OWNER PROFILE one of the most beautiful cities in the world,” Pinto says – the conversation returns to her headliner project, the Hôtel Lambert. It’s one of many she’s currently working on across a portfolio that includes private residences, yacht and plane interiors as well as hotels. But for all the glories of her acclaimed career, the rebirth of the Hôtel Lambert may be the project for she is most enduringly remembered. This is because there are few buildings in Paris that have the cachet of this elegant limestone building, a place that is still special to the international beau monde as the venue for the dazzling parties of Alexis von Rosenberg, Baron de Redé, when he had a flat here from 1949 to 2004, and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, after she and her husband acquired the property in 1975. The Hôtel Lambert was purchased by Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa al-Thani, brother of the then Emir of Qatar, for the purported sum of €60 million in September 2007. Classic look Linda Pinto infuses her designs with a wit-infused chic “ It’s about creating beauty and giving it life, maybe by inventing décors that are a little offcentre and very subtly surprising ” In 2010, Sheikh Abdullah’s son Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah al-Thani hired Alberto Pinto, known for his opulent interiors and founder of the eponymous design firm, to renovate the mansion in 2010. Alberto died in 2012, and then a fire caused severe damage to the building in July 2013. Now, under the auspices of Linda Pinto, who had already been working with her brother for 30 years but took over their business on his death, the magnificent building has been renewed and revived. “It makes me feel rather humble, really,” says Pinto, “because it’s part of the history of Paris, the history of France. It’s a great honour to have done this work.” So what exactly did Pinto and her team of nine decorators and seven project managers (80 people work at the company in total) do at the Hôtel Lambert? “The mansion is a listed French national monument, so we had to respect the building’s good bones at the same time that we responded to the needs of the new owner.” She pauses for a second, and then adds, “You know it isn’t about ‘good taste’, that awful clumsy phrase. It’s about creating beauty and giving it life, maybe by inventing décors that are a little off-centre and very subtly surprising.” This aptly describes the sensibility of another much-lauded recent Pinto project, the renovation of the Lanesborough Hotel in London. “We respected the visual DNA of the great English country houses, but rescaled the usual decorative idioms, including furniture and mouldings, to make them more legible. We also used colour to create modernity,” says Pinto, who admits that hues and pigments are her true passion. “My brother and I were born in Casablanca, and the family also had a house in Tangiers,” she explains. “So the rich colours of Morocco were imprinted on my imagination when I was a girl. I think colour has an immediate emotional impact, too. I will always remember how exultant I felt once during a trip to India when we went to a lake near Benares, and the shoreline was a kaleidoscope of colours from the saris that had just been washed and set out to dry. For me, colour and light are essential elements of every interior I design, whether it’s a mansion or a jet,” says Pinto, who joined her brother’s firm in Paris as a young woman after working in art galleries. Alberto studied at the École du Louvre in Paris, and then moved to New York and opened a photographic agency that specialised in architecture and decoration. This led to COURTESY LINDA PINTO 32 NetJets
