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There are a few constants that the Internet knows about Lenny Kravitz’s lifestyle. Photos of him wearing an enormous brown blanket scarf, which resurface each year, have become a reliable indicator of the approaching winter. And he’s never far from a pair of leather pants, which the 60-year-old American musician proved last year when he posted a video to TikTok bench pressing while doing sit-ups at the gym in black leather, a sheer mesh tank and sunglasses.
(“This isn’t how everyone’s dad works out?” his daughter, the actor Zoë Kravitz, asked “The Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon in response to the video). But over the years, the rock star has also provided a window into his life through his homes, from the idyllic Brazilian ranch that Architectural Digest (AD) toured in 2019, to the beachside Airstream trailer he occupies for part of the year in the Bahamian island of Eleuthera. For AD’s “Star Power” issue , published today, Kravitz is showing off the grand Paris townhouse he has had for two decades and was the previous palatial home of a countess.
Kravitz was taken aback by the enormous space when he first saw it, located in the 16th arrondissement, the French capital’s home to embassies, museums and luxury shopping. In the early 2000s, he had already released several Platinum albums, but had in mind something more modest: “a little apartment, maybe on the Seine — one bedroom, two bedrooms, maximum — where I could write and hang out,” he recalled to AD. It was his real estate agent who encouraged him to see the “once-in-a-generation” listing, he added.
When he arrived, he thought perhaps he was touring a single floor, not the entire property. “I said, ‘No, no, no, no, absolutely not.’” Inside though, his feelings changed.
“I walked in and said, ‘This is my house.’ Spiritually, I knew.” Combining ‘soulful elegance’ Years later, the home feels undeniably his — “a true reflection of his personality and creative energy,” noted Marina Hemonet, head of editorial content for AD France, in an email to CNN.
From the airy interiors outfitted with work by blue-chip artists, traditional African art and some of his own studio’s furniture designs — Kravitz Design was included in the prestigious AD100 list in 2023 — to the eccentric wine room and red-lit subterranean party space he calls “The Chaufferie,” the musician has continued to transform the space as an extension of himself. (Though he’s not the only Kravitz to enjoy the home, as Zoë has “been having a lot of soirées” in the speakeasy-esque boiler room, he told AD.) “The things he surrounds himself with — (Andy) Warhol masterpieces, African artifacts, major music memorabilia, and rare furnishings by Paul Evans, Karl Springer, Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Joe Colombo, and others — offer an astounding feast of the dreamily recherché,” AD’s global editorial director, Amy Astley, who leads AD U.
S., wrote in the issue’s editor’s letter. Kravitz’s sensibility reflects his upbringing, he noted to the magazine.
He often moved between his parents’ Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan — his mother, Roxie Roker, was an actor best known for “The Jeffersons;” his father, Sy Kravitz, was a TV producer for NBC — to his grandparents’ home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Two completely different worlds,” he said. He calls his aesthetic “soulful elegance,” which is “comfortable, clearly.
But also chic,” he explained. “I love that balance of African, European, and Afrofuturism mixed with midcentury pieces. I love things that are extremely glamorous and also extremely brutal.
” And though artworks by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Avedon hang on his walls, it’s a portrait by the photographer Ruven Afanador of Kravitz’s late grandfather, Albert Roker, that he considers a centerpiece of his home. Afanador photographed the cover for the musician’s fourth album, “Circus,” released in 1995, and his grandfather attended the shoot. “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,” Kravitz said. “It’s all him. So he presides over the table at all times.
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