What goes where? It’s complicated

For years, movie producer Ed McDonnell traveled to France between film shoots, flea marketing at the Porte de Clingnancourt and filling his large Hancock Park home with French furniture, art and accessories.

In 1997, he traded down to a 1,300-square-foot 1920s Spanish style house nearby -- and bought a studio apartment in Paris and a small 17th century stone farmhouse just outside St. Remy in the south of France a few years later.

So naturally, he shipped everything back to France.

“Well, not everything,” McDonnell says on a recent morning, putting croissants on a plate in the kitchen of his 19th century apartment on a quiet street in the Marais. “I mean, I had 10 years of collecting that sat in L.A., and it was sort of like, ‘Wait a minute, that chair is so French, it would really work in the farmhouse’ or ‘it would work here in Paris.’ ”

Over the years, McDonnell, 49, who has produced films such as “Three Kings” and “Catwoman” and has a production deal at Warner Bros., also has developed a reputation among his friends and colleagues for his ability to hand-carry items most people wouldn’t dare try to get on a plane -- sets of china, wall mirrors, bar stools.

He points to a large French Art Deco mirror hanging over a fireplace.

“This mirror I could take on a plane,” he says.

But you can’t get that into the overhead compartment!

“No, but you can get it behind the seat or in the closet. I know which planes literally have a closet and which don’t,” he says.

McDonnell grew up in Connecticut in a house filled with early American furniture. He first came to France in 1976 as a sophomore in college, where he spent a year at the American University of Paris. “A bunch of friends were taking a year abroad, and I literally signed up after studying Spanish for like 14 years,” says McDonnell, whose French is still a work in progress.

If, like so many Americans in Paris, he didn’t start out a Francophile, he quickly became one. “I immediately had an affinity for the French,” he says. “I love their rituals and holidays. I never got the attitude. Because maybe I wasn’t a Francophile, I never had this preconceived notion of what the French were supposed to be.”

McDonnell’s style knows no strict geographical bounds and tends to be constantly refined by playing a continuing game of musical chairs in which a loveseat made in France might be jetted to Santa Fe (where he owns another house), subsequently reassigned to Los Angeles and finally summoned to the south of France, where it will seem perfectly at home.

This morning, McDonnell is smoking American cigarettes, drinking the Maxwell House coffee he brought from California and eating croissants from his corner boulangerie, seated on a Pierre Frey sofa that had to be lifted through the window of his second Paris apartment. The lovely 700-square-foot apartment is on the first floor of an 1880s building that he found by staring in through the windows from his first apartment across the narrow street.

A mirror on his neighbor’s wall allowed him to make out the interior. His studio apartment had old floor tiles and rustic ceiling beams, but he pined for the bourgeois charm of the apartment in which he now lives, with its original moldings and marble fireplaces. Even knowing that Paris apartments often don’t change hands for decades, he told everyone he wanted it. So when a “for sale” sign appeared in the window, three friends called him in California to tell him it was available.

“It hadn’t been touched for like 50 years,” he says. “It was kind of dark and dingy.”

During three months of renovations, he took out a wall that made what was a two-bedroom apartment into a spacious one-bedroom, removed unnecessary doors, opened the twin fireplaces in what is now his gracious living and dining room, added new floors, replaced the 1950s toilet and put in a new kitchen.

He says he developed an appreciation for French craftsmanship, in which painting 19th century walls alone is an art form involving sanding and the application of various layers of mesh, linen, plaster, paint and more paint to give the old walls a long life and to prevent cracks.

In the dining room area, a 100-year-old French butcher’s table is surrounded by Italian metal and leather chairs from the 1960s found in the south of France (“That’s 4,000 euros you’re looking at,” he says. “I just had to have them”) and inexpensive new ‘30s-style twin lamps on the fireplace mantel that came from the BHV, Paris’s one-stop-shopping department store.

Four contemporary art pieces brought in from Santa Fe now hang on one wall. Across the room is a large Chinese painting bought in Paris, a Chinese wedding basket, and in the entry an Indian armoire seems perfectly at home with a Mexican chandelier. In the bedroom are drapes that once hung on a movie set and student drawings from the 1800s.

McDonnell says that French china and glass from the 1920s and ‘30s and contemporary French cubist drawings work just as well in L.A., but he wouldn’t mix French Deco with French country the way he has in his 19th century apartment.

“There’s a cultural sort of shorthand that you get when you come to France,” he says. “Here, you’re in a building that was built in the 1800s, so right there you’re given almost the sort of leeway to put in almost anything from when the building was built all the way up until today,” he says. “Whereas in L.A., the house is built in the 1920s, early 1930s, you feel a little less able to do it. I like the fact that here you have a broader base to be able to decorate from.”

McDonnell’s taste does not run to the gilded cliches that are so often embraced by Americans. “You start with your historical images of what’s it going to be like to live in a Paris apartment,” he says. “And then when you do it, you come to realize that’s a fantasy image of the French, because they are equally as contemporary as anybody. I have nothing ‘Louis’ -- it’s never been my style. It’s not comfy. I like things that have a great history, but I also like things that have a practicality to them. I want to be able to put my feet up on something.”

McDonnell bought the current apartment for just under $400,000, and the farmhouse in St. Remy for less than $200,000. He has offset the cost of his investments by renting out his properties when he isn’t in town. The man who drinks Maxwell House coffee in Paris and fills his Los Angeles house with French antiques appreciates the different lifestyles he has in each of his adopted cities.

“L.A. is beautiful, but I almost feel a little bit like I’m on holiday when I’m in L.A. Because it’s otherworldly. It’s just so green and it’s so sunny and it’s so warm and it very rarely -- except for this year -- rains.”

At home in Hancock Park, he says, “I’m much more of a homebody. I spend much more time fixing my home or working in the gardens. In L.A., the paper comes to my house and you’ve been to the grocery store. I mean, you could not leave your house for months in L.A. Here, the first thing I do in the morning is go out and buy my croissants and the newspaper.”

McDonnell turns every trip to a foreign country into a decorating treasure hunt. He rented an empty loft while working in Prague on “Shanghai Nights” so that he could furnish it. In South Africa on his last movie, “Racing Stripes,” he collected arts and crafts, but no furniture. He is currently in development on several projects, including a love story set during the Chicago fire of 1871. But without a definite movie on the horizon, he plans to return to France for the summer -- accompanied by his five dogs.

Buying the larger apartment and the country house is all part of a five-year plan to move to France full time, he says, adding that he still imagines himself retiring in Southern California. “As much as I love the movie business, I’ve been doing it for 25 years,” he says. “I can see another career for me.”

Decorator? Antique dealer?

“I’d hate to take away the joy I get shopping for furniture and antiques and make it a vocation,” he says. “But I could see myself getting into the real estate business. I just love looking at French real estate.”

In the meantime, he contents himself with seven or eight trips a year, spending up to four months annually in France.

“I’ll probably take another five years to finish this apartment,” he says, leaning back on his sofa, looking around. “I’ll change the artwork,” he predicts, noting that a nearby wall adorned with just one small painting of Paris’ Place de la Concorde, circa 1840, could use some attention.

“I have a place for this table in L.A. that will really work,” he says, motioning to his twisted-rod iron coffee table while possibly mentally jamming it into the closet of an aircraft, “so I’m trying to figure out how to get that home.”