The Style Saloniste - Rose Tarlow Melrose House

I was having lunch a few years ago with Axel and Boris
Vervoordt at their ‘s-Graveweezel castle, just outside
Antwerp…and who should arrive and join us but Rose Tarlow.
She was full of tales of her house in Menerbes in Provence and
her travels in Paris.
Rose Tarlow, always slightly mysterious, heads to Europe
several times a year, always looking for the rare and the
recherche.
It was midwinter when she turned up at the historic Kasteel
von ‘s-Gravenwezel, northeast of Antwerp. A pale ivory sun
hovers and barely glimmers, low in the sky. The air is still,
giving the frozen moat and ice-etched rhododendrons and
noble old oaks in the subdued landscape the look of a faded
sixteenth-century oil painting or a delicate watercolor.
Axel Vervoordt walked briskly from his study to greet his
longtime friend.
Tarlow has dropped in at the 12th-century castle to view and
admire and perhaps acquire pieces from Vervoordt’s art and
antiques collection.
“I am a person who loves beautiful things, and I try to be
around beautiful objects and exciting art at all times,” said
Tarlow, glancing at a dramatic Antonio Tapies painting in an
upstairs salon in the castle (which is also Axel’s residence).
She continues on toward a collection of rare Chinese
porcelains, smiling, in a reverie. Her eye flicks across a Dutch
armoire, a Japanese wooden bowl, a stack of old books.
“Beauty nourishes me, it fulfills me spiritually,” Tarlow told
me in conversation. “That’s why I design beautiful furniture. I
am always looking for objects that move me.”

Tarlow has a particularly fine-tuned sensibility for chairs—the
hardest furniture to design—and bestows even a modest dining
chair with presence, originality, character, and a distinctive
silhouette.