colour palette changes and softens once more.

Try this exercise from, say, the external tubular escalators of Centre Pompidou. As you reach the upper floors, Paris (as seen above) blends to tones of grey. That’s because most Parisian rooftops are made from slate tiles or zinc, which Haussmann preferred for the material’s cheapness, for one, but also for the way it could be moulded over domes, or shaped over the dormer windows jutting out from the chambres de bonne that he tucked into top floors.

Haussmann also, incidentally, loved black wrought iron, with which he ornamented buildings in the form of lacy-looking balconies.

Hmmm, a canvas of beige, trimmings of grey and black, splashes of bright colours … It’s arguably the architectural equivalent of a trench coat, dark beret, and a colourful scarf. Which begs the question: Can a city’s appearance affect the way its residents dress? But that’s perhaps a subject for another newsletter.

Until next month,

Katrina 🧥🧑‍🎨🧣