Kitchen renovation in Paris.

The kitchen, heart of the project.

It is the room where you live, where you entertain, and the one that dates an apartment more surely than any other. It is also, technically, a concentration of trades: plumbing and drainage, high-power electrics, ventilation and extraction, floor and wall finishes, cabinetry fitted to the millimetre — and sometimes structure, when you open onto the living room. A kitchen fitter sells furniture; a general contractor delivers a finished room, services included, under a single contract. Our kitchens are most often born at the heart of a complete apartment renovation — as at Le Vénitien, 240 m² rethought as a family cocoon around an open kitchen, or at Trocadéro, 227 Haussmann square metres where sixteen trades were coordinated — but the method remains the same when the kitchen is a project in its own right. Its technical twin, the bathroom renovation, answers to the same demands of trade coordination.

Bespoke, from the worktop to the last drawer

A kitchen drawn for your apartment resembles no other: full-height fronts running up to the Haussmann ceiling, columns that absorb the irregularities of the period fabric, an island sized for the real circulation of the room. Bespoke is not a decorative luxury; it is the only serious answer to the never-straight walls and unusual ceiling heights of Paris. Our joiners and cabinetmakers work to the millimetre, and every handle, every shadow gap, every alignment of the fronts is resolved at the design stage — because a kitchen is drawn in full before it is installed.

Marble and stone: the worktop as a piece of craftsmanship

A worktop in marble or natural stone is chosen from the slab, fabricated in a single span whenever possible, levelled by laser and sealed against staining. Polished edges, a draining board grooved into the mass, a matching splashback cut from the same block so the veining continues: those are the gestures that separate a fitted kitchen from a signed one. We also work quartzite, large-format porcelain and solid timber — each material with its own constraints of weight, care and installation, explained honestly before you choose.

Integrated appliances, invisible and properly sized

Refrigeration set flush with the fronts, ovens in a column at working height, an extractor concealed in the suspended ceiling or retracting into the worktop, an integrated wine cabinet: the high end is recognisable by the fact that the technology cannot be seen. Provided the supply keeps pace — dedicated circuits, power rated for range cookers, extraction correctly sized and discharged by the book. These electrical and airflow prerequisites are checked and brought up to standard at the design stage, not discovered at installation.

Services renewed throughout

Moving a sink, creating an island with a water point, supplying a dishwasher at the far end of the room: all of it presupposes drainage at the correct fall, supplies rerouted and electrics brought up to code. In the older Parisian building stock we systematically use the renovation to bring these services up to standard — it is now or never, and it is one of the sixteen trades we coordinate in-house.

Opening the kitchen onto the living room.

It is the transformation that changes the life of an apartment more than any other — and our clients' most frequent request. Two scenarios. If the partition is lightweight, the opening is simple and quick. If the wall is load-bearing — common in Parisian buildings, where the cross walls hold the structure of the block — the operation requires a structural study by an engineering office, the installation of a supporting beam (a steel I-beam or equivalent) with propping during the works, and, in a co-owned building, the authorisation of the general meeting before anything is undertaken. It is exactly the kind of operation where a general contractor comes into its own: we carry the study, the co-ownership file, the execution and the responsibility — covered by our €5,000,000 ten-year warranty. To understand why this arrangement protects you better than a juxtaposition of separate parties, our general contractor or architect guide sets out the comparison.

How the works unfold.

Everything begins with the design: precise surveys, layout drawings, choice of materials and appliances, item-by-item costing. It is during this phase that the bespoke cabinetry goes into fabrication — an incompressible lead time to be anticipated, not endured. The site then opens in an immutable order: strip-out, the opening and structural work where applicable, plumbing and electrical services, floors and walls, installation of the cabinetry, worktops — templated on site once the carcasses are in place —, appliances, then finishes. Depending on the scale — a simple replacement, a complete renewal of the services or an opening onto the living room — the duration runs from a few weeks to a few months, and our schedules are contractually committed. On complete projects such as Le Marquis, a 130 m² duplex renovated in Versailles across every trade, that discipline of phasing is precisely what holds the calendar.

What it costs.

The budget for a kitchen depends on the layout (a single run, a double run, an island), the materials, the appliances and the extent of the enabling works — opening a load-bearing wall adding to the cabinetry budget. At the scale of an apartment, the ranges observed in Paris run from €1,000 to €1,200/m² for a refresh, €1,800 to €2,500/m² for a carefully executed complete renovation, and €2,500/m² and above at the high end; a quality renovation at W.A.R.D averages around €2,000/m², with the kitchen concentrating a large share of that budget. The kitchens in our portfolio give the measure of the standard we aim for. For a precise costing of your project, describe it to us: answer within 48 hours.