by Cecil Beaton
The arrangement of these almost empty boiseried rooms is modern in spirit, yet the furniture consists of the most rare and wonderful eighteenth-century pieces. On the parquet floor polished like glass is an antique vase of stone filled with the heads of white lilac, a table of exquisite charm and proportions is graced with a fragment of a Greek sculpture, one stalwart lily sprouts from a Chinese pot on a shelf, while the head of a Buddha on a column casts its carefully arranged shadow onto a curved screen. An enormous divan, upholstered in white satin, is strewn with a rug of pale-coloured fur and cushions of champagne-coloured velvet. Madame Toussaint’s wonderful canopied bed is hung with a heavy satin that is neither white nor blue nor grey, but is all these colours, and of a consistency that combines the richness of Devonshire cream with the rigidity of metal. This apartment is purity itself, the millionaire’s equivalent to the extreme simplicity of the cottage room with a cane chair and a pot of geraniums. Being the combination of an artists’s and a collector’s sensibility, the result is highly intellectual. In her jewellery Madame Toussaint reveals her voluptuous sensibility, and in the superb quality of the wine and food over which she presides. They are the gourmet’s delight, revealing this unusual awareness that man does not live by thought alone.
Madame Toussaint is a typical example of the catholic taste of the French. A jeweller by vocation, she demonstrates her skill in these allied arts of living. One marvels, indeed, that the French have been able to maintain such standards of creativity in the difficulties of a post-war world. Most western European capitals, even at this late date, are far from recuperated in their manifestations of luxury.
ARTURO LOPEZ-WILSHAW
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of luxury to keep alive today is the large-scale decoration of private houses. Yet this enterprise still flourishes in Paris, where in spite of perpetual economic upheavals a handful of régisseurs seem to have large enough coffers to bring about great wonders of building and ornamentation.
Happily, there is no lack of craftsmen as well. Perhaps only France can today boast of skilled workers who excel at eighteenth-century carving or are willing to apply a hundred coats of paint before they have acquired the exact tonality that is required. Such men are artists in their own right, appreciative of various nuances, and they applaud rather than condemn the master’s æsthetic integrity when he refuses to accept a second best as substitute, tenaciously clinging to his ideals of perfection.
Above all cities, contemporary Paris still boasts those survivors of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries—the rich patrons who are themselves dilettante architects, capable of producing results alone or hand in hand with their own architect. The Vicomte Charles de Noailles and Monsieur Charles de Beistegui, for example, work with Emilio Terry, a rich South American architect of consummate skill and taste, who has a reverence for the Greek simplicities. Arturo Lopez-Wilshaw, in conjunction with Paul Rodocanachi, built additions to the Rodocanachi house at Neuilly. Together they created a miniature Versailles. Since Mr. Rodocanachi’s death Mr. Lopez-Wilshaw has worked with Georges Geffroy, who has a practical sense, an uncanny taste in objets d’art, and a flair for discovering the rarest pieces of furniture.
Since Mr. Lopez-Wilshaw is, I believe, a South American of great wealth, he has been able to devote much of his time to the search for unique pieces, and his knowledge has become infallible. If his taste treads little new ground in its grandeur of style and perfection of theatrical effect, it at least continues to keep open the path trodden by Largillière and Cécile Sorel in the style of Louis Quatorze. To look at the house in Neuilly, one can hardly believe this transformation scene is of recent development. The very fact that contemporary workmen have been trained to work in shell decoration and are quite capable of duplicating a ballroom with eighteenth-century rocaille is in itself an astonishing feat. Likewise, the yacht in which Mr. and Mrs. Lopez-Wilshaw sail the Mediterranean Sea, with its ormolu, chinoiserie, and its furniture the work of maîtres ébénistes must be unique in the history of navigation.
Mr. Geffroy has also had a helping hand as advisor and sleuth in the imaginative metamorphosis that has recently taken place in the apartment of young Baron de Rédé at the beautiful Hôtel Lambert, which was built on the Isle Saint-Louis in 1640 by Le Vau, the King’s architect. Voltaire observed that “it is the house of a sovereign who would like to be a philosopher.”
