Karl Lagerfeld’s Home on the Seine in Paris to Sell at Auction This Month

The minimalist Paris apartment that was the home and studio of the late fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld is headed to auction later this month with a starting price of €5.3 million (US$5.77 million).

Nestled in the heart of the Saint-Thomas d’Aquin district, on the city’s Left Bank, the roughly 2,800-square-foot spread will go under the hammer on March 26 at the city’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, according to a news release from the Paris Notaires Services, which plays an essential role in French real estate transactions.

The apartment is on Quai Voltaire, a Seine-front street, and within a historic building dating from 1694 that belies the contemporary home inside that was Lagerfeld’s until his death in 2019 at the age of 85.

He told the New Yorker in 2007 , as he was moving into the property, that living there would be “like floating in your own spaceship over a very civilised past.”

The home has a stainless steel kitchen.
Mediacorp

Located on the third floor, the apartment has a sprawling living room with a panoramic view of the Seine, polished concrete floors, and walls of towering glass bookshelves that once held the designer’s vast collection of books.

The avant-garde space “embodies Lagerfeld’s visionary aesthetic,” with an “ambiance that is both luxurious and design-oriented,” the news release said.

Elsewhere in the achromatic home is a bedroom overlooking a courtyard, a dressing room, a shower room, a bathroom and a professional-looking stainless steel kitchen.

The entire home, including the bathroom, has a modern aesthetic.
Mediacorp

The auction “represents a rare opportunity to acquire a part of the history of fashion and of French cultural heritage,” according to Paris Notaires Services.

Much of the furniture and art that one filled the apartment has been sold at auction across a series of Sotheby’s sales .

With his iconic signature style of black sunglasses, fingerless gloves and high-starched collars, Lagerfeld was the long-time creative director of Chanel and creator of his own eponymous fashion label.

The apartment’s giant living room has polished concrete floors and walls of glass bookshelves. MEDIACORP

There has been a substantial increase in the number of Australians earning high incomes who are renting their homes instead of owning them, and this may be another element contributing to higher market demand and continually rising rents, according to new research.

The portion of households with an annual income of $140,000 per year (in 2021 dollars), went from 8 percent of the private rental market in 1996 to 24 percent in 2021, according to research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The AHURI study highlights that longer-term declines in the rate of home ownership in Australia are likely the cause of this trend.

The biggest challenge this creates is the flow-on effect on lower-income households because they may face stronger competition for a limited supply of rental stock, and they also have less capacity to cope with rising rents that look likely to keep going up due to the entrenched undersupply.

The 2024 ANZ CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report notes that weekly rents have been rising strongly since the pandemic and are currently re-accelerating. “Nationally, annual rent growth has lifted from a recent low of 8.1 percent year-on-year in October 2023, to 8.6 percent year-on-year in March 2024,” according to the report. “The re-acceleration was particularly evident in house rents, where annual growth bottomed out at 6.8 percent in the year to September, and rose to 8.4 percent in the year to March 2024.”

Rents are also rising in markets that have experienced recent declines. “In Hobart, rent values saw a downturn of -6 percent between March and October 2023. Since bottoming out in October, rents have now moved 5 percent higher to the end of March, and are just 1 percent off the record highs in March 2023. The Canberra rental market was the only other capital city to see a decline in rents in recent years, where rent values fell -3.8 percent between June 2022 and September 2023. Since then, Canberra rents have risen 3.5 percent, and are 1 percent from the record high.”

The Productivity Commission’s review of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement points out that high-income earners also have more capacity to relocate to cheaper markets when rents rise, which creates more competition for lower-income households competing for homes in those same areas.

ANZ CoreLogic notes that rents in lower-cost markets have risen the most in recent years, so much so that the portion of earnings that lower-income households have to dedicate to rent has reached a record high 54.3 percent. For middle-income households, it’s 32.2 percent and for high-income households, it’s just 22.9 percent. ‘Housing stress’ has long been defined as requiring more than 30 percent of income to put a roof over your head.

While some high-income households may aspire to own their own homes, rising property values have made that a difficult and long process given the years it takes to save a deposit. ANZ CoreLogic data shows it now takes a median 10.1 years in the capital cities and 9.9 years in regional areas to save a 20 percent deposit to buy a property.

It also takes 48.3 percent of income in the cities and 47.1 percent in the regions to cover mortgage repayments at today’s home loan interest rates, which is far greater than the portion of income required to service rents at a median 30.4 percent in cities and 33.3 percent in the regions.

Karl Lagerfeld’s Home on the Seine in Paris to Sell at Auction This Month

The apartment, located in a Louis XIV-era building on the Left Bank, belonged to the fashion designer for more than a decade until his death in 2019

This may be contributing to continually rising weekly rents