We Will Be Happy Here

For a war correspondent, a Paris apartment provides a refuge, and moments of grace.

-  Janine di Giovanni

Everything in my home is a treasured memory, a road stretching back to my intricate, woven past. The broken blue and yellow Iraqi tile above my fireplace reminds me of the day I found it, after the bombing of a Shia shrine in Baghdad. The Ivory Coast chair that Bruno, the father of my child, bought for me in 2001 when we were living in Abidjan. A tattered Afghan prayer rug found on Chicken Street in Kabul. Detailed wooden boxes from Aleppo, Syria. These things divide the chapters of my life. 

For many years, I roamed the earth as a war reporter. These days I direct a war crimes unit called the Reckoning Project inside Ukraine. My apartment in Paris, which is very close to the Luxembourg Gardens, is more than just a home. It is a nest, an escape, a place for solace and healing. My home restores calm after the chaos of war.

Bruno and I bought the fourth-floor home in the sixth arrondissement in 2006. An elderly woman who lived there for decades had died; there were family quarrels, so the sale went through a notaire. The minute I walked in carrying our baby on my hip, I knew: We will be happy here.

We got a good deal, but the place needed to be gutted. The electricity and plumbing were ancient. There were four dark bedrooms, one bathroom. A winding staircase led to a former maid's room two floors up.

It took a year to knock down walls to get two large bedrooms and two bathrooms with American plumbing. The old kitchen in the back became the primary bath; the clawfoot tub is from a salvage store. We furnished the home in muted, beachy colors, with cushy sofas and a long oak table with plenty of chairs for kids, friends, and raucous dinner parties. I hung my collection of black-and-white photography, gifts from photojournalists I had worked with in war zones.