In his principal apartments the note of splendour is given the slightly wry expression of today.
In the Gallery of Hercules (whose ceiling was painted by Lebrun before Versailles had even been started) innumerable balls and fetes have been given since its walls of gilded stucco were completed by Van Obstal. It can never be seen to better advantage than today, with its powder-blue chairs, monumental sculpture and candelabra, and the dinner table set in all its splendour for fifty covers. When the frail and good-looking young Baron entertains, dozens of chefs in their tall white hats can be seen through a window as the guests mount, from the Court of Honour, the stone staircase. On these occasions the Meissen porcelain is in use, orchids and yellow roses are sprayed with artificial dew, and at intervals footmen rush forward over the parquet with the next course of the Lucullan banquet. The effect is far from suggesting that the assembled guests are living in the century of the average man.
In Paris, also, the American-born Princess Chavchavadze has a knack of making a splendid setting for herself. Her houses, of similar appearances, contain her opulent collection of French and Russian pieces. But she brings such discretion and taste to assembling a room, as well as adding the comforts of England and America, that the general effect is neither overpowering nor vulgar in its richness, conveying rather an impression of warmth and cosiness.
In England the taste of the elite is more rugged. Attentions to detail are more cursory. Yet, whereas present-day difficulties preclude the spending of vast sums on interior alterations, gardens are cultivated with more relish than ever.
Among those who energetically flout all contemporary obstacles or disparagements, Mrs. Nancy Tree (who is somewhat of an exception to the rule, bringing an indefatigable eye to detail) has a talent for sprucing up a stately but shabby home and making a grand house appear less grand. She has an adequate reverence for tradition, observes the rules of style and proportion, and manifests a healthy disregard for the sanctity of “important” furniture. Unless it can be used as grist to her particularly effervescing mill and be integrated with a livable, gay, and pretty ensemble, she will have no scruples about changing its colour or discarding it. Her love of colour, her flower sense, and her feeling for comfort have brought a welcome American touch to many an English house sorely in need of such ministrations.
Since the war Paris has given rise to one particular kind of interior-decorating taste that has not yet infiltrated into England or America. It is even doubtful whether such a taste could flourish outside France, for it is the height of super-sophistication.
The aim of those who have this acquired predilection is to assume character rather than an effect that is pleasing to the eye; and the character must be of a stolid nature. Certain objects and colours are given prominence because, while they might seem ugly from one point of view, they have the virtue of being able to evoke the period of security enjoyed from 1860 to 1900.
The general intention is thus a slightly cynical reversion to a period when the general level of taste was admittedly bad, “flair” was unknown, and artistry denied. In those days of Victorian France, the gardener had charge of indoor floral arrangements and the butler was responsible for the look of the dining table. Comfort was cushioned (often on leather cushions), curtains were chosen primarily to keep out the chill of winter, and carpets were likewise selected for their effect of warmth.
This taste is epitomized with certain piccalilli-coloured or pale soup-green majolica pots of the nineteenth century and plates representing a sunflower or pansy, baked into a heavy ochre or restrained mauve. It is a cult for
the sobriety of the nineties, when nobody thought in terms of decoration, except to believe that clear colours were lacking in reserve and that it was unrewarding to follow carefully the earlier traditional styles of former periods. Individuality found expression in the stuffed animal’s head hanging in the hall, a trophy of some personal hunting expedition. Or private taste might at best be reflected in the silver-rimmed drinking cup that had been converted from the horn of a favourite old heifer.
In its most advanced terms this revived æsthetic is to be found in the house of the family of seed merchants, the Vilmorins. The three Vilmorin brothers and their sister, the writer and poet Louise de Vilmorin, indefatigable detectives of objects that express their particular brand of beauty, have created a dun-coloured world at Verrières, their seventeenth-century house outside Paris. Verrières is so raffiné and recherché that, by comparison, it makes grandiose taste seem somewhat conventional. The Vilmorin atmosphere is one of the poetic perversity combined with a well-to-do nostalgia for the joys and the unhappiness of the day nursery and the schoolroom of forgotten foggy days. Each of the rooms has its own calculated atmosphere: some are consciously lowering in their effect, some fraught with a particular form of melancholy; but none is spontaneous, brightly coloured, or gay.
