The French Connection.(Francois Halard's apartment)

Byline: Photographed by Francois Halard.

A well-traveled photographer brings Mediterranean verve to a downtown Manhattan loft. Hamish Bowles delights in the unexpected Provencal parallels.

Photographer Francois Halard may have documented many of the world's most memorable rooms, but he has created some of his own, too. A decade ago, he photographed his eighteenth-century town house in Arles for VOGUE. Halard had discovered the house by happy accident, bidden to a viewing by a friend who was preparing a sale of its contents. Although it was in a state of advanced dereliction and abandonment--trees grew from cracks in the walls, and the cellars oozed with the fetid waters of the nearby Rhone--Halard was nevertheless intoxicated by its labyrinth of soaring rooms and its infinite poetic possibilities. The bedrooms were still hung with their original Louis XVI wallpapers, and the drawing room's majestic trompe l'oeil panels (the work of a Genoese court painter, Halard has since discovered) were symbolic depictions of the birth of Rome, a city for which he has a special affinity. Halard was seduced and has since created magical interiors that pay homage to Cy Twombly's castle in the Roman countryside.

Halard's life is peripatetic, and while the Provencal manor is now a constant in his life, he has brought his idiosyncratic eye to several residences in Paris and Manhattan since he first acquired it. Having given up his most recent Parisian home--an exquisite Directoire apartment with the elegant surprise of a perfectly circular drawing room--Halard decided to return to Manhattan two years ago.

His earlier real estate adventures in the city included an 1836 town house in the West Village (originally a butcher's shop and shaped like a wedge of cheese) and a loft in the then-unfashionable Meatpacking District (above a nightclub called Hell). Halard's quest this time, with his girlfriend, literary publisher Sylvie Blin, was for space and a blank canvas. They found both in a warren of fourteen offices with low ceilings and apparently no distinguishing features, in a former warehouse that was in the throes of conversion. But with the uncanny sensitivity to environments that has made him the most sought-after of interiors photographers, Halard recognized its lovely bones--and thrilled to an unusual extravagance of space that would eventually allow for an enfilade of rooms and even a muniments room for some of his archives.

Halard wanted to create an atmosphere that had the patina of age, and he worked with his nephew the architect Bastien Halard to achieve it. To their delight, when the false ceilings and walls were torn out, handsome wooden beams and imposing cement columns were revealed. "Basically, I just wanted to do a New York extension of Arles," says Halard, "a nostalgia for the Mediterranean, with something of Morocco and something of Rome."

When he was a child, Halard's parents, the French decorating gurus Yves and Michele Halard, refused to take him to the Mediterranean. "They thought it was too vulgar!" he says, laughing. Perhaps it was inevitable that when he finally laid eyes on its ultramarine waters, in his late teens, it was love at first sight. The romance has proved enduring, and Blin happily shares his passion: She is from Marseille, the historic port on the Cote d'Azur.