The Best Interior Designers for French-Inspired Interiors 2026

A truly bespoke interior is defined by more than ornament, furnishings, or expense. It begins with proportion, light, spatial relationships, materiality, craftsmanship, and the way each element contributes to the experience of a home.

For French interior designer Rita Chraibi, these elements are never considered in isolation. A ceiling detail, a transition between rooms, a custom piece of furniture, or the relationship between stone and wood belongs to one complete interior composition, created specifically for the residence.

Creating an interior at this level requires more than aesthetic refinement. It requires disciplined spatial thinking, exceptional materials, close project coordination, and a design process capable of preserving a clear creative vision from the earliest concept through final installation.

Through International Designers and Maison Royale, her private atelier in France, Rita Chraibi brings a distinctly French approach to residences internationally. The objective is not simply to create a beautiful interior, but a home with an identity entirely its own.

For clients considering an interior designer, the following firms represent distinctive approaches to high-end residential design in 2026.

How the Firms Were Selected

Between February and June 2026, our research team evaluated interior design firms serving residential, hospitality, and mixed-use clients who had explicitly commissioned French-inspired interiors, ranging from Parisian classical apartments to cross-Atlantic renovations carrying a distinctly French aesthetic sensibility. Firms were assessed across five criteria reflecting both design credibility and practical delivery competence:

• French Design Authenticity (20%): Measures how deeply the firm’s aesthetic is rooted in genuine French design principles — from classical proportion and material hierarchy to the Art de Vivre approach to lived-in luxury.
• Turnkey Project Delivery (20%): Measures whether the firm manages the complete project journey from initial concept through final installation, with accountability at every stage.
• Bespoke Craftsmanship & Millwork (17%): Measures the extent to which custom joinery, cabinetry, furniture, and decorative elements are designed and specified in-house, rather than sourced from standard supplier catalogues.
• Renovation & Interior Design Expertise (17%): Measures the firm’s documented capability in full-scope gut renovations and structural interventions — not decorative overlays applied to existing layouts.
• Portfolio Range & Project Scale (26%): Measures demonstrated competence across project types — residential buildings, private homes, hospitality, cultural institutions — and geographic markets, including high-value and complex commissions.

Using this scoring model, we rank-ordered all firms and identified the top 6. The table below provides a side-by-side snapshot. In-depth reviews follow.

The Best Interior Designers for French-Inspired Interiors of 2026

1. International Designers, for interior designer-led French interiors and bespoke craftsmanship

Rita Chraibi, founder and creative director of International Designers, brings a design education from the École Camondo in Paris to a body of residential work spanning Paris, New York, Greenwich, Miami, and international commissions. Her training gives the practice a distinct point of departure: interiors are approached through proportion, circulation, structure, materiality, and craftsmanship before decoration. This design-led approach is visible in projects including a waterfront property on Palm Island, residences within Jean Nouvel’s Monad Terrace in Miami Beach, and commissions at Steinway Tower and 111 West 57th Street in Manhattan.

Her work has received international recognition from SBID, the Muse Design Awards, A’Design Award, Luxe Red, and The International Design and Architecture Awards, with press coverage in Forbes, Robb Report, AD Pro, and Elle Decor. Bespoke joinery and custom furniture are developed through Maison Royale, Rita Chraibi’s French atelier, where artisans produce details created specifically for the residence rather than selected from standard catalogs. The result is a home shaped by one continuous creative direction, from the earliest spatial concept to the final installed detail.

• Location: Paris, France; New York, NY; Greenwich, CT; Miami, FL;
• Services Offered: Conceptual interior design, renovation-oriented interiors, bespoke millwork and joinery, custom furniture and decorative arts specification through Maison Royale atelier, procurement, installation coordination, and final styling.

