WHEN OLIVIER MARTY and Karl Fournier of the Paris-based architecture firm Studio KO were asked by an Australian entrepreneur to create a pied-à-terre on the city’s Place des Victoires, the pair reveled in the strange layers of history they uncovered. The apartment, on the third floor of one of the square’s grand four-story mansions, needed to be completely gutted — time had not been kind to the walls or the floors — but the client, who has built a retail empire known for its daring, bespoke store design, didn’t want to merely recreate its original charm. Living in Paris had been his dream since he was a young adult in Melbourne, so he insisted that the flat reflect his minimalist taste as well as the city’s storied surroundings: In a place of Rococo construction, destruction and architectural resurrection stretching over centuries, there may be no better illustration of how venerable sites never stop evolving than the Place des Victoires — and how the most elaborate facades often conceal something unexpected.

Built in the late 17th century by François d’Aubusson de La Feuillade, a marshal of France under Louis XIV, as the first circular public square in Paris, the Place des Victoires has been remarkably transformed through the ages. Dividing the First and Second Arrondissements, it was conceived as a homage to the Sun King’s military triumphs; La Feuillade hired the sculptor Martin Desjardins to create a statue of the monarch and enlisted the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who was at the time building Versailles’s Grand Trianon, to plan a ring of virtually identical adjoined houses to surround it.