IN 1953, THE parents of Benoît Rauzy, 53, a co-founder of the design studio Atelier Vime, moved into a timeworn two-floor flat in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The neighborhood — a tangle of streets radiating from the 11th-century Saint-Germain-des-Prés abbey — was in those days a sanctuary for artists, poets and freethinkers, a place where philosophers and writers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir would gather in cafes to share ideas. “There was a deep sense of intellectual freedom,” Rauzy says. His father, a dentist, had an office on the first floor of the six-story early 18th-century building, where he would tend to the neighborhood’s eclectic residents. “Some of them went…