Tea at Trianon: Jacques Grange's Storied Paris Apartment

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, December 14, 2019

Jacques Grange's Storied Paris Apartment

From Architectural Digest:

Fifteen years later, after Madame Goudeket had died, Grange was able to purchase the 1,400-square-foot flat from the estate. But like Colette before him, he longed for the roost above; it had an unobstructed view over the squared-off linden trees to the historic Comédie-Française theater. Two years ago, he bought it and made a duplex, with spiral stairs inspired by the curling Man Ray chandelier in his entrance hall. “I’m very proud of the staircase,” he said. “It looks like a sculpture.”

There was other major work to be done. On the lower floor, he replaced the leaky Belle Époque verrière with a new Cubist-style one after the Robert Mallet-Stevens–designed Villa Noailles in Hyères, and converted Colette’s (and his) bedroom into a guest room. Upstairs, he reorganized the flow of the 1,000-square-foot space so natural light could sweep through.

“To have lightness is so peaceful,” he said. From his beach house in Comporta, Portugal, he traveled throughout the southern Iberian Peninsula to collect neoclassical tiles—some glazed with sponge smears in plum, chestnut, and pine, which he used for the master bath, powder room, and fireplace, and others with classic blue-and-white geometric designs, which now enrobe the entrance hall.

Then he filled the home with art, photography, and furnishings that are meaningful to him—usually by or of people he has known or admired. Like the string of photographs of French arts patron Marie-Laure de Noailles—by Man Ray, Dora Maar, and George Hoyningen-Huene, respectively—above the library sofa (de Noailles was also a friend of Bergé and Saint Laurent), and a soot-tinted tableau of a Paris artist’s atelier by Bernard Buffet, Bergé’s lover before Saint Laurent. It is poised over a sweet still life of buttercups by Grange chum Andy Warhol. “They go very well together, yes?” Grange mused. Next to them is a Marc Newson sculpted-marble console, and in the entrance hall, a pair of “little wire chairs” from Madeleine Castaing’s Chateau de Lèves, near Chartres, that he picked up at her estate sale. (Read more.)