“The most beautiful house is always the next one.” This phrase is a good summary of the relationship that Karl Lagerfeld had with his homes. The creative director of Chanel and Fendi, one of the most influential men in the fashion industry, applied his inexhaustible talents to his many houses. A string of apartments, villas and mansions that Lagerfeld assembled and dismantled over several decades. Thirteen residences that, for the first time, have been compiled in a unique book: Karl Lagerfeld: A life in houses, from the Thames publishing house.
For Lagerfeld, his houses were a kind of three-dimensional canvas that served him to experiment with his many aesthetic passions. Among others, the 18th century, art deco, Italian design and neoclassicism. All of her houses bear her signature, but the surprising thing is that each one is radically different from the last. A sample—as the writer Patrick Mauriès explains in the prologue—of her ability to reinvent herself. Mauriès, who has written several books about Lagerfeld, also highlights the passion for collecting of the man who relaunched Chanel.
Karl, he writes, “collected interiors in the same way that Don Juan conquers.” He claims that he was a “horizontal collector.” Unlike others (like his rival, Yves Saint Laurent), he did not pile up objects in increasingly cluttered houses, but rather tended to expand horizontally: “The fun was collecting, not owning,” Mauriès summarizes. And when what was hoarded no longer worked, a tabula rasa was made and other interests were sought.
This dynamic explains why Lagerfeld got rid of thousands of belongings throughout his life. In 1975, she auctioned off the art deco furniture and objects that decorated her first two apartments in Paris. In 1981, she put up for sale her collection dedicated to the Memphis Group, an Italian architectural collective with whose designs she decorated her apartment in Monte Carlo. And in 2000, she auctioned off the valuable collection of 18th-century pieces that had made up the opulent interiors of the Hôtel Pozzo di Borgo (her residence in Paris for thirty years) and La Vigie, her villa on the Côte d'Azur. . In this house facing the sea, with a frosty white façade, she shared many moments with her great friend Carolina de Monaco.
It was the Monegasque princess who bought him Le Mée, a mansion in the French countryside that Lagerfeld had decorated inspired by Gustavian design, but of which he soon tired. “The problem is that I don't have enough life to apply it to all my houses,” he said. He also did not frequent Elhorria, a fabulous house in Biarritz, which he also got rid of.
He spent more time in his large Parisian apartment on the Quai Voltarie, a loft with ultra-modern decoration, which was his personal bunker: only Sébastien, his right-hand man, and Françoise, the caretaker of his cat, Choupette, were admitted.
For meetings and meals, Lagerfeld went to a second floor nearby, on Rue de Saints-Pères. With soaring ceilings and elegant moldings, he filled it with neoclassical references and his beloved books, which played a prominent role in all of his homes.
In Rome, where he worked for Fendi until his death in 2019, he sought out two elegant homes: for one he was inspired by Viennese modernism. For the other, on the Grand Tour: the aristocratic tradition of traveling to Italy to contemplate its beauties.
It could be said that the life of Karl Lagerfeld, fashion aristocrat, was a constant Grand Tour: the search for beauty was everything to him. And his last residence, Villa Louveciennes, on the outskirts of Paris, was a compendium of this passion. In this house, acquired in 2009, he gathered the objects that he truly loved, those that he did not sell or give away throughout his intense life. He said it was the house that most resembled him, although he only slept under its roof one night.
