| Madeleine Castaing Review
Madeleine Castaing was to interiors what Diana Vreeland was to fashion. Just as Vreeland would decree, “Bad taste is better than no taste at all!” Castaing was known to say, “Don’t be intimidated by audacity, be audacious, but with taste.” Her wonderful world is amusingly and thoroughly captured in The World of Madeleine CastaingITALS by Emily Evans Erdmann, published this past fall by Rizzoli.
Born in 1894, the famously strong-willed Castaing grew up an hour outside Paris, in Chartres, avidly reading Balzac, Zola and Stendhal, whose romantic stories remained the backbone of her style for the rest of her life. After her marriage to Marcellin Castaing, a wealthy art critic to whom she remained married for 52 years, the couple moved to Paris in the 1920s and were swept up in the avant-garde artistic movement. They became close to such notables as Picasso, Cocteau and Soutine, whose careers they encouraged and supported.
Design entered Madeleine Castaing’s life with the couple’s purchase of Lèves, the former chateau of the Bishop of Chartres. The dilapidated mound became her dream world. She tended to the grounds as meticulously as she did the house, something she would become known for going forward. She also had a talent for bringing nature indoors by using sky blues and foliage greens long before this was a popular palette. During the couple’s second renovation of Lèves (the Germans had taken hold of it for a time during the war), Castaing became a flea-market junkie. She rarely bought an object because it was “good;” instead she bought because something had a story or would simply work well in a room. Le Style CastaingITALICS is a term instantly understood by designers today to reflect Castaing’s love of Napoleon, Empire, Neoclassical and Regency furniture.
She soon amassed so many items that she began reselling them in her own stall at the marché Jules-Vallès. This stall proved so successful that she took it to the next level and opened a store on rue du Cherche-Midi in 1941. Here she revolutionized the way people merchandise, right up to today’s Pottery Barn and Bergdorf Goodman. She decorated the store as if it were a home, and this caught the eye of designers, aristocrats and Hollywood stars alike. As her fame grew she moved her store to 21 rue Bonaparte, causing a scandal by painting the exterior black (later she expanded again by taking over the adjacent shop). While it’s not quite clear when Castaing began formally as an interior decorator, projects began being published in the 1940s.
In the 1950s, she trademarked her own carpet and fabric designs, but it was after her husband died in 1966 that she really became the cult figure of “the style Castaing.” Sporting a chin-strap wig and false eyelashes, she began to brand her eccentricities. Commissions and publicity were at their peak and she became a treasure to the French for the romance and nostalgia that she created.
Castaing died in 1992, but her spirit and design ethos are here to stay. Madame’s world has been discussed for decades, but thanks to Emily Eerdmans's in-depth tome, fans finally have a comprehensive, amusing and colorful collection of her work, life and stories.
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