Castaing Outtakes - Take #1

There have been a few whisperings as to whether The World of Madeleine Castaing will have any unfamiliar material in it - after all her country house Lèves has been profiled dozens of times. I believe there will be more than a few surprising moments in the book, but the verdict, of course, will rest with you. Here is the first of a few or several posts with photos that weren't able to make it into the book.

One of the most important and first client relationships Madeleine had was with Mme Alec Weisweiller. While her husband was off watching his prized stable of horses win blue ribbons, Francine assumed the mantle of patroness, with Jean Cocteau as her prime benefactor.

Madeleine collaborated with Francine on all her residences, including the Paris hotel particulier pictured here. Francine's husband Alec preferred the established elegance of the eighteenth century to Madeleine's Balzacian romance, so the society decorator brothers Barroux were called in to fit out the main reception rooms, including the dining room and salon.

But elsewhere, Francine and Madeleine went wild. The top photo shows Francine posing in her red silk velvet bedroom. Don't miss the "borne" off to her left.

courtesy Maison et Jardin, February 1956

Here is the fumoir where guests repaired after dinner or stopped off on their way to the double-height bar below. The mouflon-head snuff box on the tray table terrified Francine's young daughter Carole.

Who says Facebook is a time sink? I found this photo, credited to Mark Shaw, c. 1960, on Fashion Images of the 20th Century - a great place to while away an hour or two.

Los Angeles April 24 Lecture: Madeleine Castaing and Le Style Malmaison

My first MC lecture!

Madeleine Castaing and Le Style Malmaison
While many were drumming to the beat of modernism, French antiquaire and decorator Madeleine Castaing created her own look that was a unique blend of Neoclassicism, Proustian Romanticism, and pure wit. EEE will discuss the elements of the Castaing style along with a look at her fellow traditionalists, including Emilio Terry and Charles de Beistegui, who found great inspiration in historical styles.

Details:
Friday, April 24th, 4:00 PM
Los Angeles Antiques Show
Barker Hangar at Santa Monica Air Center
$15 admission to show includes lecture

Living with Castaing: John Woodrow Kelley



Madeleine Castaing has inspired so many people and what I find fascinating is how different all these people are and how each one resonates to something quite different.  Charlotte Moss brought to life MC's retailing skills, Jacques Grange gave me an entirely new lens when he said it was all about architecture, and my new friend John Woodrow Kelley, a classicist through and through, surprised me completely.

The Allegory of Classical Architecture, 1998, by John Woodrow Kelley

After training as an architect, John continued on to become a painter whose work is a contemporary interpretation of the Classical tradition.  It can be no coincidence that he hails from Tennessee, whose capital Nashville is home to the only full-scale replica of the Parthenon in the world. 

MC's bath in her Paris apartment

 When John heard of my MC book, he didn't enthuse over the coffered vaulting above her bath reminiscent of the Baths of Caracalla or some such Classical detail. No - what John astonished me by saying was that Madeleine Castaing gave us permission to be romantic!  Indeed the creation of a mood, of atmosphere, is just as important in the experience of a space as pleasing proportions and scale are.  So for those of you who think Classicism or Classical architects are hardened to the possibilities of the picturesque, think again.

John found this pair of lamps complete with Coolie shades a la Castaing at a flea market



A mantelpiece arrangement in Castaing's rue Jacob shop - in the center is a photograph of a young Madeleine looking adoringly at her husband Marcellin; photo by Jean-Francois Jussaud 



Click here to visit John's Brooklyn residence courtesy of New York Social Diary.

A view of John's sitting room where he is magically able to arrange 6 people for dinner around the center table

Top photo with John sitting next to a Castaing blue shade found at Just Shades and bottom photo by Jeff Hirsch courtesy of nysocialdiary.com

Life after Castaing: Chez Harry Heissmann

Harry Heissmann's living room, featuring a pair of Castaing brackets, photo by Russell Gera

Madeleine Castaing didn't buy Important or Fine French Furniture, but rather what charmed her.  This pair of brackets in the form of tree branches captured her fancy and found a home at her fairy-tale Leves.  Years later when her estate was sold off, they also captured dashing designer Harry Heissmann's and here they are in installed today in his Brooklyn Heights flat. (That he lives in the most fabulous neighborhood in the city is enough evidence of his excellent taste to my mind; Harry also spent years working for the master of the refined, Albert Hadley.)

another view, photo by Russell Gera

Madeleine's quirky side would no doubt have found his snail table very amusing. 

