Charles-Eric Guerrier — independent owner’s representative in Paris, since 2023.
This work took shape, one project at a time, wherever the same gap widened: an owner in Brooklyn, Singapore or Dubai, and a renovation in Paris moving forward without them. Not from bad faith — from gravity. Execution happens on the ground, decisions are made six thousand kilometres away, and information bends between the two. The site begins, slowly, to decide for you. Quotes round up. Timelines lengthen. Someone says don’t worry, which is usually the moment to start paying attention.
My working setup in Paris is simple. On your project, I work for you and for you alone, at fees agreed in writing and paid by you alone. That is what keeps my interests aligned with yours — from the first coffee through to the night you first sleep in the apartment.
In practice, the work begins before the offer is written. I read what should be read: the co-ownership rules, the recent minutes, the technical diagnostics, the surface certificate, and the quiet signs a single visit rarely surfaces. I return one page: go, go with conditions, or do not go. Once the purchase is decided, I propose one or more architects, or a general contractor, from people I know professionally. You choose and contract with them directly, at their own rates. Nothing moves between us and them financially — they invoice you, you pay them. During the works, I read every quote they send you, line by line, and flag whatever seems loose. I walk the site each week, photograph what has been done, and write the Friday journal that arrives in your inbox: dated photographs, decisions pending, discrepancies reported. I take the decisions you have explicitly mandated me to take. I draft the pre-handover synthesis — the room-by-room reservations note that prepares the official handover — and I forward to you for signature any document the design authority hands me for you. You then sign yourself, with your design authority. The coordination of the trades remains with the design authority you retain; my role is to read, to report, to verify, and to alert.
I work from Paris, alone, with an address, a direct number, a face. The relationship is never handed on. What I know, I tell you; what I don’t know, I find out; what I suspect, I flag. This is less a service than a mandate — an owner’s representative, client-side, nothing more and nothing less.
Twenty years of interior architecture, mostly residential, before this work narrowed into the AMOA mandate I now hold from Paris. The early years played out between Africa and Asia — that is where I grew up, and where the longest part of my professional life later took place, with a company I founded and ran in the Philippines. Paris is a point of fixation I chose, not an evidence of origin.
That detour shaped two things. A working ease with international owners whose lives sit across several time zones at once. And a lasting curiosity for cultures other than my own — which makes the bridge between a foreign owner and a Parisian renovation a natural place to stand.
The mandate I hold today continues that posture: to make room for the people who do the work — architects, contractors, Parisian craftsmen — and to stand exactly where the owner needs me to stand. Nothing more, nothing else.