Au revoir, Paris: Saying goodbye to my dream apartment | Canada Voices

The first time I imagined myself living in France was during a trip to Provence in 2011. It was shortly after I had finished pastry school in Paris. As I walked the flea market along the winding river in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, I was captivated by the beauty of the bric-a-brac. My sense of romance was stirred by stacks of vintage linens, embroidered with the initials of someone I could never know; and by each hairline crack on a piece of pottery, which told the story of a time it was knocked against a kitchen sink, or lost its balance at a lively dinner party.

It wasn’t the first time I had toyed with the idea of staying and committing to the life I had begun to piece together, discovering my love for candied cardoons or happening into a shop to sample perfumes that smelled of powdery almonds. I often had little visions about my imagined life in Paris (would I take the metro in the early morning, too, commuting to work in the sea of fine leather shoes, my freshly washed face buried in the manila-coloured pages of a book?). But this time was different. I wasn’t simply wondering about life in France; I began to design it.

There was the hand-carved antique bed, the gilded mirror sitting above the marble fireplace, and hardwood floors (herringbone or chevron, naturally). I started to collect copperware from markets and imagined them filled with alpine strawberry jam or posed on a shelf next to bowls patinaed with fractures and chips. But setting these visions aside, I returned to Vancouver to open a bakery. Six years that felt like perpetual winter passed before I found myself back in Paris, looking at an apartment owned by a hoarder. In between the dark, stifled mess, I found the chevron floors, the colour of walnut skins, and seashells carved into the white marble mantelpiece. I saw the life I had already created in my mind, an old dream, so I bought it.

The apartment became a shrine to beauty, and I, its bodyguard. I surrounded myself with a cocoon of things that took my breath away: silver platters from old hotels, brass faucets with years of handsome tarnishing, ceramics sculpted from Parisian clay, and ink-green coffee cups with gold rims, like the ones you sip from while people-watching at cafés. I found the antique bed, carved with flowers, and piled feather-filled things on top of it, and me on top of it all. There, for years, I would allow the city to wake me with its light each morning.

I would also share my Paris dream with the world, via social media, decor magazine spreads and a best-selling memoir. Seeing that others seemed to enjoy the beauty that I had so carefully made for myself delighted me. Creating a dream can be such a private act, but seeing it live in the world felt affirming. I learned how beauty transports, transforms, and gathers a community.

As was the case for most of us, life changed in 2020. Today, I’m back in Vancouver, raising a toddler, writing my second book and on the precipice of selling my Paris apartment. I am often asked if I am sad to let it go. Of course, it is bittersweet. It is a dream, but it is a dream of the woman I used to be.

I came to understand, only after I left Paris, that my apartment was an ode to the beauty that had pulled me out of my darkest times, a gift to the woman who had yearned so painfully for freedom, to live. I see, now, that I had become so tired of chasing beauty and life that I created this space so it could rise from within me. And it did.

Today, my definition of a life lived beautifully has relaxed. I no longer feel the need to curate things so strictly, but I still have an uncontrollable urge to create – through writing, through the earrings I wear, the flowers by the kitchen sink, and the textures of home. These softened boundaries include toys stuffed in the cracks of the couch that tell the story of hide-and-seek, and handprints on the window that have somehow grown so fast.

The red stains on my shirt from picking berries in the garden, and the colours my son and I point out to each other – the sunset in a rose; the rainbow cast from the windows of cars that go “beep, beep” – these are the beauties of the woman I am today.