As installed by Madeleine in the dining room of Leves - do you think the plant is plastic? I do.

Many thanks to Harry for giving us a glimpse into his personal world.  And another big thank you to Habitually Chic for including MC and EEE in her Fall Book Brigade.

Paris Report: A Proustian Madeleine

O, the things I saw, the people I met, and the café crèmes I drank!

Without a doubt, the absolute highlight of my Castaing fact-finding trip to Paris was visiting MC's former apartment at the intersection of the rues Jacob and Bonaparte. The current owner purchased a few select items from the estate, including the stove in the above photo which remains in its original position.* A wild bit of information I picked up - apparently furniture designer Eileen Gray lived in the apartment right next to MC's with their front doors just inches apart - can you imagine?!

MC's shop was located directly beneath the apartment and is now the premises of the venerable tea room Laduree. It was decorated by Roxana Rodriguez as an homage to MC...

and as you can see in this photo I surreptitiously snapped of the upper floor, some elements were preserved, such as these biscuit plaques

which were mounted by MC when she had this space installed as a bedroom.


If you've read anything about MC, you know that she loved to read Balzac and Proust and that she intentionally created a romantic atmosphere that recalled the poetic settings both writers so lyrically described. This made a visit to the Maison de Balzac museum, located in the tony if quiet 16th arrondisement, a must.

Balzac only lived here for a short period to escape his creditors and overall it was a bit disappointing. However, I did come across this stove which sparked all sorts of connections....

It seems l'esprit Castaing is truly in the air. While walking down the rue d'Assas, we espied these window vignettes installed by a young designer.



Codimat, the premiere carpet manufacturers who have the exclusive rights to the Castaing designs, will soon be launching new document MC patterns which will knock your socks off.

If there's one thing I learned on this trip, it's that there are many layers to the Castaing myth to peel back and that one visit is but a start. How very lucky am I.


* You may remember that the divine Patricia van Essche suggested I track down a pair of sizzling red gloves like the pair MC is wearing in her photo by the stove. I found my pair chez Alexandra Sojfer on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Although more tourists than Parisians patronize Sojfer's boutique, it is definitely worth a visit. Her family purchased Madeleine Gely, Paris' oldest umbrella shop, and Sojfer takes great care in preserving the high level of artisanry.

She is also constantly changing the interior and windows of the shop. This visit it was all fuschia and hunter green and reminded us of the eye-popping sets of the 1964 cinematic feast The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

The World of Madeleine Castaing Launched and Set Sail

 

Last night friends, colleagues and family turned out to help me celebrate the publication of The World of Madeleine Castaing.   The Haughtons along with Bruce Addison, Maureen Footer and Charlotte Moss generously hosted the launch party which took place in the International Show's Glorious Food Cafe.

The hosts of the evening: Maureen Footer, Bruce Addison, and Charlotte Moss

Beth and her team from Potterton Books kept me on track...

...which I needed because it was too much fun talking to everyone...

...like the extremely stylish and renowned milliner Rod Keenan and connoisseur Philip Hewat-Jaboor

Pigs in blankets and miniature grilled cheese sandwiches from Glorious Food kept everyone happy as did the absolutely delicious and refreshing special cocktail of the evening, the Cointreau Blush, courtesy of Remy Cointreau.

1. Put ice into a tall glass
2. Add 30ml Cointreau
3. Add 10ml Lime juice
4. Top with 60ml Pink grapefruit
5. Finish with 70ml Soda
6. Stir well
7. Add a lime wedge as a garnish

Thank you to everyone who came - it was thrilling meeting other kindred members of the cult of Castaing!  And a special thank you to Magda Grigorian and the International Show for a most splendid evening.

Originally posted on the International Show Blog.

Living with Castaing: Charlotte Moss



Charlotte Moss in her Upper East Side garden - MC would have adored this indoor/outdoor space; photo by Mark Heithoff

A few years ago, I sat behind design doyenne Charlotte Moss at a screening of a Madeleine Castaing documentary and by her expression, it was clear that Moss was a Castaing devotee.  Ever since, I have been dying to hear CM's thoughts on MC and by the end of our conversation,  I was left inspired and energized by this intrepid traveler of style. 

EEE: When did you have your first Castaing experience?