2. Gilles & Boissier, for French heritage at international hospitality scale

Founded by Dorothée Boissier and Patrick Gilles, the Paris studio Gilles & Boissier has spent more than two decades building one of the most recognisable bodies of work in French-heritage luxury design. The firm has completed projects spanning private residences, ultra-luxury hotels, restaurants, and more than 250 Moncler boutiques worldwide – a scope of output that few studios operating in the French design tradition can match. Their method is articulated as a “creative oxymoron”: French classicism and contemporary spatial language working in deliberate tension to produce environments that feel both historically grounded and genuinely modern. The studio designs furniture, accessories, and spatial elements as a unified gesture, ensuring interior coherence from the largest architectural surface to the smallest decorative object. Projects have included major hotel commissions in Paris, New York, and across Asia, alongside a number of high-value private residential commissions.

Gilles & Boissier’s primary limitation from a residential client’s perspective is one of focus: the studio’s portfolio skews substantially toward hospitality, specifically hotels, restaurants, branded environments, where their multi-project, multi-team model is well-calibrated. Residential clients seeking a deeply personal renovation with a single accountable point of contact across the full lifecycle may find the studio’s structure less suited to that need. The firm’s public-facing process documentation for private residential delivery is also limited relative to its hospitality credentials, making it harder for prospective clients to assess the full-service model at the private scale.

• Location: Paris, France (serves clients internationally)
• Services Offered: Interior architecture, residential design, hospitality design, retail design, furniture and accessories design, graphic design

3. Chahan Minassian, for gallery-calibre residential curation

Chahan Minassian operates from Paris as both an interior designer and gallery director – a dual position that shapes the distinctly curatorial quality of his residential and boutique hospitality work. His interiors are built around the combination of rare materials (exotic stone, aged leathers, precious woods), French modernist furniture from the 1930s through the 1960s, and commissioned decorative objects: an approach that treats a finished room as a collected environment rather than a designed one. The result is a body of work that reads as deeply knowledgeable, both historically and aesthetically, and that appeals to clients whose primary interest lies in the quality and provenance of individual objects as much as in the overall spatial outcome. Recognition includes the Villegiature Award for Best Hotel Interior Design in Europe and Best Bar Design in 2018, reflecting the studio’s crossover between residential and boutique hospitality commissions.

The limitation for clients seeking a turnkey French-inspired renovation is that Minassian’s model prioritises curation over construction management. His process centres on acquiring, specifying, and placing extraordinary objects rather than overseeing full structural interventions from design concept to contractor handover. Clients with demanding renovation scopes, for example gut renovations, structural reconfiguration, complex millwork, may find the studio’s delivery model insufficiently comprehensive for their needs. The studio is also small by design, which limits project volume and may extend lead times for new commissions.

• Location: Paris, France (serves clients internationally by referral)
• Services Offered: Residential interior design, boutique hotel design, furniture and object curation, art acquisition, gallery representation

4. Laura Gonzalez, for theatrical French pattern and artisan maximalism

Laura Gonzalez is a Paris-based interior architect whose work occupies the maximalist end of the French design tradition: richly layered rooms built from bold patterns, saturated materials, bespoke ceramics, artisan textiles, and a deliberate irreverence toward restraint that is, itself, entirely French in character. Gonzalez has built a reputation across residential and hospitality commissions, including Hôtel Christine, Brasserie La Lorraine, and Lapérouse in Paris, that is grounded in her ability to combine disparate visual registers (historical, contemporary, artisan, theatrical) into rooms that are cohesive without being conventional. Her studio collaborates with artisans across upholstery, ceramics, metalwork, and wallcovering, producing elements that are specific to each commission and cannot be sourced elsewhere.

Where Gonzalez’s approach represents a clear strength for clients seeking maximally expressive French interiors, it is also a potential constraint for those seeking structural renovation leadership or a more restrained classical aesthetic. The studio is design and art direction-focused: contractor oversight, millwork specification, and full project management at the construction level are less central to the documented model than they are at architecture-credentialed, turnkey-oriented practices.

