The Musée des Arts décoratifs is inside the Louvre palace, in the wing that faces rue de Rivoli, but it has its own entrance and its own ticket: your Louvre ticket will not get you in here. Every day thousands of people walk past it without knowing it is there.
Inside are some six thousand objects on seven floors, from the Middle Ages to today’s design: furniture, jewellery, glass, ceramics, and above all whole reconstructed rooms, with their panelling, their beds and their furnishings. It is the museum where you understand how people lived, not only what they painted.
The museum is closed on Mondays, and on Thursday evenings only some exhibitions stay open, not the collections. I take you through seven rooms, in the order you meet them as you climb.
What is the fireplace of a café demolished in 1955 doing in a museum of furnishings?
Let’s begin!
Finding your way: the nave and the seven floors
You come in from rue de Rivoli and find yourself in the nave: a large white hall rising the full height of the building, with balconies along the sides, from which the collections branch off.
One thing to know before you start: drawings, photographs, wallpaper, toys, fashion and graphic design are not on permanent display. They are too fragile and they rotate, inside exhibitions and temporary displays. If you are coming for the clothes or the toys, check first what is on at that moment.
1. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
The oldest collections number more than 3,600 works, from the 12th to the 16th century: altarpieces, wooden sculptures, tapestries, stained glass, enamels, furniture. Almost all of them came from private collectors.
Stop in front of the Madonna of an Annunciation in gilded wood, from around 1500. She kneels, her hands joined, before a lectern covered with a cloth, and her cloak falls around her in deep, broken folds. The angel of the scene is not with her, and the figure, alone, listens to someone you cannot see.
In the same section is a Passion altarpiece produced in Brussels around 1490 by the so-called Master of the View of Saint Gudula: an altarpiece with painted wings and the carved scenes of the Passion at its centre.
2. The salon of the hôtel de Serres
Climbing towards the 18th century, you walk into an entire room. It is the salon of the hôtel de Serres, a mansion on place Vendôme, reassembled here with its panelling and its mirrors. It dates from the last years of the 18th century, around 1795, and is also known as the Barriol salon, after the decorator who gave it to the museum.
What is original in a reconstructed room?
The walls, the mirrors and the panelling, but not the furniture. The museum says so plainly: the original furniture, in mahogany and painted wood, has been lost, and only the design of the console tables is known. The gilded chairs you see date from the 1780s and were chosen to give the idea. Look at the mirrors facing the windows: they multiply the light and the chandelier, and they were the real luxury of a room like this.
3. The bedroom of Valtesse de la Bigne
Who was the woman who slept in this bed?
Valtesse de la Bigne was a courtesan in 19th-century Paris, and the museum points out that she was the inspiration for Nana, the heroine of Émile Zola’s novel. Her state bed, from around 1875, stands at the centre of a reconstructed room.
Look at the canopy, the pale green drapes, the gilt bronzes that cover the headboard and the side like a railing. It does not look like a bed for sleeping in: it looks like a stage.
4. Art Nouveau: Guimard, Gallé, Majorelle
Here everything changes. Lines curve, the wood seems to grow like a plant, the wrought iron twists. The museum devotes several rooms to Art Nouveau, and the first bears the names of Hector Guimard and Émile Gallé.
Guimard is the architect of the entrances to the Paris metro, the ones with lamps shaped like plant stems, and here you see the same language applied to a bedroom: the bed, the clock, the chairs and even the window frame follow the same curve.
In another Art Nouveau room is a piece that tells of a vanished Paris: Louis Majorelle’s fireplace from the Café de Paris, at 41 avenue de l’Opéra. Majorelle worked on the café’s decoration in 1898 together with the architect Henri Sauvage, and the café was demolished in 1955: this fireplace is what remains of its furnishings. Then there is the furniture Georges de Feure designed for the gallery of Siegfried Bing, the one that gave the style its name in 1895, and the string-quartet cabinet by Alexandre Charpentier, a friend of Debussy’s, designed to hold two violins, a viola and a cello.
5. Jeanne Lanvin’s apartment
The founder of the fashion house Lanvin had an apartment furnished in the mid-1920s, and the museum keeps three of its rooms: the bedroom, the bathroom and the boudoir, designed by Armand-Albert Rateau around 1925.
The boudoir is grey and gold, with pheasants and exotic birds in gilded stucco above the display cases and a floor of white and black marble. Look beyond the large glass bay: the bedroom is all in blue silk, the colour Lanvin is said, the museum explains, to have fallen for when she discovered the Italian primitives, with daisies embroidered in tribute to her daughter Marguerite. The silk you see was remade identically from the original model, and the embroidery redone by hand.
6. Charlotte Perriand’s kitchen and the design floors
As you climb, you reach the five floors devoted to design of the 20th century and today. Here the stop is small and everyday: the kitchen Charlotte Perriand designed for Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseille. The museum calls it «ingenious», and it is the room where you understand how the ordinary home changed after the war.
Around it is the «library of seats», a collection of mass-produced chairs, and a few one-off pieces, such as a work by François-Xavier Lalanne.
7. The jewellery gallery
Finish in the jewellery gallery: some 1,200 pieces from the Middle Ages to today, in chronological order. There are Empire earrings, Art Nouveau combs, pieces by the great jewellery houses and jewellery designed by artists.
Go up to the cases one by one, because the size changes: after entire rooms, here a whole century of taste is concentrated into a few centimetres, and in an Art Nouveau comb you find the same curves as in Guimard’s bedroom.
Practical information
Data checked on 22 September 2026 on the official website madparis.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. A full ticket costs 15 euros and covers the collections, the current exhibitions and the audio guide. Free admission. The museum is free for anyone under 26, collections and exhibitions included. Opening hours. From Tuesday to Sunday the museum opens at 11:00 and closes at 18:00. On Thursdays some exhibitions stay open until 21:00, but the collections do not. It is closed on Mondays. The ticket desks close 45 minutes earlier. Closed rooms. The museum warns that on any day some rooms may be closed for works or rehangs, and that the updated list is posted at the ticket desks. Ask for it as soon as you go in. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is covered by the Paris Museum Pass. Getting there. The entrance is at 107 rue de Rivoli. The nearest metro is Palais-Royal - Musée du Louvre, on lines 1 and 7, five minutes away on foot. How long to allow. The seven rooms need two hours. Allow three if you want to climb to the top floor of design.
The current exhibitions, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The museum has a younger sibling, the Musée Nissim de Camondo, a house built on an 18th-century model in the Monceau district, which tells how a Parisian family lived in the Belle Époque: I will write about it soon. For now, the natural next visit is next door: the 12 artworks to see at the Louvre, where the Napoleon III apartments form a bridge between the two museums. And crossing the Tuileries garden you reach the Musée d’Orsay, which tells the same 19th century from the side of painting.
Photo credits: nave, salon of the hôtel de Serres, Madonna of the Annunciation and Hector Guimard bedroom by GFreihalter (CC BY-SA 4.0); Valtesse de la Bigne’s bed by Pline (CC BY-SA 4.0); Jeanne Lanvin’s boudoir by Sailko (CC BY-SA 3.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
