‘Mona Lisa’ Is Moving to a New Home. The Louvre Just Announced the Architects Who Will Design Her Private Suite

Visitors will be able to view Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece without touring the rest of the Louvre, and visitor traffic at the museum will be able to grow by three million people annually

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

May 19, 2026 2:27 p.m.

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French officials chose an international team of architects to usher the Louvre into a “new Renaissance,” with an overhaul that may add up to $1 billion aimed at addressing crowd control, security and infrastructure needs at the world’s busiest art museum.

Selldorf Architects, a New York-based firm, will team up with Studios Architecture Paris to lead an ambitious renovation and expansion, the French Ministry of Culture announced this week. The architects were chosen from a group of five finalists selected in October from a larger pool of more than 100 applicants.

The winning design is “respectful and contemporary” and will create “an elegant connection between the city, the palace and the museum,” Catherine Pégard, France’s minister of culture, says in a statement, per Mark Landler for the New York Times.

The project centers around a redesign of the plaza at the “Grande Colonnade,” the museum’s eastern facade, which was built in the 17th century in the classical tradition with giant coupled columns.

Pégard highlighted the winning design’s envisioned symmetry for this facade, which will feature two new underground entrances, expanded exhibition space, dining areas and gift shops. New pathways and greenery connecting the museum with the rest of Paris aim to solve the museum’s growing foot traffic problem by accommodating an estimated three million more visitors per year. The Louvre currently receives about nine million guests a year.

The firm will also be tasked with reimagining the display of the Louvre’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The work, which alone attracts an average of about 20,000 visitors each day, per Le Monde, will receive a custom-built 33,000 square-foot exhibition space. The new gallery will allow people to view the painting without necessarily visiting the rest of the museum, a change that officials hope will further cut down on crowding. Information about Leonardo and the painting’s history will help fill the massive room.

Mona Lisa’s current gallery is frequently mobbed.

“Every day, this very room is the scene of intense agitation,” Laurence des Cars, the museum’s former director, said at the press conference, according to the Washington Post’s Ellen Francis last year. “Exceptional visitor numbers are not a curse, they’re a source of pride. … It’s also a challenge to reinvent ourselves and remain faithful to our public service mission.”

The Mona Lisa expansion is expected to be completed in 2031, per the Washington Post, and will cost at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who announced the Louvre projects in January 2025, has responded to complaints about the price tag by making clear that renovating the Louvre is a matter of national importance and cultural pride. The museum lately has had to grapple with the high-profile heist of French crown jewels in October, which spurred subsequent reports of security deficiencies. In December, water leaks damaged between 300 and 400 artworks, while another leak caused tears in a painting in February, BBC News’ Anna Lamche and Marianne Baisnee reported.

There is a recent precedent in Paris for restoring beloved cultural institutions to their former glory. Macron has referenced the renovation of Notre-Dame Cathedral after a devastating fire in 2019 as an inspiration for the Louvre initiative.

“Notre-Dame has been a catalyst for our architecture and arts and crafts,” Macron said in a January 2025 address, standing in front of the Mona Lisa, according to a translation from French by the Associated Press. “This new Renaissance project for the Louvre must be for art history and its transmission, a new stage in the life of the nation.”

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Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.