• Location: Paris, France (serves international residential and hospitality clients)
• Services Offered: Interior design, residential design, restaurant and hotel design, furniture design, artisan collaboration and specification

5. Studio KO, for French architecture rooted in place

Founded in 2000 by Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, Studio KO operates from offices in Paris, Marrakech, and London with a team of approximately 50 professionals. The studio sits on the productive boundary between architecture and interior design: Fournier and Marty design the architecture, specify the interiors, and oversee FF&E as a single continuous act, which gives their completed work an uncommon formal coherence. The Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech for instance, illustrates the scope the studio is capable of at its most ambitious. Residential commissions span Europe, Morocco, North Africa, and more recently Hong Kong and Uzbekistan, each characterised by a response to the material and contextual logic of the specific site rather than the imposition of a transferable signature.

Studio KO’s primary constraint for clients pursuing a French-inspired interior in the classical or decorative register is the studio’s commitment to contextual design. Their work draws heavily on the physical and cultural specificity of each location – an approach that produces exceptional results in projects where architecture and landscape are the brief, but that can feel misaligned when a client’s primary interest is a transportable French decorative aesthetic applied to an existing interior. The studio’s model is also architecture-first: clients seeking focused interior decoration without a full architectural frame may find Studio KO is designed for a different kind of engagement.

• Location: Paris, France; Marrakech, Morocco; London, United Kingdom (serves clients globally)
• Services Offered: Architecture, interior design, FF&E specification, adaptive reuse and renovation, residential, boutique hospitality, cultural institutions, bespoke objects (Lloyd KO)

6. Pinto Paris, for French decorative arts institutional legacy

Pinto Paris, founded by Alberto Pinto (1943–2012) and now led by his sister Linda Pinto, is among the oldest continuously operating luxury interior design studios in France, with a five-decade archive spanning private residences, superyachts, private aircraft, presidential residences, and five-star hospitality commissions across multiple continents. The studio produces bespoke furniture, tableware, and decorative objects through its in-house production arm, maintains a proprietary catalogue of original designs, and has executed commissions at a level of formal complexity that very few studios in any design tradition can match. For clients seeking an interior grounded in the full vocabulary of French decorative arts: classical symmetry, layered surface treatment, historical reference used with authority rather than pastiche. Pinto Paris carries a depth of institutional knowledge that reflects decades of practice at the highest level.

The studio’s most significant limitation for contemporary clients is the question of creative continuity following Alberto Pinto’s death in 2012. Linda Pinto leads the practice with evident commitment to the founding aesthetic, but clients commissioning work today are, in effect, working with an interpretation of a creative vision rather than its originator. This is a legitimate consideration for discerning clients who are specifically drawn to the studio’s legacy work, and the distinction is worth raising in any discovery conversation. Additionally, Pinto Paris’s documented strength lies in formal, highly ornamented interiors: clients seeking a French-inspired project with a lighter contemporary register, or those commissioning a full architectural renovation rather than a decorative commission, may find the studio’s register more constrained than their brief requires.

• Location: Paris, France (serves clients internationally)
• Services Offered: Residential interior design, hospitality and hotel design, superyacht interiors, private aviation interiors, bespoke furniture and decorative objects, tableware design

The Best Interior Designers for French-Inspired Interiors by Specialty

By Turnkey Interior Renovation Capability

By French Design Authenticity & Aesthetic Rigour

By Bespoke Craftsmanship & Custom Production

Contact International Designers

International Designers works with private clients on exceptional residences and selected international destinations.

Rita Chraibi leads the conceptual interior design and creative direction of her projects, creating highly individualized interiors shaped by proportion, materiality, craftsmanship, furniture, art, and bespoke design.

Private consultations may be requested through the studios in New York, Greenwich, Miami, and Paris.

• New York: +1 (646) 793 9492
• Greenwich: +1 (475) 500 2530
• Miami: +1 (786) 763 0100
• Paris: +33 1 40 07 80 30

Professional Services Notice

International Designers provides interior design, conceptual interior design, and creative direction services.

Architectural, engineering, permitting, construction documentation, code compliance, and other regulated professional services, where required, are provided by appropriately licensed local professionals within their respective professional scopes.