Valentino Garavani is Italian through and through, from his debonair manner to his elegantly rolled r’s to his suavely tailored suits. But ask the haute couturier about the biggest influences on his work and life and he will steer the conversation halfway across the globe. China.
Evidence of the fashion designer’s Sinophilia can be found throughout Château de Wideville, his magisterial 17th-century residence outside Paris, built by Louis XIII’s finance minister and later home to one of Louis XIV’s mistresses. Valentino, who also maintains luxurious footholds in London, Rome, New York City, and Gstaad, Switzerland, acquired the eight-bedroom château in 1995 and commissioned eminent interior decorator Henri Samuel to make it comfortable yet regal. “We did every room together,” Valentino says of their work, which was completed the following year, two months before the nonagenarian Samuel died. “I am quite particular and love to put my nose everywhere. Even if I admire the decorator, I have to say my opinion.”
Valentino’s favorite spot on the estate, he reveals, is the château’s winter garden, a multipurpose chamber furnished largely au chinois. Masses of Asian ceramics come into decorative play: famille-rose garden seats, stout covered jars perched on gilt-wood consoles, and a battalion of figures garbed in Chinese costumes and displayed on golden wall brackets.
The pigeonnier, Valentino says, was a challenge to decorate. “You couldn’t put in the usual 18th-century European furniture and objects, like in the château—it wouldn’t feel right,” explains the couturier, who also transformed the estate’s two-story hay barn into a sleekly minimalist archive for his nearly five decades in fashion. “I said, ‘No, I want to do something special.’” Perhaps even more special and more dramatic than his beloved winter garden.
source: architecturaldigest