Each day at the Paris offices of AXA Group, employees work amid the kind of 18th- and early 19th-century furnishings that are normally roped off in a museum. The exquisite interior is part of an overall vision by AXA’s Chairman Claude Bébéar for their new, larger headquarters to reflect the unusual history of the business, which he has built into one of the largest insurance conglomerates in the world. “We wanted to show that AXA was at the same time a very old company [the oldest company of AXA started in the 18th century],” but because the AXA brand is just 20 years old, Bébéar adds, “it is also a fairly new company.”

To translate this into visual terms, Bébéar engaged the Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill to combine three old buildings on Avenue Matignon into a unified space. His innovative solution includes a steel-and-glass façade that also spans the roofs to create an inner courtyard.

Bofill’s futuristic structure provides an interesting counterpoint to the second part of the project: the historic restoration of the space’s main building, the Hôtel de la Vaupalière. Constructed after the death of Louis XIV, when the French court moved from Versailles back to Paris, it was designed and owned by the architect Louis-Marie Colignon. When it was completed in 1767, Colignon rented the house to the Marquis de la Vaupalière, the building’s namesake. For the next 200 years, counts, ambassadors and government ministers have called it home.

The original structure remained basically intact when AXA finally took over the property from the newspaper Le Figaro. The interior decoration, however, had not fared so well, and to return it to its 18th-century state took the hand of a master. For that, Bébéar selected the most prominent period designer in Paris, François-Joseph Graf.

Graf, whose recent projects include the renovation of the Grand Palais—where the prestigious Biennale des Antiquaires was held last year for the first time since 1992— and the period rooms at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, began by researching documents about the Hôtel’s original décor. “When someone dies, you have a description at his death of all the boiseries [wood paneling], the mirrors, the furniture, even the color of the curtains and the fabrics,” says Graf. “So we had a wonderful description of the inside.”

While Graf attended to such period details as the repainting of the faux-marble walls, the recreation of pilasters or the re-laying of parquet floors, he also had to contend with the requirements of a modern corporation. The boardroom, for example, seats 24 in original Empire white-and- gold lacquered chairs and also provides modern teleconferencing facilities. The two restored floors include private offices, smaller meeting rooms, a formal dining room and grand spaces where large parties can be held.

Bébéar’s goal, which he expressed to the Monument Historique overseeing the project, was to “do the best renovation that had been done in France in the last century.” This included furnishing each room with actual period pieces. In less than two years, he and his successor as chairman, Henri de Castries—both of whom are knowledgeable collectors of 18th-century antiques— worked with Graf to scour the finest antiquaires in the country, including Didier Aaron, Aveline, Galerie Kugel, Galerie Kraemer and Segoura, to uncover museumquality pieces, many of which were still in private collections.