“I want people to read the houses that I design like a book,” says Aurélien Gallet. “Each room is like a chapter, with its own distinct identity. But everything fits together in the end.”

In his native France, his surname means “the rooster”— an inside joke that inspired Gallet’s rooster-shaped company logo. Certainly, this interior designer has plenty to crow about. No sooner had he established his own interior design firm, Aurélien Gallet LLC, based in New York, earlier this year, then he was selected for several high-profile honors: he was asked to design rooms at both the 2011 Kips Bay Show House and the 2011 Hamptons Designer Showhouse, and he was chosen as one of ELLE DECOR’s “Designers to Watch” for 2011 and invited to create a room for the magazine’s Modern Life Concept House.

Gallet grew up in Normandy and the south of France, surrounded by historic architecture, fine art, rare objects, and antique furniture. As a boy, he attended a French boarding school housed in a sixteenth-century Renaissance castle and it was there that he developed a passion for architecture, design and fine art. “The school was very strict, but the atmosphere was phantasmagoric. It was there that I learned to draw, paint and sculpt,” he says.

After graduating from university with degrees in law and art history, Gallet moved to Paris where he earned a certificate in art appraisal, while completing an internship at Tajan, the leading French auction house. He then moved to New York where, over the course of the last decade, he worked for two leading international interior design firms.

As the director of the antiques and decorative arts department for a renowned decorating firm, Gallet worked on significant residential projects in both North and South America. He then became the director of a major international interior design firm based in New York and Paris, where he managed a staff of forty and completed large-scale residential projects throughout the Americas, Europe, Russia and the Middle East, supervising and approving all of the architecture and interior designs.

During this time, he hired and collaborated with some of the best artisans in the world as well as selecting furniture, antiques and fine art from the world’s leading dealers and auction houses. Gallet was involved in the interior design of a royal palace in Qatar, a palace in Moscow, a Manhattan townhouse on Sutton Place, and a beach house in Malibu.

With the establishment of his own interior design firm, Gallet is currently working on several luxurious commissions around the world, including a downtown loft and an Upper East Side apartment in New York City, an oceanfront house in the Caribbean, as well as an apartment in Paris.

Aurélien Gallet’s holistic philosophy of design begins with the architecture of a space. “I create the box”, he says. “I’ll design everything, from the architecture to the paneling to the floors and the furniture. What’s important for me is to create a sense of volume, proportion and balance.”

When it comes to interior design, Gallet’s unique interpretation of Modernity is cultivated by a combination of references of the past and contemporary creations leading to an avant-garde sense of design. The dreamlike sophistication and sexiness of his interiors is fed by the marriage of edgy art works, antique and contemporary elements, while at the same time always pushing the boundaries of style. “I like to use pieces from different periods,” he says, “but what’s important to me is that they all speak the same language. I look for connections between objects, whether it is in their lines, materials, or their history.”