Step inside Serge Gainsbourg’s legendary home in Paris

The legendary address of 5 bis rue de Verneuil originally served as stables for the large Parisian townhouse opposite. Gainsbourg bought it in 1969, moving in with his then partner Jane Birkin and extensively renovating it with the help of the British interior designer André Higgins. He cloaked the walls in black felt, an aesthetic touch borrowed from the 19th-century Joris-Karl Huysmans novel À rebours, and added Venetian checkerboard floor tiles to the ground floor and a black Axminster carpet covered in a chintzy floral motif through the rest of the house. As a result, the house feels like a Gothic manor – exacerbated by the museum’s choice to block out all of the windows to protect the interior from sunlight.

After Gainsbourg’s death, Charlotte bought her siblings’ shares of the house – and then promptly shuttered it, freezing it and its contents in time. The butts of Gainsbourg’s beloved Gitanes still molder in ashtrays dotted around the house; a forest of cosmetics bottles cover all available space in the bathroom; and the kitchen stocks pots of desiccated sweets, dubious-looking liquids in jars, and half-eaten chocolate bars still in the fridge. Although Charlotte openly spoke of her desire to one day turn it into a museum, the cast iron front gate remained closed to the public for more than 30 years.

‘For us, for the public, Gainsbourg is this mythic person,’ explained Sébastien Merlet, the museum’s curator. ‘But for Charlotte, it’s her dad. She needed to take the time.’