The ultimate salon treatment
Make-up pioneer TERRY DE GUNZBURG’s quirky Paris home is a shrine to her collections. Olivia Lidbury pays a visit
I’m all about details,’ says French skincare legend Terry de Gunzburg, whose Paris home is a feat of artisanal craftsmanship. From the handmade, stone-embellished cement floors and stained-glass windows to her vast collection of ceramics, art and curiosities, it’s laden with decorative elements.
De Gunzburg, founder of the luxury beauty brand By Terry, laughs that, at 68, she is finally getting better at seeing the ‘bigger picture’. However, it is her devotion to beauty that led her and her husband Jean, a renowned cancer researcher, to this remarkable jewel-box property 30 years ago.
The house was an early work of French architect Hector Guimard (he designed Paris’s art nouveau metro stations), and its petite proportions weren’t ideal. However, the couple bought it anyway and, a week after getting the keys, staged their wedding reception here, transforming the interior into surrealist gardens with sunflowers trailing from the ceiling, while the outdoors was turned into Moroccan-inspired and 1950s-themed ‘salons’. ‘It was extraordinary,’ she recalls.
With two sons together and five daughters from their previous relationships all vying for space, the couple bought the property next door a decade later. By contrast, it was ‘horrible, badly built and uninteresting’.
But with the help of her friend, interior designer
Jacques Grange, it now looks
‘I HAVE A SERIOUS SIDE AND A KITSCH SIDE – MAYBE ONE DAY I’LL UNDERSTAND THE TWO’
as if the two houses were always aesthetically aligned. De Gunzburg’s brief was to inject a flavour of art nouveau, not a carbon copy; and only specialist tradespeople – not builders – were to be commissioned ‘to create the magic of one house’.
De Gunzburg’s favourite spot, the salon d’hiver (winter garden room), was a happy accident. Added temporarily for Jean’s 50th birthday party, the structure proved too difficult to remove, so almost 20 years later, it endures as her haven. Heated and shrouded in verbena and fresh herbs, it is punctuated with her weakness: elaborate majolica ceramics. She acknowledges the gaudiness of these abundant piles of faux fruits: ‘I have a serious side and a kitsch side – maybe one day I’ll understand how those two sides of my brain work.’
De Gunzburg’s taste is unapologetically eclectic. She began collecting at flea markets, unearthing with her first pay cheque a highly sought-after
Picasso ceramic from his time in Vallauris, Provence. After five decades of combing galleries and auctions, her collection is split between the couple’s other homes in Provence, New York and London. What draws her to an objet? ‘It has to provoke an emotion; I have to fall in love with it. The most expensive things aren’t always the most beautiful.’
She credits her eccentric way of arranging her collections to living in London for 17 years: ‘I was influenced by friends’ houses, by that way of mixing things. It has a sort of boho British cosy look.’
Her love of colour is rooted in working with Yves Saint Laurent – she was creative director of his beauty division for 15 years and responsible for the brand’s cult hit Touche Éclat. While a slick of red lipstick is De Gunzburg’s ‘recipe for good humour – when I feel a little bit down, I wear it’, her equivalent for the home is an extravagantly laid dining table. Cue her majolicas, with fresh flowers cut from the garden – even just for a midweek tête-à-tête with Jean. ‘I’m a compulsive buyer of tablecloths and crockery,’ she admits. ‘I have over 200 service sets. When I tell my husband that I must be ill, he says, ‘No, you’re a true collector.’