Divine Provence: Inside Terry De Gunzburg’s Idyllic French Home

Midway through a tour of her Provençal home, Terry de Gunzburg tells me that she loves cleaning and cooking so much that she’d like to be a housekeeper as her next job. Give up By Terry, her multimillion-pound make-up and skincare brand, for a bit of Cif and elbow grease? Surely not. I picture the ad: “Excellent housekeeper, vegetarian Provençal dishes a speciality, make-up expertise an optional extra.” “Of course, I’d be very expensive,” she goes on. “And I can’t follow a recipe because I always think I’m better than it, so when they say ‘five eggs’, I’m thinking, ‘I’m sure I can do that with three…’” We leave her husband Jean’s office, which is on the vaulted mezzanine floor over the bedroom, and move down to the bathroom. “Oh, I haven’t cleaned the bathroom,” she murmurs.

Read More

How To Score Vintage Gems At Auction Like An Interiors Expert

By Olivia Lidbury

As pristine as it is, I can’t help but think there are other side-hustle careers for which she might be better suited, interior design being one obvious option. From the expansive lawn flanked with plane and cypress trees, the façade of her house in Provence is at first sight simple but, as she says, it’s also sophisticated. “It’s a country house, a family house, and I could live here for the rest of my life,” she says of the 17th-century farmhouse, one of four homes she shares with Jean, a renowned cancer researcher. The building that was once used to store rice, and was rebuilt piece by piece in 2015 using the old stones following storm damage five years earlier, is arguably her favourite, loved as much for its homely informality as for the pieces she has filled it with over the years.

The garden is dotted with art, ceramics and roses, while inside the roomy living area, with a double-height vaulted ceiling, there is a giant fireplace as a centrepiece. “I call this my ‘Xanadu’ piece. It’s finished with green shimmering tiles by an Asian-American artist.” Her friend, Jacques Grange, the famous interior designer who also created the look of her homes in Paris, London and New York, decided to keep tiny gaps between the tiles so that the joins look imperfect, “otherwise they would look like kitchen tiles. I was never taught about art, interiors or furniture – it’s totally intuitive,” she says. “My style is not at all the French style from the 18th century, but nonetheless there’s a fil rouge that runs through this house, and whatever goes in it has to be artistic. If I need an armchair or a ceiling lamp, I don’t just go to a store and buy it, it has to come from an artist. And I don’t search for it. It’s a process over which I have no control – there’s no planning, it just happens. That said, I do have some beautiful 18th-century French mirrors that are gold, but they’re in a bamboo bedroom. So, you see, it’s a mix and match.”

Read More

Inside Karl Lagerfeld’s Futuristic Parisian Apartment

By Zoe Whitfield

Her less-than-studied approach has paid off. Despite the priceless pieces on display (“I’m very happy that Jean and I bought art instead of throwing parties,” she says, laughing), it feels like a home. “Twenty-eight years ago, when we bought the Bacon and Giacometti, they were still expensive, but the prices were acceptable,” she says. Now, and for the past few years, she has supported emerging artists, with a special interest in ceramics. “My daughter, Eloise Margoline, has had total autonomy to buy art for me for over 10 years; it was my way of supporting her as she built her career as an art advisory company and gallery.” In particular, she loves the work of two French ceramicists: Stéphanie Larène, with whom she creates table sets and collaborates on other projects; and Nelly Bonnand, who is now almost in her seventies. “I’d like to open a ceramic museum one day, with everything from very old and expensive pieces from Picasso and Matisse to young artists. Planning this is what takes up 70 per cent of my time now.”

Her home, though packed with art, doesn’t feel remotely museum-like. “I have 14 grandchildren, aged between two and 13, and they know they have to touch things with their eyes only,” she says. “The TH Robsjohn-Gibbings sofa, for example, gets cotton blankets thrown on top of it when they’re here. I don’t want to be running around saying, ‘Don’t touch this, don’t touch that,’ and living in fear.” She attributes her desire to share beautiful things with her grandchildren in part to the way her own parents wanted to share their love of the arts. “They had no money when they arrived in France, but every week as a young child I was in the Louvre, the botanical gardens or travelling in the back of our small Renault to Amsterdam so they could show us things.”

Her family was forced to leave Egypt in 1956, when Gamal Abdel Nasser became president and expelled the French, English and almost half the Jewish population. De Gunzburg was one year old, and her mother, who had lived life “like a princess” growing up amid her own mother’s fields of roses and jasmine, was forced to start over in France with nothing. “My grandfather never got over the fact he was reduced to living in Paris in a one-bedroom apartment, but my grandmother kept her teacups and still took tea every day as if she was back in Cairo, with her red lipstick, perfect nails, perfect hair, her cashmere. She used to spray her pillowcases every day with perfume. I learnt from her that you don’t need a lot of money to have good manners. This was my education.” De Gunzburg inherited her grandmother’s positivity, as well as her style. “I am well known for setting beautiful tables, while my mother used to say, ‘You spent how many hours setting that table when you could be reading?’ I’d say, ‘But I read too!’” Perhaps it was the influence of Egypt in the background, that outsider’s perspective while still being intrinsically French, that led to her making such a strong connection with Yves Saint Laurent, whose family had been forced to leave Algeria in his teens. She met him in 1985 and was hired to create his cosmetics line, notably going on to invent one of the beauty industry’s most iconic products, Touche Eclat, the under-eye lightener. “I never thought about this before, but it’s true: we had that oriental spirit in our DNA,” she now says.

How much has her life in London, where she lives in South Kensington, influenced her style? “The British are civilised, polite and more polished,” she says. “And I adore their eccentricity. I have a very well-connected friend who rides a camel. I love that you can attend a high-society wedding and see a woman wearing plastic shoes. You see grown men wearing strawberry-coloured corduroys all the time in South Kensington. It fits with my philosophy of life: ‘Do things seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.’” Which perhaps is also the way to live in Provence. “It’s like a retreat,” she says of her healthy lifestyle that starts at 6am with a nine-mile walk, “when the light is so amazing, the sky is orange as if it’s on fire, and I am at my most creative. It’s not by chance that the landscapes here turned the artists crazy.” Keeping in touch with the head office in London via Zoom isn’t always so easy. “This country is good for cheese and wine,” she says, “but the Wi-Fi in Provence? Forget about it.” But, ultimately, she is the first to admit that life here is “a big privilege”. The day ends with a simple dinner just with her husband or any visiting family. For special occasions, her table-laying skills come to the fore: “I’ll ask my friends to come in their long dresses and I’ll light thousands of candles.” Best add that to the job description

Read More

Interior Design Trends To Know In 2022 – And What’s On Its Way Out

By Elise Taylor