October 22, 2014Interior designer Pierre Yovanovitch and AD France editor in chief Marie Kalt pose at the preview party for this year’s AD Intérieurs, an annual show house event whose current iteration is at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. (Photo © Cyrille George-Jerusalmi) Top: As its jumping off point, Yovanovitch’s room uses the clean lines of a 1920s Biarritz chair from the museum’s collection. All images © Claire Israël, unless otherwise noted
New York–based designer Bruce Bierman still clearly recalls his first visit to the annual AD Intérieurs show in Paris two years ago. “It left me breathless,” he says. “The range of talent and commitment to creating great spaces was better than anything I’ve ever seen in the States. It was beyond my wildest expectations.”
Opened on September 6 after a jam-packed preview cocktail party the night before, and now in its fifth year, the event is the brainchild of Marie Kalt, the editor in chief of AD France, as in Architectural Digest. As Kalt is the first to admit, designer show houses are nothing new, but AD Intérieurs seems to have taken the concept to another level. “AD France makes it such an event,” enthuses designer Kelly Wearstler. “It’s not just about the design community. It’s so incredibly appealing that a broader audience comes to experience the rooms.”
Last year, that “broader audience” included more than 17,000 people who passed through a show house featuring 14 rooms created by different interior designers from around France. Every year, Kalt handpicks the participants, inviting them to create eye-catching rooms using not only furniture and artworks borrowed from dealers, but also custom pieces manufactured with the help of some of France’s finest craftsmen, such as the fabric house Charles Jouffre and the metalworker Bataillard et Meilleur. “The artisanal quality is just exceptional,” adds Wearstler. “It’s something that really shines through.”
Vincent Darré selected an 18th-century French overmantle still in its packing crate as the jumping off point for his surrealist, pine-paneled living room, whose seating and tables nod to Salvador Dalí.
A connoisseur of 1950s Italian design, Charles Zana conceived his bathing lounge as an homage to ancient Roman and Turkish baths with a contemporary twist.
Highlights from previous years have included Joseph Dirand’s Art Deco–style “Maharajah’s Bathroom” in 2012, fashioned from marble, ebony and white-gold leaf tiles and decorated with pieces by the likes of Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Marc du Plantier and Gilbert Poillerat. A standout last year was Vincent Darré’s tiny “Bedroom for the Little Prince,” which featured a riot of vintage prints he had unearthed in the archives of Pierre Frey, the French fabric house. Each time, the investment is immense. According to Kalt, designers will spend from $125,000 to more than $1 million installing their rooms.
Past editions have lasted two weeks — the current iteration runs for an unprecedented 11 (it closes on November 23) — and have been held in the salons of the Artcurial auction house and in the Enclos des Bernardins, a mansion directly on the banks of the Seine. This year, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is hosting AD Intérieurs, and each designer has been asked to create his or her room around at least one object selected from the museum’s collection.
A 1966 steel-and-smoked-glass desk by the sculptor César, borrowed from the museum, forms the centerpiece of a stately office by Chahan Minassian. Photo © Cyrille George-Jerusalmi/Magazine AD
Working with a selection of the museum’s 12th- to 14th-century swords and a desk created by the French artist César in 1966, Chahan Minassian, for example, has constructed a spectacular space featuring travertine walls, leather floors and a stellar collection of Harry Bertoia sculptures. The angular forms of Pierre Yovanovitch’s room were inspired by a modernist garden chair from 1926, while Laurent Bourgois and Caroline Sarkozy opted for a bench that once graced Marie-Antoinette’s theater at Versailles. Their beautifully refined decor also integrates a chest faced in straw marquetry, a wall panel hand-embroidered by Gianluca Berardi of Macondo Silks and contemporary pieces by female ceramicists.
There are more quirky iterations, too. Gilles & Boissier’s space incorporates an enchanting hut created by designer Christian Astuguevieille in collaboration with Hermès’s Petit H atelier, which specializes in crafting objects from the luxury house’s discarded materials. It has Saint-Louis crystal handles, a desk clad in crocodile leather and a mirror bedecked with hundreds of the paper strips one uses to sample perfume. Elsewhere, Linda Pinto of Cabinet Alberto Pinto presents a hybrid piano-cum-bar, which can play on its own, while Darré wittily left the two objects he picked from the museum — an installation of metal pipes made by the artist Arman in the 1970s, and a French overmantel, circa 1720 — in their packing cases, imagining his room as a giant freight container.
Inspired by the elegance of Marie Antoinette and French craftsmanship, Caroline Sarkozy and Laurent Bourgois spun a refined space in shades of white and cream featuring a straw-marquetry chest and pieces crafted by female ceramicists.
The museum’s director, Olivier Gabet, declares he had little hesitation about hosting this year’s edition. “What’s important about AD Intérieurs is that it crystallizes a certain taste at a given moment,” he says. It has also helped to propel the careers of a number of its participants. After admiring their work at past outings of the show, the operators of Paris’s Crillon Hotel hired both Minassian and Tristan Auer to work on its current renovation. Darré received a restaurant commission after last year’s event, and Yovanovitch has worked on three projects for one of France’s leading businessmen and art collectors, who discovered his work directly through AD Intérieurs.
For Yovanovitch, the show not only offers the chance to attract a new clientele, but also to push the envelope design-wise. “It’s interesting to be more conceptual and to really give people something to think about,” he says. In the same vein, Minassian looks upon it as his “creative lab. It gives me the opportunity to design without any client specifications,” he asserts.
For Kalt, this year’s edition represents the “apotheosis of the project. It’s being held in the foremost venue in France for the decorative arts,” she says, “which is a consecration for both the decorators and the magazine.”