CM: Oh my gosh. It was probably on one of my first trips to Paris in the early 80s. I nearly stumbled on her shop. She was in there, in the store sitting in a corner. 
 
There were some things I was interested in and I introduced myself. She acknowledged that, we chatted and that was that. And then I probably saw her a couple of other times when I was on trips. For me, she was such a goddess and her store was like being in a temple.

The Bibliotheque at Leves: Moss carried off the Napoleon III X-form chairs and the reading stand in the archway

Castaing chic for everyone!  Moss  had this quintessentially Castaing chair reproduced

She was famous for refusing to sell things. 

There were no prices on anything. Remember, she was the first one who ever did a shop where – it’s tough to even call it a shop – it doesn’t do it justice...  It was if you walked into someone’s salon and it felt like you were intruding. It was almost like you had gone to someone’s house and you got busted opening the medicine cabinet or caught opening a drawer, you know what I mean?

And she would have a fire going and a tea cup perched here and there...

She was having tea in some mistmatched number – fabulous – I thought – oh my God – my grandmother did that! And French women do it too. All these things start to line up for you. When your grandmother did it, well of course that was your grandmother and when your parent tells you something, you think yeah, yeah, yeah – but when you see someone else do it, it’s immediately validated.

Were you able to buy things from her?

I don’t remember if I actually bought anything – maybe a pair of candlestick lamps with shades. I remember I was interested in a screen one time and she had some fabulous ceramics… that would have been the kind of thing I would have bought. I wouldn’t have bought any upholstered furniture because the prices were crazy. But years later I did end up buying things at the auction.

One of a pair of stools embroidered with Madeleine and Charlotte's initials by longtime Castaing employee Laure Lombardini who pretty much did all of MC's needlework; photo by Francis Hammond

The thing that I wanted but I had with good sense to stop in the bidding was the pair of stools with the blue checkerboard needlepoint with MC in the middle – those are the opposite of my initials.

Some people look at her style today and see a zany grandmother, maybe a little fuddy duddy....

You have to look at everything in its period and in its time and then to understand how a person may reflect their time. And sometimes they might be ahead of their time.  

There’s no fuddy-duddy grandma about Castaing. She was an original.  She first said that everything has to have heart in it. She had courage, she wasn’t going to work for anyone she didn’t like.

She set her own rules….

Yes, she set her own rules. I know a lot of decorators who think that is heresy. They think that if they’re on the other end of the phone and someone calls them, they have to work for them – well, how could anything of beauty come from that? She just said no. She had a mind of her own. There’s no fuddy duddiness. She put no price tags on things because she didn’t sell things to people she didn’t like.

Did she influence you as a retailer?

Oh yes.  You learned that it was all about atmosphere, seduction, selection, and details.



A pair of opaline cachepots from the Castaing sale in Moss' bedroom; photo by Pieter Estersohn


Your Townhouse really had that in spades.

It's about setting the mood. Those little moments you can create, those little vignettes – I don’t care if it is a tabletop vignette inside a bookcase - every surface, vertical or horizontal, was an opportunity to inspire, to entice, to make people stop, and think – take note. Engage them. And that to me is 90% of retailing. Because when it comes right down to it, the stuff is coming from the same places, so it’s what you do with the stuff that distinguishes you.

You’re inspiring me right now!

Right now everyone is over in France at Maison Objets looking at the same objets – what are they going to do with it all once they get it?

Why is the person going to buy it from you instead of someone else….

Because someone’s going to give them an idea. Someone’s going to tweak it, put it with something.  A a customer, I'm going to keep going back to the store that keeps giving me ideas.

One of the things I appreciate about you is that you find inspiration from past style setters and celebrate them… who is on your radar at the moment?

The large porcelain covered urns in the dining room at Leves...

are now in Moss' study

I can’t think of anyone in particular- I’m closing my latest book and there are women in the book that are always  resonating in my work…more than anything, it is the red thread that connects these women - -  their spirit, energy, curiosity, adventure, generosity is also a big one....

I just had a big discussion last night at a dinner party about the women who traveled in the Middle Eeast, about the Gertrude Bells of the world and a lot of others who are more obscure… My next fabric collection for Fabricut is being named after these women because for me it’s really important that history lives on. And that we keep bringing it forward and find a way to bring it forward in a fresh way.