Verrières is the house of memories of a united and strangely original family. Each brother has his own highly developed ego, yet none of them is ever in disagreement with each other or with their adoring and adored but egocentric sister. It is the house of people of high sensitivity—a mansion of botanists, a fortress calculated to give its occupants the maximum feeling of security, moral comfort, and invulnerability.
The ordinary person would not consider Verrières at all out of the ordinary. But for others it is unique. Louise Vilmorin regards it as a house which, decorated in a mixture of styles of the Second Empire, 1860, 1914, and 1925, succeeds in being the most luxurious expression of poverty. Everything at Verrières is significant. The sisters says in explanation: “It means that we still love and revere our grandmother and could never treat her house in a way she would not have liked. It means, ‘How can we throw out that ugly table of Father’s when we remember so well his sitting against the lamp which made a halo round his head and cast a shadow on that green tablecloth?’ It means a brother taking his sister by the hand and saying, ‘Do you remember when we bought that china donkey carrying those flower containers?’ Every room is haunted with souvenirs that mean so much. The silver filigree duck from Yugoslavia means a day of rain, or sunlight, or how you cried.”
Like memory itself, the house has little colour; it is a house in daguerreotype, with walls the colour of egg shells, pale brown or blue or pale green, illuminated by old electric light fixtures that provide a gentle, warm golden glow. The vases of tutti flori might have been made by Fantin-Latour. There are rich but subdued colourings for the plush cushions and the carpeted sofas. Often the family conducts La Veillée sitting in rows in the living room, with the three brothers and sister, their wives and children (ranging from thirteen to twenty-five) watching their father play solitaire. The scene might have been painted by the Victorian Guernotte or Béraud, whose exquisite conversation pieces hang upon the walls.
Among the naturalized Parisian decorators, Charles de Beistegui, a Spaniard who spends part of the year in Paris, London, New York, or Venice, is a rare phenomenon in our time. He is a man of fashion with an artistic integrity, a knowledge of architecture, furniture, objets d’art, and a seemingly endless fortune with which to indulge his talent for assembling luxurious houses. Wherever he may be, he is perpetually adding to his collection.
CHARLES DE BEISTEGUI
In the thirties de Beistegui indulged himself in the frivolities of baroque decoration with as much enjoyment as anyone in his world. His rooftop apartment in the Champs Elysées was a dazzling hodgepodge of Napoleon III, Le Corbusier modernism, mechanism, and surrealism. Not since Louis of Bavaria had there been so many candelabra in one room; Catherine of Russia never had so many gold boxes on one table. Certainly never before had anyone seen the like of de Beistegui’s terrace. After mounting a white spiral staircase, the visitor pressed an electric button that caused a glass wall to roll back. Thus was revealed a terrace that overlooked the traffic and the lights of the Champs Elysées. It was furnished with Louis Quinze furniture that had been painted white and placed on a grass carpet open to the sky. In this fantastic apartment, mirrors, in all their narcissistic forms, were used for decoration: on the top of the long dining table, for festoons of stylized drapery shrouding windows or doorways.
A giant statue of a black woman with shoots of ostrich feathers on her turbaned head stood like a Saxe figuring between a phalanx of crystal girandoles. A baroque rocking horse, harnessed with precious jewels, pranced among obelisks of porphyry. The effect upon the visitor must have been like that on the very young and impressionable Cinderella when arriving at the Prince’s ball.
As in every interior de Beistegui created, his aim was achieved with this fantasy. Yet this was a phase that did not give de Beistegui opportunity to show his real flair. As soon as blackamoors, baroque festoons of mirror curtains, and plaster arabesques started to find their way into less exclusive surroundings, his taste revolted against theatrical “chi-chi” and the pink-and-white flamboyancy by which he had been influenced. He discarded them overnight.
