A hand-drawn house in Paris

Photographs Jeremy Liebman

Ionescu originally studied architecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He makes and sells furniture, and occasionally releases collections of (highly stylised) household objects. So is he a designer? An architect? “I say artist because it is the most general,” he tells me. “But I think historically, in the history of art and architecture, I’m just like those guys that were coming out of Bauhaus, where they were doing an ashtray, a painting and a building all in the same year. I love that idea.”

His studio, in a stand-alone conservatory, is accessible directly from the garden. Inside, dazzling sketches and sculptures are everywhere. Attached to the wall are in-progress versions of several wooden chairs, their backs resembling haphazard doodles of birds or ghosts. “I think on my tombstone it’ll say drawer,” he says. “Everything emerges from an act of drawing. I think there are three organs of thought: the mind, the stomach and the hand – and I rely a lot on the hand.”

This makes a lot of sense. Two years ago he published a book entitled 148 Oblique Drawings, and his drawings and paintings are exhibited often, including currently at Plus-One Projects in Antwerp. Beyond that, these abstract, almost absent-minded sketches he produces are fundamental to his sculptural works. He grabs one of the countless little versions around us, which are holdable in one hand. “Let’s say I’m trying to draw a straight line,” he says, “and I ate too much or drank too much coffee or whatever. Those things are transferred into these lines.” He gestures at how the original waverings of his hand have been faithfully reproduced in three dimensions, giving the somewhat architectural objects their signature playful warmth.

We move into the second room of his studio, where an open laptop sits on a technical cutting board. There are some bookshelves in here and a small sink. A whiteboard on the floor carries reminders of the year’s projects, three or four a month: a talk at Us By Night festival in Antwerp, a “chair show” in Paris for the designer and architect India Mahdavi.

Ionescu spent the first 10 years of his life in Ploiești – “the Pittsburgh of Romania”, as he calls it. He was born there late in the Soviet era. From 1994 onwards he lived in New York, working most recently out of Red Hook, in Brooklyn. It was the pandemic and the changes it wreaked on the city that gave rise to his longing to try elsewhere.

At the time his wife, the cinematographer Bérénice Eveno, was working on the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, so they lived in Toronto for a year, after which a project of Ionesco’s took them to Brussels for 18 months. Following each stint, the question of returning to New York permanently was considered and rejected. In the end, Paris, where Eveno was raised, made the most sense.

We climb the steps into the two-floor living space he shares with Eveno and their two young daughters, which was discovered thanks to a trick proposed by a friend. “He told us to seek out the listings on property websites that had no images,” he says. Surely that’s counter to all natural house-hunting instincts? “That’s what I thought, but the logic is that the agent thinks they don’t have to put in much effort. Because the place is so good that whoever sees it, they take it.”

To secure a formal rental property in Paris is notoriously difficult. Prospective renters must provide extensive paperwork – the dreaded “dossier” – so that an agent can gauge their reliability, at which point all but the most conventional applicants (married couple, employed in banking) risk being summarily dismissed. Their strategy to secure this place, which is in the 11th arrondissement, a few minutes from the Place de la République, was to lean in to their nonconformist credentials. “We put press articles in the dossier, photos of our cute daughters. We made it very personal.”

The ground floor combines a living room and kitchen in a single open-plan space. The former area is filled with playful objects in tune with the aesthetic I witnessed in the studio, such as a hand-carved wooden chair by the New York-based designer Minjae Kim and a painting by the late American artist Ron Gorchov, whose use of bright colour was a strong influence. “I had the fortune to be next to his studio when I started out, 15 years ago,” Ionescu says, “and learned a lot from him.”

A lot of the furniture and art in Ionescu’s house was acquired not using cash but through the barter system. “I’m a great believer in trading versus buying,” he says. He paid for the surfaces in the kitchen (which are by Bel Albatros, a Belgian company that works with recycled plastic, and resemble marble from an alien planet) with a sculpture. Rows of herbs and spices in glass jars elsewhere seem almost disappointingly earthbound by comparison.

The downstairs toilet is filled with traditional masks from around the world. A more restrained upper floor has three bedrooms: one for children, one for parents, one for guests. “Our link to New York and our link to America is kind of reinstated with that guest room,” he says.

Ionescu retains a studio in New York and returns often, but the family see themselves as being in Paris for the long haul. “My daughter had her first birthday in Canada, her second birthday in Belgium, her third birthday in New York. We just want to find a rhythm,” he says. “I think a home needs time. It takes energy. There’s still stuff in storage. So this, being the first year, was just us feeling the space.” His children attend Saint-Merri School, near the Centre Pompidou. “It was a school that was designed in the seventies, where there are no walls,” he says. “It’s an open-plan, brutalist building. I love that idea.”

As he walks us back along the secret path towards the street, he shows me a working sundial above a doorway. The object receives regular visits from a “sundial community” – apparently it’s rare to find a working one in Paris. And while neither Ionescu nor I have any idea how to use it, the knowledge that we could if we tried hard enough feels important. This hint of a hidden practicality is a very Ionescu-like quality. All the sculptures, objects and paintings he makes contain secret layers – put there, in part, thanks to their foundations in the art of drawing.

“I try to stay true to it as much as possible,” he says. “I’m an immigrant – I moved to America, I Americanised myself, and I’ve been in America for 30 years. But I’m somewhat Romanian still. I feel the same way as a drawing, a doodle. I love that there’s this DNA, this trait, running throughout it all.”