Past Perfect After a six-year redo by Jacques Garcia, the 17th-century Château de Villette is fit for a modern-day marquis. ALICE CAVANAGH reports Château de Villette’s garden facade illustrates the signature French style of symmetry with restrained embellishments If you’re a Francophile like me, then it’s likely you have a fascination with the storybook French château. Temples of symmetry and opulence, they spoon-feed the imagination with glamorous images of a bygone era, when every part of aristocratic life was guided by aesthetic beauty above all else – no wonder the revolutionaries were so incensed. Case in point is the 17th-century Château de Villette outside Paris, one of France’s most stately properties, which has recently been restored and is the subject of a new coffee-table tome, Château de Villette: The Splendor of French Décor (Flammarion). Originally designed by architect François Mansart and finished by his great-nephew Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who oversaw the work at Versailles for Louis XIV, the Château de Villette was once the country estate of the Marquis and Marquise de Condorcet. The couple were leading intellectuals of the 18th century who hosted the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine in their cosmopolitan Paris salon. It was the latter epoch – considered the heyday of the estate – that served as a touchstone for the new owners, Sergei and Irina Bogdanov. A Luxembourg-based Russian couple with a 44 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
BLACKBOOK CLASSIC REVIVAL ”You follow the style from 200 years ago and then you can keep it for another 200“ PHOTOS BRUNO EHRS/CHÂTEAU DE VILLETTE, FLAMMARION 2018 passion for restoration projects, they chose to refurbish the house exclusively with 18th-century art and antiques. “Either you make it modern, and then you have to change it every 10 to 15 years because it becomes outdated, or you follow the style from 200 years ago and then you can keep it for another 200,” says Sergei. The Bogdanovs have revived a number of estates in Europe, among them the Villa Astor in Sorrento and the Villa Balbiano on Lake Como, with the same art de vivre. All of them, including the Château de Villette, can be rented. For this project, which took six years and cost around €35 million, the couple recruited Parisian interior designer Jacques Garcia, a known connoisseur of 17th- and 18th-century decorative arts whose artistic flair is behind the luxe interiors of the Hôtel Costes and La Réserve hotel in Paris, as well as significant restoration work at Versailles. Garcia worked alongside architects from the Monuments Historiques, an organisation that safeguards heritage sites. “We wanted to revive the château using our knowledge of historical interiors,” he says, adding: “The colour palette is from the era of Louis XV.” With its highly decorative legacy, the château’s original frescoes and boiserie, with their pastoral and chinoiserie motifs (as was the fashion), have been refurbished. These are most striking on the ground floor, in the oak-panelled library, and in what is perhaps the most significant room of the château: the dining room. Records have it that this is one of the earliest examples of a dining room in Europe (previously the aristocracy had taken meals in their private quarters). Painted bleu céleste – the original hue took much trial and error to reproduce – the room has Rococo flourishes in the panelling, stonework and cartouches. Today, everything looks set for From top: the dining room features a 1740s Rococo fountain for keeping refreshments cool; the blue bedchamber includes a rosewood commode from the 1770s CONTACT CENTURION SERVICE FOR BOOKINGS CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 45
