Inside Lenny Kravitz’s Regal Paris Refuge

He settles deeper into the chair, a turmeric-ginger shot in a thimble-sized crystal coupe sitting before him on one of two Paul Kingma–designed Brutalist cast-concrete-and-resin coffee tables. A mod poster that had been in his parents’ East 82nd Street flat when he was a kid hangs on the wall. “ ‘Soulful elegance’ means it’s designed, curated, balanced, not too minimal, not too maximalist,” he explains. “It’s comfortable, clearly. But also chic. It’s got a lot of ethnic and African elements mixed with European, because I love that balance of African, European, and Afrofuturism mixed with midcentury pieces. I love things that are extremely glamorous and also extremely brutal.”

Things like Richard Avedon’s iconic portrait of Marilyn Monroe in a plunging black sequin gown, set upon a Lella and Massimo Vignelli slab-like Ambiguità console adjacent to the upstairs landing. Or Ubald Klug’s 1970s buttery leather Terrazza landscape sofa for de Sede in the Lounge—Kravitz’s louche subterranean screening room—across from a swaggering brass-and-polished-steel coffee table with a rotating center.

A 1970s mirror by Vittorio Introini hangs above a Tee console by J. Wade Beam in the Sous Sol Hall. The floral-print shirt and multicolor fur-lined vest were owned and worn by Jimi Hendrix.

Kravitz reclines on a Terrazza sofa by Ubald Klug for de Sede. Model 1705 chair by Warren Platner for Knoll; coffee table with rotating center by Massimo Papiri; artwork by Andy Warhol; Gold Gun lamp by Philippe Starck.

Items from or depicting family and friends are always near, like memento mori, be it the portrait of his godmother Diahann Carroll in the library, or the framed black-and-white publicity shots of his mother in her namesake Roxie Room, an elegant den next to the grand salon, or the framed Miles Davis leather jacket, a gift from another godmother, Davis’s former wife Cicely Tyson, days after the great trumpeter died, in the basement’s memorabilia gallery outside Kravitz’s studio. Or the most important piece in the house: the handsome Ruven Afanador portrait of Kravitz’s grandfather, Albert Roker, above New Hope School designer Paul Evans’s Sculpted Front sideboard in the dining room.

The wine room is decorated with a mix of artworks and objects including a contemporary Russian oil painting of a woman and child, a James Mont table lamp, and an 18th-century mirror.

“Ruven was doing the cover for my fourth album, Circus, and we shot it all in Nassau,” Kravitz recalls. “I put my grandfather in one of my suits, and Ruven took a bunch of portraits of him. He is why I am here, and why I’m in this house, why my mom went to Howard University in DC and studied at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and became who she became, then I became who I became, and Zoë became who she became. It’s all him. So he presides over the table at all times.”