Beistégui penthouse apartment

Charles de Beistégui (1895-1970) collected art and came from a family enriched by mining in Mexico. For several years he had rented a flat on the fifth level of a town house on the avenue des Champs-Élysées. When works became possible, he commissioned Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in 1929 to create a home on the building's roof, organised around terraces tied together by outdoor stairs and steps and meant as a backdrop for his parties.

On 5 July 1929 Le Corbusier wrote to him that the brief appealed because it was a "first-class programme" and offered a solution for Paris rooftops that he had been discussing for fifteen years. Work started between April and May 1930; Beistégui moved in during autumn 1931 and left in 1938, finding the place too cramped.

The terraces have since been radically altered. When a request came in for facade cleaning and waterproofing on the building, the Commission du Vieux Paris took notice of the site and ordered a heritage study of the condition of the exterior structures, presented in plenary session on 21 October 2010.

The apartment fills the first level, mostly a vast L-shaped room serving as lounge and dining room; a spiral stair leads up to a small study. Across three levels, the terrace reaches an open-air lawn enclosed by high walls, one of them fitted with a fireplace aligned on the Arc de Triomphe.

The job let Le Corbusier try out a number of technical novelties in sound insulation and in electrical and mechanical systems: a mechanised hedge on the terrace, a removable partition between the dining room and the lounge, and a cinema arrangement in which a projector was concealed behind a pivoting mirror, alongside a periscope.

The volume of the apartment and its terraces can be seen from the street.