Sculptural furniture offsets works of art in the lounge of this home in the French Riviera.
Designer India Mahdavi brings her eye for colour to match the sculptural pieces in this French Riviera villa, a holiday home for a family of art connoisseurs.
“Everyone always thinks of colour when they think of my work, so I decided to do a monochromatic interior here” INDIA MAHDAVI
In the hinterland of the French Riviera between Monte Carlo and Marseille, the villa in the Domaine du Muy sculpture park glistens in the Mediterranean sun. Painted matt silver, like many of the artworks installed in the surrounding 10 hectares of pine forest, the house-slash-gallery is designed to reflect the rugged landscape.
Although the original two-storey structure was designed along traditional Provençal lines, it in fact dates only to the turn of this century. “But it was a disaster,” says Paris-based architect and designer India Mahdavi. “The proportions were all wrong. It didn’t flow properly. The spaces were unreadable.” Because planning regulations are notoriously strict in this part of France, the owners decided it was simpler to renovate than demolish and rebuild. So Mahdavi’s first task was to clarify the floor plan.
To create intrigue with the proportions and re-anchor the building to its site, she stretched out the basement to form an elongated colonnade and gallery. Then she roofed an internal courtyard to limit ingress of harsh summer sun and create extra living space on the top floor. “There had been an overly grand entrance that led to nothing,” she says. “We had to remedy that.”
Once she achieved a new equilibrium, Mahdavi punctured the façade with asymmetric archways to give the blocky volumes a rhythm, appearing elegantly stacked up the hillside above their slender podium.
Inside, she opted for a stark palette of black-and-white floor tiles throughout, offset by walls tinted almost imperceptibly green. “Everyone always thinks of colour when they think of my work, so I decided to do a monochromatic interior here,” Mahdavi says.
Fortuitously, Italian ceramics brand Bisazza had commissioned Mahdavi to design a range of tiles at the same time she was planning Muy, so she was able to use the house as a testing ground for her ideas.
The dynamic offset geometries she devised — a play of asymmetric hexagons — appear to sweep through the entire ground floor, the variegated patterns leading the eye outside. In the garden, a swirling Vasarely-inspired swimming pool picks up the op-art vibe.
Colour inside would come from the art collection, Mahdavi decided, inspired by the fact that there is a lot of it — and of very fine pedigree.
The Domaine du Muy belongs to Parisian art dealer Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand and his son Edward, an art consultant based in Geneva. Jean-Gabriel established his art gallery three decades ago under the banner JGM to deflect attention from the fact that he is the nephew of François Mitterrand, president of France from 1981 ››
“We were able to relax a bit with the interior – play around to create a statement” INDIA MAHDAVI
‹‹ to 1995. (It was François Mitterrand’s Grands Projets that produced iconoclastic buildings such as IM Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre.)
With a special affection for sculpture from the last third of the 20th century, Jean-Gabriel represents the estates of seminal French artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Claude and Xavier-François Lalanne, as well as work by Yves Klein, César and Arman and the furniture of American minimalist Donald Judd.
It is artists of this ilk that provide the ‘colour’ Mahdavi nonetheless craved for the interior — as well as add focal points throughout the garden. A gilded Claude Lalanne Pomme de New York from 2015 squats on the edges of the forest; hundreds of silver metal balls (a sculpture from 1966 by Yayoi Kusama reprised in 2011) float upon the pond; and a giant mirrored kinetic sculpture (2011) by Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno reflects and refracts the sun.
The apparently wild garden — straggly cork and pine trees underlaid with the aromatic local scrub known as la garrigue — is in fact a finely honed essay in indigenous planting that landscape artist Louis Benech orchestrated. Benech is best known for his restoration of the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris.
Back inside, while restraining her natural tendency to decorate with colour, Mahdavi instead opted for plays of light. All doors and cupboards, for instance, comprise panels of grey MDF, which she had varnished in zigzag patterns to create a sense of motion. “On a floor plan, you indicate a door’s movement by this kind of shading,” she points out. In the kitchen, she extended the optical pattern of the black-and-white splashback down to the floor along one wall — a clash of monochromatic design that makes for a dramatic wake-up each morning.
“The house is not a principal residence but a summer house and gallery space that is open to the public by appointment,” the designer explains. “So we were able to relax a bit with the interior — play around to create a statement.”
To soften things up, as a final flourish, Mahdavi has scattered her own rattan furniture throughout. “If you add only one, it’s as if a pretty girl has walked into the room and grabbed all the attention,” she says with a laugh. “But if you put three or four or more, it starts a conversation.” VL india-mahdavi.com; artist enquiries to galeriemitterrand.com