THE SCHEME FOR the French musician Nicolas Godin’s apartment began with a meeting, for which he was running early. It was 2004, and the appointment — its purpose now forgotten — was in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris, where a friend of his has an antiques shop. Godin stopped in to have a look, and emerged smitten: “I had a crush on a painting,” he said. The object of his affection depicted a young woman in a simple white dress with voluminous sleeves. She had pale skin, a lustrous bun and an unflappable expression.

“I used to have sleepovers at my best friend’s house,” Godin recalled. “I’d be sleeping on an old couch in the TV room and there was this portrait of a beautiful woman. I saw all of my childhood coming back in one snap.” He took the painting. He also took from it an idea for how to decorate a flat that he had recently bought in Gros Caillou, a quiet residential area not far from the Eiffel Tower. The background of the portrait was rendered in a dark but serene hue that was not exactly green and not exactly gray, a color that now covers the walls of Godin’s flat, speaking to what he calls his “nostalgic desire to refresh memories and places around the Paris life I used to know.”

Godin’s mother was a housewife; his father, Philippe, an architect, helped design the Stade Louis II in Monaco and worked on Yamoussoukro, a new capital city commissioned in the ’80s by the president of the Ivory Coast. The family lived in the 17th Arrondissement and, when Godin was a year old, moved to a “cool, ’70s wood-and-stone building” in the genteel suburb of Versailles. The contrasting aesthetics of his surroundings impressed on him the fundamental link between style and place. “I grew up in this, like, ‘Mad Men’ world,” he said. “But on the other side of the road I was in Marie Antoinette’s village with my bike.”