So these women from the past who were intrepid travelers have nothing to do with my fabric collection at all! But they have something to do with me. And I admire them so this is my opportunity to bring it forward – so when someone asks me why I named it "Florence" or "Isabel", I can say, "Isabel is a woman that…" and I can give them this 2 minute trip down the Amazon….If that inspires someone to pick up that book, then I feel like I did my job, to get someone interested in history.



Moss in her study surrounded by inspiration

As someone who teaches design history, it seems that many inherently find history boring, or even a dirty word!

History is only a dirty word if you're stuck in it.  What people forget oftentimes is that history informs us and that every decision we make today about tomorrow is a better decision with the knowledge of yesterday.  


I've told this story a hundred times:  I had an interview with an editor and they were talking about the line on the legs of a chair – it was a sabre leg. And they went, don’t you think this is incredible? Don’t you think he's the smartest designer? And I said, "have you ever seen the klismos chair?"

Of a thousand years ago…. Wow.

Before you write that one, you need to pick up a history book. But that’s the problem – they all think it’s new. And the same thing in fashion too.

There’s nothing new under the sun.

That’s right. If you really want to learn about construction, study a Balenciaga sleeve, and they just don’t know about that. Without trying to be schoolmarmy, there’s a way to bring the past in – in a soft way – and I hate to say commemorative - but I’ve got to name those fabrics after something!

It seems that in many design schools, the emphasis is on New – and that to call work "beautiful" is almost a put-down - which I find sad.  What's wrong with aiming for beauty?

That’s interesting. Creating beauty, seeing beauty is what I built my business around and I'm not giving up any time soon!

We just put up a couple of articles from my old magazines on charlottemoss.com. The opening line to one is "Nothing of beauty was ever created by anyone afraid of making a mistake." It’s so true.  "What makes a house romantic?" is another article done by Joseph Hudnut who was the Dean of Architecture at Harvard.

Pretty impressive credentials..

Yes, but also responsible for bringing Gropius and Breuer [founders of the Bauhaus] to Harvard! This was a guy with a different aesthetic and here he is talking about romanticism and beauty. I have the 1920 through 1979 issues of House and Garden – I’m up to 1929, going backwards all summer. I totally bonded with the 70s. That was the era when I was in college so I had a little walk down memory lane.

What?!  Are we going to see Charlotte Moss shag carpeting coming soon?

No!  But you will see ikat carpeting this fall.

Can't wait.

A thousand thank yous to Charlotte for sharing her thoughts and enthusiasms. To see what else is on Charlotte's mind and what other vintage articles she's archived, visit her here.

Proust for the New Year

In preparation for my next book, The World of Madeleine Castaing, I have committed to reading Proust's magnum opus In Search of Lost Time. Castaing claimed to have read it a staggering 12 times and undoubtedly his poetic and descriptive prose played a part in Castaing's romantic interiors.

Proust can not be read in brief spurts, jammed into the subway ride on the way to work. It is not that it is intellectually rigorous, but rather that one needs the mental space to savor and meander along with his paragraph-long sentences.

The first volume, Swann's Way, introduces us to Proust's Aunt Leonie whose house (where Proust spent his summers) is conserved today as a museum in Illiers-Combray, France.






As part of my New Year's resolution to read more, I will be tuning out for the next few days and enjoying Proust and his madeleines. Bonne Annee!

All photos © Bernard Annebicque/CORBIS SYGMA

Film Couture: Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne

Brooding, melodramatic, and beautifully styled, the 1945 film Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is a tale of revenge served cold. Auteur Robert Bresson retells the story of Denis Diderot's Madame de la Pommeraye with the help of dialogue by Cocteau and sets furnished with props from Madeleine Castaing's shop.

But what most swept me away was the beyond stunning wardrobe worn by woman-scorned Hélène (played by Maria Casares). Well, no wonder - Alix Grès and Schiaparelli were its creators, and their respective signatures of exquisite draping and wit are reason enough to see this classic.

The plummeting V-neck shows a daring amount of décolleté and is even more exciting in combination with the full-coverage elsewhere. Note the shimmering beaded hem...

which is picked up by this jet necklace...

Note the finally woven mesh scarf thrown over this Grecian goddess gown

Love the dramatic tulle that veils the face then gathers around the neck

another great hat and super strong shoulders.... this dress is intriguingly combined with a cape

and doesn't every fashion show end with a bride? Yes please, Madame Grès...