Reading a Haussmann apartment floor plan

Buy or rent a flat in one of Paris's grand 19th-century buildings, and the floor plan you receive from the estate agent can look strange at first: rooms of very different sizes, a corridor that seems to lead nowhere useful, a kitchen tucked into a corner far from the main rooms. None of this is random. A Haussmann apartment floor plan follows a logic set at the end of the 19th century, and once you can read it, it tells you exactly what a new plan can do with the same walls.

A Haussmann apartment, read room by room

Every Haussmann building was designed around a clear divide: the street side and the courtyard side. On the street, behind the tall windows and wrought-iron balconies you see from outside, sat the rooms meant to be seen — a large drawing room, sometimes a second reception room, high ceilings, the finest plaster mouldings. On the courtyard, in second daylight, sat the rooms meant to work — bedrooms, a small kitchen, and once, a maid's room reached by its own staircase. The same building, seen from the street or from the courtyard, tells two different stories.

The floor matters too. The second floor, easiest to reach before lifts were common, usually carried the tallest ceilings and the richest mouldings of the whole building; floors above it step down slightly in height and ornament as they rise. None of this is a flaw to correct — it is simply the grammar the building was written in, and it is worth reading before deciding what to change.

The enfilade: reception rooms that open into one another

The grandest apartments arranged their reception rooms in a line, each one opening directly into the next through a tall double door. This sequence, called an enfilade, let a host fold two or three rooms into one long space for an evening, then close the doors and return each room to its own use the next morning. Many of these doors are still in place today, and they remain one of the most striking original features a buyer can inherit — a piece of flexible planning almost a century and a half ahead of the open-plan idea.

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Grand rooms for show, small rooms for work, and a corridor built to separate the two.

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The corridor that separated two lives

Between the reception rooms and the service rooms usually ran a long, narrow corridor, often windowless. Its purpose was practical rather than beautiful: it let household staff move between the kitchen and the bedrooms without ever crossing the drawing room where guests were received. That corridor still exists in most unrenovated apartments today, and it is often the single largest source of wasted space in the whole flat — a metre or more of width, running the length of the apartment, used only for walking through.

Bedrooms along this corridor typically open directly onto it, one door after another, with no hallway of their own — practical for staff moving quickly between rooms, less so for a household that values privacy between bedrooms today. Recognising this pattern early explains why so many Haussmann renovations start by asking what the corridor is really for, rather than assuming it must stay exactly as found.

Reading the clues in your own apartment

You do not need the original architect's drawings to read your own apartment this way. The mouldings alone tell most of the story: the deepest cornices and the largest ceiling rose usually mark the original drawing room, while plainer walls point to a former service room. Ceiling height helps too — ceilings step down slightly as you move from the street side towards the courtyard in many buildings. And a doorway that feels unusually narrow, or a room with a strangely shallow window, often marks where a bedroom or a kitchen once stood, whatever it has become since.

What a modern floor plan can do with it

Once the original logic is visible, a new plan becomes a set of choices rather than a puzzle. The service corridor can often be absorbed into an adjoining bedroom, or turned into fitted storage drawn to measure, since it rarely earns its footprint back as a passage alone. Looking at renovation cost per square metre early helps decide whether absorbing the corridor is worth the wall it removes. The former kitchen can move closer to the reception rooms, or stay put and open onto them instead, depending on how you actually want to cook and gather. And the enfilade, where one survives, can stay exactly as built for a family that entertains, or lend one of its rooms to a bedroom, a study or a child's room, provided the new room gets its own door from the corridor rather than only from its neighbour.

Imagine a couple buying a Haussmann flat from abroad, planning to live there part of the year and let it the rest: the old maid's room and the narrow corridor beside it, together, are often just enough to draw a proper second bathroom — turning two barely usable spaces into one the household, or a tenant, actually wants.

Circulation first, rooms second

The most useful habit when rethinking a Haussmann apartment is to think about how people move before deciding what each room is called. Who needs to reach a bedroom without crossing the living room. Where a guest bathroom needs its own door from the entrance rather than through a private room. Whether a home office needs a quiet approach for video calls at odd hours, which matters as much for a family living there year-round as for an owner renting the flat out between visits. Settling these paths first makes every later decision about furniture and finishes far easier.

See your new plan before it is built

A floor plan on paper rarely conveys what a room will actually feel like once a corridor disappears or an enfilade gains a wall. We draw the perspective of each room before any work begins, so you can judge a proposed layout by what you will see standing in it, not by lines on a page. The full sequence, from first conversation to a construction-ready file, is described in our method. It is what we draw for every Haussmann apartment renovation we take on — including for owners managing the project from abroad, for whom drawings and clear written English carry the whole conversation.