He definitely had loads of alternatives to experiment with inside design. Lagerfeld’s private actual property holdings over time have been appreciable, and every room was embellished in a different way from the following. Within the Seventies, he rebuilt a Nineteenth-century condominium on Paris’ Left Financial institution in fully Deco-inspired black and white. Ten years later, he entered a maximalist section, amassing the technicolor brick-style furnishings of Italy’s postmodernist Memphis motion. Then got here a cavernous condominium within the 1707 Hôtel Pozzo di Borgo close to the Musée d’Orsay, stuffed with Louis XV gilded wooden antiques. Subsequent was a spaceship-modern condominium with stainless-steel and glass furnishings in a 200-year-old constructing on Paris’s Quai Voltaire. And, in fact, there was the Belle Époque summer season home on a hilltop in Monte Carlo, which the late André Leon Talley famously mentioned houseguests on trip have been anticipated to alter “no less than two, if not 3 times a day.” Surprisingly, it was reported in October 2008 that Lagerfeld had purchased a Greek Revival brick home on Vermont’s Lake Champlain — and primarily based on his loopy libstype penchant for sudden design combos, the creativeness runs wild with what he may presumably have carried out in a house on the state’s Historic Registry.
These have been simply his private properties. Along with working with Peter Marino for greater than twenty-five years on Chanel boutiques world wide, Lagerfeld has been recognized to dabble within the occasional one-off company mission, together with the swimming pool at Monaco’s Hôtel Métropole in 2013; a set of textured grey suites on the legendary Hôtel de Crillon, a Rosewood Resort in Paris; the lobbies of The Estates at Aquilina, a luxurious improvement in Sunny Isles Seashore, Florida, the ultimate section of which debuted this spring; and the brand new Karl Lagerfeld Macau, which opens in June.
A design universe as vast and deep as this one invitations Lagerfeld’s admirers to seek for clues, join the dots to attempt to perceive how such a prolific thoughts labored: one second deco, adopted by Greek antiquities, then Italian maximalism from the 80s? Take a step again from the jarring singularity of his varied design obsessions and a few considerate strains, like streaks in marble, start to emerge.
First, the person was a prolific collector and lover of books. He’s mentioned to be a high buyer of the well-known Librairie Galignani bookstore on rue de Rivoli. His assortment, mentioned to be over 300,000 sturdy, permeated each one in all his properties, not simply as design objects however ingrained within the structure – total rooms lined with rigorously stacked floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (at all times stacked horizontally and nearly by no means vertically, some imagine you’ll be able to rapidly scan the titles with out having to tilt your head to learn sideways). You’d see a ebook on Le Corbusier subsequent to Nabokov novels subsequent to Kant’s philosophies. “That was Karl: the person of every little thing,” informed his previous buddy and collaborator Woman Amanda Harlech Style in 2022. These closest to him have mentioned that regardless of the ample dimension of his assortment, he was capable of keep in mind the placement of particular person titles with computerized precision.
