We are in Louveciennes, not far from Marly, one of Louis XIV’s favourite residences, and within earshot of the great state occasions held at Versailles. Here small lanes are flanked by high walls, with majestic trees rising above them. Mansions hide away in vast grounds, but then suddenly a railing appears and a name engraved on stone: Pavillon de Voisins. In view is a large house lost among the greenery, insignificant and characterless, the perfect place for a reclusive aesthete to stage his imaginary worlds. Karl Lagerfeld was to make this his last refuge, a reflection of his most intimate passions, reserved for himself alone. He never entertained guests here, never held any film shoots; people even wonder if he ever spent the night here.
Lagerfeld may have had ten or 20 houses: we no longer know; did he even know himself? A succession of apartments dispersed around Paris, Rome and New York; a mansion in Faubourg Saint-Germain; an apartment and villa in Monaco and in the Basque country; a château in Brittany; a noble house in Hamburg, the town of his birth. None of the interiors was similar, each of them budding from the aesthetic impulse of the moment before being abruptly erased.
Take Art Deco, which was rediscovered in Paris in the early 1970s. With Andy Warhol and Yves Saint Laurent, Lagerfeld was in the vanguard and the interwar style gradually invaded his apartment in Rue de l’Université. When he moved to a flat on Place Saint-Sulpice, the passion tailed off and his Art Deco sale in 1975 was the first of its kind. ‘I sell my objects when I begin to like them too much. I’m not into possessions,’ he confided at the time.
In his villa in Monaco, as in his house in Le Mée-sur-Seine near Paris, exercises in Louis XV, Gustavian and 1940s style rubbed shoulders. Here Lagerfeld photographed his favourite designs. Still in Monaco, in Le Roccabella building, he invited in the playful creations of Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis Group. In Hamburg, he tried to revive his childhood home at the Villa Jako, an elegant 1930s Neoclassical house in the Peter Behrens style, in which Biedermeier furniture evokes a fantasy family past.
What really carried him away, however, was his deep passion for the French 18th century, those Louis styles that ranged from the wildest rocaille to the strictest Neoclassicism. They allowed him to play the fine gentleman. He was a Francophile from childhood, as he was fond of telling the world: ‘At the age of seven, I fell genuinely in love with a reproduction of a painting by Adolph von Menzel depicting Frederick the Great surrounded by friends, one of them Voltaire, whom he was receiving at Sanssouci. I immediately decided that this elegant and refined scene represented a kind of ideal that I have since endeavoured to achieve.’ It was in his Château de Penhoët in Brittany, and in the Pozzo di Borgo mansion in Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he transformed this dream into reality with the help of art historian Patrick Hourcade.
The final incarnation of his aesthetic journey, the Pavillon de Voisins is a testament above all to his hidden love for his own heritage, the major trends that forged modern Teutonic aesthetics: from the expressionist film sets of Dr Caligari to the clean lines of the Bauhaus, passing through his own discovery: German Art Deco.
This debt to his homeland can already be seen in the blue salon, with several pieces of Biedermeier furniture, a set of Bruno Paul chairs and two remarkable Rosenthal porcelain lamps by Gerhard Schliepstein. These china pieces, like those by Wackerle for Meissen, are probably the finest example of this ‘expressionist’ return to Rococo, one of the curious facets of this German Art Deco. Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier captures a similar nostalgia on stage, and the same impulse gave rise to the casual interiors of Bruno Paul’s Yellow House of 1914.
On the first floor, we find the anxiety-inducing interiors of Dr Caligari and the angular engravings of Schmidt-Rottluff. Oskar Schlemmer engravings evoke his eurythmic vision of the human body exploring space in his Triadic Ballet. All the utopias of the time are aired, from the labyrinth of passions to cosmic escape, while a collection of posters offers a more ironic and allusive vision: that could be the nonchalant follies of Simplicissimus, Munich’s Jugendstil magazine, or Ludwig Hohlwein’s advertising posters. There’s humour too, for Lagerfeld also surrounded himself with all the caricatures that his iconic self brought forth. In such a stimulating atmosphere did this tireless creator set up his offices. He also housed part of his fabulous library in a lodge in the grounds.
But the house would also become the scene for one of his final crazy ideas: the Greek Revivalism of TH Robsjohn-Gibbings. In the 1960s this designer, inspired by red-figure pottery, invented a range of klismos chairs, chaises-longues and tables that he had made in Athens. Lagerfeld accentuated their dry and slender appearance by covering them with a silvery patina that he also applied to a bust from Herculaneum in the hallway. Only a gilded-bronze chandelier by Armand-Albert Rateau, more Pompeian than Greek, tempers this purist manifesto, which extends into the grounds with Nordic cast-iron furniture.
Two calmer spaces evoke antique passions: on the ground floor a salon devoted entirely to the creations of Süe et Mare, under the gaze of a fashionable lady of the court of France by Boutet de Monvel. On the first floor, a small bedroom with a tiny bed, his childhood bedroom perhaps, has retained several paintings of the Pozzo period, including a Renaud Abandonnant Armide by Dufresnoy, and a sketch for the portrait of Bishop Bossuet by Hyacinthe Rigaud, a gift from Liliane de Rothschild; she adored Karl’s passion for the prelate’s sermons, which he was able to recite by heart. It is in this inner sanctum that the picture that never left him and which inspired his aesthetic career hangs discreetly: the famous dinner of Frederick II at Sanssouci by Adolph von Menzel.
A version of this story about Karl Lagerfeld appeared in the September 2021 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
