Provence Interiors [antikvár]

Une maison de reve en Provence Préface de Christian Lacroix Photographies d'Edouard Boubat / TOP The Provençal Dream House Preface by Christian Lacroix Photographs by Edouard Boubat / TOP Ein Traumhaus in der Provence Vorwort von Christian Lacroix Photographien von Edouard Boubat / TOP Houses in Provence are today's castles in the air. People hunt them as Tartarin hunted the lion, pursue them as they might Daudet's Arlésienne; they are precise as images, and yet are as hazy as the mirages that the dog-days set floating over the horizons of the Agachóle beaches, betv^een the pine groves and Atlantis. This hunt is mine too. My head full of fragments of the past and scraps of the future, I live in expectation of my house in Provence, w/hich will, when time and place provide, prove the more perfect for every hesitation on the way. This vision will be the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle of childhood and adolescent memories, for "we build the future by enlarging upon the past" (Goethe). Porten years, this "patch-work" has served my aspiration to create the fashions of today; tomorrow it will serve a return to my roots. The Mediterranean is a magnet. Its siren song is heard in New York, London and Paris; all of them find themselves at home there, and with every new recruit it feels itself still more the capital, the cradle, the centre of the world. Its magnetism was never so strongly felt as when I tore myself from the Midi to "go up to Paris"; even now, in Saint-Cermain-des-Prés where we live, its influence remains and it is the bold, grand, amiable façades of Aix, Aries or Montpellier town houses that I seek. Our Left Bank apartment wears the blood-red and old-gold livery of Spain and Provence; the Lacroix "Maison de Couture" on the Right Bank, with its terracotta, bare wood and bronzed ironwork is an Embassy of the Camargue in the centre of Faubourg Saint-Honoré. With every new day, we build upon the foundations of yesterday: the sediment of imagery laid down by the past. As a child, I honed my imagination on the birth of humanity, dreaming of a troglodytic life in the Val d'Enfer. December's Pastorales told us the same story, those 19th-century plays in Provençal that recounted the nativity through the folkloric characters of the South, characters also found in the crib. Where was the Christ-child born, if not here in the Alpilles.^ The nativity unfolds amid the timbers and straw of the stable, the bare rocks of the landscape, the 18th-century Indian silks of the players. In short, the last word in Provençal decoration is al- Provence Interiors Préface de Christian Lacroix