London-born actor, singer, and design Jane Birkin arrived in Paris in 1967 and summarily became the prototype for French-girl style. Birkin’s easily elegant ensembles sealed her as a sartorial icon, and the high-end bag that bears her name is, fittingly, among the most lusted-after devices in the style world: the ever-elusive Birkin by Hermès. The height of her popularity came throughout her 12-year relationship with French provocateur Serge Gainsbourg. Their coupling skyrocketed them both into the pop-culture stratosphere, starting with their scandalous 1969 hit tune “Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus.” Regardless of leaving Gainsbourg in 1980, she continued to collaborate on music with him till his death.Birkin’s signature unfussy visual equated well to her living environments, which included a jumbled selection of items of all kinds, layered by years of flea market finds and classic store check outs. From the famously messy home on rue de Verneuil where she lived with Gainsbourg to the spaces she later on produced herself and her children, the model’s interiors showed a life that was equal parts glamorous, chaotic, and deeply personal. Keep reading for an appearance inside the eccentric areas she called home.< img alt ="blackandwhite photo of Jane Birkin and Serge
Gainsbourg relaxing on a chair with ottoman”src =”
https://media.architecturaldigest.com/photos/6a428f8ecf21513a3d531ccf/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/GettyImages-2661198.jpg “/ > Birkin and Gainsbourg at home in 1969 Picture: Reg Lancaster/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images/Stringer
Living in a “Gothic manor”
“The understanding between Gainsbourg and Birkin was that she was moving into his home. He had lived there first, and this was his extremely personalized domain– your house of a single man,” Marisa Meltzer composes in It Girl, her 2025 biography on Birkin. Gainsbourg bought the former two-level carriage house on 5 bis rue de Verneuil in Paris’s 7th arrondissement right before meeting Birkin, and, with the assistance of British interior designer André Higgins, proceeded to turn it into what one outlet called a “Gothic manor.” Apparently influenced by the 19th-century Joris-Karl Huysmans novel À rebours, Gainsbourg included Venetian checkerboard tiles to the ground floor, a black chintz-covered Axminster carpet throughout the remainder of the house, and covered the walls in black felt. The couple accept on a leather armchair somewhere in the home in this 1969 breeze.