Buying a Paris apartment to renovate: what to check

Viewing an apartment with a renovation in mind is a different exercise from viewing one to move straight into. The details that matter change: a strange room shape stops being a flaw and starts being an opportunity, a dated kitchen stops being a deal-breaker. Buying an apartment in Paris to renovate rewards eyes trained to see potential rather than finish, whether you live here already or you are an American buying a pied-à-terre after two short trips. A few things are worth checking before you sign, whichever agency is showing you around.

Look at the plan, not just the room count

A three-bedroom listing and a two-bedroom-with-a-study can be the exact same apartment, described two ways. What matters is not the label but the shape: where the partitions fall, whether a corridor eats a third of the surface, whether the rooms line up in a way that lets light and circulation flow from one end to the other. A poorly cut apartment at a generous size often has more potential than a well-cut one that is already tight.

None of this needs an architect standing next to you at the viewing. A few honest questions to the agent, such as which walls are original and whether anything has already been moved, plus a floor plan in hand, are usually enough to start imagining. The real answer, which partitions can move and which stay, comes later, once the apartment has been properly measured and drawn.

Light and orientation decide more than square metres

Two apartments of the same size, on the same street, can feel completely different depending on which way their windows face. South and west-facing rooms carry warm light late into the afternoon; north and courtyard-facing rooms stay even and grey, which suits some rooms, such as a bedroom or a home office, better than others. Ask, or check, which way the main rooms face before falling for a floor plan on paper.

A dark apartment is not necessarily a bad one. A good layout can open a wall between a bright room and a dim one, or move the room that needs light most into the spot that already has it. But it is far easier to design around a known constraint than to discover it after the sale, so bring a compass, or simply note the time of your viewing and imagine the opposite hour.

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Judge the shape of the apartment first; the finish is the easiest thing to change.

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Ceiling height changes what is possible

In a Haussmann apartment from the late 19th century, ceiling height is rarely uniform floor to floor. The grandest rooms, with the tallest ceilings and the most ornate mouldings, tend to sit on the lower floors, while upper floors and former servants' quarters can be noticeably lower. A high ceiling opens options a low one does not: a storage mezzanine above a bathroom, a tall bookcase that reads as architecture rather than furniture, a glazed partition between two rooms that keeps its proportions.

It is worth standing in the room and simply looking up before anything else. A ceiling height under roughly 2.3 metres narrows what a designer can propose; anything close to 3 metres or above is worth treating as an asset from the very first sketch, not an afterthought once the sale is signed.

What the building will let you do

Every Paris building runs on its own règlement de copropriété, a rulebook that sits on top of the usual planning rules, and it can be more restrictive than owners expect: which floors may relocate a wet room, how noisy works may run, sometimes even which windows may change. None of this should stop a purchase; it simply belongs on the list of things to read, or have read, before falling in love with a specific layout.

This is not a legal opinion, which a notaire covers as part of any purchase, but a design eye can flag, from the plan alone, the moves that are more likely to raise a question with the building than others. Going into the purchase with realistic expectations beats discovering a restriction the week the works were meant to start.

Floors, mouldings and other things worth keeping

A tired-looking apartment often hides its best asset under grime rather than lacking one. Herringbone or point de Hongrie parquet can usually be sanded back rather than replaced; marble fireplaces, ceiling roses and door mouldings from the period are rarely worth removing, even in a full renovation, because they are exactly what a Haussmann apartment is bought for. What looks like damage under a viewing torch is, more often than not, decades of varnish.

Worth checking on a viewing: whether the parquet is solid wood, which can be sanded several times over its life, or a thin veneer, which usually cannot, and whether original features have already been stripped out by a previous owner. Their presence, or absence, changes both the character of the apartment and the scope of any project, furniture included.

Where a kitchen or a bathroom can actually go

Moving a kitchen or a bathroom is common in a renovation, and almost always possible, but not from anywhere to anywhere. Water and drainage prefer to stay close to an existing riser, shared with the flats above and below; moving a sink or a shower more than a metre or two usually means raising the floor slightly to keep the right slope, which is worth knowing before you plan a floor-to-ceiling glass shower in a room three metres from the nearest pipe.

None of this needs solving at the viewing stage. It is exactly the kind of question a full survey answers before a single partition moves, and it is our business, not yours. What is useful on the day is simply an instinct for which rooms are naturally suited to plumbing, and which would need real work to get there. Once you own the apartment, seeing the layout in perspective settles the rest, and it is exactly the kind of decision we help international owners make from wherever they are viewing the plans. Everything covered in renovating a Paris apartment from abroad starts exactly here, at the viewing, before a single wall is confirmed.