Page 3 - Navigating Paris Real Estate Can Feel Like an Olympic Sport 7.22.24

In 2023, Neuilly’s average home price of $1,092 a square foot made the leafy, stately community Paris’s most
expensive suburb.

Longtime residents, Alain and Michèle Bigio, decided this year is the right time to list their 7,730-square-foot, four-
bedroom townhouse on a gated Neuilly street.

The couple, now in their mid 70s, completed the home in 1990, two years after they purchased a small parcel of
garden from the owners next door for an undisclosed amount. Having relocated from a white-marble château
outside Paris, the couple echoed their previous home by using white- and cream-colored stone in the new four-
story build. The Bigios, who will relocate just back over the border in the 16th Arrondissement, have listed the
property with Emile Garcin Propriétés for $14.7 million.

The couple raised two adult children here and undertook upgrades in their empty-nester years—most recently, an
indoor pool in the basement and a new elevator.

The cool, pale interiors give way to dark and sardonic images in the former staff’s quarters in the basement where
Alain works on his hobby—surreal and satirical paintings, whose risqué content means that his wife prefers they
stay downstairs. “I’m not a painter,” he says. “But I paint.”

The Trendiest Arrondissement: the 9th
French interior designer Julie Hamon is theater royalty. Her grandfather was playwright Jean Anouilh, a giant of
20th-century French literature, and her sister is actress Gwendoline Hamon. The 52-year-old, who divides her time
between Paris and the U.K., still remembers when the city’s 9th Arrondissement, where she and her husband
bought their 1,885-square-foot duplex in 2017, was a place to have fun rather than put down roots. Now, the 9th is
the place to do both.

The 9th, a largely 19th-century district, is Paris at its most urban. But what it lacks in parks and other green spaces,
it makes up with nightlife and a bustling street life. Among Paris’s gentrifying districts, which have been
transformed since 2000 from near-slums to the brink of luxury, the 9th has emerged as the clear winner. According
to Le Breton, average 2023 home prices here were $1,062 a square foot, while its nearest competitors for the cool
crown, the 10th and the 11th, have yet to break $1,011 a square foot.

A co-principal in the Bobo Design Studio, Hamon—whose gut renovation includes a dramatic skylight, a home
cinema and air conditioning—still seems surprised at how far her arrondissement has come. “The 9th used to be
well known for all the theaters, nightclubs and strip clubs,” she says. “But it was never a place where you wanted to
live—now it’s the place to be.”

With their youngest child about to go to college, she and her husband, 52-year-old entrepreneur Guillaume Clignet,
decided to list their Paris home for $3.45 million and live in London full-time. Propriétés Parisiennes/Sotheby’s is
handling the listing, which has just gone into contract after about six months on the market.

The 9th’s music venues were a draw for 44-year-old American musician and piano dealer, Ronen Segev, who
divides his time between Miami and a 1,725-square-foot, two-bedroom in the lower reaches of the
arrondissement. Aided by Paris Property Group, Segev purchased the apartment at auction during the pandemic,
sight unseen, for $1.69 million. He spent $270,000 on a renovation, knocking down a wall to make a larger salon
suitable for home concerts.

During the Olympics, Segev is renting out the space for about $22,850 a week to attendees of the Games.
Otherwise, he prefers longer-term sublets to visiting musicians for $32,700 a month.