Charles de Beistegui is a pasticheur par excellence, his forte being the re-creation of an atmosphere of any specific place or age. More often than not, his intention is to produce character rather than to create loveliness. Instead of a cretonne gracefully strewn with sweet peas, he will prefer a chintz of tight-packed bunches of stiff violets to go into a bedroom with a viridian green carpet. His choice of Paisely-covered walls with travelling-rug curtains and black woollen loose covers, his adept use of mouldy strawberry, mustard, and chutney colours are intended less to compliment the eye than to create a desired emotional effect of Victorian stability and heavy comfort. Charles de Beistegui strikingly reveals how atmosphere can be created by the choice of certain colours. His colour sense is highly cultivated and always some years in advance of the public. Today he prefers sombre colours—blue-greens, slate greys, royal blue, mud, deep crimson, and black. When he uses pale blue, it is as an exclamation mark in the melancholy surroundings.
De Beistegui’s taste is essentially masculine: bold, uncompromising, sometimes even slightly acrid. When he hangs the walls of a drawing room with a Philippe de Lasalle silk that has been woven for him from the loom originally set for Marie Antoinette, the result is a room very obviously decorated with a man’s restraint, though women may certainly look their best in it. Flowers do not play an important part in de Beistegui’s rooms and are rarely seen, except on the patterns of silks, china, or chintzes. Nor do these rooms rely on “finishing touches”: they are as complete in the morning as when lit for a party.
Charles de Beistegui’s love of the English taste dates from his years at Oxford University. He has always been impressed by the comfort and luxury of the grand Victorian house in the English countryside, with the boiling-hot water in a brass jug wrapped in a linen towel on the washstand, and the folding mahogany steps, covered with carpeting, that lead up to the high brass bed with its mahogany-encased chamber pot underneath. The carpeted bathrooms furnished with pictures, the huge bathtub encased in wood, the vast Turkish towel placed in readiness on the wickerwork chair, the heavily studded green baize doors leading to the servants’ quarters, and the “silver” room where the family plate was on display behind the grained wood doors of the cupboards—all these aspects of the large country house have always had an undying fascination for him. He is obsessed by the old houses that bear traces of the tastes and habits of successive generations, and he has succeeded in re-creating this effect at Groussay, his country house outside Paris. Here he has mixed the styles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with those of the Empire, Second Empire, and Restoration. The vast library
with circular mahogany staircases leading to the gallery two stories high, the billiard room and the bedrooms done up in chintz and tartan create an atmosphere of Czarist Russia and late Victorian England.
For many years now Charles de Beistegui’s science and talent as a decorator have been celebrated, and it is undoubtedly he who has been the instigator of the current renewal in France of “le goût anglais.” De Beistegui never asks advice of others; his opinions are firm and independent. Yet his imagination allows him to renew ceaselessly the schemes and the discoveries which give life and variety to all his houses. Charles de Beistegui has never been interested in decorating professionally, but to prove that he can make a delightful setting without spending large sums of money he transformed an apartment in the New York hotel in which he spent one winter by the most simple and effective means.
Perhaps some of de Beistgui’s decorating is cold, without soul or heart, and one suspects that he possesses a secret disregard for quality. He possesses much magnificent furniture signed by the great cabinetmakers of France, but for a certain position in some room he often prefers to make a large, bad table rather than buy a good one. He will happily mix imitation classical statuary with the superb ormolu and mahogany of Roentgen; paintings seem to be decoration and not art when hung on the walls of his room.
As the years pass, his taste becomes more classical. Perhaps in order to protect himself he now chooses a scheme of decoration that it is impossible to copy. His Paris apartment in the Rue de Constantine is furnished with audacious sumptuousness that could be seen today almost nowhere else except in a museum. The grand salon, with red, black, and blue as its key colours, with a painted trompe-l’oeil ceiling twenty-four feet above, has six tall windows hung with black fringed curtains. The sculpture and furniture are of gigantic proportions. The dining room has a more simple and poetical atmosphere, with its pale grey walls around a green-velvet-covered table set out with a Saxe service of the eighteenth century. Its high-backed leather chairs and its elongated emptiness are based on the picture where the young Mozart plays the clavichord during the thé à l’anglaise at the Prince de Conti’s.
