Layout LC.indd - Professur Schett

La Maison de Verre
Pierre Chareau
1925-1932
31, rue Saint-Guillaume, Paris
Pierre Chareau
143
The house is made of glass. Its translucent glass-block façade hides
everything that happens inside. There are no plastered walls; the doors
open without handles; the entire building is an amazing glass box set
in an 18th-century paved courtyard, with above it an older structure,
opposite an 18th-century building. From the street it is invisible. To reach
it, I had to cross the courtyard. The doorbells for ‚Doctor‘, ‚Visitors‘, and
‚Tradesmen‘ make different sounds.
It was usually my grandfather‘s nursing assistant, Madame Carré, who
answered the door; however Noémie, the faithful lady‘s maid, could, from
her lookout post in the laundry room, let visitors come in and go up to the
fi rst fl oor where my grandmother, Annie Dalsace, the lady of the house,
stood at the top of the main staircase. Silent and elegant, she would watch
you come upstairs. Her hair, drawn back from her forehead, swept down
fl awlessly in a series of waves that covered her ears. Every morning, her
immaculate coiffure was tamed by an invisible hairnet. When I reached
her level I could feel her disapproval of my too-daring cl0thes or make-up.
Her natural shyness led her to object violently to anything that she judged
to be in poor taste. Nonetheless, it was to her that I owed my fi rst black
dress with a white lace collar, which we chose together. It did not seem
out of place to her that I should wear black, a colour then unthinkable for
a girl of sixteen.
My teenage self did not see this unusual house in the passionate way that
I would later. The architecture was not what appealed to me. It was the
lunches that I enjoyed, when I would often fi nd an imaginative little gift
on my plate, the discovery of unusual fl avours, combinations of sweet and
savoury, foreign dishes, exotic fruits.
The dining room opens on all sides to the great room (we called it ‚Ie
grand hall‘), the blue sitting room, and the corridor leading to the kitchen,
and is separated from the main staircase by a row of small cupboards,
above which can be seen, depending on where one is seated at the table,
the wall of glass bricks, the garden, or the bookcase fi lling the wall in the
great room.
Under the stairs to the second fl oor, continuing the line of the cupboards,
is a perfectly proportioned tall cupboard in black lacquer with sliding
curved doors. To my delight, it opened to reveal brooms.
My grandmother‘s choice of contemporary materials and shapes rules
in this house; not a single obstacle arrests the eye as it glides under